The Blackstone Commentaries

by Rob Riggan

  “I didn’t hear about that in the campaign,” Eddie said, thinking he had never heard that in any campaign.

  “You don’t win elections saying that.”

  “Why not?”

  Charlie leaned back in his chair and studied Eddie. The smile appeared again. “I wouldn’t be here if I thought you didn’t know better.”

  “Why not?” Eddie demanded, knowing he had nothing to lose, not that it would have made any difference if he had. He was too old to give a damn about political niceties. Then he noticed Charlie’s hands for the first time, big and thick. Working hands. Hands, he realized all of a sudden, that had known poverty. He looked at Charlie again, startled by what else he’d never noticed before: the slightly slumped shoulders. He felt a new respect. The shoulders hid it and said it all; he was powerful but probably unaware of his physical strength because strength had always been a tool, a necessity, something that just came to him, not a goal. If Charlie took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, Eddie knew he’d see the proof.

  At first, Eddie had felt disloyal inviting the sheriff-elect into his home because Charlie, one of their own, had turned and ousted Mac and, it was to be expected, all his deputies as well. Some had held those jobs for more than twelve years and gotten smug about holding them forever, the way all politicians and appointees seemed to get. Politicking and a sense of history didn’t appear to go together, or was it simply a sense of mortality? Anyhow, there was always a little outrage and something personal in being kicked out.

  “Would you be willing to come work with me, Eddie?” That soft voice, like that manner of his, was suddenly as clear and intelligible as a man would ever want anything to be.

  Eddie hadn’t seen that one coming and couldn’t reply for a moment or two. “Politics the way they are around here, that won’t make you any friends. Or me. You’re a Republican now,” Eddie said finally.

  “You’d mind?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Eddie’s prize possession, a Chelsea ship’s bell clock on top of the TV in the parlor that he wound and dusted every Sunday evening, chimed then, right into the silence between them and into places Eddie hadn’t wandered in many years. “It’ll go tougher on you,” he said at last. “You’re going to need all the goodwill you can get. Mac may be down, but he isn’t out.”

  “You’d mind, then?” Charlie repeated.

  “Some things are the way they are, Charlie.” True, Dugan had just been elected, but Eddie was his senior in years, and suddenly, under the circumstances, he felt okay calling him by his first name. “And you said something that suggested they might be made otherwise. Like you believe it. You really think you can do that?”

  IX

  Elmore

  Elmore Willis floated through the lush days of that spring as in a dream going bad, forever struggling, it seemed, against the burden of his past in Blackstone County and its attendant memories. Then, one night, a woman entered the dream.

  He was at a dinner party given by Mrs. Joan Trotter—“Jo,” widow of the owner and heir to Trotter Mills, the biggest employer in Blackstone County. It was his first invitation to one of her parties, to any party that might be considered respectable, and all the women were very nice to him, while their men were reserved in inverse proportion to the women’s attention. He was the object of special curiosity, he knew, because he was a new lawyer in town, a bachelor and connected; Jo Trotter had decided he was worthy of an invitation. The parties were a tradition. Back when she lived in Damascus and attended them, his mother had called them “Jo Trotter’s soirees,” only not breathlessly, as many did. She never wanted to be in Blackstone County, much less attending Jo Trotter’s dinner parties. She had acquiesced, she would still say, for love of her husband.

  Early in the evening, when he entered the big living room with its well-remembered line of French doors overlooking the terrace and lawns, the river valley and the Blue Ridge beyond, he was disappointed to find the scale far less grand than he recalled. But then he was scarcely ten years old when he’d been taken there by his mother.

  “So you’re back among us, Mr. Willis,” Jo Trotter said, gliding across the room and taking him by the hand. “My, you’ve grown handsome. It was Elmore back then, if I remember correctly.”

  “It still is, Mrs. Trotter.”

  “Your mother is well?” She didn’t release his hand but covered it gently with her other, locking him in.

  “Yes.”

