Heading Out to Wonderful

by Robert Goolrick

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Every lie like a stab in his heart, but easier every time, the pain lessening, his brain hardening around the fact that he had become a person who did not, who would not, tell the truth.

  He didn’t tell Beebo about the lies, about the questions. Beebo knew, and he seemed to treat the boy with a new respect, a greater kindness than ever before. There was no need for them to talk about it. It was just a fact, and now everybody was keeping secrets, and everybody was lying. Lying about what they knew. Lying about who they were.

  They went fishing again, just the two of them, with the dog. They went to look for eagles on the top of House Mountain. Sam had never seen the world from so high up. The carpet of the valley lay spread out far beneath him, and he asked a thousand questions, and Charlie answered every one of them, patiently, and with such enormous gentleness, pointing out where their town lay, Sam’s house, a tiny dot among a thousand other tiny dots. Charlie pointed out, as well, the farms and rivers and waterfall that had once belonged to him.

  Their companionship was closer and more constant than ever, but there was a kind of farewell feeling in it, too. Sam learned for the first time that you didn’t say everything that came into your mind, that most things that came into your mind, in fact, went unsaid, unremarked, left there to wonder at and be troubled by. He didn’t even know what it was Charlie was supposed to have done, but he knew enough not to ask.

  In the weeks before the trial, Charlie seemed nervous all the time. He tried to make Sam feel better, even though they never discussed what it was that was making Sam feel bad. He just knew, and he seemed sometimes to be close to crying about it, but they never talked about that, just other things, but those other things in such a way that Sam knew Charlie was trying to give him all his strength and courage.

  Charlie drove the boy all the way into Lexington to have soft ice cream, and to see a movie, just the two of them. They saw Red River, and even Sam could see that Charlie looked like that actor in the picture. One night, Charlie pointed to the sky and named a star after Sam Haislett, but the boy couldn’t find it the next night or the next, or ever.

  Now, on a very warm October day with all the courtroom windows wide open, Sam was doing the thing he knew was right, even if he also knew it was wrong. He was saying nothing.

  There were very few people in the courtroom, other than the judge, the lawyers, and the officers of the court. There was a policeman who never took his eyes off Sam. His mother and father. Claudie Wiley. The man who was asking him questions. Charlie and his lawyer, Charlie dressed in a brand new suit from J. Ed Deaver’s on Main Street, the tie knotted too tight at his neck. His brother, Ned, was there, looking like death warmed over. The only people from the town who had come were the twins, and they sat right behind Charlie. They were too old to care about what their minister said about not going to the trial, they figured they were so old they were either going to hell or they weren’t, probably weren’t, and one day in court just to sit and show Charlie Beale that he did have a friend in the world wasn’t going to make a damned bit of difference in their fate for eternity.

  And, of course, sitting at the other table was Mrs. Glass, all in black, with a hat and white short gloves, and, behind her, her husband, smooth as silk, so calm you might have thought he was asleep, except that his black Boatwright eyes stared at Sam, and even he knew Sam was lying every time he opened his mouth.

  “Do you know what lying is, Sam?” the tall, ugly prosecutor asked.

  “Yes,” said Sam. He surely did know that one thing, if nothing else.

  “What is lying, Sam?”

  “It’s when you don’t tell the truth.”

  “And what happens to little boys who lie?”

  “They go to hell,” Sam said, in a voice so soft the judge asked him to repeat his answer.

  “They go to hell,” Sam almost yelled.

  “Yes!” the lawyer yelled back. “But first you know where they go before they go to hell? They go to jail. They go to jail, Sam, and they don’t ever go to school, or see their mama and daddy ever again, and, if they live, if they live, they grow up to be as mean and ignorant as the coloreds. Is that what you want, Sam, because I’m pretty sure you’re lying right now.”

