The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  No matter how hot it was on a July day in Johnson City, up here on the Bonesteels’ mountain farm it would be spring. The chestnut trees, shaggy giants with trunks bigger around than he was, shaded the yard, and the little spring-fed creek at the bottom of the garden always ran cold as snow melt. They didn’t have ice or refrigeration up here on the farm. They didn’t need it.

  It was peaceful up here, like a journey to another time. Telephones and electric lights hadn’t reached this far up the mountain yet. He expected they would in a year or two, and then he would give Nora a radio for her birthday, but for now, his uncle’s place was like an island, afloat in the twentieth century, but untouched by it.

  Nora had gone back to her needlework. He thought she made a pretty picture with the red and black velvet patchwork covering her lap, and her dark hair curling a little at the nape of her neck. It wasn’t the sort of picture they’d run in the newspaper, though. You’d need to capture the colors of the scene to do it justice. The scarlet of the quilt squares, and beyond the parlor window the complementary quilt in the pattern of the landscape: the brown sweep of lawn, falling away to a vista of golden fields and bare gray forests in the valley far below. Beyond them lay a haze of blue mountains wreathed in clouds. It would take a landscape artist to capture the scene, he reckoned, and there wasn’t likely to be one of those passing by.

  Summer or winter, Carl was happy to spend an afternoon visiting his favorite cousin and staying to supper, but he wouldn’t live up here. In town his course was set firmly toward the future.

  “What’s it like being a reporter?” asked Nora. “Are you having adventures?”

  “I’m too far down in the pecking order for that,” said Carl. “All the fires and sudden deaths go to the fellows who have been working on the paper as long as I’ve been alive. Mostly, I get assigned to do the stories none of them wants.”

  “I expect that will change,” said Nora, still intent upon her sewing.

  He looked up sharply, turning her words over in his mind. That was the thing about the Bonesteels’ bloodline. They might be content to drift along in this backwater remnant of the pioneer past, but folks said that when they had a mind to, the Bonesteels could see just as far into the future as they could into the distance.

  Carl’s mother had been a Bonesteel, but he reckoned that the Sight must have skipped because she had never showed a sign of having the gift. He had inherited the family’s blue eyes, the angular body, and the quick intelligence, but their knack of knowing things before they happened had passed him by, as well. A pity, that was, because it would have been a useful thing for a newspaperman to have. Imagine being able to know the future: when and where things would happen. But when he had mentioned that thought once to Nora, she said it didn’t work that way.

  “The Sight never tells you what you want to know,” she told him. “And I don’t think it even lets you see the most important things. It’s just . . . flashes in the dark, kinda.”

  He had persisted in trying to get her to explain. Nobody in the family liked to talk about the Sight, but he wanted to understand it. “Can’t you focus on what it is you need to know?”

  Nora blushed and shook her head. She didn’t care much for talking about it, either. “It’s like . . . well, like what you said once about tuning a radio after dark. Sometimes you get a faraway station for a minute, and then all you get is a crackling noise, and the next voices you hear will be something else altogether. It’s like that. Hard to make sense of.”

  He persisted. “But sometimes you know things.” There were stories in the family. Little Nora seeing the funeral wreath a week before it was placed in the church. Or telling her mother to bake a cake for the neighbors who did not yet know they were bereaved. “Sometimes you do know, don’t you?”

  Nora sighed and plucked at the quilt square with restless fingers. “Every now and again,” she conceded. “But I can’t make it happen. And it might be better not to know at all, because you can’t change anything.”

  “Why can’t you? Surely if you know . . . Well, say you get a vision that your dog is going to be bitten by a copperhead. You can keep the dog in, so that it won’t happen.”

  She shook her head. “But you don’t know when it’s going to happen, Carl. You can’t keep the dog penned up forever. Or if you tried, like as not he’d slip out the door one day, and that’s when it would happen. Our Grandma Flossie used to say, ‘Knowing is one thing. Changing is another.’ Be glad you don’t have the Sight. It’s awful to know what’s coming, and be powerless to stop it.”

