by Rob Riggan
Who’s he talking to? she wondered.
She owned him. From the time she first saw him, he was hers to do with as she wanted, and she knew it. Given all that had happened to her before she met him, and what a damn fool she’d been, if any other man had given her that opportunity, she would have made a fool of him just to prove he couldn’t do that again. But from the first, there was something about Charlie—she didn’t want to call him vulnerable, but he was. An honest heart could do that to you. It was scary to her. She knew she could do what she wanted with a man like that—love him or make him ridiculous because he couldn’t hide how he felt, it was out of his control. She’d never felt anything like it from a man before. But that vulnerability showed only with her.
She heard about him long before she ever saw him because everyone was talking about him. Her sister Sarah, Frank Cady’s wife, told her first. Sarah lived in New Hope along the highway down from Tennessee, not too far from New Apex. New Apex was three miles west from Charlie’s cabin along the same ridge, and a bit higher. A dozen houses or so, a church, a brick WPA school and a store with two gas pumps and a repair garage at an intersection of two state roads. The forest drew back for about a mile around into pastures, and the land looked like an upside-down bowl, and bony, especially when the skies were gray. It was a place of moods, she knew, and not for everybody. Charlie would tell her later it seemed to him at times like the very end of the earth, a place hanging on after all life elsewhere had been washed away. Other times, he said he could feel all the pulsating world below their mountain rise and electrify the very solitude. Well, she knew that feeling, too.
But that cabin! It was down a little grass-covered track you could drive a car on, and suddenly you were out of the woods into a meadow. There it was—stone chimney, big fireplace, porch looking way south down into the flatlands, where the heat blurred everything in a fine, sun-drenched haze. If you imagined, you could almost smell that sweltering world down below, and were glad you weren’t there. He told her he thought it was the prettiest place he’d ever seen, that when he first saw it, he felt like a rich man for the first time in his life. She thought it was the prettiest place, too—certainly they were happiest there, if happiness is a rightful expectation out of life. They had never stopped loving each other, and finally that was all that mattered to her. The cabin was torn down a few years after they left so someone with money could build a proper house.
She first saw him outside the Blackstone County Courthouse one lunch hour. He was standing down by the sidewalk like he was waiting, his Stetson tipped, Reggie Tetrault, the bailiff, beside him, leering as always. She knew she had nothing to be ashamed of—Reggie could leer all he wanted. But she guessed her look caught Charlie because he started to blush. She stopped—she couldn’t help herself—and looked at him, disbelieving. Could any man be such a damn fool? Big gun on his hip, baseball mitts for hands and nothing but putty? That blush showed it all. She showed him her back then. She didn’t dare reveal the fear that came over her in that moment that she hardly understood herself.
She didn’t know then that he was the one who had served the capias on her ex-husband, Lonnie. It got kind of ugly, she heard. Lonnie could be that way, she remembered from when he had beat her for the last time and she’d taken off for good. That was before she ever saw Charlie or he knew anything about her. Her married name was Parcel. She took back Conley when she left Lonnie and went home. She’d like to say Lonnie Parcel was a sweet man except when the liquor got to him. That’s what women always wanted to say about their men, it seemed. But liquor revealed a man, and she knew Lonnie never was sweet; he was a sonuvabitch. He was always looking at her sidelong, finding something new to fault her by, when he wasn’t eyeing other women, telling them what he’d told her about his playing backup to this and that star over in Nashville, and even backup at the Opry. Only with him, it was true. He was that good on the banjo. He liked the drugs and life that went with it, too. She used to love to hear him play. If he were only that way all the time—his banjo, his voice—she could understand her love for him. But if she’d let him, he would have made a career out of scaring her. He’d buy her tight dresses and parade her like his whore. Sometimes that wasn’t a bad feeling, she found. It was kind of satisfying, like it touched something deep. And the way people looked at her would scare him in turn. She was young then, and wild.
Had she told them, most people wouldn’t have believed that Charlie Dugan was a shy man. He made her smile. He was so formal sometimes she wanted to laugh but didn’t dare—she didn’t want to hurt him. No one was more surprised and disbelieving than she was at the idea that she, wild Drusilla Conley, would take up with a lawman, the first one in a long time tough enough to get respect from the people up around New Apex, her people. By the day she saw him that first time in front of the courthouse, he was regaining his belief in himself and a world he liked and thought he could improve. He really believed that, she knew now. He really liked people and thought they all should be treated fair, and the only mechanism for that was the law. After a while, it became clear to everyone that he would help them in any way he could. She watched it happen. In time, they came to feel that not only did he not despise or look down on them, but he actually expected more of them than they were accustomed to, and they feared they might disappoint him. That went right back to Alabama, she knew.
After the courthouse, she heard he’d come looking for her in the bank where she worked and just about burned a hole in the floor when he found she wasn’t there and felt everyone was looking at him. And they were looking at him because he already had a reputation, and he just stood there in the middle of the lobby for almost ten minutes. Anyhow, they finally met months later in a snowstorm up at the New Apex gas station and store, where she let him see her smile at him, then kidded him a bit about being tongue-tied. He was never tongue-tied again, not with her. Lord, no! They talked all the time to each other, and just the memory would make her smile. My, how we did talk, she’d recall, like we were friends.
