by Ninie Hammon
“You’re right. It’s probably more like one out of a dozen.” As Sarabeth continued to cough, Sonny got up and met his secretary at the door, carrying a tray with fresh coffee.
“You take cream? Sugar?”
Sarabeth shook her head yes to the cream and no to the sugar, as she struggled to get her breathing under control. Sometimes she had trouble swallowing and that was part of the problem. Of course, she didn’t tell him that. She hadn’t gotten her own arms around her illness yet; she wasn’t ready to share it.
But the rhythm of swallowing soothed her and the choking sensation eased off.
“I’m sorry. I just got strangled,” she said.
“Don’t get this part confused,” Sonny continued as if there’d been no interruption. “This isn’t about whether marijuana should or shouldn’t be illegal It is illegal. And as long as it is, it’s my job to bust the people who grow it.” He sighed. “And it’s the court’s job to let them go. That’s the rhythm of my professional life.”
“I don’t get it.”
Sonny took a big gulp of his own coffee—black—sat down in the chair and leaned back in it. “Let me see if I can make this simple. It’s the ‘there-but-for-the-grace-of-God’ principle, with a good portion of ‘we-look-after-our-own’ thrown in for seasoning. Every time I put a doper on trial, he’s facing at least one juror who’s raising dope, or has raised dope or has thought about raising dope, or who’s brother/father/uncle/cousin or next-door-neighbor is, has or is thinking about it.”
Sarabeth was flabbergasted. “How in the world … ? Juries are selected randomly from voter-registration lists, right?”
Sonny nodded.
“Callison County’s population is about 16,000 people, so there are what, maybe 6,000 registered voters?”
“Seven thousand, four hundred and eleven as of the May Primary Election.”
“So a computer randomly selects—?”
Sonny shook his head. “No computer. Every voter’s name is typed on a piece of paper. Each paper is put into an individual clear plastic cylinder, and then the cylinders are loaded into a huge drum. It’s in the basement, locked up with padlocks that require three keys—mine, the circuit judge’s and the commonwealth’s attorney’s. Every January, we add in the new voters, roll the drum around to mix up the cylinders, and then select 300 of them, toss out the names of people who’ve died or moved out of the county and that’s the year’s jury pool.”
“And you’re telling me that out of those 300 people, you can’t pick 12 jurors without getting at least one who’s either raising dope or knows somebody who is?”
“I’d wager the percentage is even higher than that.” The look on Sonny’s face said it was true, whether she believed it or not.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “There was nothing like that going on when I grew up here.”
“The last time you were home was … ?”
“Almost 14 years ago.”
Sonny made a humph sound in his throat. “A lot can change in 14 years.”
She hadn’t stayed away from Brewster on purpose. She’d just been chained to her job. With the tenure monkey on her back, she felt compelled to teach every summer semester and tutor during holiday breaks. Jim Bingham loved to travel, and he’d used visiting Sarabeth as an excuse to shake the dust of Kentucky off his feet for awhile.
“But Daddy never said a word to me about marijuana.”
“I suspect Jim didn’t talk about what was going on at first because he didn’t want to admit it was happening. None of us did. And later … ” Sonny looked uncomfortable. “He probably didn’t want you to worry about him.”
“Why would I have worried?” A twinge of dread raised the hair on her arms.
“There were a couple of incidents. Somebody threw a brick through the front window of the newspaper after Jim started publishing the dope arrests in the court news. Tires slashed, prank calls, that kind of thing.”
If her father had been in some sort of danger, why hadn’t he said something? Why had he kept as tight-lipped about that as he’d been about the big story he was working on? Sarabeth felt the dread settle cold as a stone into her belly. Were the two related?
“What happened here?” she asked, a plaintive note to her voice. This was not the Callison County she remembered.
“If you really want to know, there are any number of ways you can find out. You could study sociology and criminal pathology—a good history course might be a plan, too. Or I can give you the random rambling of one man with a shiny gold star.”
“I’ll take Door Number Two,” she said, tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it.
“You do know they used to grow industrial hemp in Kentucky, right?”
“I do now.”
“Industrial hemp’s used to make rope, but it’s a form of cannabis—marijuana—with a real low concentration of the chemical that gets you high.” Sonny drained his coffee cup and set it down beside the sugar bowl and creamer packets on the tray. “There were a lot of Callison County boys went to Vietnam.” He paused. “Bunch of them never came home, and the ones who did come home weren’t the same boys they were when they left.” He stopped, cleared his throat and continued in a stronger voice. “And our boys in ’Nam tramped through the jungles next to soldiers who were smoking the same stuff that was growing wild out behind grandma’s barn back home—smoking it and paying big money for it.”
He leaned toward her. “We’re talking farm boys here. A few of them …” He paused again and Sarabeth suspected he could name exactly who those few farm boys were. “…came back to Callison County with seeds to grow a crop that wasn’t on the US Department of Agriculture’s list of approved produce.”
“And it didn’t matter to them that growing marijuana was against the law?”
“So was making moonshine, but that never stopped their granddaddies from brewing it. Callison County produced the best hooch in the state. Same principle, different day.”
