by Lee Smith
I nodded, sitting on my bed, surprised, for in general, Odell Cartwright was as dumb as a post.
“Well, you can’t,” he said. “Yer time is up, yer rent is due. Now I believe you done it, just fer the record, but I don’t give a damn whether you done it or not. You could of done it, I’ll say that, as you are a hard un, and you could of made yer time here a lot more pleasurable too, if you was not so high and mighty.”
I looked up at my window while he finished eating the chicken and threw the last bone through the bars and out on the floor at my feet.
That night I scarcely slept but listened to my heart beating louder and louder in the prison cage of my ribs all night long. The moon was full. It shone white as day in the slit of my window for one half hour soon before dawn and then was gone from view. In spite of myself, I felt my body stirring, waking up. I felt a slow deep agitation.
Silent Mrs. Cartwright came for me at first light and led me to the washroom where she had filled the tub with water hot enough that I gasped when she poured a panful of it over my head. I scrubbed myself with the hard old soap. It felt wonderful. “Thank you,” I said.
She handed me the scratchy towel. “I wisht I got to go too.” She bit her lip, and turned her narrow face away.
“Why, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to go to court!” I said.
“I would ruther go anyplace atall than stay here with Mister Cartwright,” she blurted out, then looked behind herself fearfully.
“But you could leave,” I said, pulling on my underthings. “You could, Mrs. Cartwright. You’re not in jail.”
She snaked out a thin hand to pinch me suddenly, high up on the thigh where I could show no one. It hurt like blazes. “Bitch,” she said. “You don’t know nothing.”
And in truth I knew only one thing as they cuffed my hands together and led me to the door. Jacky’s gone, fare thee well, Jacky’s gone. It came as a tune running through my head, Jacky on banjo. I wore the black suit and the white ironed blouse which Martha had brought me, my damp hair held back with two tortoiseshell combs she had stuck in the skirt pocket. I did not have a hat.
Though I had pulled up the hood of my old blue cloak, I gasped when they opened the door and the chilly wind hit me full in the face, bringing with it the smell of burning leaves which seemed to go straight into my body. November! Suddenly the world was all around me, bright and sharp. The sun shone, the wind blew. Red and yellow leaves flew past. They hustled me into a carriage.
The rest of that day is like a dream to me now, vivid disconnected moments, bright shiny bits of time jumbled together like the casket of fool’s gold here in this old box of phenomena at my feet.
First, the yellow blowing day itself. The sharp smell of wood smoke in the air. It made me think of all the fires we made in that stove at the Bobcat School, and the long walk over there from Chattie’s on the Indian Trail with its quiet carpet of fallen leaves, the mountain laurel pressing close and green on either side.
But who was the girl who did that? I wondered. That girl who had not yet met Jacky.
I saw Mrs. Cartwright’s lean dark face in the window as they drove me away.
It took only minutes to get there, or so it seemed, as we passed through the unreal town with its painted houses and busy people who stopped to gawk and point and stare as we went by.
“Standing room only,” announced a man in the jostling crowd on the courthouse lawn when we arrived. A woman had set up a stand, selling sandwiches.
“Just look straight ahead, mam,” the young deputy said, holding my elbow, and I did, all the way up the shallow scooped courthouse steps worn down in the center by thousands of feet before me. And am I so different? I thought, and knew that I was not. Jacky’s gone, fare thee well played on in my mind.
Then the arch of the entrance, the sudden chill and dimness inside, the long narrow corridor, the echoing marble floor, the thick door, then the courtroom itself with its blue walls, blue as a robin’s egg, the many little faces all turned to me like so many moons. The jury sat up in the front like a choir. We went in, and a murmuring rustle swept across the courtroom like a breeze.