  “Well, do you see anything headed in my direction, little cousin?” He put the question to her lightly, but in his eyes she saw the anxious look that people always had when they asked her that.

  She shrugged. “Maybe a train ride.” When a few more minutes had passed in silence, she looked up again from her needlework. “Well, Carl, aren’t you going to tell me what’s going on in the wide world?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Why, Nora, I thought you said you had been reading that newspaper of mine before you used it for tinder.”

  “Well, I think there’s more going on in the world than you tell about in your newspaper.”

  He smiled. “After we finish recounting the local weddings, the funerals, the recipes, the advertising, and the high school football stories, I reckon we put in as much else as we can. What did you want to know about?”

  “Well, I wish you could tell me that Will Rogers didn’t die in that plane crash in Alaska, but I reckon he did.”

  Carl nodded. “You’re not the only one missing him. The column he wrote was about the most popular thing in the newspaper. When it stopped, folks came in to complain, and when we told them he wasn’t around to write it anymore, why, some of them started to cry. I never met a man who didn’t like him.”

  Nora smiled to show that she understood the jest. “He’s not buried yet, though.”

  “Well, hon, he must be. That plane crash was back in August.”

  She shook her head. “He’s shut up somewhere in California, but he wants to go home.” She shivered a little, and drew the quilt closer around her. “Carl, what about that fellow that got convicted of kidnapping Mr. Lindbergh’s baby?” she asked.

  “Bruno Hauptmann? Nobody’s crying for him, little cousin.”

  “But have they executed him yet?”

  “Set for April, I think. Why?”

  “Well, your paper said that the governor of New Jersey visited him in his cell last month with a lady interpreter who spoke German, and I wondered why he did that. Maybe the governor’s not entirely sure he did it.”

  Carl shook his head. “I don’t know who I’d trust the most: a convicted murderer or a Republican governor.”

  But this time Nora did not smile. “Sometimes in trials they get it wrong,” she said. “And newspapers get it wrong, too.”

  NEWSPAPERS GET IT WRONG, too. He had looked into the details of the plane crash in Alaska, and found that Will Rogers’s body was in storage in a vault in California. Like most people, he had assumed that they buried him back in Oklahoma. Little Nora must have heard that somewhere, he told himself.

  But maybe a train ride, she had said. Now here he was rumbling along in a drafty Clinchfield Railroad coach car, bound for a trial in a little Blue Ridge coal town. It was just a coincidence, he told himself. A lucky guess, that’s all. But he wondered what else she might know.

  THE TRAIN PULLED into Abingdon in a bleak afternoon of leaden skies and misting rain. The depot had no covered platform attached to it, merely a concrete walkway running for a few yards alongside the railroad tracks. People got off the train onto the walkway, and then filed into the depot itself to exit.

  Carl paced the walkway in the cutting wind until he found the notice board that said the westbound train from Washington was due in at half past four. He thought it was worth waiting around to see who would arrive on the Washington train. He could always stay the night in a cheap hotel or boardi
nghouse here in Abingdon, and then go on to Wise the next morning—in the company of his newly met colleagues, perhaps.

  The biting cold and the inadequacy of his cheap overcoat finally drove him to the refuge of Pat Johnson’s Café on Wall Street, just across the street from the depot, where the coffee refills were free and a nickel got you a slab of pie. He fortified himself with black coffee, and made his slice of lemon pie last as long as he could while he killed time, jotting down a few more words of his article, and crossing out more than he wrote. He had hoped to pick up some local gossip about the case in Wise County, but when he tried to start a conversation about it, no one seemed to know any more than he did.

  Finally a genial man in a business suit and a gray fedora patted Carl’s shoulder on his way to the door. “Try the pink tearoom,” he said with a wink.

  Carl didn’t know if the man was joking or not, but since the remark had struck him as well-intentioned, he filed the advice away for future consideration.