Sonny got up and walked to the window, drew the curtain back and looked down on the street. “It was the easy money. Raise a dope crop for a couple of years and you’re driving a big car and living in a fancy house, and folks thought, ‘What’s the harm in that?’ Pretty soon, everybody wanted some of the action.”
He turned back to face her.
“See, dope itself isn’t the problem. It never was. The problem is the outrageous fortune you can make growing it. That kind of money breeds evil like a fly breeds maggots. Big money, easy made, attracts bad people. And charms good people into making bad decisions. Disastrous combination.”
“Sounds like there wouldn’t be a problem if they’d just legalize—”
“No sense in going there!” Sonny interrupted. He’d obviously heard that line before. “It is what it is. Growing dope’s against the law. Period. Just like brewing whiskey was against the law during Prohibition. And the millions made on illegal booze birthed organized crime, the Mafia. Look how many good people they’ve hurt over the years.”
Sarabeth thought about the engaging young man who’d been working in a dope barn to make some of that ‘big money’ to finance a medical school education.
“You know Wanda Lee? She works for me. Her sons, Gabe and Jesse—”
“I know Gabe. Coached him in Little League before he shot up tall and started playing round ball.” He dropped the curtain and leaned back against the window sill. “A good boy. What happened to him …” He couldn’t finish. “And Gabe Lee’s not the first. He won’t be the last, either.”
Sarabeth was suddenly afraid if she didn’t change the subject, she might cry. “Taxes, what about taxes?” So emotional, she was just so emotional lately. “Can’t you catch dopers like they caught Al Capone?”
“Dopers have figured out ways to scrub their money cleaner than shoving quarters in a washer at the laundromat.” Sonny seemed grateful for the change of subject, too. “Everything from investment schemes to music festivals.”
�
�Music festivals?”
“Yeah, they hire a bunch of top-name bands and set up expensive sound equipment in an open field. Tickets, booze, concessions—all cash, of course—and no matter what happens, they win. If it rains and everybody stays home, they claim huge business losses. If there’s a full moon and a warm breeze, they claim that 10-20 times more people showed up than actually did. How you going to count a bunch of drunk teenagers in the dark? And now they’ve got legal income to report.”
Sonny’s face darkened. “Plus, there are businesses all over this county—legitimate businesses—propped up by marijuana money. Businesses that are sailing on down the pike, good times or bad, because somebody’s pouring dope money into them and cooking the books so you can’t see it.”
He stepped back to his desk and sat down slowly in the chair.
“It’s not just the little guys like Jimmy Dan. There are powerful men out there, bad men.” He turned and looked her full in the eye. “And the money is so huge …”
“You think it’s going to get violent, don’t you.”
“It’s already gotten violent!” Sonny’s voice was tight with suppressed anger. “I’m saying it’s going to get worse. Sarabeth, these people are only a generation or two and a couple hundred miles removed from the Hatfields and the McCoys.”
Jana stuck her head into the office and caught the sheriff’s attention. “The jury just came in with a verdict upstairs,” she said and shook her head. “Not guilty.”
Chapter 9
That afternoon, after her staff had gone home, Sarabeth climbed the stairs into the attic of the newspaper office and brought down two huge books marked 1987 and 1988. Each contained back issues of the Callison County Tribune.
She sat down at the big table in the break room and began to flip through the bound volumes, looking at front pages starting in January of the preceding year. There was no marijuana news in any of the 1987 newspapers until springtime.
But when she turned to the April 24 issue, a headline leapt off the page at her. Crawford man found dead in pot field.
The story said an anonymous tip had sent the Kentucky State Police to Blackburn Ridge. They found a 24-year-old Callison County man shot in the back of the head, his blood soaking into the ground around two dozen 5-inch-tall marijuana plants.
He was survived by his wife, who was “expecting their first child.”
Six weeks later, the June 5 issue proclaimed six columns across the top of the page: Dopers beat, torture local couple in their home.
The subhead read: Three children hear parents’ screams.
Sarabeth’s hands began to tremble as she read the bizarre story of mistaken identity. Three men had broken into the house they thought belonged to a man who’d reported their dope crop to police. They locked the couple’s children in a closet and tortured the man and his wife for hours.
“They would have killed us,” the woman said from her hospital bed. “But they found John’s driver’s license when they were going through his wallet. He wasn’t who they thought he was, so they left.”
After Sarabeth read that story, it was as if every dope-related event in the huge books was colored fluorescent red. The words, a headline here, a few sentences in a story there, jumped out at her, page after page.
The man accused of injuring four men in a hail of gunfire outside a bar last Friday night claimed three of them had stolen marijuana out of his barn. The fourth was a bystander.
Police believe the arson fire that destroyed a home on Keynes Lane Monday night was retaliation in a feud between rival dope-growers.
Shots were fired at a Drug Task Force helicopter last week.
The marijuana news tapered off during the winter months and bloomed with the crocuses the following spring. There were raids on dope fields, four separate incidents of shootings in the woods; one of the victims would remain paralyzed for life. A state police trooper was stabbed while arresting a dope grower, and of course, the recurring melody of “found not guilty” haunted the songs of marijuana trials.