The young deputy walked me over to the stand. “Oyez, oyez, oyez,” said a man in a deep voice, and it began, and they swore me in and there was a lot of talking I did not hear, for just then I saw dear Agnes, wearing the close brown felt hat I knew so well, sitting in the second row with Cicero Todd, his hair plastered down unnaturally on either side of his uneven part and hanging into his rough red face. Just then Martha Fickling burst through the closed doors at the back of the crowded courtroom, past the deputy, nodding to everybody, and gave a great sigh as she took her seat and blew me a kiss. She put her finger under her chin and jerked her head up in a way that meant, Buck up, honey! Never let the bastards get you down. I had heard her say these words before, and found myself grinning back at her, the first time I had smiled in months, I believe. It made my face hurt. It caused a stir in the courtroom. But I didn’t care — it felt good to smile. It felt like me.
Felix Boykin sat on Agnes’s other side. Why, Felix is old! I thought. Somehow he had gotten so old. His old wife sat beside him.
But the coroner was younger than I would have expected, a thin pale man with a gleaming white forehead and wisps of blondish hair straggling way down over his collar. He bent low over the papers arranged before him, lost in his black robe. When he looked up, his eyes were as big as lakes behind the thick lenses of his gold framed glasses, with dark circles beneath them. He was very serious, his mouth pinched together as if in pain. Perhaps he was in pain. He seemed years older than he was, I thought, and this made me feel a kind of kinship with him suddenly, for ever since the fire, I had felt as old as the world.
Coroner Ragland called the court to order in a slow voice with an accent from the other side of the state, beyond the mountains. “Ladies, gentlemen, officers of the court and members of the inquest jury,” he began, “I have summoned you here today to make inquiry as to the circumstances of the death of Jack Wesley Jarvis and to call witnesses as necessary to determine these circumstances, an affadavit having been duly filed by the Sheriff’s Office of Ashe County, indicating blame. If it appears that the deceased was slain, or came to his death in such a manner as to indicate any person or persons guilty of a crime in connection with the said death, then this inquiry shall ascertain who was guilty, either as principal or accessory, or otherwise; and the exact cause and manner of the death. Whenever in such investigations it shall appear that any person or persons are culpable in the matter of such death, I shall forthwith issue my warrant —”
By then my eyes had found my dear ones, my family from up on Plain View seated all together in a row halfway back. They had come a long way to be here. How I ached to jump up and run across the courtroom and hug each one! How much Biddle looked like Jacky, it stopped my heart, how much I wanted Jacky to pick me up and swing me around the way he did whenever he came back home with the rolling store. Jacky’s gone, one more time, Jacky’s gone.
“Therefore we shall hear and examine any and all witnesses,” the young coroner concluded. His voice was soft and measured.
And so it began, with Newt Letcher called up first to the stand, bent over to one side and shifty-looking as ever — Jacky used to say he moved “slaunch-ways” — yet all spruced up in his brown uniform, so closely shaved that his jaw was bleeding, grinning his sly one-sided grin and cutting his eyes over at me as if embarrassed. Jacky had never liked him.
Coroner Ragland asked Newt Letcher some questions which he answered one by one while I stared at all the Jarvises from Plain View, drinking them in with my eyes. Yet it was strange. They seemed utterly changed to me, sitting there. They looked like people in an old photograph, all dressed up in the way people dress up when the photographer is coming, in clothes they would never normally wear. They looked so country — Calvin in his high stiff collar and shiny brown suit, Clara with her plain lined face and hair pulled back like an old gra
nny woman, Uncle Hat and Uncle Solomon like engravings from another century. Even Betsy, jolly Betsy, looked stiff and old fashioned as a doll, bright red spots of color on her fat cheeks, a silly lace collar foaming up under her chin. Thank goodness they had not brought Belle! Though I caught myself smiling to imagine Belle in that courtroom, preening and looking all around to see what men might be in love with her now. I tried to catch Biddle’s eye, but could not for he looked straight ahead, with his jaw set in a way that almost made me cry, it was so familiar, like Jacky when he took a powerful notion to do something.
“Mrs. Jarvis,” the coroner was saying.
Finally I caught Clara’s eye, dear Clara, but to my surprise she turned red and looked down and would not look back up at me. I felt suddenly as if years had passed, not months, and they truly were people in another century, beyond some great divide.
“Have you ever seen this weapon before, Mrs. Jarvis?” The coroner leaned forward.
