Jake didn’t say anything.
“My Lord, we have closing arguments this week. The child psychologist, my best bet, is going on the stand this morning.”
“The sister is Karen. She’s twelve. She’d never come to trial.”
“I don’t know, Jake. Jamie-Gwen still won’t talk. I didn’t want to put her on the stand. I promised her I wouldn’t put her on the stand. I’ve got to go.”
Jake slid quietly onto the bench at the back of the courtroom. All that could be seen of the defendant were the dark tangles of her hair above the back of the chair. Sloane was standing before a witness holding out a document. The paper fluttered in his hand. Jake had seen the tremor in Sloane’s hands when he first met him, but this shaking was full blown tremor, a symptom of old age everyone on the jury would recognize as a sign of infirmity in a man who was even older than they were.
“Am I correct, sir,” Sloane asked in a calm, strong voice, “that this forensics report which you as medical examiner have signed, confirms that the semen on Exhibit A, the white tights, belonged to Arnold Wainwright?”
“Yes.”
“Am I correct that this report attests that the blood type is B Positive?”
“Yes.”
“Am I correct that B Positive is a very common blood type?”
“Yes.”
“And am I correct that you did not perform a DNA test to confirm whose blood it was?”
“Yes, I didn’t DNA the blood.”
“And why didn’t you do this further test?”
“The sheriff didn’t ask for it.”
Jake felt heat in his face and wondered if people were looking at him, but his chief reaction was thank God. He left the courtroom to answer his vibrating phone. When he got back Sloane had another witness on the stand.
“Dr. Alegria, as a specialist in family dynamics, at Lakeside Women’s Hospital in Kansas City, would you please assist the court in understanding rape within a family.”
“Certainly,” the woman said and addressed the jury box. “Although every case can have its own motives and results, there are certain patterns that psychologists have observed and recorded over decades of study. In some cases the first causal act is the abdication of the mother who no longer wants her position of providing intercourse to the father.”
The courtroom was absolutely silent.
“Or the mother may also be an intimidated victim of the father’s violence and threats, but in a majority of cases of prolonged sexual abuse, the mother has turned a blind eye to her husband’s reach for a younger and perhaps more attractive sexual object. Men have been known to rape their own daughters when the girl is as young as two months old, but more often the abuse will start before the age of eight, when the girl is still too young to know she is being abused and too frightened to defy threats of what will happen to her if she tells anyone what has happened.”
Jake bit his lip. This could be the turning point in the jury’s sympathy. Or the point when the jurors want to stop listening.
“This begins a pattern,” the Doctor continued, “of isolation of the girl in which the father can act with impunity. The daughter suffers a deterioration of her sense of self. In some cases her self-esteem is extinguished. There are cases of fathers who will stop the abuse when the girl begins menstruating for fear of impregnating her. In other cases, the father is seeking to make the girl pregnant and forbids her to use birth control pills. These children born to—”
“Thank you, Doctor, for this background. Can you now speak to the case of Jamie-Gwen Wainwright. Have you interviewed her?”
“Yes.”
Jake felt sick. He knew more than most about what went on under the calm surface of Cadillac. But he sure hadn’t known what was going on at the Wainwright’s house. He had arrested this fragile, haunted girl who walked ahead of him to the squad car as though she didn’t want it to leave without her. Why hadn’t he noticed that this was unusual behavior then.
Sloane kept getting yeses from his witness. “Would you say that Jamie-Gwen had lost her sense of self to such an extent that she would be able to sacrifice herself to save her little sister, Karen?”
The courtroom gasped.
“Yes,” The Doctor said.
Right out of the blue Sloane had pitched this. Jake was amazed. But at the moment neither Sloane nor his chief witness was saying anything. Sloane was staring out one of the long windows seemingly engrossed in the fluttering Oklahoma flag. Shuffling and murmuring could be heard from the gallery. The jurors looked at each other.