He was proud, no matter his being poor. He was big and strong, and of course she liked that, and he had hands that had worked all his life doing hard things. He did everything but the mining, which he hated and his uncle wouldn’t let him do anyhow, and his hands were almost too big even for him, and she liked that, too. He would come up behind her and rest those hands on her hips, and they were like pillows, holding her softly to the earth while her heart flew. Because he was tough, but in a good way, he encouraged a toughness in her, not the meanness she’d come to feel with Lonnie, and even before that while growing up, always wanting to hit back somehow or other.
He had taken a seat on the little chair by the dresser and was bent over, holding his head in his hands. “None of the killings, of which we have far too many in a county this small,” he said, “and the assaults, the beatings and affrays, with the exception of that murder-suicide with the doctor and nurse last year out at the veterans’ hospital, ever involve educated people or people financially well off, have you noticed? The law isn’t about them, Dru. The law has never been about them.”
She didn’t reply. She knew better than to push. He would come to her when he was ready, and she would comfort him, but now there was too much choked up in there, and it made an almost physical barrier for him to tear through before he could reach her. She’d learned that a piece of him was like an animal that was still half wild, and it took patience.
“This wasn’t even murder, tonight. But it’s the damn Titanic, I tell you! It was her hand, Dru, a woman’s hand just like yours, pale and feminine and soft, reaching after me as I climbed out of Junior’s cruiser after talking to her and checking on the kids. She wasn’t even looking at me, but it was like she wanted something from me I once felt I had to give. It would be Pemberton who’s supposed to be involved.”
That’s when she first felt the alarm. Until then, for all she knew, it was just another bad night. “What’s Martin got to do with this?”
> “And Eddie saying, ‘Back off, Charlie!’ just like that, the moment we were alone in the car again. You know Eddie doesn’t use my first name unless he’s upset. ‘You can back away, take some heat,’ he said, ‘and you know as well as I do, it won’t be much. Mostly from the family.’ ”
“Did you back off?”
She saw he didn’t hear her, or that he was ignoring her or the question, and she felt a little panic and didn’t know why. It was the last thing she expected to feel with Charlie after all these years. He was looking out the window now, where he could see the outlines of trees emerging from the edge of the field and even a couple of black lumps in the mist low to the grass that had to be his Angus cattle. His secret, those Angus. He raised them for an investment, he said, but mostly for sheer joy, and not many people knew he did it.
“I wonder where that old man’s rotting,” he said.
“Who?” she asked, startled by the sudden loudness of his voice.
“The preacher.”
He talks about that preacher like he’s a haunt, she thought. He tried to take Charlie back out of here, said it was Babylon, offered to bring him up to the pulpit and into Tennessee. But that preacher brought him to me, too.
“You should have seen Danny Carver, coiled like a blind, angry snake ready to strike at anything. Wants his justice. I don’t know whether I can give it to him.”
“Charlie? What is it?” She was really alarmed now.
“Eddie knows me, Dru, knows how much I hate losing.”
“What happened?”
“It’s a lot more than what happened,” he replied real softly, like he always did when he was trying to make up his mind about something.
VI
Elmore
Elmore Willis, lying on his back, gazed at the three huge, arched windows that filled most of the front wall of his law office on the top floor of the Trotter Building. The windows overlooked South Charlotte Street, four stories below, and the courthouse square. He had just awakened and was confused by the soft golden glow of the early-morning sun easing its way along the high ceiling and down the wall behind him. The window was open. Birds were singing. Trees were in leaf. It was warm, and he knew it was only April. This sure as hell wasn’t New Haven.
Then he remembered where he was and knew at once he shouldn’t look at the other end of the huge, old leather sofa on which he lay; he knew what he would find. He could smell her, and he could smell the night before. Without looking, he could see the almost-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s, the glass smeared with lipstick, his clothes scattered across the huge room and its scanty furniture, the old mission-wood oak desk.
A church bell began to ring, the sound clear and salutary. It was Sunday, a beautiful day, the sky, cleansed by the night’s storm, a rich blue. He shook his head, trying to reconcile the madness he’d witnessed on the square hours earlier—Dugan playing justice with bootleg whiskey, and the violence of the storm itself—to this Southern morning.
He had hours of work to do—three cases to plead on Monday alone, one nonsupport and a driving under the influence. The third involved speeding and reckless driving, and the man would lose his license, and so probably his job, if convicted this time. Two kids and a mortgage. No one would notice. The man was guilty. Small, ordinary cases, small fees, people without much money or influence who had come to him right from the start, not in droves, not even in quantities sufficient to pay the rent and board, but they’d appeared, and because of a name—his father’s name, Doc Willis. They actually seemed to think that because they’d known his father, they knew who the son was, and what to expect from him.
He opened his eyes—he’d been snoozing. The bright, sun-flooded room floated into focus again. Then he knew he had to get up and out into that blue sky, free and clean. Forever, if possible. That’s what had brought him to Damascus in the first place. Now he was feeling hemmed-in once again, by the woman sleeping at the other end of his sofa, but even more so by Dugan, his late father’s friend.
