The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Rose, who was inspecting her makeup in a silver compact mirror, looked up with an expression of notable indifference. “Well, it beats watching a farce about bundling,” she said. “I’m game for it, Shade. Is there a jamboree—or whatever they call those things—here tonight?”

  He shook his head. “Not here, per se. That’s why I asked young Werther over there about the possibility of hiring a car. Apparently, the best place around to hear first-class hillbilly music is the live performance at the radio station over in Bristol.”

  “I thought that was in Tennessee,” said Henry.

  “You’re half right, Henry. The main drag is called State Street, because the Tennessee/Virginia line goes right down the middle of it. That’s where we want to go, too. The station is on the corner of—” He pushed up the sleeve of his jacket and glanced at a penciled notation on the white cuff of his shirt. “WOPI Radio. Corner of State Street and Twenty-second. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  “How long will it take us to get there, Shade? I promised my Danny I’d call tonight, let him know I got in safely. He’s probably been at the airfield all day, tinkering with that plane of his.”

  The room fell silent. Henry Jernigan stared into the fire, affecting not to hear, and Shade Baker eased a cloth bag of tobacco out of his coat pocket and began to roll a cigarette with every appearance of rapt concentration. Finally, he said, “I think Bristol is less than twenty miles from here, Rose. Say an hour, allowing for bad roads. We should eat soon if we’re going, though. No leisurely repast with the cigars and brandy, Henry.”

  “I shall try to bear up.”

  “Good. Well, if we’re all agreed, I’ll go back over and see if the desk jockey has managed to find us a car. I hope it will come with a working heater and a decent motor. I’d hate to break down in the middle of nowhere on a night like this.”

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER Rose entered the red-carpeted dining room to find Shade Baker, still in his rumpled suit, already seated at a table, with his open pocket watch set prominently on the starched linen tablecloth, beside a candle in a glass holder and an open bottle of red wine.

  “I’m not late,” said Rose, easing into the chair beside him. “At least, I’m not the last to arrive.”

  “You are, though,” said Shade, nodding toward the door to the kitchen. “Henry came down with me, took a long look at the menu—which I’d hoped he was going to translate for me—and then he toddled off into the inner sanctum to confer with the high priest.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “That was ten minutes ago. They’ve probably progressed from side dishes to sauces by now. Or else the chef has taken a cleaver to him.”

  “We’d better get rid of that candle,” said Rose. “You know Henry won’t allow one on the table. I’ve always meant to ask him why, but somehow Henry’s manner doesn’t encourage confidences.”

  Shade grunted. “That, and the fact that you’re not above writing it up for your column.”

  Rose ignored this salvo, because there was no point in denying it. “I hope he doesn’t try to order for us,” she muttered. “I hate it when he tries to broaden our horizons.”

  “I hope he isn’t planning to make a production out of this dinner. We need to get out of here by seven. I don’t want to be late for the show.”

  “Before we leave, I need a few minutes to make a phone call. I tried a little while ago, but got no answer.”

  Shade shrugged. “Make it quick.”

  “I just need to tell Danny I got here. I already wrote him a postcard, though, so if I don’t reach him, it’s okay. It’s not easy to stay in touch with a pilot. Maybe he got a last-minute job on a mail run or something.”

  Shade Baker studied the contents of his wineglass. “He could call you.”

  Rose looked away, studying the vast formal dining room with its twenty other diners; mostly businessmen or prosperous-looking couples dressed for an evening out occupied the candlelit tables around them. “Nice place,” she said. “Very de-luxe. Is your wineglass real crystal, Shade?”

  He shrugged. “Would I know?” He consulted his watch again. “If he’s not finished eating by seven, I’m leaving without him.”

  Rose was still studying the other diners. “I wonder if any of those men are lawyers or court officials headed for the trial.”

  “Shouldn’t think so. Surely they’d already be there. And they’d want to stay closer to the court, which is a good fifty miles from here over washboard roads.”

  “I suppose you’re right. They all look like stuffed shirts. They probably wouldn’t talk to us about the case, anyway.”