Oh, God! I did this, thought Jake. I put a senile old man in charge of a young girl’s life. Sloane had now turned to the defense desk where his trembling hands shifted the papers back and forth, stopping only to adjust his glasses.
“Mr. Willard?” the judge asked softly.
“I will add just one more thing,” the psychologist said, taking the situation into her own hands and addressing the jury in a strong voice. “Jamie-Gwen obviously loved her little sister, Karen, age eleven. Karen had not suffered the long-term damage that Jamie-Gwen had and was probably seen by her older sister as worth a great deal. Whereas she regarded herself as worthless and would not have hesitated to sacrifice her life for her younger sister.”
“One last question,” Sloane said, his gaze swooping up from the desk to lock onto his expert witness. “What happens in adulthood to a girl who as a child suffered long-term sexual abuse by her father?”
“Objection!” Flowers shouted. “This psycho-babble has gone on long enough.”
“I will allow it to proceed another minute,” Judge Garner said.
“They are more likely,” the psychologist continued, “to make marriages to abusive men. And they are more likely to commit suicide or to go into prostitution.”
“Prostitution?” Sloane exclaimed, “Why would that be, Dr. Alegria?”
“Pimps know an abused girl when they see one. If they offer the promise of affection or just the tiniest bit of appreciation—one compliment will do—the pimp can make a prostitute of her overnight, a kind of slavery in which he will keep her overworked and afraid, a condition she had grown used to in her own home. Rarely will she be able to escape, chiefly because she does not believe herself worth saving.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Sloane turned to the Judge. “Your honor, this was my last witness.”
The judge looked at his watch and said there was plenty of time this afternoon for closing arguments. He asked the two attorneys if they were prepared. They both said yes. “This is Friday. After I charge the jury, they can retire and deliberate over the weekend. Or as long as they need.”
As in so many trials Jake had witnessed, the verdict hung on one detail: Did Jamie-Gwen go back into her house before the shot was fired that killed her father as Leroy Flowers promoted, or after the shot was fired, as Sloane Willard had strongly implied. That was the weekend’s work ahead for the jury.
“So, Boss,” Jake’s deputy Curly asked, “have you got any money on the verdict?”
“No.” Jake was trying to have lunch alone at The Busy Bee.
“You know that lawyer with the glass house? What’s his name?
“McCall,” Jake said, not looking up. “Gavin McCall.”
“Whatever. He said Flowers has an open and shut case. He said juries like hard evidence—forensics, confessions, ballistics. A lot of blather by a psychologist won’t cut it with juries.” Curly was standing on one foot and then the other beside Jake’s table, appearing not to realize that Jake didn’t care about the opinions of Gavin McCall and kept his head down eating his BLT. “Of course,” Curly continued, “McCall may be sore at women ’cause his wife left him.”
Jake put down his sandwich and looked up. “Judianne McCall has left her husband?”
On Monday evening, just as darkness fell on Cadillac, the jury brought back a verdict of not guilty. When the jurors were interviewed, O’Brian was jostled aside by a full rank of television cameras, photog
raphers and reporters from across the state. The yard was packed with excited members of the public talking about the verdict. The jurors who wanted to speak stepped in front of the cameras and had a lot to say about the responsibility of holding a girl’s life in their hands. More than one of the young jurors made selfies with an arm around the neck of the old lawyer who several said, “Took the heat off us by giving us reasonable doubt.”
Jake stood on the edge of the crowd as Sloane entered the bright spotlight to speak to the press and the mass of the public. The old man blinked and adjusted his glasses. Then, in full voice and without notes called out across the crowd. “Keep your eyes open, folks.” The crowd hushed. “Don’t turn a blind eye on the kid who sits alone in the park. Don’t pretend not to see that blank-eyed girl who looks so shabby because she feels so unloved. Reach out to those loners whose hurt is so deep they push you away.” Then his gaze grew more intent and his voice stronger: “Don’t give up on the young and vulnerable who may quietly suffer savagery at home!”
