Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement

by Grif Stockley

“She called him a son of a bitch when she got the letter telling her he was foreclosing.”

  Mr. Carpenter studies the reddish liquid in his glass.

  “See, I remember all that because your mother and I were friends. I liked her, but she kind of felt people owed her special treatment because her daddy was a doctor. The way I remember it, all she got was a letter from Oscar saying that since she couldn’t sell it and was a whole year behind on the payments to sign it back over to him. She was angry, but I thought he had gone the extra mile. He didn’t want to humiliate her by filing suit. Finally, she signed it back over, but she stayed mad

  at him.”

  It will be easy enough to check this out through John’s abstract company.

  “Well, I remember the Taylors pretty much ostracizing us after my father died,” I say.

  “I guess that’s the reason.”

  The old man closes his eyes as if the sight of me hinders his memory.

  “It was a hard time for her, but she kind of did that to herself. She got real bitter. I think she felt like everybody was supposed to ignore her debts and got mad when they didn’t. I was about the only friend she had left, and sometimes I think that was because she didn’t owe me anything. She was in debt to people while she sent you off to Subiaco. That hacked some people off, too.”

  Though it is cool inside his house, I feel sweat dripping down my sides. Have I really mis remembered so much of the past that none of it makes sense to me? What is making me feel out of synch is that I am realizing that I don’t understand what I do remember about it. This old man has no ax to grind.

  “Were you around when Paul Taylor got my grandfather’s remaining property by paying her taxes?”

  Mr. Carpenter bobs his head up and down like a sparrow drinking from a pond.

  “I couldn’t believe she would be so negligent. She showed me the notices afterward. She just couldn’t believe anybody would do that to her. But if it hadn’t been Paul, it would have been somebody else. She was kind of a lost soul by then. See, my theory is, your grandfather had overprotected her. It would have been okay if your dad had stayed healthy.”

  My mother, a lost soul? I feel guilt seeping into the room like carbon monoxide. I never thought of her that way. Now, I see that my father, until his drinking and schizophrenia destroyed him, was the stronger of the two. After he died, she hid her weaknesses behind a naive belief that nobody would dare hold her accountable for her life after all she had been through. Where was I? Where was Marty? She was off being a hippie, rebelling against the world, while I was off saving it in the Peace Corps. Were we so selfish we didn’t see what was happening to her?

  “For some reason I always thought of my mother,” I admit, almost dazed by these revelations, “as tough, even feisty.” “An act,” Mr. Carpenter says, almost apologetically, as if he can smell my guilt.

  “She was scared to death beneath all that sarcasm.”

  “Did she begin to drink too much?” I ask, knowing the answer.

  “More than she should have,” he says, and actually sighs.

  “I should have helped her on that.

  Too many of us did drink too much, of course, and still do.”

  And certainly a fault that has carried over to her son. I put down the empty can, noticing that I have made small dents in it with my fingertips. I realize I came over here secretly hoping that he would tell me how wonderful my mother was, and how badly the Taylors exploited her. Instead, for the first time I realize how badly I neglected her.

  As if he were back in class giving me time to answer, the silence fills the room as he waits for an explanation of my seeming inability to get a single detail right from my past in Bear Creek. Why should he be surprised? I’ve had thirty years to get it wrong. Sensing my humiliation, Mr. Carpenter asks, “How’s the case going? I still can’t believe Paul would be involved in a murder. But maybe so. Getting old doesn’t make you get better.”

  “Is it true that he and Mae Terry are good friends?” I ask, ignoring his question as I put the beer can down on the coffee table in front of me.

  A sardonic smile comes to Mr. Carpenter’s face.

  “I think they are, but Mae is a lesbian. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  I squint hard at the old man in the dim light, wondering if he is pulling my leg.

  “You’re kidding!”

  Mr. Carpenter finally takes a healthy sip of his sherry.

  “The girl who moved here from North Carolina and has taken care of Mae

  is her friend,” he says discreetly.

