Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Rest my case,” I told him resolutely. “Rest it now or you’re fired.”

  “Sam, please.”

  I shook my head. “Either you do it or I will.”

  “Sam . . .”

  “No!”

  Morty nodded, then lifted himself from the chair.

  “Your Honor, my client has come to a decision,” he said. He paused and for a moment I thought he would stop, turn to me, argue against the choice I’d made. In fact, he did glance at me, saw that I was absolutely firm, then returned his attention to the judge. “The defense rests,” he said.

  And so, at last, it seemed to me, did the clearly guilty defendant in Sandrine’s case.

  Verdict

  “Ready?” Alexandria asked as I came toward her early on what would surely be the last day of my trial. She was standing at the door and had already opened it.

  I nodded. “I truly am,” I told her.

  “Just remember, Dad,” she added. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it.”

  I smiled. “Yes, we will.”

  During the past two days, while we’d awaited the jury’s verdict, it had become clear to me that Alexandria had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t guilty of the charge, that Sandrine’s death had been a final, desperate effort to save my life by waking me up to what I was and would forever be if not shocked into a change.

  Like a warrior prepared to charge, Alexandria said now, “Let’s do it.”

  On the way to the courthouse we passed directly through the town, the people opening their shops, the usual traffic, a town whose quiet lanes and modest university Sandrine had accepted in lieu of that far more idealistic dream of building a school in some remote corner of the earth, one never specified but which, as a vision for us, our lives, our work, she had never entirely abandoned.

  “What are you thinking, Dad?” Alexandria asked.

  “It’s always about your mother,” I told her. “This time, it was how she could be quite a stickler for grammar and an elegant structure, the way she insisted on using phrases like ‘into which’ and ‘about which’ and ‘according to whom,’ because they made thoughts flow so beautifully and seamlessly, one into the other. She taught me all of that.”

  “She taught me that, too,” Alexandria said. “And I’ve tried to pass it on to some of the writers at sleeplesseye.com, but they never seem that interested in learning the old lessons.”

  Morty stood waiting at the top of the courthouse steps, still unhappy that I’d ordered him not to defend me and now peering at me with just the sort of stern look that could, as P. G. Wodehouse had once said, open an oyster at forty feet.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked when I reached him. “There might still be some way that I could . . .”

  I shook my head.

  “All right, then,” Morty said. “Let’s go.”

  The members of the jury appeared quite somber as they filed into the courtroom, all of them peering either at some distant point in the room or toward the judge or in the general direction of where Mr. Singleton sat in the same suit he’d worn on the first day of my trial, though now the serpentine fold that had slithered across the back of his neck was less visible when he sat.

  Once seated, the members of the jury continued to either face solemnly forward or glance at their hands or follow the dance of some imaginary light around the room, twelve citizens, good and true, who suddenly seemed exactly that to me, not the hate-filled provincials of Morty’s perfervid imagination but simple, decent people with a job to do and who had done it as best they could.

  “Mr. Foreman, have you reached a verdict?” Judge Rutledge asked.

  “We have, Your Honor,” the foreman said.

  The hinge that swings us toward calamity rarely squeaks, I thought as the jury foreman rose to deliver the verdict in my case. Life should fill our ears with warnings, but it falls silent at our infant cry.

  “Would you hand it to the bailiff, please,” Judge Rutledge said.

  He did so, then sat down and watched as the bailiff carried the jury’s verdict to the court reporter.

  “Would you please read the verdict,” the judge instructed.

  The court reporter rose and read.

  “We, the jury, in the above entitled action, find the defendant, Samuel Joseph Madison, not guilty.”

  To my surprise, there was not a sound in the courtroom, not one ripple of discontent. A few reporters scribbled in their notebooks but, beyond those small movements, the world seemed very still.

  The judge turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for rendering a service our democracy requires,” he said. “You are dismissed.”

  Morty glanced at me and whispered, “You’re one lucky bastard, Sam.”