Elmore was learning fast. To hear it said all these years later, his father had been a friend to virtually everyone in Blackstone County. Myths or legends of that sort had a way of growing in the mountains—sainthood for a variety of sins was not uncommon. The exception in his father’s case had been the Damascus elite, the lawyers and doctors and other professionals, the wealthy families who had built the mills, the aging and often eccentric direct descendants of the aristocracy—the would-be cavaliers of the Lost Cause, that greatest of all romances. To them, his father had been at best a communist and at worst a traitor to his class, if not exactly his profession, to be held forever suspect, tolerated only because he was a doctor and therefore by rights one of them.
Dugan was something else. That was his, Elmore’s, territory. The law as presented in the courtroom was theater, true, and Elmore was learning to enjoy it. But the night before, all he had felt was revulsion at Dugan’s wild assertion of self, of bald power and inherent violence under the guise of law. Worse, it had seemed that only the gods—lightning, thunder and rain—had been able to shut down that travesty.
Now, more than at any moment since his return to Damascus, everything felt tentative, fragile and alien.
He recalled driving south out of the gray rain and patches of dirty snow that winter, propelled by a dream, a siren call that had affected his sleep for months, and finally even his ability to have a cup of coffee and just relax. Driving south, excited because he’d finally made a decision, he’d wondered at the lure of Blackstone County, where he’d lived such a short time so many years before.
It was his father’s funeral that uncorked it all. Elmore was not what the people gathered in Damascus had expected that day, he knew that even then. Rather, what he looked like wasn’t what they expected. He knew there had always been a lot of his father in him, though he was bigger in stature and far more of a hothouse creature in those days, pampered in the private schools he’d hated and college—Yale Law was still to come—all according to his mother’s design, not his father’s. His prior residency in the South had been limited to the three years they lived there as a family before his mother left to return north to hate his father from a safe distance, taking their boy with her. Elmore had never made a visit back; his father had always come north to see him. So the sense of surprise among the crowd when he stepped from the car at the cemetery that day was palpable, a kind of curiosity verging on wonder, as though maybe his father hadn’t died. It was eerie; Elmore had felt himself being almost physically possessed by this expectation or hope, whatever it was. Then, it had been seductive. Now, it was a burden.
For it was this desire, of course, that he felt from the people knocking on his office door. “No secretary?” they sometimes said, looking around with an almost startled look as they realized they were looking right at him, that there were no barriers to their access. “Yes, your daddy was like that, too,” they might add. Then they’d depart, satisfied, for the bench he’d placed out in the hall alongside a small table with magazines, if he hadn’t already asked them through the closed door to wait there because he had a client.
For his father’s funeral, vehicles of every sort had parked all the way back downtown as far as the courthouse square, a mile away. And they were parked just as far in the opposite direction, as well as down the side streets. That cemetery with its rolling, manicured lawns and elegant head-stones and old, enshrouding trees was just where his father belonged, Elmore’s mother had insisted to Harlan Monroe, publisher of the Damascus paper, when he called to report his father’s death. He belonged there among “the county’s finest and the brave fallen of the War Between the States,” she had said, her contempt just below the surface, there for the taking. But Harlan was a gentleman and chose to accept things at face value, though Elmore knew now how it must have saddened him. His father had specifically asked to be buried near his clinic up in the forests of Rainer Cove, any pretense of rank having always been a great irritation to him.
Harlan said it was like nothing he’d ever seen, the hundreds of people who filed down out of the mountains from the north and west, the slow, measured flow of the cars and trucks through town having an ominous feel for any would-be aristocrat. “You just want to take your hat off and pray,” Harlan said, “and mostly for yourself. And here I thought we’d lost the art of celebrating death.”
But Elmore wasn’t like his father then any more than he was now, he thought, feeling the leather of the old sofa suck at his skin as he moved ever so carefully, trying not to awaken the beast at the other end. My mother sure as hell didn’t have to be afraid of my being him.
But he didn’t think she really was afraid by the time of the funeral, just that the pretense was simpler than the truth. She was, he was convinced, afraid of something else: that huge crowd’s display of love for Dr. Willis, “Doc,” the apparent simplicity of that feeling that wasn’t really simple at all, any more than his father’s love for them had been. She was afraid of the implied reproach, too; if one thing characterized his parents’ marriage, it had been competition.
It wasn’t clear if the wives of the good doctors, lawyers and businessmen of Damascus—the New South, as Harlan put it with his curious mixture of pride and irony—who showed up really came to pay their respects to the deceased doctor or to catch a glimpse of her. It had been over twelve years since they last saw her, those who had actually known her. Harlan had probably been his father’s closest friend. He’d called Elmore and his mother when Doc died suddenly, fighting, even hiding, the cancer as long as he could. Then Harlan had arranged the funeral when it became clear that, except to defy his father’s last wish, Elmore’s mother was all too willing to have someone else do the work. Elmore took to Harlan from the moment the publisher wandered out to meet him at the plane in Charlotte.