  “I remember her as terribly bright and insightful but not very happy. I’m afraid Blackstone County never provided enough stimulation for her.”

  He smiled, meeting her very direct gaze, thinking, Oh, it provided plenty of stimulation, and then, What else did you think? Jo Trotter’s gaze didn’t waver.

  “Your father is still terribly missed after these several years. He did wonderful work. Many of our employees were his patients.”

  He knew she hadn’t said that when his father turned to the mountains and their poor, for in doing so, abruptly turning his back on the country club and Damascus society, he had not only repudiated that society but, by the terms of his profession and status, appeared to betray it. Even his mother had understood that and pointed it out to him well before it happened, not because she expected him to care but because she had to say it if for no other reason than to irritate him. No matter what she’d thought of life in rural North Carolina, she’d understood it. Despite her harsh prejudices, she’d always had a keen instinct for the way things really worked. His father hadn’t; he’d simply loved the place after his fashion, just as, Elmore suspected, he’d loved his wife to his dying day.

  “Thank you,” he said without the irony he felt, Mrs. Trotter still watching him like she was taking his measure. Would he be like his father, difficult and unpredictable and finally, by the very terms of his life, judgmental? He was sure she’d already heard rumors of a certain wildness, but that wasn’t necessarily a fault, especially in an unmarried young man who was also a lawyer—even he knew that.

  She pulled him up beside her, then, still holding him in that light, faintly cool, double-handed grip, started to guide him across the room toward the other guests, her long dress sighing over the parquet floor as she leaned toward him.

  “Have you met superior-court judge Hubert Thurston?” A short, balding man with sandy hair and bushy eyebrows turned toward them. “Huby, this is Elmore Willis—Dr. Willis’s son, you recall? That little clinic up in Rainer Cove?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes! The doctor from up north. Helped some of our poor people. Very dedicated man. Very dedicated. I dare say, Mr. Willis, you will have found Blackstone County changed from your father’s day. Much for the better.” The judge smiled as they shook hands, and Elmore saw that the smile was solely for Mrs. Trotter’s benefit; Elmore was male, an outsider, his allegiances and honor untested.

  Elmore and some fifteen other guests had been seated for several minutes at the giant dining table in the most famous room in Standard, the Tudor mansion built at the turn of the century by the Trotter family on the highest hill in Damascus, when suddenly a young woman appeared like a half-tamed mare on the arm of an older man. A shadow of anger swept across her face as she and her escort, who had to be at least ten years her senior, stepped through the tall archway into the dining room to discover how late they really were. All conversation ceased. Elmore, like everyone else, watched as she suddenly became very still, even regal, all startling blue eyes and black hair chopped childlike around her cheeks. In her look that was now more than anger, Elmore thought he saw a ferocious intelligence in mortal combat with its own enveloping body, demanding if not outright abnegation of her beauty and the effect it had on people, then at least a disavowal of any responsibility for it.

  Her hair was wonderfully disheveled. Elmore repressed a smile, for he was certain she’d just gotten out of bed. He wanted to feel the moral outrage he sensed around the table but was only charmed. And envious. Then he realized he knew her, he was absolutely sure. But
from where?

  Applause and good-natured laughter greeted her escort, who was tall, quite handsome, graceful and athletic looking. The man was dressed in an elegantly cut suit. At the applause, his wide mouth broke into a smile at once self-assured and sardonic, and he made a little bow. He had obviously been drinking, was possibly quite drunk, Elmore decided, for his face was a bit flushed and the long hair unruly across his brow. But undoubtedly in obedience to the code of true gentlemen, he carried himself not just well but almost flawlessly.