  “I hope not,” said Shade. “I want to eat my dinner in peace.”

  “Well, at least I don’t see the Hearst reporters here. Unless they’re already in Wise. Did you hear that they’ve secured exclusive rights to the defendant’s story?”

  Shade nodded. “I figured that either you or Henry will figure out a way around that.”

  By the time Rose had studied the menu, and deciphered a few of the foreign bits for Shade Baker, the kitchen door swung open, and Henry strolled out in his freshly pressed suit, sporting a carnation in his lapel. He looked as if he had just bought the place.

  “Does the kitchen meet your approval, Your Grace?” asked Rose, as he eased into his chair and reached for the wine.

  “There are advantages to being in the country,” he said. “Of course, the chef’s repertoire in sauces and pastry is not all that one could wish for, but he has access to farm-fresh meat and cream just in from the local dairy. I’ll wager that in the summer season the garden vegetables at his command would turn every repast into a culinary symphony.”

  “A culinary symphony,” echoed Rose, shaking her head. “Well, you’d better settle for the Minute Waltz, Henry, because Shade here swears he’s taking off tonight at seven sharp.”

  “Oh, I’ve already ordered our dinner, children. We are having the fried chicken, a fine old Southern tradition, and the gravy is excellent. I have tasted it.”

  “Of course you have,” said Shade. “But you might have at least asked us first. Suppose we didn’t like chicken?”

  Henry gave him a pitying smile. “But, Shade, I have observed that you hardly ever order anything but chicken. I have broken bread with so many of my colleagues in the course of so many different assignments that by now I believe I could cater for the entire national press without forgetting a single preference. And, Rose dear, don’t bother to ask me if the food served here is kosher when you have a rosary in your purse.”

  AN HOUR LATER, Henry having been outvoted on the issue of dessert, they met the garage mechanic in the reception room, and followed him out to the hotel parking area, where a boxy pewter-colored car, glistening with raindrops, sat under a streetlight. The car, not new but well cared for, had a roof, running boards, and fenders of gleaming black, and a spare tire strapped in place above the running board, just forward of the passenger side door. Above the rear bumper a suitcase-shaped box served as a storage compartment.

  “H’it’s a Ford,” the mechanic announced.

  Shade Baker, armed with the desk clerk’s hand-drawn map to State Street, nodded. “A 1930 Model-A Tudor sedan. Looks in good shape. Anything else I should know about it?”

  “This one’s got a heater,” said the mechanic. “Figured you’uns would be glad of that on a bitter night like this. Look here. There’s a cast-iron unit fitted over the exhaust manifold to bring in the heat from the radiator and the manifold. The hot air goes into the passenger side of the cab through the fire wall. Ain’t that a daisy?”

  Shade nodded, as if he understood all of that, which he probably did. “Good deal,” he said. “Any way to adjust it?”

  “Sure, there is. There’s a little hatch that you can open or close to adjust the air flow going into the cab. Look here. I’ll show you how to set it.”

  The mechanic opened the passenger door, and began to demonstrate the fine points of the heating system to his fellow car enthusia
st.

  “Thank God they didn’t give us a DeSoto,” said Rose loudly. “I’ll be damned if I’d have ridden in a rumble seat.”

  Shade, who was still conferring with the mechanic, glanced in her direction. “Rose,” he said, “you don’t know the first thing about cars.” He waded back into the technical discussion without waiting for a reply. The mechanic had unlatched the hood of the Ford, which he called its bonnet. Now he was leaning into the engine, pointing out various features of the motor, while Shade listened, tossing in an occasional question about the spark plugs or the carburetor.

  “Where’s the fuel tank?” he asked. “Oh, here. Behind the engine. I see.”

  “I wish he’d just ask for directions,” Rose muttered to Henry, as she watched her breath cloud the air.

  Henry Jernigan opened the passenger side door and clambered into the back seat. “Get in,” he told her. “Shade will be finished very soon. Nothing could keep him out in this cold wind for long.”