There it sat on the table, gleaming dully, drawing all eyes, its old oak handle charred black.
“Mrs. Jarvis?”
“Well, of course I have! I saw it every day,” I said in a way that somehow occasioned laughter and did not advance my cause. “This is the pistol we kept underneath the counter at the store, anybody can tell you that. I imagine BJ has told you that already. Where is BJ anyway?” I looked all around.
People murmured throughout the courtroom.
The coroner tapped his gavel and said, “Order in the court. Now Mrs. Jarvis,” he went on in his kindly, pained way, “Our purpose at this time is simply to establish what happened on the night in question, August 25, the night of the fire, and whether there is any proof of your probable guilt in a capital crime.”
“That is ridiculous,” I heard myself say, and then there was a lot of noise, and then several people came forward to testify that they had heard shots on the night of the fire and that they had seen the body, Jacky’s body, and that he had not been burned to death but shot in the neck at close range.
Mrs. Carmel Reece, whose son Dean I had taught at the storehouse school, went on and on about this until I thought I would explode or go crazy. “The entire side of his head was gone,” she said, “the entire side.” She said some more things. She was all dressed up for the occasion in a fancy ecru lace blouse caught at the neck with a cameo pin featuring a cameo lady in profile so calm, so elegant, suddenly I would have given anything to be her, on her deep rose oval stone, surrounded by filigree.
But you can’t be a cameo lady if you give your heart away, ran through my mind as a tune.
To this day, I remember that cameo pin better than anything else at my hearing.
I could not bear for them to talk about Jacky’s body, and after a while I simply could not hear it though others were called, people I had waited upon at the store all these years, such as old Dwight Mahaffey who always came up short, buying medicine for his wife, and Mrs. Atkinson who drank vanilla.
Nobody looked at me except for Coroner Ragland, who looked at me steadily.
Finally they called BJ.
A hidden door in the other side of the wooden wall opened and there he was.
Before I knew it, I had jumped up and run halfway across the floor, I was so glad to see him. The deputies caught me, the judge called the court to order, they brought me back.
“You must sit down in order for Mr. Jarvis to testify, do you understand?” Coroner Ragland leaned forward to fix me with his huge pale eyes.
I knew that he was trying to help me.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
But there was BJ, dear BJ, after so long, limping out in a badly fitting blue-striped suit — I could not imagine where he had gotten it — and a boiled white shirt, and a red bow tie, tied clumsily. One of Jacky’s bow ties, I realized, understanding in the same moment that BJ must have gone into our house to get it, for Jacky kept all his ties in a willow basket on top of the chest. Then I felt so strange and agitated that I thought I would faint dead away or blow up in spontaneous combustion, as in Dickens, though I knew I must do nothing of the kind. For I understood what it cost BJ to dress up in a boiled white shirt and appear in a public court of law with his misshapen raspberry face on display before everyone. He placed his poor hand on the Bible.
“John Howard Willetts, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” the clerk asked.
“I do,” BJ said in a surprisingly strong voice, staring at me, and I smiled back at him though the tears sprang into my eyes as I remembered all the hours we had spent in the store together. Why, I had probably spent as much time with BJ as I did with Jacky! But I remembered too how BJ had always hung back from the door, and nodded, and pointed, so as not to have to answer our customers.
I could never have imagined him here before all these people.
“Now go back, and start at the beginning,” the coroner said.
Everyone leaned forward as BJ began to speak in his halting way, in bursts with long pauses between them. The coroner nodded, listening as if he had all the time in the world, asking a question from time to time. Sometimes they were surprising questions. Don’t ask him that! I wanted to scream at the coroner, and You don’t have to answer that! You don’t have to tell him everything.
But of course I could not interrupt.
It was all beyond me now as BJ went on and on, laying bare his poor soul, as if he had been waiting for a chance to do so. Perhaps he had. He looked straight at me all the while though I had to look away from time to time, I couldn’t stand it. I had known yet not known these things. I listened with a sinking, bursting heart, and a growing knowledge that soon I would go free and that then there would be no going back from any of it. I felt the walls of my cell close back around me, iron bars of love, and finally I bowed my head and sat waiting.