  “Your Honor.” Cully Blake rose unsteadily from his seat. “The prosecutor is badgering and unmercifully threatening a six-year-old boy. He’s said what he knows, and what he knows is nothing. For shame, sir.” He turned to the prosecutor with a magisterial turn of his neck in its white collar, so starched you could hear the rasp of the cloth against his red neck.

  “Please stick to the facts, sir,” said the judge.

  “He’s lying, Your Honor,” said the prosecutor.

  “Well, then either catch him at it, or leave him alone. That’s an order.”

  “Okay, then.” The prosecutor turned to Sam. “Let try this another way. You say they were never alone together?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You didn’t say it, or they weren’t alone?”

  What was the right answer? Sam spoke out of confusion. “I think they weren’t not ever alone.”

  “Well, then, when they weren’t alone together, did they ever talk to one another?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did they ever touch each other, when they weren’t alone together?”

  “Objection.” Blake rose again to his feet.

  “Overruled,” the judge said. “Sit down, Mister Blake. I’ll allow it, for now.”

  “And when they weren’t alone together, did Charlie ever kiss Mrs. Glass?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Take their clothes off?”

  He had seen her. He had seen all of her, and the picture of her body in his mind was so sharp and bright, it was almost as if he had touched her himself. She had made him cookies and given him funny books, and then they had gone into another room and she had taken her clothes off and he knew what it sounded like more than he knew what it looked like, and he understood the sounds better than he understood the picture of her, so bending, so everywhere, so blonde.

  “No, sir.”

  “Damn it. I give up. You’re lying, Sam. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it, including the God who will put you in hell and the judge who will put you . . .”

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained.”

  “. . . in prison for a long time. Sorry, Your Honor. I have one more question. Sam. When you were alone with Charlie, did he ever say anything about Mrs. Glass?”

  Sam just sat for a long time. Jail, one night in jail away from his mother and father, frightened him almost to tears, and hell was forever, that much he knew.

  “Sam?”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied, in a tiny voice.

  “Speak up, Sam. Speak up. What did Charlie say?”

  “Beebo said . . . he said he would die for her.”

  “What?”

  “Die for her. He said he would die for her.”

  “Thank you, Sam. He just might do that.”

  Blake said he had no questions, speaking with a flourish about the child’s age and the tenderness of his youth and so on, and Sam just sat there until they told him it was time to go, that he could go back and sit with his parents. His mother took his hand and squeezed it tight, and he knew that it wasn’t over like they said. It was far from over.

  Next came Claudie Wiley, dressed, fantastically, as though for a Negro Baptist wedding in New York City, bright in fuschia, cut from a pattern she had found in the back of Vogue magazine, and adapted to suit her figure, with a hat to match, and a veil, and shoes, all the same intense color, the color of sunset, the last burst of color before the darkness falls.

  She swore on the Bible, and she did mean, in fact, to tell the truth, because, even though she hated what she had to say, her fear of white men and courtrooms was so great, she felt compelled, lest she lose her freedom, her daughter, her hope. White men would do you in, she knew that for sure, and not e
ven think twice about it. Send a six-year-old white boy to prison? It would not ever happen. But a black woman who kept her own and minded little else? They would leave her in the darkness and her daughter would go to charity and that would kill them both.

  “Now, Claudie,” said the prosecutor, whom she hated immediately.

  “Aren’t you supposed to call me Miz Wiley, or something?” she asked.

  “I can call you anything I want, but if you want Mrs. Wiley, then I’ll call you that. In fact, are you Mrs. Wiley? I mean, is there a Mr. Wiley?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Ever, was there ever?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, have it your way. Mrs. Wiley,” he almost spat at her, “how well do you know Mrs. Harrison Glass?”

  “Right well, Your Honor.”

  “I’m not the judge. The judge, who is sitting there, is called ‘Your Honor.’ ”

  “Excuse me. She’s my only friend, just about.”

  “And did Mrs. Glass ever talk to you about Charlie Beale?”

  “All the time. That’s hardly all she ever talks about any more.”