Sarabeth stopped at the July 8 issue, the newspaper published the week after her father’s funeral. A headline there read: Killer dog mauls Cincinnati man. The story said police believed the animal was guarding a marijuana crop.
Sarabeth didn’t go into the office the next day. Instead, she walked up and down Main Street in Brewster asking questions. She did the same thing every day for the rest of the week, wandered the streets in all the smaller communities in the county. She figured it was time she found out how the residents of Callison County felt about dope.
She stopped young mothers pushing strollers and old men pushing walkers. She talked to mail carriers, bank tellers, rescue squad members, store clerks and one semi-comatose man slumped on a bench in the back of a pool hall. Even talked to the jailer and the janitor at the high school. Not in-depth interviews. More what her grandfather called “howdy-and-shake” conversations, though she didn’t do much of the talking. Just asked questions about marijuana-growing and listened. To what the people said, and more importantly, to what they didn’t say.
• • • • •
When Sarabeth opened her eyes Saturday morning, the amber glow of autumn sunshine filled her bedroom with light so bright it hurt her eyes, so pure it left sparkling flakes like fairy dust on every surface it touched. Birds sang a haunting melody outside her bedroom window, and the aroma coming from downstairs was irresistible. Ben had made coffee, fried bacon, too. She could smell them both! She reached up to throw back the covers and—
She couldn’t move.
She could feel her body, her arms and legs stretched out under the sheet and the hand-made quilt, as unresponsive as a crash dummy. Like it wasn’t even her body. She struggled, tried to lift her leg or wiggle her finger. Nothing.
Panic welled up in her chest, hot lava from a crack in the earth’s core. She was paralyzed. Paralyzed! Overnight, the MS had taken it all, her world, her life, everything.
Sarabeth screamed, wailed, her voice a high-pitched shriek she didn’t recognize.
“Nooooo!”
She sat bolt upright in the midnight dark, the sweat-soaked sheets so tangled around her they felt like wet straps binding her—mental hospital restraints—and she fought them in silent hysteria, praying she hadn’t really cried out.
“Sis! What’s wrong?”
Ben stood in the doorway, a shadow backlit by the spill of illumination from the hallway nightlight.
“I’m all right,” she gasped. When she saw him fumble for the light switch on the wall, she begged, “Please don’t turn on the light. A nightmare, I just had a nightmare.”
Ben flipped the switch on the lamp on the chest of drawers by the door, padded across the room in his bare feet and sat down beside her on the bed, his red hair an unruly tangle that any other time would have made her smile.
She forced herself to take a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“Ben, you need to go back to bed. I just had a bad dream. I’m fine.”
“No you’re not.”
“Yes, I—”
“No you’re not! Your hands shake sometimes and you limp. Sometimes, your vision is all screwed up. You’re not fine. Don’t pretend you are, that none of this is happening. Don’t protect me. Let me in.”
She fought back tears.
“Ok. I’m not fine, but I’m doing the best I can and it’s not awful.”
When he started to protest, she raised her hand. “Really. It’s not bad, at least not as bad as it could be. But I’ll tell you. If it gets worse, I’ll tell you.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” She paused. “You haven’t told anyone have you?”
“Of course not! You said it was private.”
After the initial shock, Sarabeth was certain she could eventually come to terms with MS, figure out how to live with it. She was equally certain she would never be able to live with other people’s sympathy. She couldn’t countenance hanging her disease around
her neck like an albatross.
“This job, it’s more stress than you thought it’d be, isn’t it? It’s making the MS worse. Maybe we shouldn’t have moved here.”
“No! Remember the rule…” Then the two of them chanted in unison: “No looking back.” Sarabeth reached up and shoved her bed-head hair out of her eyes. “Moving here was the right decision, Ben.”
She’d been surprised by how quickly Ben had adapted. He’d taken to life in a small town like a duck to quacking. And she felt so deliciously free here, released from bondage to the Academia Troll.
“Give it some time. I just need to get the hang of actually doing all those things I taught.” But it looked like she’d have to forgo the luxury of gradually getting her feet wet. A few weeks as a practicing journalist wasn’t nearly enough preparation, but it was all she had.
“I need to be here right now,” she said quietly. “It matters.” She reached up and tousled his unruly hair. “Now, go back to bed.”
She lay back and tried to sleep, flopped around like a guppy on a table top for what seemed like hours. Then she got up, quietly so as not to wake Ben, pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt and drove the three blocks from the house to her office in the pre-dawn darkness.
She sat in front of the typewriter for a long time, thinking about her father, conjuring up his image. Finally she spoke aloud to his presence in the room. “Daddy, I don’t get it. Why didn’t you write about this?” In her search through the back issues, she’d found lots of news stories about pot, but the silence from the editorial page had been deafening. And there was nothing her father loved more than a good rant. “Why didn’t you stand up to the dopers?”
The only response was silence.
“Surely, you don’t expect me to. I can’t!” But, of course, she could, too. Fact was, few people were better qualified. Editorial-writing was her one great gift as a journalist. Still …
She pleaded with the silence to let her off the hook. “It’s so engrained now if I shoot the flea, I could end up killing the whole dog.”
