Rough Justice

by Brad Smith

  Browning went back to the table, tossed the papers down, then pointed at The Mayor.

  ‘You are here to judge this man. You know of his record as a civil servant, you know of his character. Has there been a single sliver of credible evidence presented in this courtroom to question that character? There has not. There has not. It’s your duty to acquit Joseph Sanderson the third. It’s your duty to demonstrate in the most clear and emphatic manner possible that our system does work. And when you walk out of this courtroom for the last time, you’ll feel good about yourself. Your heart will soar. Trust me – I know that feeling. It is your duty to acquit this man.’

  It seemed to Kate that Prosecutor Grant had, over the course of the trial, been diminishing before her eyes. Not in any physical sense but in some strange spiritual way she couldn’t quite define. There just seemed to be less of him, day by day.

  In summation, Grant restated the prosecution’s case, and he went to great lengths to convince the jury that whatever the events in the lives of the four women after the attacks, those events had no bearing on the veracity of the testimony regarding the rapes in question. That the four had not led exemplary lives since could hardly be surprising. A sexual assault was a traumatizing experience. To suffer it as a teenager would multiply that trauma tenfold.

  He questioned the testimony of the elderly and uncertain Norma Stevens, but casting aspersions on someone her age was a tricky proposition. He told the jury that there was no evidence of a cabin on Lake Sontag because The Mayor had, quite simply, made it up in order to lure Kate to the lake house. He had no chance, however, of impugning Louise Sanderson’s testimony, and he did not try. She was, if anything, held in higher regard than The Mayor himself.

  In the end Grant told the jury that they must decide who was telling the truth and who was not. It was as simple as that. He told them that he too had a belief in the system, and that he too was depending upon them to prove him right.

  The jury was out for less than two hours. Joseph Sanderson III was acquitted on all counts.

  Miles Browning held forth for some time on the front steps of the courthouse after the verdict, The Mayor himself standing alongside; a pair of media hounds reluctant to leave the stage. The four accusers were given the option of facing the media but they all declined and were escorted from the courthouse through the side entrance.

  Frances went home with Kate but Carl decided to stay behind. He stood on the sidewalk outside of the media throng for a time, then gradually made his way through the crush until he was on the concrete steps below where Browning and The Mayor stood.

  ‘You’re innocent,’ a reporter shouted to The Mayor. ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘I was always innocent. Should I feel different now?’

  ‘Will you try to claim back the mayor’s office?’

  ‘I’m heading to South America. I’m going to try to claim a big trout or two.’

  ‘Mr Browning! Why did they lie?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Browning said. He smiled. ‘I fear I’m not nearly as clever as you try to make out. Besides, my job was merely to demonstrate that they lied, not to establish why.’

  ‘Why didn’t your client testify?’

  ‘There was no need,’ Browning said. ‘This trial should never have seen the light of day.’

  ‘Mayor Sanderson! Will you be pressing charges against these women?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ The Mayor replied. ‘I have no desire to add to their woes.’

  ‘We have sympathy for these women,’ Browning interjected. ‘People need to know that. They were coerced to lie. The question you – as the Fourth Estate – should be asking is by whom. As for the women themselves, leave them be. I myself have a teenage daughter. I have nothing but sympathy for these women.’

  Now Carl pushed his way forward to step directly in front of Browning. ‘This daughter of yours,’ he said. ‘Would you leave her alone with your client?’

  Browning’s face turned red. Carl stared at him before turning toward The Mayor. The old man looked at him for a moment. And then he smiled.

  ELEVEN

  Kate went back to work after the trial and waited for her life to return to her. The verdict had knocked her on her heels, but in the following weeks she reconciled herself to the fact that she had spent a lot of years living with the notion that The Mayor had gotten away with what he had done. This was just a matter of him getting away with it again. Apparently there was a part of her mental make-up that had been capable of accepting that fact. If she had lived with it before, she could live with it again.

  As long as she didn’t think about it too much.

  So she went back to her life, to weekends working at the bar, to slow pitch, to movies and dinners with David. She returned to the insurance office, to a job that she tolerated but had no passion for. Who could? The politics there were a little strange when she returned and it was obvious why. After all, she had accused a senior citizen of a certain social status in the city of raping her. Probably half the policyholders were senior citizens of a certain social status. They looked at her differently now, at least some of them anyway, and she noticed that there was less harmless flirting. Were they afraid that she would accuse them of something, or were they pissed at her for taking The Mayor to court? She decided that she didn’t care if either was true. She wouldn’t allow herself any regret over what she had done. Things slowly returned to what she could loosely refer to as normal. She put the trial behind her. She wasn’t sure she was moving forward, but she didn’t feel that she was sliding back either.

  Things changed in September.

  The slow pitch finals were held on the last weekend of the month. Shoeless Joe’s made it to the semis, and there Kate blew her knee out Saturday trying to score from second base on a bloop single. Her cleat caught on the bag as she rounded third and she felt the knee twist violently. She limped home but was out by twenty feet. Half an hour later she was in the hospital, and on Monday morning she had surgery.

