Blind Judgement g-5

by Grif Stockley

  “I think I’d spend some time on this case if I were you, Dick.”

  Dick sputters into the phone that I better tell him what Bledsoe is going to do. For the first time since I have known him, there is a sound of desperation in his voice. He knows that he didn’t have time to take this case. He knows now that he will have to prepare for the worst, regardless of what I say. Finally, he concludes by saying, “Your mother would be ashamed of you, Gideon. I’m glad she’s not here to watch how you’re handling yourself.”

  I’m glad she isn’t either, but I’m not about to admit it and give Dick that kind of satisfaction.

  He’s such a holier-than-thou prick he makes me want to puke. Abruptly, I tell him I have to get off the phone and do some work, and hang up.

  To hell with the old fart.

  At three o’clock the next afternoon I’m on the road to Bear Creek.

  Judge Greer, who has a history of heart trouble, became sick on the bench and abruptly declared a mistrial, freeing me to focus on Doss’s case. I’m headed straight for Oldham’s Barbecue. I was out there a month ago and got nothing out of him, but maybe I didn’t ask the right question. Henry Oldham is nothing like his nephew. A tall, light-colored elderly man with short, white hair, he was a high school math teacher who, according to Class, lost his job when the schools were first desegregated and then was hired back when blacks got control of the school board. He retired from teaching three years ago and worked out his arrangement with Paul. On my way to his restaurant, I pass the Cotton Boll, and suddenly it hits me that the one person who may put some things in perspective for me is an old gay man who never had much

  respect for my abilities. I have been out of synch for most of this case, and I don’t know why. My recollection of what went on in Bear Creek when I was growing up doesn’t seem to jibe with what others rem em her. Maybe Mr. Carpenter, who has spent his life on the outside looking in, can clue me in. I will stop by here as soon as I finish with Oldham.

  Oldham’s Barbecue is a nondescript whitish concrete block house out Highway 1 just inside Bear Creek’s city limits. There are five vehicles parked in the gravel out front, and I realize I have arrived at the worst possible time to talk to him.

  Inside there are only six plain vanilla tables and metal chairs on a concrete floor. Most of Oldham’s business is carry-out. Uke last time, a black girl who surely isn’t out of high school is at the counter handing over Styrofoam containers to a black customer, with two behind him. I remember that before Oldham was out back tending his cookers. I retrace my steps, go around the north side of the building, and almost run into Oldham, who is leaning up against the wall smoking a cigarette. The smell of barbecue is delicious. I tell him I realize he can’t talk but a minute or two, but that it is important to his nephew’s case. He gives me a look of scandalized distaste. Clearly, the last thing he wants to do is be called as a witness. Throwing his cigarette into the grass beside him, he says, “I told you everything I know last time.”

  Knowing I won’t get much out of him, I ask the most important question first.

  “Mr. Oldham, all I want to know is whether Paul Taylor had talked to you about retiring at any time or giving up your arrangement with him, either before or after Willie Ting was murdered.”

  “Why do you want to know?” he grunts, irritably.

  “All I can tell you is that it’s important to your nephew’s case.”

  “Well, I don’t remember right now,” he says cagily.

  I want to throttle the old man.

  “Class can easily end up on death row if you don’t tell me what you know.”

  Mr. Oldham gives me a skeptical look.

  “You tell me why you need this.”

  “I can’t do that right now,” I insist.

  “You know that I represent your nephew. All I’m looking for is the truth.” This last sentence comes out sounding hollow and trite. What am I looking for? I have felt so conflicted about this case I don’t even know.

  As if the odor of hypocrisy is overpowering the smell of the cooking meat, the older man frowns.

  “I gotta go help inside,” he says abruptly, and wheels to his left inside a back door into the building.

  Frustrated, I stomp around to the front, get back in the Blazer, and

  drive back toward the Cotton Boll, where I pull in and give Mckenzie an order for chicken fried steak, lima beans, cole slaw, mashed potatoes, corn bread, and iced tea.

  Maybe I will have a heart attack and die so I won’t have to try this case. I dawdle over my food and order coffee and a piece of pecan pie for dessert. By 7:30 the last of his few customers has cleared out, and Mr. Carpenter himself brings out a pot of coffee to pour me a refill.

  “Gideon, you’ve never come by,” he reproaches me, wiping his hands on a mostly clean apron.

  I cut through the syrupy crust. It is wonder 3

  folly sweet and perfect with coffee.

  “I’d like to come by tonight,” I say, watching him refill my cup, “if you’re not too tired.”

  He gets up from the table.

  “I’ll start locking up now,” he says gloomily.

  “I won’t have any more business tonight.”

  I had forgotten how early people in small towns eat at night. Fifteen minutes later I follow him to his house and realize I could almost close my eyes and get there, so familiar is my old neighborhood.

  Nothing in my memory is more vivid than a few select moments in my childhood.

  On nights like this if our homework was done, we played kick the can until bedtime. Though I can’t see the honeysuckle, I can smell it.

  Inside he flips on lights, and tells me to have a seat while he disappears down a hall, presumably toward the bathroom.

  I look around the room, curious about what I will find. I can’t ever remember being here.

  Mother must have suspected he was homosexual and discouraged me from coming here. Since I was such a flop as a science student, he probably wasn’t interested in me anyway. On his walls are reproductions of what I call “trick art.” It looks like a bunch of white ducks flying one way, but if you stare at it long enough you realize a flock of black ducks is headed in the opposite direction.