  “There’s no doubt about that in my mind.”

  What a dupe I’ve been. So Angela constructed that scenario to keep me from suspecting she had an affair with Paul. My undershirt feels clammy, and I wonder whether Mr. Carpenter can smell my fear and embarrassment. What else has she been lying to me about? The chair I’m sitting in has begun to pinch every part of my hips.

  “I need to get on the road, Mr. Carpenter,” I say, and get to my feet.

  “I appreciate the beer.”

  The old man looks crushed. Yet what does he expect?

  “Your mother was a fine woman. The circumstances were just too much for her. Women are better prepared today to take care of themselves.”

  “I’m not upset,” I lie, edging toward the door.

  “I just need to get on the road. We’ll get together again.”

  I head out into the soft spring air, thinking that tomorrow I will call my sister for a long overdue chat. Marty has long warned me away from eastern Arkansas. I used to think it had to do with my grandfather’s liaison with a black woman. Now I’m not so sure. If I’m not capable of understanding my past, what chance do I have to understand what is going on over here now? I look at my watch. It is only 9:30, and desperate to do something that will help my client, I drive by Darla Tate’s house and

  see the glow of her television through the window.

  Darla is Doss’s last hope, and I go up to the door and boldly knock on her door as if I am a late-arriving dinner guest.

  Barefoot and in a pair of brown shorts, she opens the door with a can of Miller Lite in her hand. I apologize for not calling, but she invites me in with a shy smile that suggests to me that she hopes I might be staying for a while. If she knew that inside my shirt I was wringing wet, she might not be so eager.

  Embarrassed anew by her obvious hopefulness, I sit down (there is no evidence of her boys), decline a beer, and get right to the point.

  “Now that you’ve had time to think about it, is it possible you might have mistaken,” I ask, trying not to sound as if I am too desperate, “someone else’s voice for Doss’s that day when you were in the bathroom?”

  The sad little smile on her face is not reassuring.

  “I’ve been reconstructing that moment and comparing others’ voices with his,” she says, carefully, “and now I’m more convinced than ever it was Class. I’m really sorry.”

  Shit! I feel depression clamping down like a fist on my will to think.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  I ask.

  “Don’t be mad at me, Gideon,” she says, her tone becoming anxious.

  “You wouldn’t want me to lie, would you?”

  “No,” I say, telling myself not to be angry at her.

  “I just thought you weren’t so sure.” Why should I be pissed? She is merely confirming what Class has admitted. Of course. Class may have been calling someone else, not Paul.

  “I didn’t want to,” she says, her voice wistful.

  You don’t score points with a man you would like to ask you out by convicting his client.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “If that’s what you think, you have to say it.”

  Her eyes follow mine to her muscular legs, and she awkwardly covers her thighs with her large, rough hands.

  “Are you absolutely sure Muddy didn’t drive back over and murder Willie?” she asks.

  “I though
t I had solved the case for you.”

  There is self-mockery in her voice. She knows I’m not interested in her as a woman; yet I know the feeling. False hopes are among the last

  things we give up.

  My heart no longer in it, I ask how the plant is doing, and she says that Eddie appears finally to be getting a grip on the costs that were eating the plant up. Once the trial is over, things should settle down and get back to normal. Life goes on, her manner suggests. I leave after a few more minutes, thinking that is easy for Darla to believe.

  She isn’t going to have to cross examine her lover about her affair with a murder defendant. Knowing this case is going down the tubes, I drive back to Blackwell County. Riding through the interminable blackness, I wonder why I thought I knew what I was doing when I took this case. A simple matter of hubris? But arising from what?

  Was it that Southern white male arrogance that kicked in the moment my mother gazed on me at birth and assumed she would die happy? As I swerve unsuccessfully to avoid the remains of a skunk, it occurs to me that Paul Taylor and I may not be much different.