  The surgeon told her she would be off work for six weeks. Physiotherapy would begin once the swelling went down. He gave her a script for painkillers and told her to take it slow.

  ‘Shit,’ she said that night, lying back on the couch, her leg propped on cushions. ‘I don’t need a lot of down time right now.’

  ‘Well, you got it,’ David told her. ‘Catch up on your reading. Watch some movies.’

  So she caught up on her reading, and she rented some movies she’d been meaning to watch, and then some she had no desire to watch. And she went to physio, and she cleaned the house, hopping around on one leg.

  And she grew bored. Boredom had a capricious nature. Sometimes it was a breeding ground for good things.

  And sometimes it wasn’t.

  Autumn, when it came, slipped in through a side door and suddenly was just there, like a guest who’d arrived early for a party. It wasn’t that the interloper was unwelcome, it was just that Frances wasn’t ready for it yet. The farm was having its best year yet, which meant that Frances was busier than she’d ever been in her life, up at daybreak seven days a week, working in the warehouse or the fields for ten or twelve hours and usually falling asleep in a chair before ten o’clock. Her nails looked as if she worked on a chain gang. She hadn’t had her hair cut since Martin had left for South America.

  He was in touch regularly, e-mails and the occasional phone call, although most of the time his cell didn’t work, especially when he was in the mountains. He continued to pester her to join him, suggesting that she fly into Santa Cruz one week and then, when she’d declined, Lima a couple of weeks later. He was depressed without her, he said. The work wasn’t going well; he’d been sent to photograph some disappearing species that were proving to be, not all that surprisingly, difficult to locate. For some reason he didn’t recall that his insistence that she drop everything to come running to his side was what had created tension between them to begin with. In any case, with fall approaching, there was no ch
ance that she would be leaving the farm. And she kept telling him that.

  Nevertheless, he continued to send pictures and e-mails and he called more frequently. During those conversations he invariably began to talk about how much Frances would love where he was at that particular moment, whether it was in a café in Bolivia or on a rock in the Galapagos. She noticed for the first time that he had a habit of telling her how great she would look there. As if she was an accessory. Other times he would even speculate on just how fabulous the two of them would look, standing on a peak in the Andes, or walking a Chilean beach. Maybe it was just the photographer in him, but it struck her as a strange thing, and quite likely not worth fretting over. More worrisome was the fact that he rarely asked her anything about the farm. And the less he asked about her work, the less she asked about his. It was sophomoric, she knew, and she told herself to stop. He was coming home soon, he said, whether he finished the assignment or not. The money was running out. Maybe then things would return to normal, although Frances couldn’t recall just what normal felt like.

  The drought had continued throughout the summer. In late August Frances hired Carl to overhaul the farm’s irrigation system. The original set-up depended on a two-inch pipe that ran from an aged Beatty pump by the river to a pond behind the old barn. Frances’s father had raised beef cattle and the pond had provided drinking water for the herd. But now the Herefords were gone, replaced by a hundred acres of thirsty vegetable plants. The old system wasn’t up to the job.

  After the trial Carl had hung around for a week, drinking at Archer’s and dropping by the farm every couple of days, a man adrift. Frances had expected him to head back to Dundurn but it soon became evident that he wasn’t going anywhere for a while. She wasn’t sure why, and she suspected that he didn’t know himself. She did know that whenever he’d been too long at the bar he would begin to talk darkly about The Mayor. Frances decided she would find something for him to do before he got himself into trouble. The new irrigation system was a fairly expensive proposition and one that she’d been putting off for a couple of years. But she needed water for the business, and she knew Carl to be someone who was very good at any number of things. Unfortunately one of those things was getting himself into trouble. So she hired him.

  Carl, maybe knowing he was in need of diversion, took to the project like a hungry man to lunch. He found a pump powered by a six cylinder Cummins diesel engine at an auction sale near Kitchener, along with two thousand feet of four-inch aluminum piping. The engine was seized so Frances bought the entire system for a quarter of its value. Carl set up a shop in the old garage behind the house, stripped the motor down, freed and pulled the pistons, the crankshaft and the cam, then washed out the block with Varsol and honed the cylinders. He took the cylinder head to Krupp’s in town to have the guides replaced and the valves re-seated. He bought main and rod bearings, rings, camshaft gears and a carburetor kit. Then, in the shade of the old machine shed, he reassembled everything. Frances happened to be walking by when he first started the engine; she stopped to watch him as he adjusted the mixture screws on the carburetor, his head cocked as he sought the sound he wanted from the idling engine. When he looked up and saw her standing there, he smiled. It wasn’t the first smile she’d seen since his return, but it was the first one that seemed to come from somewhere inside of him.

  Perry, who wasn’t much of a smiler on his best day, became increasingly sour in the face of Carl’s presence at the farm. When Frances had told him that she had hired Carl to install the new system, Perry had insisted that he could do it himself, although that wasn’t true. Perry had more work than he could handle in the fields and besides, he couldn’t have rebuilt the diesel engine in a month of Sundays. Perry had reacted by ignoring Carl outright, even to the point of not responding if Carl asked him where he might find a certain wrench or other tools. Frances could see what was happening but she decided she would let the two of them work it out on their own. She couldn’t be concerned about a pissing contest between the two, even if Perry was the only one doing the pissing.