  Rose stepped up on the running board and hesitated, clutching the door frame. “Are you sure you don’t want the front seat, Henry?”

  Henry shook his head. “The navigator’s position? No. If there is any map reading to be done in the dark, you had better do it.” He settled back against the seat and pushed his homburg down over his eyes.

  Henry had been right about the effect of the cold on Shade Baker’s attention span. Two minutes after they settled themselves in the car, he sent the mechanic on his way, climbed into the driver’s seat, and and pushed the starter.

  “We’re heading west, toward the Tennessee line,” he told Rose.

  She shrugged. “It’s dark and rainy, Shade.

  In less than a mile the lights of Abingdon vanished, and they were alone on a two-lane country road, with only the Ford’s headlights for illumination. Rose could just make out the white paper in her lap, but she could not read the clerk’s hastily penciled directions. She hoped Shade had memorized the route; otherwise he would have to stop the car while she got out and held the map up to the headlights in order to read it.

  “Don’t worry about the map,” said Shade, as if he could hear her thoughts. “It’s a straight shot, more or less, and the rain is slacking off. You all right back there, Henry?”

  The only reply from the backseat was a sonorous snore.

  SHADE ALWAYS SAID that anybody who had grown up behind a plow could handle a car, and he must have been right, because forty minutes later he was parking the car on State Street in Bristol, within sight of the studio of WOPI.

  Rose slipped the map into her coat pocket, in case they needed it to find their way back. The streetlights and the bright marquee of the local movie house gave her the reassuring feeling that they were back in civilization. Any place without sidewalks and neon might as well be an Eskimo village as far as she was concerned. Bristol looked like the sort of place they described as an all-American town, when they rhapsodized about hayrides and county fairs and high school football games—the sort of place that pretty girls and square-jawed soldiers ought to call home. And, although none of them would ever say it in print, the sort of burg that you left behind if you were pretty enough or ambitious enough to make it to the big time. The town existed so perfectly in her mind that she felt no urge at all to find out what it was really like.

  Rose had spoken very little for most of the drive, partly out of deference to Henry’s beauty sleep, and partly because she hadn’t been able to reach Danny, which had left her unwilling to talk about anything else. She would have happily spent the drive talking about Danny, and whether he got a flight assignment, and why he hadn’t called, and what she ought to do—but Shade was no sob sister. If she ever tried to talk about anything more personal than the weather, he would fidget and look away until someone changed the subject. Perhaps his defense against a life spent awash in other people’s emotions was to feel as little as possible himself.

  AS SOON AS THE CAR stopped moving, Henry woke up, yawning and stretching. “Where is our destination?” he asked, as he clambered out of the back seat.

  “Just over there,” said Shade, nodding toward a building across the street whose entrance looked more like a private home than a business. Large multi-paned windows flanked a dark-painted door that looked like a keyhole: framed by an arch of stonework and topped by a fan-shaped transom. Covering the upper half of the door was a sign that read: NO ADMITTANCE MAIN STUDIO OFFICES 410 STATE STREET, but as they approached the curb, a laughing foursome pushed open the door and went inside.

  “Well, this is what I call roughing it,” said Henry as he crossed State Street arm and arm with Rose. “You park the car in one state, and we have to walk all the way to another one.”

  THEY JOINED A SECOND GROUP entering the radio station, following them down a long tiled hallway that was carpeted on one wall for soundproofing, and dotted here and there with vinyl-upholstered benches, metal canister ashtrays, and small potted palms. From an open door at the end of the hall came the sound of fiddle music and muffled applause.

  Shade Baker felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. That sound took him back to the nights on the prairie, when he would sit on the braided rug in the parlor, fiddling with the knobs on their battery-powered Atwater Kent and trying to find a gap in the static for the music to come through. In the Morris chair, his father, bundled up in an old nine-patch quilt, would strain to hear the singers’ voices over the counterpoint of static and scratchy fiddle music, trying to hold his cough until the song ended. The memory had brought him to a standstill in the dimly lit hallway, and he saw that Henry and Rose, mingling with the other arrivals, had nearly reached the door to the studio. He hurried to catch up to them, wondering if, as he listened to the live performance of the WOPI Saturday Night Jamboree, his mind would supply from memory the sound of muffled coughing.