  “People, this here’s Rachel McPherson,” the man announced in a soft, assured drawl, claiming the room and all its contents as his birthright, the same smile rising again beneath eyes Elmore now saw were humorless. Just “Rachel.” Not Miss or Mrs. Although back in the South for only a little while, Elmore was fast becoming resensitized to the innuendo of Southern manners, something he’d never even realized he’d learned, it was so long ago when his mother taught him; but she had done it meticulously, of course, out of spite. Introductions and the manner in which they were made mattered. Hell, everybody knows ol’ Rachel, Elmore found himself thinking, mimicking her escort’s drawl, and suddenly he was enraged. Worse, the others in the room only nodded. They didn’t seem to mind. And they were, it was to be assumed, the elite of Blackstone County, himself excepted.

  Then Rachel McPherson flicked her short hair in defiance. She was wearing a close-fitting dark blue dress cut to just below her knees, a style few had the legs, not to say the body, to wear well. On her, it was splendid. It was probably not expensive, he found himself thinking, as though it mattered, and was promptly furious with himself for succumbing to the mores he sensed surrounding him. But the dress was a bit too informal for the occasion, he knew, and he felt people seize on that as well, especially the women. Elmore was enchanted by that flick of the head and the pride.

  Placing a hand on her waist, the man urged Rachel McPherson on to the enormous table ahead of him, pointing her toward the only two vacant place settings. Without betraying a hint of irritation or dissatisfaction, Jo Trotter rose and in a wonderfully clear voice said, “Mrs. McPherson.” Taking the woman’s hand, she introduced her to the individual members of the table. The man only smiled.

  “Everybody just loves Martin Pemberton,” the woman seated on Elmore’s right leaned over to explain, indicating Rachel McPherson’s escort with a nod of her head. “But he’s always in trouble!”

  “How do you mean?” Elmore asked.

  The woman was the wife of the owner of a machine-tool company east of Damascus. “You have to understand, Martin’s always late,” she explained. “It’s almost rude of him to be on time. And you just never know who he’s going to bring.”

  “Then this Mrs. McPherson is not his regular escort?”

  “Oh, heavens no! I’ve never seen her before. Nothing is regular for Martin except his work—and county politics. And wild behavior. Seems to me I heard she’s an elementary-school teacher, or some such thing, out in Little Zion. Came down out of the mountains to better herself, like they’ll do.”

  “You’ll pardon me for interrupting, Marjorie,” a man on the other side of the woman interjected, leaning forward to catch Elmore’s eye, “but I can’t recall ever having an elementary-school teacher like that.” He winked.

  “Now, Sam, how would you have known at that age? And you’re not supposed to be listening, so shoo! He is brilliant, too, you know,” she added, turning to Elmore once again. “He’s old family and went to Duke—Martin, that is. But didn’t I hear Jo say your father was a doctor here, too? Did he go to Duke? Such a wonderful school.”

  “No, ma’am. Cornell.”

  “You don’t say! He was a Yankee?”

  Elmore smiled. “He was born in West Virginia. What did that make him?”

  “Oh, dear.” She smiled back, her eyes twinkling, causing him to appreciate her quickness. “Before or after secession?”

  They both laughed. Southern women always surprised him—they were so much smarter than they were expected to act. He watched her remember herself and pat him lightly, almost apologetically, on his arm.

  At the end of the evening, when Elmore went to leave the party, he found Mrs. McPherson waiting for her escort at the door. A black butler stood discreetly by, his hand on the knob. A sweater draped over her arm, she was staring at the wall in the privacy of her thoughts, a finely sculpted upper lip turned down at the corners. Not for the first time that evening, he was seized by a desire to run a finger ever so lightly over that lip. A shudder ran down his entire body. “Excuse me,” he said.

  She jumped and swung around, her chin lifted. But then she saw him, and the look became more neutral, if still guarded. “Yes?”

  “I apologize, but I couldn’t stop looking at you this evening.” He said it without hesitation or regret or anything remotely apologetic, surprising himself as much as he obviously surprised her. “I know this sounds terrible, but I think I know you from somewhere. My name is Elmore Willis.”

  “I know.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said, feeling himself turn red under the intensity of her gaze, which, too, was unlike him. “Mrs. Trotter introduced us.”

  “I already knew.”