  She had enough on her plate, having somehow allowed herself to be declared the president of a group called Halt All Landfills in Talbotville, a grassroots organization which quickly became known as HALT. Since Hank Hofferman had announced his landfill proposal for the Irish Line, several hundred citizens from the area had signed petitions against it. An initial meeting at the town hall had unexpectedly overfilled the place. Hofferman was the only one present in favor of the project and it was obvious he had seriously underestimated the public’s resistance. Standing in front of the gathering, in his creased jeans and polished cowboy boots, he assured those present that he was on their side.

  ‘I’m one of you,’ he kept saying.

  ‘You ain’t one of me,’ one old farmer told him. ‘Not in them boots.’

  When a second meeting was called ten days later, Hofferman was prepared. This time the gathering was at the auditorium of Talbotville High School, and even that venue was too small as several hundred people crowded inside, with the overflow listening from the hallways.

  Hofferman arrived with an entourage this time. There were two engineers, one with a background in agriculture, the other in waste disposal. There was the local councilor from the riding. And there was Bud Stephens from Rose City. The six men were seated on plastic chairs across the stage in the front of the hall, beneath a picture of a very young Queen Elizabeth.

  The moderator was to be Mayor Luanne Roper, but she was suddenly called out of town on an emergency and Rufus Canfield was summoned from the bar at Archer’s to pinch hit. During the course of the evening it was suggested that Mayor Roper had been receiving sizable campaign donations from Hofferman for years in gratitude for her support on the contentious issue of factory hog farms. It was further suggested that the emergency that called her out of town may have been a premonition of her political future.

  Rufus was sober enough to chair the meeting and yet drunk enough not to bother to conceal his disdain for the assembled experts on the stage. The engineers spoke first, one after the other, and they mouthed the anticipated assurances that the landfill would be completely safe.

  ‘The soil in that area is clay-based, perfect for containment,’ said the first of the two, a skinny man with rimless glasses and gelled hair. He had a slide show that displayed a number of landfills across the continent, all excavated in clay. If he expected that snapshots of various dumps would reassure the crowd of anything, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

  The second engineer was a local man, and it was known that he had worked on various projects for Hank Hofferman over the years, including the hotly debated sow barns. He spoke to the drainage concerns, describing to the assembly a series of ditches and lagoons that would safeguard the landfill in the event of heavy rains.

  ‘But the land drains into the river,’ Rufus objected.

  ‘Not true,’ the man said. ‘It drains into a creek on the property.’

  ‘Where does the creek drain?’ Rufus asked.

  The man looked at his map for a moment. ‘Well, I guess that eventually it would drain into the river.’

  Rufus gave the man a long look, raising his eyebrows theatrically. The local councilor was next up and he made a little speech about Hank Hofferman – local farmer made good, successful owner of several intensive livestock operations, a friend to the environment and to the common man. The speech was not meant to be funny and the councilor was dismayed when people laughed at it. He hurried on to talk about the benefits of the proposed landfill to the county, in terms of jobs and added tax income.

  ‘Added tax income,’ Rufus repeated. ‘Does it mean that my taxes will actually go down, because the county is collecting additional monies from the landfill?’

  ‘Well, no,’ the councilor said slowly. ‘It doesn’t work like that. It would be a residual thing. Your taxes would not go up.’

  ‘And when in the history of the world has that happened?’ Rufu
s said.

  ‘My point is,’ the councilor said, getting testy now, ‘more tax revenue for the county is a good thing. Not only that, but a project of this scope would be beneficial to Talbotville’s image in general. There are investors out there who don’t even know that Talbotville exists. This is going to raise our profile. This will put us on the map.’

  Frances was standing along the wall. She was weary to the bone and had considered not even coming. Her distaste for Hank Hofferman had convinced her to drink a couple of cups of coffee and make the drive into town.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said now. ‘Just so I’m clear on this – we’re going to improve our image by accepting trash from the big city?’

  ‘I didn’t say that—’ the councilor began, but Bud Stephens interrupted him.

  ‘Then I’ll say it,’ Bud said, and he stood up.

  Frances smiled. ‘Speaking of trash,’ she said.

  Bud stared at her as if he was genuinely hurt. He had dressed down for the country crowd, wearing black jeans and a maroon t-shirt. His eyes weren’t right, Frances thought. There was a chemical flash there she recognized from her partying days.

  ‘Well, it’s not organic cucumbers,’ he said to her, ‘but this will enhance this area’s image. This project will mark Talbotville as a progressive community. Listen, people, I’ll tell you what I tell my constituents in Rose City. You’re either in the twenty-first century or you’re not. We have a chance to build a state-of-the-art disposal facility in your area, something other communities are going to look at—’

  ‘It’s a goddamn dump and we don’t want it!’ someone shouted.

  ‘Not in my back yard?’ Bud said. ‘Is that it?’