  At 4:28 by the clock behind the counter, he heard the whistle of the Washington train, and then the rumble of its engine, and the clattering of the wheels along steel rails as it lumbered into the station. Carl Jennings was out of the café and back on the concrete walkway before the wheels ground to a halt.

  The clouds of his breath mingled with the steam of the locomotive, and he peered through the mists for a glimpse of the disembarking passengers. He was momentarily distracted by the arriving coal company matrons with mink pelts draped across their ample shoulders: four or five skins of the animals—head, feet, tails, and all—with one’s little jaws clamping onto the tail of the next one. No woman up the mountain would have worn anything so primitive.

  Laughing families got off, leading children by the hand, followed by farmers and laborers, struggling with portmanteaus and shuffling awkwardly in their Sunday clothes. Blowing on his numb, reddened hands, Carl glanced farther down the concrete walkway, where another group of passengers had just emerged.

  Suddenly there outside the depot he spotted the patrician countenance and the portly frame of Henry Jernigan himself, resplendent in a black wool overcoat that would have cost Carl three months’ pay. Jernigan’s expression reflected serenity and wisdom, just as it did in the newspaper photos.

  Carl gulped a mouthful of cold air to calm his nerves, and willed himself to approach the eminent scribe. As he touched the sleeve of that elegant coat, he said breathlessly to the great man, “Mr. Jernigan, sir, I would know you anywhere.”

  Jernigan turned and regarded him with a regal nod. Grinning foolishly, Carl held out his hand, and felt the gloved fingers press something into his palm. It was a nickel.

  Jernigan set a suitcase down at his feet. “Take that round to the hotel for me, boy,” he said as he strode away.

  ERMA

  Really, if they left you in a jail cell long enough, you would read anything. She had been given a Bible, of course. Several, in fact. Nearly all her early visitors had brought her one, perhaps as a gesture of comfort, or as a reproach for the sins they may have thought she committed. She thanked each person graciously, and stowed the Bibles away in a box in the corner of her cell, unread.

  She wished they’d let her have a radio. One of the first things she had bought last fall with a paycheck from the new job was a fancy floor model radio. It sat in the parlor of her parents’ home, but still it was hers. She wondered if she’d ever get to listen to it again. Her cell in the basement of the courthouse wasn’t exactly quiet, what with drunks singing and bawling, and prisoners shouting out to the turnkeys for every little thing, but perhaps if they would let her have a radio, she could drown out the cacophony. The latest songs would cheer her up. She had loved the parties they used to have at somebody’s house on a Saturday night. A whole gang of young people would show up, roll back the rugs, and dance. No harm in that, whatever people might say now.

  She’d never be allowed to have a radio. The jailer was her own uncle, and you’d think with that kind of inside track, she’d be treated like a princess, but that was not the case. Her uncle was so afraid of being accused of showing favoritism that he erred in quite the opposite direction. He was mortified that his own niece should have got herself arrested, and perhaps he meant to punish her for that humiliation. She wondered if she ought to apologize to him for the inconvenience, but if one is innocent, then ending up in jail scarcely seems to be one’s own fault, and why should she apologize for the mistakes of the commonwealth’s attorney? There was probably some appropriate passage in the Scriptures about that, but she wasn’t yet bored enough to search for it.

  People seemed to think that she should spend her every waking hour poring over the Good Book: seeking forgiveness, perhaps, or praying for deliverance from her oppressors. But to do so would be to spend every waking moment dwelling on her present situation, and that she could not bear. She couldn’t see any point in dreading the future until you knew what it was. What she craved was distraction. If she could not leave her jail cell bodily, at least let her go elsewhere in her mind.

  The sheriff, who was not a relative, and who therefore had nothing to be embarrassed about, offered her a few books he said he had already read, perhaps some of them left behind by previous inmates. If so, their taste had run to thrillers and adventure tales: Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Dickson Carr. Such yarns did not interest her, except that they were better than staring through the bars. She was always careful to mention to whoever visited that she would be glad to be given things to read, and some of the local ladies had obliged by sending her books. The ones who reckoned her guilty sent Bibles. She wondered sometimes whether these strangers brought her books in order to be kind, or if they did it just so that they could boast that they had given a book to the murderess from Pound. Well, she didn’t care. Let them talk. At least they had provided her with a way to pass the time.