  Perhaps so, I thought, or perhaps the twelve men and women of the jury had simply decided that, though I may well have murdered my wife, there was scant evidence to prove it. They had been charged by the judge to be fair and scrupulous and to adhere to the laws of evidence in my case, and that is exactly what they had done, and in response to which these people of Coburn, who no doubt still despised everything I believed and everything I was, had set me free.

  Now, as they rose, I rose, too, and in that gesture of respect returned to them all I could.

  Mr. Singleton came over to Morty as the last of the jurors exited the court. He smiled and offered his hand. Morty took it, smiled back, then each exchanged the sort of look that said, Well, the jury has spoken, and a good thing, too. Then, to my astonishment, Mr. Singleton offered his hand to me, and I saw that he really had believed I’d killed Sandrine, though now he seemed less sure.

  “I felt the evidence compelled me to make a case,” he told me. “But I knew I never had a strong one.” With that, he nodded politely, turned, and left.

  “What an asshole,” Morty muttered.

  Was he? I no longer knew. Sandrine had thought Montaigne the soul of wisdom for the simple reason that, in answer to so many conflicting matters, he had responded only with “I withhold judgment.”

  Which is what I now did upon Mr. Singleton, and upon all the witnesses against me, upon my colleagues at the college, too, and at last upon all the Coburnites of this world.

  “So what now?” Morty asked as we made our way out of the courtroom.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, which was true.

  At the top of the stairs, he shook my hand. “Stay in touch,” he said, but I knew he didn’t mean it.

  “I will,” I said, and didn’t mean it either.

  Alexandria took my arm and smiled. “You can drive us home, Dad,” she said.

  And so I did, back through the town, through the life I’d shared with Sandrine, back into those many memories, aware of how they seemed to sprout like flowers in every open space.

  At the house, Alexandria rushed in to call Jenna and let her know the verdict. I headed for the mailbox, where I found nothing but the usual bills and advertisements. I was already halfway back to the house when I heard again footsteps behind me, though this time, when I turned, it wasn’t April I found standing there.

  “Clayton,” I said.

  He drew the pistol from his jacket, his grandfather’s dueling pistol, I saw immediately, probably the very one he had mentioned to me on the afternoon I’d gone to his house.

  How appropriate a weapon, I thought, with which to kill a scoundrel.

  “My grandfather defended his wife’s honor with this pistol,” Clayton said. “I’m going to do the same.”

  I nodded, and for a moment I wondered why I was not afraid, why I felt it quite in keeping that I should die this way, shot by Clayton Blankenship after being freed by a Coburn jury, the fact that many of my fellow townspeople would certainly feel that no matter how much they disapproved of such vigilante
justice it was, in fact, justice that had been served, and Clayton the perfect man to have served it. Morty would doubtless get him off.

  “She was just a silly girl to you,” Clayton said. “I’m sure that’s how you thought of April, that she was just a silly girl you could toy with.”

  I nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly how I thought of her,” I told him.

  Clayton pressed the pistol toward me slightly. “Don’t move,” he said.

  “I won’t,” I assured him, and never had I felt more certain of anything in my life.

  “I want you to know that I plan to go with you,” Clayton said. “As soon as this is done.”

  “There’s no need for that,” I told him, then forced a small sad smile. “You’ll be acquitted, Clayton. I myself would find you not guilty.”

  Something in those kind and noble eyes softened slightly. “I’m so sorry it has come to this.” He drew the hammer back and it sounded with a fatal click. “Well,” he said softly. “Well, then.”

  He hesitated, and I have no idea if he actually would have pulled the trigger. I know only that a voice came out of the dark.

  “Dad?”

  It was Alexandria. She was standing at the door, peering out at what must have seemed a strange tableau, Clayton and I facing each other.

  “Hi, Mr. Blankenship,” she said gently, sweetly, with great . . . yes . . . kindness. On that note, my eyes grew moist. Oh how like Sandrine she is, I thought, oh how like her deeply knowing mother.