Sloane stepped out of the bright light and craned his neck to search the crowd. When he spotted Jake, he nodded and walked his way.
§
Hillary O’Brian’s
Cadillac Voices
The Courier is pleased to have received this colorful piece from a member of our valued academic community.
THE LAND RUN
Who among us here today would have the courage or the skills to line up for that harum, scarum race, the Oklahoma Territory Land Run of 1889? I know some of you are descendants of the brave souls and adventurers in wagons, buckboards, buggies, train cars, horseback, bicycles or on foot who made the first land run into Oklahoma Territory’s thousands of square miles of treeless land and endless days of sunshine. A farmer’s dream.
Of course, in hindsight we are aware that those treeless plains, parching sun and the plow combined to produce the dust bowl forty years later. But at the time, for those land-hungry pioneers, land was free, people were friendly, and hard work was going to guarantee success.
Penniless immigrants, as well as folks who owned marble topped tables and swallow-tailed coats, lived in dugouts and sod houses until wagons could haul in enough lumber from Texas and the state of Washington for proper homes. Anybody too proud to live in a sod house had better scoot on back East where a sissy could keep his fingernails clean. Right?
The sodbusters could thrive, and salary men do the clerking, but the Oklahomans who got rich were the high-rolling risk-takers who had luck, willfulness and the stomach to gamble. After oil was discovered in 1919, a Harvard degree wouldn’t get you a cup of coffee, no siree, but any roughneck working in the oil fields figured all he needed was land on a lucky spot to become rich. And this dream became for us both our myth and our expectation.
Stan McCurry, PhD
Cadillac Community College
History Department
Cadillac resident since 1996
SUGAR HOUSE
2010
The Sugar House used to be a real tavern over on old Route 283—one of them places with four stools and a jukebox. It’s got a big oak rocking chair now for me, but it used to be a place to buy beer and hang out. You wouldn’t want your girls over there, but you’d hope your boys chose it over a lot worse places.
Well, this whole tiny honky-tonk was lifted up onto a flat bed truck and brought over and set down on a new slab right here in the trees at the edge of Cadillac’s Juvenile Detention Center. Every child when he’s growing up needs to go across the tracks to the bad side of town once in a while. Here at the Center, that’s what the Sugar House is, a runned-down place to sneak off to and pretend you’re not a child.
Now if that surprises you, let me tell you something else—that it was a lawyer that did it—Sloane Willard bought the place himself and plunked it down here twenty years ago and sent me to be the cook when I was about to be sent to the penitentiary.
I guess this isn’t going to make any sense unless I go on and tell you that I killed my husband. Shot him in the neck with his own rifle. Mr. Willard, my lawyer, said it was a crime of passion because of the awful fight that was going on at our place, but between you and me, it felt like cold blood.
I’m big, some say fat, but I’m as strong as any man in this whole institution even if I am an older woman. There are folks who will be afraid of someone as big as me, my own kids were, I’m ashamed to say, especially Ronnie, the oldest, who caught the worst of it.
I used to try to tell the details of my husband’s killing so folks wouldn’t be afraid of me, but I quit that. My pastor at Graceway got me to stop. He was real young then and kinda odd, talked more like one of the psychiatrists around here than a Baptist minister should. He said, “Lena, forgive yourself.” That sounded real strange to me ’cause in those days I was stark ravin’ crazy hoping God and the children would forgive me for killing their daddy. They’d all been screaming—Ronnie and my oldest girl trying to help me, and the little ones too scared to move. ’Course afterwards they were all hanging on me and telling me it was okay, but I knew they’d never forget what they saw. And sure ’nuf, when I’d go to whup one of them, I’d see the fear in their eyes.
Now you’re wondering what happens to the six kids of a woman who shoots her husband. Mr. Willard had known my family when we all lived in Ardmore. It was him suggested to the judge she send all my kids to the Juvenile Detention Center and send me and the Sugar House along too. My kids and me had our own cottage, and they went to school with the rest of the kids. They’re grown up now, pretty much okay, law abiding.