  “And what does she say?”

  “She say how cute he is, how he looks like some actor in the movies. We saw him in a movie last week. He didn’t seem like a very nice man, that actor, in that movie.”

  “In real life, is Charlie Beale a nice man?”

  “I guess. He has the power. He has the gift.”

  “What gift, Mrs. Wiley?”

  “The healing gift. I saw it.”

  “Did she say anything specific to you, anything particular, about Charlie Beale in the first week of September?”

  She was a queen, Claudie. She sat alone in the witness box, trembling with terror and excitement both, reveling in the attention and fighting for her life.

  “She said he raped her. She said he raped her three times.”

  “Three times?”

  “Yes, sir. She was very particular. She made me write it down.” She pulled a piece of paper out of her handbag. “He raped her on November eighteenth, 1948, April twelfth, 1949, and then just the last week in August, right after he saved that boy, on the twenty-fourth.”

  “May I see that piece of paper?” Claudie handed it to the prosecutor, and he showed it to the judge, then to Blake, and then he entered it into evidence.

  “Did she say how he did it?”

  “He did it the usual way, I guess. He would bring that boy to see her, and, while she was playing with the boy, he would just up and grab her and rape her with the boy right there.”

  “And how many times?”

  “Asked and answered,” objected Blake.

  “Three. Three times.”

  The prosecutor seemed much nicer to her now. “Thank you, Mrs. Wiley. You have been very helpful. Your witness,” he said to Blake, and then he sat down, smugly.

  Mr. Blake got up. He didn’t get too close to her, like the prosecutor did. He didn’t like to stand close to people, in case they could smell the whiskey on his breath.

  “Mrs. Wiley, that is a very beautiful dress you have on.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You also make dresses for Mrs. Glass, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’re friends as well, yes?”

  “I guess so. I guess she’s about the only friend I have.”

  “How many times have you seen Mrs. Glass in the last year?”

  “A lot of times. ’Bout once or twice a week.”

  “A hundred times?”

  “Maybe could be.”

  “And in all that time, did Mrs. Glass ever mention these alleged rapes before that one time?”

  “No, sir, she did not.”

  “Not on November nineteenth, right after it happened the first time?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Or on April thirteenth, the second time?”

  “No, sir.”

  Claudie’s rehearsals with Sylvan hadn’t gone this far. Sylvan had thought just the statement of the dates would be enough, the specific times, the hour, the setting, all these had been gone over, but they didn’t seem to be of any interest now, and Claudie knew that her friend was expecting her to lie for her, but friendship with any white woman didn’t go that far. Claudie wasn’t going to be caught out and sent to jail just because a white woman asked her to.

  “Not even the day after August twenty-fourth? The last time?”

  “No, sir, she never said a word.”

  “When did she first tell you about these alleged rapes?”

  “About two weeks ago, sir.”

  “And when you finally heard her confession, her story of these brutal rapes that had been going on for a year, almost, how did you feel?”

  “At first I felt sorry. She cares for him. I believe she does.”

  “And then?”

  “I didn’t believe her.”

  “Objection, Your Honor. Speculation.”

  “Overruled.”

  “And then, Mrs. Wiley?”

  “I didn’t and I don’t. I don’t believe her.”

  “Objection. This is pure speculation.”

  The judge ignored the prosecutor’s protests and excused Claudie, who left the chair as though leaving the throne, a queen deposed, but with her head held high.

  The bailiff called Mrs. Harrison Glass, and the two women, so close as to be sisters only moments before, passed each other without a glance.

  As Sylvan walked through the swinging gate that led to the witness stand, Charlie stood slightly, and turned to look at her, and he spoke in a voice so hushed and breathy that only Elinor and Ansolette, sitting directly behind him, could hear.

  “Sylvan,” he said. She stopped, but didn’t turn to him. “Girl, what’s done is done. Don’t do this thing, don’t say it. Not to my face. Not in front of the boy.”