  THE WOPI PERFORMANCE STUDIO looked like a high school auditorium. Rows of straight-backed wooden chairs faced a low wooden stage with a red-curtained backdrop framed by a plywood archway. They weaved through the crowd until they found a row close to the front with three empty seats. Only two of the seats were together, but Henry waved away Rose and Shade Baker, and took the single vacant seat fourth down from the aisle. Loosening his overcoat and muffler, Henry sat down, greeting his neighbor on either side with a cordial nod. Beside him a gaunt man with a face like a Bible cover gave him the appraising stare reserved for an outsider, and then, with the briefest of nods, he returned his attention to the stage, where a boy in dark glasses and a white shirt was playing a guitar and singing a ballad in a plaintive tenor. Oblivious to the music, Henry studied the boy, who faced a little away from the audience as he sang, with his upturned gaze focused on a spot high on the right-hand wall of the auditorium. As he played, he never glanced at the frets of the instrument, never changed his blank expression, and never shifted his attention away from the spot on the wall. Henry nodded to himself. The boy was blind. Until the applause came, he would not know whether the audience appreciated his playing or not. To Henry the music was as alien as anything he had heard in Japan, but at least he was able to see, and, judging by the rapt expressions on the faces of the listeners, the blind guitar player was very good indeed.

  He smiled at the pretty young woman in the seat beside him and nodded his approval of the performance.

  She leaned close to his ear and said, “The Carters is on next.”

  He wondered what that meant. Before he could ask, the blind boy finished his set and left the stage to generous applause. The master of ceremonies stepped up to the microphone and motioned for quiet. “Well, I reckon most of you come to hear this next group, and we’re right proud to have them with us. They recorded their new album last May up in New York City, but here in Bristol we’re proud to call them neighbors. Folks, let’s make them welcome—A.P. and Sarah and Maybelle Carter. The Carter Family!”

  The audience whooped and clapped as the trio took the stage: two dark-haired women in knee-length Sunday dr
esses, accompanied by a distinguished, broad-shouldered man in a gray suit who towered above them. The taller of the two women had an angular body and sharp features that made her seem intelligent and brave. Henry thought that another decade or two might curdle that hawklike face into the forbidding countenance of an old battle-ax, but right now she was a handsome woman, who carried her guitar as if it were a broadsword. The shorter one, teetering on high heels to augment her height, carried a wide quadrilateral stringed board that Henry thought must be a variant of the kotos he had seen played in Japan.

  He had meant to listen to the trio’s playing, but the sight of that strange musical instrument sent his thoughts spiraling back to a long-ago concert in Tokyo, to his first sight of the six-foot wooden boardlike zither, with its thirteen silk strings arched across a staggered row of ivory points that looked like shark’s teeth.

  By then he had been in the Orient for several years, drifting in and out of Japan for excursions to China, Korea, Malaysia. There was no point in going home, really.

  He willed himself to think of the music.

  His inheritance stretched further in the Far East, and, after all, by the time he reached Japan, there was nothing and no one to go back to in Philadelphia, so he lingered, following his interests into whatever facets of Asian culture took his fancy. Though he spoke the language more like a sailor than a scholar, he had learned enough Japanese to get by, and he used his newfound skills to dabble in the arts. He studied woodblock printing and mingei, the country’s regional folk arts. For a few months, when he toyed with the idea of being an antiques exporter, he trained his eye to recognize the various types of porcelain, Kutani and Satsuma. The martial arts of judo and bushido did not interest him, but for a lark he did take lessons in yabusame, the old samurai sport of archery, practiced from the back of a running horse. Although Henry had ridden as a child, and he had even dabbled in archery at Haverford, he soon found that he lacked both the balance and the aim to master the two skills in tandem in yabusame, and he gave up trying.