  “You did?” He detected the slightest smile. Somewhere a memory began to stir. “McPherson isn’t your maiden name, of course.”

  At that instant, an arm fell around his shoulder. “If you must know, she’s a widow, as well as our sheriff’s niece, Mr. Willis. Her husband died patriotically in Vietnam. Did you have the good fortune to be a patriot?” The words, spoken sardonically, he thought, tore through him—it was everyone’s question down here, spoken or not, or so it seemed.

  Elmore saw that the words affected the woman deeply, for she seemed to withdraw. “No, I didn’t,” he said quietly for her sake, displaying far more control than he felt. Then he turned to confront his interrogator, only to find Martin Pemberton studying him without any obvious trace of irony or rancor, even extending a hand.

  “I knew your father, the only man in this county I think I ever truly wished to emulate.”

  Elmore was speechless.

  “My, and you do look like him. But are you like him? He was a good man, Mr. Willis, and people will tell you I don’t often say that. If he was a tad righteous, he wasn’t self-righteous. I have trouble with people who are self-righteous, even the appearance of it. As the saying goes, he did good works, but he liked his whiskey. Let’s get together for dinner some evening soon. Principled, your father was. He was a real rarity. I’ll call. It would be a pleasure to discover you are like him.”

  X

  Loretta

  It felt so awful when it first happened, when her babies almost died. And it was so wrong, she knew it was, but somehow Loretta Carver believed it would all be made better. Danny was trying to be good for her, she knew that, too, calm and strong, but she could tell he disbelieved. He didn’t even believe in Sheriff Dugan, who, the night the shooting happened, came over a second time—after she had brushed him off with her anger—and talked to her at length in the back of that deputy’s car, finally made her feel everything might be okay again. “We’ll wait and see, Loretta, honey,” was all Danny said, like he knew something she wouldn’t like.

  At first, she ignored Danny, let him disbelieve. She thought surely in a few days they’d be called to witness Dr. Pemberton being charged with his crimes. And then there would be recompense like they teach you in school and church, justice for what he did. She would be able to sleep again, and her little girls, too. People should not have their lives be at the mercy of other people who don’t care because they are unhappy or drunk or whatever. They should not be able to visit their miseries on you. She knew that was the way life was, but she refused to believe that was the way it had to be. There had to be justice and recompense.

  She would suddenly get so upset she’d have to call the sheriff, even though she was embarrassed to do it, but he always came right on the phone, nice
and polite, and listened. “Please be patient, Mrs. Carver,” he would say, and because he was patient and strong, she could be. And all that time, she knew she was real angry deep down about what had happened, so angry she was afraid of it. But she held it in because she knew there would be justice. They were hardworking people, she and Danny. They didn’t ask for that trouble. The county solicitor, Mr. Lamb, said to be patient, too. Loretta had never been in a court in her life. Danny either.

  Then, after the preliminary hearing was continued twice in June, and they were given one reason after another why the defendant couldn’t be there, it was finally called in district court. The solicitor called them and told them to be there right at nine, because if the case were called and they weren’t there, it could be thrown out. Sheriff Dugan called, too, just to make sure they’d been called, and she was truly excited and relieved, and told him so because at last it was going to begin, justice would happen and the world would seem right again. Only Sheriff Dugan didn’t sound so sure, trying to calm her, saying, “This could take a long time, Loretta. This is just a preliminary hearing to bind him over to superior court, if we have a strong-enough case,” calling her by her first name like she’d asked him to. Something in the way he said it suggested he thought maybe he didn’t have the case, but she wanted to believe so badly, she kept saying thank you. It was July by then, almost three months after the shooting. She hadn’t slept a full night in all that time, and Danny was being real quiet, hugging her if she got teary or wondered aloud when it was going to be made all right. But Danny didn’t say anything. He was distant, not believing, she supposed. She’d never seen him like that, so distant, except when they almost broke up over their debts. It almost killed her then, being with someone she loved so much and not being able to reach him with words or anything else, so everything felt like a judgment.