  She read Murder on the Orient Express, the new whodunit by Mrs. Agatha Christie, which was entertaining enough, but anyone who had read last year’s newspapers could see what the story was based on. The author had simply changed the names of all the people in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and set them on a train, heading from Paris to Istanbul. It wasn’t what she’d call fiction, but it passed the time. It also made her wonder if anyone would ever do that to her, put her in a book and say what they liked about her. Probably not, though. She wasn’t very interesting, really. The Lindberghs were famous and rich—a dashing pilot and an ambassador’s daughter—and so it mattered when one of them died, and people wanted to hear about it. But who cared what happened to ordinary folk in a little town so far up the mountain that they had to pump in the daylight?

  The book she liked best was by Mr. James Hilton, a famous author who sometimes visited with friends at the theatre down in Abingdon. The coal gentry from the mountain mining communities often spent time in Abingdon, and she wondered if the donor of that book had met the author on one such excursion. The volume was not signed, however, so perhaps not. She had read his earlier book, the one about a mountain village in the Himalayas called Shangri-la where people stayed young for centuries. There weren’t any Shangri-las in these mountains, that’s for sure. Up here people got old at forty. They were grandparents in their thirties, like as not, with leathery faces from toiling in the sun, and gnarled hands and sunken mouths that spoke of hardship and manual labor. How could Mr. Hilton imagine a remote mountain village where one’s youth lasted forever? Why, you hardly had a single summer to spread your wings before it was gone. She thought that Shangri-la story was mostly wishful thinking, and she didn’t see how it would make your life any more pleasant to dream about things you couldn’t have, like eternal youth.

  But his new book was more to her liking. Good-bye Mr. Chips. That one was about a schoolteacher, and although she hadn’t really wanted to be a teacher, she felt a kinship with the character on account of that. Of course, the fellow in the book taught in a high-toned English private school, so it wasn’t really like her job
in a one-room schoolhouse up on the mountain, but some things don’t change, no matter who your pupils are, and so she thought she understood the feelings expressed in the book. She read it through twice.

  One of the younger women in the county, either as a thoughtful gesture or else as a cruel joke, sent her a few recent issues of her college newspaper, the Grapurchat. The name stood for gray-and-purple chat, she’d explained to the turnkey when he brought them to her cell. Gray and purple were the colors of Radford State Teachers College, where she’d earned her two-year degree. She had read them willingly enough, because there would always be more hours than books in the Wise County Jail, but she came to the conclusion that they were about as fanciful as that magical Himalayan kingdom of Mr. Hilton.

  In mid-August Miss Martin, the campus dietician, surprised the students with an evening picnic on the lawn, featuring fried chicken, sandwiches, iced tea, and ice cream. A local man came to campus to show off the forty-two-pound catfish he caught in the New River; he donated the fish to the biology department—front page news, that. And in the October 2 issue, the Alumnae News reported four marriages, one birth, and the campus visit of a 1916 graduate who had spent the last fourteen years as a missionary to China. She had read that section three times, looking for her own name. One might suppose that a column devoted to news of RSTC’s former students might find space among the brides and babies to mention a more ominous milestone: Miss Erma Morton of Pound, Virginia, is currently awaiting trial for first-degree murder on the charge of having murdered her father. Not a peep about that.

  She combed through every issue since her arrest in July. In her two years at college, she remembered seeing her name in the paper only once: in the June 1934 graduation list, midway through the list of names. Most of the issues featured the same few girls, mentioned as squibs in the gossip column, or in social notes as they visited friends and family in nearby towns, or listing their little triumphs in this play or that poetry reading. In her two years in Radford Erma had never done anything noteworthy, and now that she obviously had, the Grapurchat declined to take note of it.