Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  “Malone is an eloquent, witty writer who combines page-turning suspense with the subtlety and deeply felt emotion of the Southern literary tradition at its finest. As entertaining as Presumed Innocent, as resonant as To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  —Booklist

  “Marvelously engaging…splendid…hilarious…Five hundred pages of Cuddy Mangum merely whets the appetite for more.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “One of the most entertaining portraitists of the new South…another winning chronicle…His hero [is] as engaging a tour guide through this peripatetic narrative as anyone could wish.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Mr. Malone peoples his fiction with large, quirky casts, and his readers come to know not only what these characters eat, drink, chew, whistle, sing, listen to, read and dream, but—most important, most especially in Time's Witness—what they believe…He should be congratulated…and thanked once again for his generosity.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Malone knows his Piedmont the way William Faulkner knew his Yoknapatawpha, but he's much more fun to read.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Malone is at the peak of his powers with Time's Witness…A very, very funny book, in the same way that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—also about race relations and class consciousness—is a very funny book.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Sculpture in the round…a richly textured novel…It replays the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird and All the King's Men, but it also exhibits a goodly amount of humor, both the wisecracking and the sharply ironic variety…Transcends the mystery genre to conjure up a vivid sense of time, of place, of history, and of hope.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “To be relished for its flavor, variety, and essential validity. Like Charles Dickens—the comparison isn’t farfetched—the author isn’t afraid of stretching the truth to encompass it.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Dickensian craft…gripping…vivid…A novel of grand themes, a kind of morality play seldom thought in current literature. Its words resonate and its values linger.”

  —Greensboro News and Record

  “A rare sort of contemporary novel. It is blessed with a strongly focused moral vision…and brims with lively, memorably etched characters. It is the work of an author at the top of his story-telling powers, and I recommend it highly. Suspense, excitement, bulls-eye dialogue and a knockout courtroom scene…Run, don’t walk to the bookstore.”

  —The State, Columbia, South Carolina

  “Michael Malone has done it again: written a huge, entertaining, satisfying Southern novel that…never relaxes its friendly grip on the reader…favoring the fundamental enduring tools of the fictional trade—plot and scene, character and dialogue, all handled with a crisp, clever touch.”

  —The Spectator, Raleigh, North Carolina

  “Sweeping…one of the most gripping reads of the year. Courtroom scenes to rival the high drama of Presumed Innocent, a cast of truly memorable characters, and a plot that consistently surprises and entertains.”

  —Book of the Month Club News

  “A consummate writer…classic…Malone's skill with words, his ear for spoken language, his ability to create realistic, sympathetic characters…combine to make Time's Witness the kind of book more best-sellers should be: literate, compassionate, memorable, riveting.”

  —Arizona Daily Star

  “A rich and engrossing story…I find myself reading voraciously, eager to find out what happens, yet wanting to hold back, reluctant to reach the end and call a halt to the enjoyment…Rich in story, in action and in insights…the South rings true.”

  —Winston Salem Journal

  “A wonderful tale with a tense, unexpected finale… fascinating…Malone's Hillston could be a microcosm for the New South…provides an intriguing backdrop for an exciting legal drama.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Time's Witness is a work that defies classification. Although it is a solidly constructed mystery thriller, it is also a love story, a riveting courtroom drama, a parable about prejudice and a powerful rejection of the death penalty…Stocked with myriad colorful and memorable characters… a skillfully crafted tale that…leaves the reader clamoring for more of Malone's novels.”

  —Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “Perhaps the best novelist of the New South…and one of the most distinctive talents to emerge in crime fiction.”

  —The Guardian

  “In Time's Witness, Malone pushes well beyond crime genre conventions, balancing Cuddy Mangum's droll narration and a comical cast of small town characters against a story whose weighty themes are capital punishment and bigotry in the modern South. A tricky combination perfectly executed, with a jackknife plot to boot.”

  —20/20

  time's witness

  by Michael Malone

  FICTION

  Painting the Roses Red

  The Delectable Mountains

  Dingley Falls

  Uncivil Seasons

  Handling Sin

  Time's Witness

  Foolscap

  First Lady

  Red Clay, Blue Cadillac

  NONFICTION

  Psychetypes

  Heroes of Eros

  Copyright © 2002 by Michael Malone

  Cover copyright © 2002 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  Cover image by Martin Parr/Magnum Photos, Inc. (man in hat)

  Cover image by Jack Kurtz (electric chair)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in Time's Witness are fictitious. The setting is the state of North Carolina, and certain public institutions and public offices are mentioned, but the characters involved in them are entirely imaginary. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author. Specific settings are also fictional: “Dollard Prison” is in no way a portrait of any actual prison. Nor have I attempted to follow with absolute legal accuracy the current courtroom and criminal policies of any given region. For example, in North Carolina, prisoners are now executed by lethal injection, whereas in this novel, the state still uses the gas chamber.

  Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410 (630) 961-3900

  FAX: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Malone, Michael.

  Time's witness / by Michael Malone.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-57071-754-0 (alk. paper)

  1. African Americans—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. Police—North

  Carolina—Fiction. 3. North Carolina—Fiction. 4. Race relations—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A43244 T56 2002

  813’.54—dc21

  2001054285

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  LB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  In memory of my mother,

  Faylene Jones Malone,

  a Southern schoolteacher who taught that justice

  is everyone's right and everyone's responsibility.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One A Common Recreation

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

&nb
sp; Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two A Kind of Puritan

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Three The Wind and the Rain

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Preview

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  For their kind willingness to answer my questions about criminal jurisprudence, my gratitude to Carl Fox, District Attorney of Orange County, North Carolina, to lawyers Dan Reed and Maria Mangano, and to Professor Daniel Pollitt at the Law School of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. For their help in gathering information, special thanks to Virginia Hill and to Sheila Waller, who also patiently drove me from police station to courthouse throughout the Piedmont. Patricia Conners, trial counsel in Boston, Massachusetts, was good enough to cast a trained eye over Time's Witness; I appreciate her generous willingness to read the manuscript. Material provided by Klanwatch at the Southern Poverty Law Center was invaluable, as was the knowledgeable work done on death row prisoners by Kathryn Watterson, author of Women in Prison and Not by the Sword.

  time's witness

  Prologue

  Of charity, what kin are you to me?

  —Twelfth Night

  I don’t know about Will Rogers, but I grew up deciding the world was nothing but a sad, dangerous junk pile heaped with shabby geegaws, the bullies who peddled them, and the broken-up human beings who worked the line. Some good people came along and they softened my opinion. So I’m open to any evidence they can show me that God's not asleep at the wheel, barreling blind down the highway with all us dumb scared creatures screaming in the back seat.

  My name's Cuddy Mangum. I don’t much like it. Short for Cudberth, by which I suspect my mother meant Cuthbert, though I never called it to her attention. Everybody's always known me as Cuddy. Cudberth would have been worse. Or Cud.

  A few years back, I was made police chief here in Hillston, North Carolina. If you ever read a story by Justin Savile, you know that, but chances are you’ve got too cute a notion of who I am. Justin's loved me for years without a clue to my meaning. He sees things personally. Me, I look at the package, and the program. According to Justin, I’m somewhere between young Abe Lincoln in cracker country and the mop-up man on Hee Haw. A kind of Carolina Will Rogers without the rope tricks. And Justin's always adding to his portrait. He never read a book without looking for everybody he knows in it, and it didn’t take him long to find me chasing after a dream like Gatsby, wearing some buckskin moral outfit Natty Bumpo left behind. I’m not saying his views aren’t flattering. But if my arms had had the stretch of Justin's imagination, I could have bounced through the state university free, playing basketball, instead of slapping concrete on the new sports arena for four years to pay my way.

  Justin and I are natives of the same tobacco and textiles city in the North Carolina Piedmont. But his folks shipped him out of Hillston early, off to some woodsy New England prep school, then to Harvard, where his imagination got away from him for a while, and they had to lock him up in a sanatorium near Asheville. I saw it once; it looked like Monte Carlo. Afterwards, they smuggled him into law school in Virginia, but he ran home to Hillston and threw them into a hissie by joining the police. I’ve heard his reasons. They’re all personal.

  I didn’t have near enough the imagination for the first place I was shipped after high school, and after too long a while slithering through rice paddies in the Mekong Delta, I crawled back to Hillston as fast as my psychic state allowed. I wanted a college degree, and I wanted to get to know my wife, Cheryl. It turned out she’d made other plans with a fellow I used to like. She was my last living family, if you want to call her that. My folks are dead. A long time ago, my sister Vivian's boyfriend, going drunk into a curve at eighty miles an hour, smashed them both through a steel rail on Route 28. He survived, and died in a motorcycle accident three months after he got out of traction. His parents still owed Haver Hospital over twelve thousand dollars. For his personal motto in the Hillston High yearbook, this boy had them write, “I want to live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory.” That year, six different East Hillston guys had this same motto. Vivian's boyfriend was the second to get his wish.