  The next day I drive out to Hutto, on the western edge of Blackwell County, to pay a visit to my sister’s clothing consignment store, which she, deaf to pleas of political correctness, has named the Wigwam.

  Hutto, a small town growing bigger almost daily due to white flight from the county’s metropolitan areas, is so unlike Bear Creek it is hard to imagine they are in the same country.

  With its multiple car dealerships, real estate offices, and bustling retail downtown area, Hutto displays a business vitality any chamber of commerce president would be proud to pitch to a visiting Yankee

  industrialist seeking to squeeze labor costs.

  A former sixties hippie turned nineties entrepreneur, my sister has cashed in on the conservation movement in clothing: I understand it’s thought smart now in some circles to wear a second-hand skirt. Our mother must be turning over in her grave. Marty, I’m told by a clerk who accepts my word that I’m her brother, is in the back, and I’m pointed to a door in the rear of the store marked private. I knock, and hear my older sister’s voice commanding me to come in.

  I open the door and find her behind a desk hunched over a computer, wearing dollar-store reading glasses identical to my own and an old-fashioned eye shade that makes her look like a clerk out of a Charles Dickens novel. Surrounded by papers and what I figure are boxes of clothes, her work area is as messy as Dan’s.

  “Gideon, aren’t you doing your Christmas shopping,” she asks, without missing a beat, “a little early this year?”

  I smile, never having been known as much of a shopper. Despite pledges to get together more often, we haven’t seen each other since Christmas.

  “How’s Woogie?” I answer, inquiring about my old dog who was exiled to Hutto. With Sarah due home for the summer in a day or so, and with me living in a new neighborhood, Woogie can make a fresh start. It doesn’t appear that Amy is anxious to return Jessie, despite her promise to do so.

  “King of the road,” my sister says, leaning back in her chair.

  “He’s a roamer, but that’s okay. You want him back?”

  “Not today,” I say.

  “You got a minute?”

  Not too long ago, Marty would have rolled her eyes and groaned aloud at this imposition. Now, happily married for the first time in four or possibly five tries, she has mellowed just a bit.

  “Love trouble, job trouble, or Sarah?” she asks. We never seem to talk unless I have a problem.

  “Just more family history,” I say, taking a seat on a metal folding chair she points out for me.

  “Not another nigger in the woodpile?” she says, grimacing. Last year she had counseled me unsuccessfully to ignore the allegations concern y ing our paternal grandfather’s sexual exploits.

  “Not yet,” I say, knowing if I wanted to aggravate her I could tell her Mr. Carpenter’s story about our maternal grandfather being in the KKK.

  Not that it would really bother Marty, whose contractor husband is so right-wing he thinks Phil Gramm is another Fidel Castro.

  “What do you remember about the Taylors when we were growing up?”

  Marty pushes up the sleeves of her gray sweatshirt.

  A true native of the Delta, it is never warm enough for her.

  “That I would have liked to have gotten in Paul’s pants if he had been a little older,” she says, smirking at me.

  “He was a cutie.

  Remember when he used to stay at our house. I kept hoping he would come try to crawl in bed with me. Of course I was so fat back then he couldn’t have gotten in my bed with me if he had wanted to.”

  My sister will say anything, and I laugh, despite myself. Since her marriage, Marty has slimmed down for the first time in her life. She has claimed she was a virgin against her will until she was twenty.

  “After Daddy died,” I ask, trying to sound nonchalant, “didn’t the Taylors drop Mother socially? Paul quit coming over; she didn’t go out to Riverdale.”

  Marty frowns and shakes her head.

  “Don’t you remember? After Daddy died, she went to hell,” she says, “which was understandable for a while.

  But Mother thought she was a Southern belle.

  When things got tough, instead of climbing down off her high horse, and figuring out how to survive like the rest of the human race, she stayed in her bedroom and felt sorry for herself. It didn’t do any of us any good: If Oscar hadn’t loaned her the money to send you to Subiaco, which

  she never paid back, you would have turned into a little thug. I was a mess, too, but that was mostly my own fault.”