  Sylvan stepped into the witness box and stood, looking around, as though she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. The jury looked at her, her posture, her black dress copied from a movie, the white gloves, which she removed with agonizing care.

  A Bible was placed in front of her, and she was asked to place her left hand on it, and she did, shyly, not sure at all of what was supposed to happen.

  “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  And then they just waited. She was frozen in her stiff posture, her black dress and her veiled hat, her golden hair, like some statue of elegance and mourning.

  “Mrs. Glass?”

  “Can you repeat that?”

  “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  She coughed, she cleared her throat, and then she spoke in a small, elegant voice, the voice she had learned so patiently and so carefully on so many afternoons in the dark, her voice that came to her twenty-five cents at a time, in the dark, from the mouths of women she would never meet and never ever be, no matter how she might dream.

  “No. I don’t believe I will. I don’t believe I will do that. You must excuse me.”

  And then she calmly put her gloves back on, the left and then the right, lowered the black veil of her hat to shield her eyes, and she stepped from the witness box and walked slowly through the courtroom, then through the door and down the steep marble steps, wiping the lipstick from her mouth with a white lace handkerchief, and moving into the fall sun. And then it was over.

  It was the last moment of full possession she was ever to have. Just twenty years old, and she had, at the same moment, finally become most completely a self she would never be again.

  She had had her closeup.

  Whatever she did, she was not a bad girl. Whatever you think, she was not a bad girl.

  Life had been hard on her, and now she had been hard back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  SHE LAY IN bed for two weeks, and did nothing but weep. She wept so hard, so convulsively, that her body hurt. Whe
n she got up, finally, he beat her so badly she was in bed for another week. There was, for her, no longer anything to hold on to, nothing to let go of. Except one thing: She still had her secret, the pieces of paper locked beneath the floorboards of the attic.

  When she got up, it was to be Mrs. Harrison Glass, nothing more than that. Her Hollywood finery, all her fancy things, stayed shut away, and she passed her days in house dresses that hid her shape and showed her station. Until one day, five days after she could get out of bed and the swelling had gone down, she took all that stuff, those dresses that Claudie had spent hours and hours making, the green dress she had worn when she pulled the boy from the water, all that dressing up for Charlie, for show, for pretend, she took it all out into the backyard and poured gasoline all over her clothes and set it all on fire, watching as the person she had tried to be went up in flames. She cried as she watched them burn up. Her clothes. Her self. If she was not to be the thing she had dreamed of being, what, then, was she to be? Who was she?

  Why wasn’t everything the way it was in the movies? Why had the screen gone dark? When she made up the character she had played, her face flickering with the luminosity of the silver screen in her shining eyes, who was it she was supposed to be? The flames told her nothing. She was an unschooled country girl who had learned everything she knew from people who were not real, and she had loved Charlie Beale, that much was sure. And she had known, briefly, blindly, the moment she had waited for, in the dark.

  There ain’t nothing after this, she thought. There is no after.

  He had been her whole movie, her movie star, but had she loved him? She had loved the way he looked, his posture, the way he moved, the way he laughed quietly with the boy over some man’s foolishness, fish or bird or rock, she had loved him before he ever came to her that first time, but then he had come, and he was no longer the flickering brightness she saw behind her lids when she closed her eyes at night and let in the dark, let him in to steal her heart and her soul, in the dark, in her dreams. When he had come, he had been smells, and skin, and a mouth that was all over her, and his weight scared her, his hands, his body, so real, so tight and muscled, smaller than her own, but coiled with power and need, need of her and for her, an endless need that was not a dream, that did not flicker, that was never-ending, and she couldn’t have that, couldn’t accept it, couldn’t endure it, and so she had shut the door in his face, had turned out the lights and sat in the dark, every inch of her skin wanting every inch of his skin, just like in the movie, shutting him out, the only natural man she’d ever known, the fullest, richest being who had ever come to her, and she just couldn’t take it.