Here at the Detention Center we mostly get your incorrigibles—chronic truants, runaways, boys who’ve been selling theirselves to buy drugs—kids whose folks have turned them over to the state to raise. There’s more of that than you think, sometimes rich kids—thirteen or fourteen years old whose folks have given up on them—broken-hearted little cusses who feel totally evil. Like this new kid who came in last night except he was only eleven or twelve—dark straight hair, small for his age, still had baby-soft pink cheeks. He had a big expensive leather jacket slung around his little shoulders. I’d been told in staff meeting that we had a hard case named Stephen, but this was his first time to come my way.
He sat all hunched over with his head down on one of the back tables away from the music and the counter, almost out of my sight, ’cept nothing is really out of my sight ’cause that’s how the Sugar House is made—one big room where I can serve snacks and keep an eye out for the hard cases. When I see this kid come in, I go over and say, “What’ll it be,” and he gives me and a couple kids that’s playing checkers real mean looks.
I’ve seen this look before. I call it feeling swampy— feeling all dark and snaky inside, like something that creeps along in the ooze, the worst, most loveless thing God made. And I’m smart enough to know when a kid is feeling swampy, he’ll strike out—stab you with a pencil or an ice pick if he can get it. And this little guy was like that.
After awhile he raises his head and starts trying to gouge a hole in that old table with one of them plastic spoons. Well, I know he’s doing that so’s someone will say, ‘Quit that.’ So I go right back there and say, “Quit that, kid. That ain’t no sand pile. How about digging into some ice cream, instead.” What does this little hard case do but ups and turns the table over—would have hit my toes if I hadn’t jumped back. He’s standing there with his hands on his hips trying to look tough. The leather jacket on the floor.
“Stephen, you put that table back the way you found it.”
“No, you old bitch,” he says so loud that the other kids get up and leave, probably embarrassed ’cause they’ve known me a long time or maybe just giving me room.
“Now listen,” I says, “we don’t talk that way here, and nobody tears up the Sugar House.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says and reaches behind him and rips the old Michael Jackson poster off the wall.
“Yeah,” I say. Then before I know it that kid sc
oots across the floor like greased lightning and slides behind the counter. He grabs a Pepsi bottle out of the rack, smashes it on the sink, and holds it up like he’s the bad guy in some gangster movie. Well, I been here twenty years. This kid and his jagged bottle ain’t nothing new to me. But he wasn’t crying, and his eyes looked kind of frozen.
I sit down real slow in my rocker like I’m taking my place in the pew at church. I know violence. It’s got three mean triggers: Fear and rage and pain, any one will blast out and fire up the other two. The only thing to stop it in yourself is to fling your mind out somewhere’s else, and he don’t know how to do that. So, sitting there in the rocker, I commence real serious-like to study a hangnail on my little finger. He’s standing there wielding the bottle at nobody and trying to keep up his fierceness, and I say, not looking his way, “Did you ever go to a rodeo?”
“Everybody’s been to a rodeo, stupid!”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”
“This isn’t a real place, it is?” he asks.
“You mean the Sugar House?”
“It isn’t really away, is it? It’s part of the prison.”
“That’s right,” I say. “Yonder through those black jacks, you can see Cadillac’s water tower through a chain link fence when the leaves is all off in the fall.
“I hate you,” he says, and that bottle is flying right in my face. I duck and come up to see him yanking the cord out of my toaster. I jump up so fast I turn over a table. The toaster’s on the floor, the plug’s still in the wall, and he’s holding the cord with two wires hanging out. And what he does next like to paralyzes me. He opens his mouth and starts to stick the wires in.
“No!” I scream and reach across the counter to yank the cord out the wall. He runs out from behind, but I grab him around the middle, pinning his arms to his sides. He’s kicking like the dickens.
Cadillac, Oklahoma Page 12