  I can’t believe my ears.

  “The Taylors paid for me to go to Subiaco?” I yelp.

  “How come you knew and I didn’t?”

  “You probably did, but you wouldn’t be a lawyer if you didn’t believe your own shit smelled good. But maybe you didn’t. You were spoiled rotten from the word go. Mother always acted like somebody had told her that you were supposed to be the next Jesus Christ,” Marty needles me.

  “She was bitter as hell in those days. She went into a snit that lasted the rest of her life when Oscar finally wanted the building back.

  When he offered to lend her the money to send you off to a private school, she acted as if it was the least he could do.”

  Like a balky window being wrenched open an inch to try to catch a breeze, my brain yields a fragment of a conversation with Mother about how Oscar was probably going to charge her interest. Until now all I have allowed myself to remember was her resentment, which became my own. Why have I had such a need to rearrange our past? I no longer really trust anything I think I know.

  “You remember Paul got granddaddy’s land just by paying off the taxes?”

  I ask, hoping to confirm at least one fact.

  “Sure,” Marty says, pushing a button on her computer.

  “But that was only fair. They had got y ten fed up with Mother by then. She really let things go after Daddy died. If you recall, I was off in San Francisco part of that time being Bear Creek’s only contribution to the drug and macrame industry. I suspect the Taylors felt they were entitled to something by then. I’d be surprised if Mother ever paid a penny back on the loan.”

  I feel dazed by what I am learning and shift uneasily in the hard chair. Am I so out of touch with reality that I don’t even know the difference between right and wrong?

  “You don’t remember the Taylors as being predators?”

  My sister laughs.

  “Who have you been talking to, Gideon? Are you going to give me a sermon on slavery? Sure, they owned slaves, and when the Civil War was over, they exploited the blacks and the white sharecroppers. Then, when they couldn’t do that any longer, they kicked them both off the land and farmed with machines.

  While the rest of the country was slaughtering Indians and herding them onto reservations, Southerners were doing their thing with blac
ks.

  But if it weren’t for people like the Taylors, you wouldn’t have the United States.

  “Anybody with drive in this country is eventually seen as evil by people like you because humanity doesn’t come in equal little packets like Sweet’n Low. Fortunately, this country doesn’t reward the weak, stupid, or lazy. It protects them too much, but the truth is, we’re talking about subsistence when we’re talking about welfare, so it’s a silly debate as far as I’m concerned. If a welfare system is the price of free enterprise, I don’t really care. Just keep giving people like me and my husband a chance to compete economically, and the United States can afford people like you.”

  Her face is flushed, and I’m glad there isn’t an American flag in the room, or she would probably stand up and salute it. Though she has been on this kick for a couple of years now, it is hard to believe this is my old anti-establishment “give peace a chance” sister talking.

  “Who are people like me?” I ask, my blood beginning to boil. This right-wing drivel makes me sick.

  “Give it a rest, Gideon,” my sister says, her voice suddenly weary.

  “You know you’re a lot like Mother. It’s been seven years now, but you never made yourself get over Rosa’s death. She was supposed to live forever or at least until you keeled over at the age of a hundred with her at your bedside drooling over you. Since she died, about half the time you’ve gone around acting like an arrogant shit because somebody cut off your lifetime happiness guarantee.”

  I feel my scalp on fire. The truth of what she is saying radiates through my brain. Maybe this is why I have gotten things so wrong in Bear Creek.

  Everything I thought I remembered has been filtered through my own self-pity. Poor me, poor Mother. Death busted both our bubbles. But I’ll be damned if I’ll give Marty the satisfaction of knowing she is right.

  “Speaking of people like me,” I say, maliciously, “did you know Paul Taylor has been charged with capital felony murder in Bear Creek and goes on trial week after next?”

  My sister’s eyes widen.

  “Paul killed somebody?