The sheriff’s men took me straight back to Jefferson, turning me over to Willard Owens when we arrived. “Welcome home, Molly,” old Willard said, helping me down the steps onto the wooden platform well after midnight. My knees nearly buckled out from under me. But there was Biddle, waiting with the wagon, sound asleep. It was coming on toward morning when we finally got home.
“Just leave my bag on the porch,” I said, and watched him disappear into darkness across the scarred field which had been the store.
I sat down in my rocking chair — that same chair where once I had rocked my Christabel to feed her, years ago. She made a little sighing, gurgling sound as she nursed. I could still feel the steady pull of her mouth on my nipple, the sweet release in my breasts as the milk came down. There is nothing like that in the world. I thought of my other babies, too, Spencer and Junius and Mary Agnes and the rest, their sweet shallow breath and little curled fingers and rosy feet, all of them up on the mountain. Somehow I could not go inside. I sat there chilled to the bone as dawn came on. First I could see the jagged outline of Three Top Mountain against the silver sky. Then all the dried gourds we’d hung from that crosspole out front, for purple martins. My rambler rose which had grown every whichaway all over the porch rail with no one here to cut it back, the roses now dead on the vine. The old swing teetering in the still cold air as if somebody had just got up from it, the poker table Calvin made, the cane-bottom chairs we used to clear away at the drop of a hat for dancing. The floorboards were worn down slick and silvery smooth by dancing. One of Jacky’s cigarettes still lay on that old stump stool. He liked to sit tipped way back in the wicker chair with his feet up on the rail, barefooted, like a kid. You’ll fall, I said. You’ll fall, but he never did.
Jacky’s gone, far from home, Jacky’s gone. His banjo rang out in the morning air.
A rooster crowed. Smoke rose in a fine wavy line from Biddle and Betsy’s chimney so I knew she was up, getting breakfast for the children, pouring milk from the old blue pitcher into their little cups. A door slammed, the rooster crowed again. The puffy clouds over top of the mountain turned red, then pink, and then ye
llow rays shot out from behind them like spokes on a wheel, like children coloring with crayons. The sun stretched across the long valley to touch the steps, then the rail, then my foot. A wagon made its slow way across the bald. “Hello there, Miss Molly,” called old Mister Davenport. “Welcome home.”
Home, I thought. Is that it?
I stood up and went inside where I saw that they had made me a fire which was almost gone. I stirred up the ashes and put a log on, then walked around in my cloak still shivering. Nothing had changed. I felt like we had never left, Jacky and me, like the story of the Three Bears which my schoolchildren had always loved. Jacky’s prize banjos still hung on the wall, close to a dozen of them, including that old cheese box banjo and the coon dog banjo and the longneck gourd banjo that used to belong to Mister Thompson. Jacky’s old guitar lay across the red-flowered chair in the bedroom, as if he had just put it down for a minute. His boots still stood by the bed, those hand-tooled black leather boots from Texas which I always loved, with the silver stars on the toes. Girl boots, Roscoe used to kid him, but they were not. His buckskin jacket hung on its peg by the door. A pile of his dirty shirts lay at the foot of the bed still waiting for me to wash them, fancy shirts, most of them, with satin piping and pearl buttons and neck studs and such as that. Jacky loved shirts. They all used to kid him about his shirts, he had so many. I leaned down and grabbed them up and sat on the bed and brought them up to my face and breathed him in, tobacco and cologne and whisky and sweat, a man will sweat out a shirt when he plays music all night long. I breathed him in, then fell back upon the bed holding the shirts to my face remembering all the nights that I had lain with him here and on the old rag rug in front of the fire and on the kitchen floor, I didn’t care, and on a pallet on the porch and out on a quilt in the yard underneath the full moon and right out on the bald in the long sweet grass on the long slow curve of the earth itself. I knew I would never wash those shirts again. My fancy man. Who had ever thought I’d have a fancy man? but I had had him. I had. Jacky’s gone, one more time, Jacky’s gone.