  Clayton immediately returned the hammer to its place and sank the pistol into his pocket.

  “Do you want to come in?” Alexandria asked.

  There was an edge of fear in her voice, but she acted against it and took an impossibly courageous step out onto the lawn.

  “Good evening, Alexandria,” Clayton said softly as he turned toward her. A smile flickered onto his lips. “I just came to tell your father . . .” He stopped and his large eyes drifted over to me. “. . . that I agree with the jury.”

  Alexandria took another step toward us, then another, until we formed a small tragic circle in the frigid moonlight.

  “I truly admired your mother,” Clayton said to Alexandria. Then he looked at me and with a decency hardly imaginable he said simply, “I hope you have a good life, Sam, the rest of it.” He glanced toward Alexandria. “With your loyal, loyal daughter.”

  “Thank you,” I told him, and with all my heart I meant it.

  He turned and walked back into the darkness, in every way a knight in shining armor.

  “So what do you want for dinner?” Alexandria asked.

  “Popcorn,” I answered softly.

  She looked at me, clearly puzzled.

  “Remember when you were just a little girl?” I asked. “Your mother and I would declare ‘junk night’ and just have popcorn for dinner, or potato chips and onion dip.”

  She laughed. “And a movie,” she reminded me. “Always with a movie.”

  “Right, a movie.”

  “I’ll go get one,” she said.

  “I’ll make the popcorn.”

  I’d popped up a huge bowl of popcorn by the time she got back. I’d also melted butter and generously doused the whole mixture with a flavorful excess of salt.

  “Smells good,” Alexandria said as she walked into the kitchen. She held one of those generic DVD cases and I couldn’t see the movie she’d chosen.

  “It’s an old one,” she said, keeping things mysterious. “One of Mom’s favorites. I remember us watching it together.”

  “Perfect,” I said and picked up the bowl of popcorn and added it to the tray upon which I’d already placed two glasses of soda. “I guess we’re ready then.”

  The movie was The Chosen, and Alexandria was right, it had been one of Sandrine’s favorites. It was based on a Chaim Potok novel that I was reasonably certain she had never read, and yet something in the film had always gotten to Sandrine, perhaps its tale of two people torn apart but ceaselessly attempting to connect again. It had always struck me as a rather sentimental movie, and it still did, save for the voice-over that comes at the very end of the film relating a story from the Talmud.

  Sitting in the dark with my daughter, the dregs of junk night strewn around us, I listened once again to that voice, the tale it told of two people who’d once loved each other but whose relationship had foundered and who now lived in different places. One sends a messenger to the other. “Come half the distance that divides us,” the message says, “and I will meet you there.” The other refuses. “I am sorry,” the return message says, “but I cannot meet you halfway.” The other considers this message, considers the consequences of never again seeing or being with this other person that he loves. And so he sends a second message: “Then tell me how far you can come toward me, and I will meet you there.”

  I recalled that Sandrine’s eyes had glistened at that.

  Mine hadn’t, and didn’t that night either. And yet I found myself quite moved by this old story, moved and wondering where it might be, this place where I could yet meet Sandrine, a woman who’d so loved language and felt that sentences should be held together by “into which” and “according to whom,” held together like the fingers of a hand, as she’d told her students, so that they might bear the weight of wisdom.

  “What are we going to do now, Dad?” Alexandria asked as the final credits rolled.

  Suddenly I knew.

  “This,” I said.

  Samuel Joseph Madison, the beloved founder of the Sandrine School of Kumasi, has died at the age of seventy-four. Mr. Madison founded the school in 2014, in honor of his wife, Sandrine Allegra Madison, for whom the school is named. For twenty-five years, Mr. Madison taught the children of Kumasi and its surrounding villages. Many of his students went on to obtain advanced degrees in England, Australia, and the United States, including this reporter. Mr. Madison is survived by his daughter, Ali, also a teacher at the school, and according to whom the school’s doors will remain open into the indefinite future.

  West African News Agency

  Accra, Ghana, July 12, 2042