  Only the baskets and stands of fresh flowers around the room indicate a sensibility that fits my idea of a gay man. His furniture is, I realize, probably a collection of antiques, though I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if any of the desks, tables, and chairs are simply junk or fine pieces of furniture. Knowing Mr. Carpenter, they’re the real thing.

  “You want a beer?” he asks from the doorway. Even without his apron he still looks like a baker or delivery man in white pants and shirt. I nod, and he heads into his kitchen, leaving me to wonder again why he has stayed in Bear Creek. Surely he would feel more comfortable around others who are like him. But as soon as I think this, I realize (not for the first time in my life) that assumptions have always been my worst

  enemy.

  When he returns with a beer for me, and a glass of what smells like sherry for himself, I ask him why he is still here. He sits down on a love seat across from me and takes off his shoes.

  “Too much standing for an old man,” he says apologetically, before adding, “I was seventy-three when mother died at the age of ninety-five in the room behind you, and then it didn’t seem to matter anymore.” He points with his thumb over his shoulder.

  “I never was out of her sight except for two weeks every summer, but for some reason I couldn’t stand being away from her. Don’t ask me what that was all about,” he says, warning me away from psychoanalyzing him.

  “It’s too late for me to worry about. Most humans aren’t capable of any more than playing out the hand genetics and our upbringing have dealt us. Look at the blacks around here. You wonder how they get out of bed. What could be more disheartening than knowing the people around you consider you genetically inferior? Did you read The Bell Curve?” he demands, his voice harsh and accusing as i
f he were back in the classroom.

  I shift in my chair, trying to get comfortable.

  Too many buttons sticking into my rear.

  “I just remember reading something about it,” I say.

  “It didn’t really say anything new about I.Q.” did it?”

  Mr. Carpenter gives me a look that takes me back to my junior high days when I gave him an answer that revealed how limited my potential for understanding science was.

  “And nothing new will be said until they can quantify what goes on in a person’s brain,” he says in an imperious tone.

  “What is worthwhile is the authors’ opinion about what this country is going to look like in the future. There’s going to be a technological elite, and then a giant black underclass that’s going to make the current racial situation look like a minor irritant. Nobody wants to face it. In my opinion, the Delta has already returned to pre-Civil War days, but without the slavery. The whites here who can afford it have their own schools, their own culture and entertainment, basically their own society. If they had their way, they’d close down the federal government except for an army that wouldn’t venture off American territory. You think things are bad now? I’m glad I won’t be alive to see what’s coming.”

  I nod, thinking of Beverly’s tirade. I’m afraid he’ll go on all night on this subject if I let him. I ask how well he knew my physician grandfather.

  Without missing a beat, Mr. Carpenter assures me, as he did the morning Angela and I had breakfast at the Cotton Boll, that he was an intelligent man.

  “My mother was the one who really knew him. A fine man who worked himself to death. She said he was one of the leaders of the Klan around

  here after the First World War. Did you know that?”

  I squint at this old man, who is beginning to seem crazier by the minute.

  “That can’t possibly be right,” I say, wondering if he is kidding me or even has my grandfathers confused.

  “He wasn’t that type of person at all.” Granddaddy Page may have been susceptible to that kind of racial violence, but my mother’s father most certainly could not have been.

  Air. Carpenter grins broadly and slaps the back of the couch.

  “Don’t get your nose too out of joint. If you knew your history after the First World War, you’d realize the Klan back in those days wasn’t a redneck organization. They had thousands of members and elected their own people to the Legislature. Some of the best men in Arkansas were members. Lawyers, doctors, businessmen, planters. It was probably as much a reaction to the war as anything. Besides blacks, they were against Catholics, foreigners, and for keeping the country lily-white and isolationist.

  Pat Buchanan would have fit right in.”

  “How do you know for sure my grandfather was a member?” I ask, furious at this information.

  He doesn’t mention homosexuals, but I suspect they were on the enemy list, too. Clearly, this old man enjoys unsettling me.

  “Like I say, my mother was a great admirer of his. I can’t prove he was, but look in a college yearbook from the times and you’ll see it wasn’t something a man was ashamed of.”

  He brings his mouth to his glass, but hardly touches the liquor in it.

  “You knew my mother pretty well, didn’t you?” I ask, realizing now they were almost the same age.

  He nods vigorously.

  “A Southern lady if there ever was one,” he pronounces.

  “She shouldn’t have ever married your father. She should have found someone with money who would have taken care of her all her life.

  That’s what she expected to do.”

  This comment pisses me: my father couldn’t help his mental illness. I don’t want to shut him up, however. I ask, “What do you mean?”

  Mr. Carpenter takes a tiny sip of sherry.

  “She never coped a single day after he died. She wasn’t trained to make a living. If your daddy had left her rich, she could have managed, but the way I remember it,” he says, slightly embarrassed, “she kind of went to pieces after he died.”

  I shift uneasily in my chair. I don’t remember it that way at all. I was

  the one who had problems and ultimately had to be shipped off to Subiaco to get straightened out.

  “People took advantage of her,” I contend.

  “Oscar Taylor foreclosed on the pharmacy.”

  Mr. Carpenter winces the way he did when I would give a wrong answer in class.

  “Well, I think he carried her for almost a year before he did anything.

  And then all I think he did was let her sign it back to him and didn’t actually foreclose and go after any deficiency. That building stood vacant for a couple of years before he got anybody in there.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” I say, shaking my head.

  “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 c
ourse, 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.”