  My daddy walked into Hillston barefooted. The first big building he saw was Cadmean Textile Mills, so he took a job there sweeping floors. His folks worked a farm fifteen miles outside the town. They didn’t own it, and they couldn’t feed him. After forty-two years on the Cadmean line, he didn’t own the house he died in. He did own a long series of large cheap cars loaded with chrome that he buffed with a shammy rag on Sunday afternoons. I don’t know if there was anything else he loved. Any dreams he kept, he kept private. Mama never learned to drive the cars. She had bad teeth and a purplish birthmark across her right cheek that she covered with the palm of her hand, and she was shy about going anyplace except the East Hillston A&P and the Baptist Church of the Kingdom of Christ. By third grade, I’d stopped asking her for help with my homework. Her tongue would stutter struggling to decipher the big printed letters, and a thin line of sweat would rise just above her lips, and her birthmark would blush purple.

  I didn’t have the best thing, which is class. Here in the South that means an old family tree, with all its early rough graspy roots buried deep down in the past where nobody has to look at them. And I didn’t have the second-best thing, which is looks—because the hard fact is, resembling young Abe Lincoln is no asset at a high-school sock hop. But I had the third thing, which is brains. So I was lucky enough to learn how to see where the light was, and where to look around for the switch. I don’t mean moving out of East Hillston, but I mean that too. I’ve got a job that makes some use of my brain and is some use to other people. I’ve got eight walls of books. I’ve got a new white Oldsmobile my daddy would have just admired. I own a condominium in River Rise, west of town, so big I haven’t had time to furnish half of it. It's big enough for love to have some space, because let me tell you, love likes a lot of room; it's hate that does fine when it's cramped. I’ve got so many former neighbors to prove that fact, it comes close to breaking my heart.

  Justin Bartholomew Savile V is a Liberal Democrat, a group just about abandoned by everybody except the upper classes. Justin's father (J.B.S. IV) was the kind of Virginian who’d name his son J.B.S. V; his hobby was running Haver University Medical School. Justin's mother is a Dollard. Well now, Dollards. For a couple of centuries they’ve sat slicing up the pie of the Carolina Piedmont and passing the pieces around to each other with polite little nods. “Why I don’t mind if I do, thank you so much.” Justin's great-great-grandfather Eustache Dollard was one of the state's best-remembered governors (mostly because his daddy had led a charge into the Wilderness against the Yankees without bothering to see if anybody was behind him), but also because Eustache had chiseled his name into a hundred large-sized public buildings, including the state penitentiary. From what I’ve read about the governor, Dollard State Prison's a fitting memorial.

  Like I say, Justin loves me. Once he even came real close to getting himself killed, leaping between me and a bullet. He didn’t think, his genes just jumped forward like they thought they were back in the Wilderness. So I keep that in mind, his body stretched over me, soaking my hair with blood, when I think about another time, the day I came to see him in the hospital. It was the look in his eyes whe
n I told him the Hillston city council had just made me chief of police, and consequently his superior. That look was there for just a blink before pleasure took it over. Oh, it wasn’t envy or jealousy or distaste. It was a look of pure unvarnished surprise. See, it hadn’t—it couldn’t—occur to Justin that some East Hillston wise-cracking white trash, with a mama so ignorant she’d named him Cudberth by mistake, could walk so far off the line as to embody the Law. Lord knows what innocent notions Justin has of Abe Lincoln's political savvy. Now, personally, he was happy for me, and proud of me. He loved it when I taped my poster of Elvis up behind my desk. If I’d called him on that blink of surprise, he wouldn’t have had a clue to my meaning. And the God's truth is, Justin Savile's the kindest man I ever met.

  My friend Justin's blink is sad proof of the power of the package and the program, the same ones that are walking a black man named George Hall into the gas chamber at Dollard State Prison on Saturday unless the governor changes his mind. So me, I’m for a new program, not to mention a new governor. Like George Hall, I can’t rely on kindness.

  part one

  A Common Recreation

  chapter 1

  George Hall was over in Vietnam trying hard not to get killed when the death penalty went out of fashion back home. That was 1967. At the time some kind folks thought we had us a moral revolution going that couldn’t slip back; it was racing along the road to glory, chucking war and racism and sexism out the windows like roadside trash. These sweet Americans could no more imagine a backward slide than Romans could imagine their Forum was going to end up a cow pasture in something called the Dark Ages, much less a big litter box for stray cats tiptoeing through the condoms and cigarette butts.