The woman on the stand studied his approach as if she was afraid he was going to bite her. “Mrs. Boren, nice to meet you. Sorry to keep you waiting so long. Just a few questions. You have children?”
“Four.”
“Four.” He looked worried. “How will they manage if you’re shut up here with this trial?”
Her shoulders relaxed just a little. “My oldest girl's sixteen, she's very responsible.”
“You must be proud of her. Your husband play a lot of golf, Mrs. Boren?”
A puzzled jerk at this sudden shift. “When he gets a chance. He works hard.”
“Ah, I know, I know. The cost of raising a big family these days.” Isaac sighed. “Do you play with him?”
Her mouth twitched. “No.”
“You work pretty hard yourself, I imagine.” His nods were full of sympathy. “But when Mr. Boren does get a moment for golf, where does he play? A public course or a private club?”
“We belong to Greenfield Club.”
“Well now, Mrs. Boren, any black members of that club?”
“I don’t know, I’m not sure.”
Isaac was benevolent as a lamb. “Well, would you be surprised to hear that there aren’t any black members, never have been any, and according to the bylaws of the Greenfield Club, there never will be any black members?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but stopped in midstride and asked, “You own a house in Hillston?”
She tensed. “In Fox Hills.”
“Any black families in Fox Hills?”
“I don’t know everybody in Fox Hills.”
“Do you know if there was ever a meeting of the Fox Hills Association to try to stop a black family from moving into your subdivision?”
“Yes.”
“And did you say at that meeting that you were opposed to that family's coming into your neighborhood?”
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t say anything. My husband—” “Your husband organized that meeting, did he not?”
Mrs. Boren frowned angrily at Isaac. “Yes.”
“Your Honor!” Bazemore lifted his chair out from under him as if he planned to throw it. “Mr. Boren's views are irrelevant.”
Hilliardson said he fully agreed, and Isaac apologized. Then he asked the woman whether they paid taxes on their house.
“We pay taxes. A lot.”
“What do you think of the public schools that you pay all those taxes to support? Think they do a pretty good job?” (One of the seated jurors was a junior high principal.) “A rotten job?”
“They’re okay, I guess.”
Isaac: “Do your children attend the public schools?”
“My oldest boy's in college.”
“May he thrive there, God willing. How about the other three?”
“C.F.A.”
“Pardon?”
“They go to C.F.A.”
Isaac appeared suddenly to remember what that was. “Ah. Right, that's Christian Family Academy, that's a private school, run by the Christian Family organization, yes, yes. Mr. Brodie Cheek is chairman of your board there, I believe. Ah.” He scratched thoughtfully at his gorgeous white hair. “Tuition there's, let's see, I believe it's forty-eight hundred dollars a year, isn’t it, around that? Times three, that's, gosh, that's fourteen thousand, four hundred dollars a year! Every year! Plus a boy in college! Goodness, Mrs. Boren, no wonder you and your husband have to work so hard! That's quite a financial burden.”
Her chin pulled into her neck and locked. “It's important to my husband that our kids get a good education.”
“You think our Hillston public schools are that bad, huh? Any black students at C.F.A?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Not that Brodie Cheek knows of either, I’m sure. Mrs. Boren, George Hall here is a black man, accused of killing a white man. Deep down, now, do you feel that fact will have a different effect on how you judge this case, than if, say, he were a white man accused of killing a black?”
She stared at him, then at her hands, then back at him. “No, I don’t, I don’t think so, at least I’d try for it not to.”
He looked back at her just as seriously. “There’re statistics proving that in this country if a black's charged with killing a white, he's far more likely to get the death penalty than if he’d been charged with killing another black. In some states, he's eighty-four times as likely. That means there's a whole lot of people in a whole lot of courtrooms not quite as fair-minded as they think they are.”
Bazemore waved his pencil in air. “Your Honor, really! I object to this. Let Mr. Rosethorn save his speeches for his summation.”
Hilliardson turned his icy glare on Isaac. “Counselor, I assume you plan to challenge this juror?”
Isaac surprised the judge, the D.A., me—and probably everybody else—by shaking his head. “No, sir. No, I don’t. The defense happily accepts Loreen Boren. Thank you, ma’am.” He gave her another of his serious nods. She looked very puzzled.
High behind his cherrywood bench, Judge Shirley Hilliardson glanced at his watch, then at Enos Cadmean's eagle clock on the wall. “As the miracle has occurred, ladies and gentlemen, and we appear to have a jury, and as it is late in the day, we shall postpone selection of the two alternates until tomorrow morning at ten.” And after five minutes of instructions and acidic warnings to the chosen twelve, he adjourned court with a sharp rap of his gavel.
George turned around and spoke to his mother while the deputies were putting the handcuffs back on him. As they moved him toward the side door, two young black men stood up to call out, “George, hang in there! Take it easy, George!” With a flap of his black sleeves, Hilliardson squinted down at them balefully, then stalked out of the handsome room.
For some reason, Nora Howard frosted me when I perched on the edge of the defense table waiting for Isaac to finish flirting with the equally frosty Miss Bee Turner, who kept squeezing her fist around the little sprig of silk violets pinned to her blue serge jacket; if they’d been real, they’d have been pulp. I said to Nora, “Isaac surprised me with Mrs. Boren; she sounded unsympathetic to me.”
Nora said, “Isaac followed my advice in the matter. Excuse me.” And she scooped up her briefcase and left.
Isaac was cooing over the clerk. “Now, Miss Bee, I know we’re driving you stark raving mad, raking through your jury candidates this way, but as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wisely reminded us, ‘The history of liberty has largely been the history of observance of procedural safeguards.’”
The plump Miss Turner stabbed a pencil into her tightly wound white curls so sharply it was lucky she missed her skull. Her whole head shook when she spoke. “Nobody has ever driven me ‘stark raving’ anything, and I don’t plan on anybody's ever doing it either, thank you very much, Isaac Rosethorn.” And off she strode—if you can imagine a partridge striding.
“Marvelous woman.” Isaac grinned at me.
“Umm. She appears to hate your guts. What's the matter with Nora?”
“Nora?” He looked around. “Nothing, why?” “She appears to hate my guts.”
He stuffed papers sloppily into folders, a few falling to the floor. “Oh, I don’t think so. You have to see a person to hate him, and who's seen you lately?…Well, we’ve got our jury, what do you think?” He waggled his hand. “Mezzo mezzo?”
Setting aside his oblique remark about my absence—from his life? Nora's life?—I waggled my hand back and asked, “Mrs. Boren?”
“I know. But Nora's got a hunch Mrs. Boren's a morally uneasy woman, maybe even repulsed by her husband's racism, if only because it probably goes along with other unpleasant ‘isms’ of his. So we’re hoping Mr. Boren's nastiness may work in our favor.” He shrugged, gazing mournfully at the empty jury box. “Well, well. Who can say. We did our best. Now, we’ll see.…God, that school principal, Gerd Lindquist? I’d love to see him elected foreman.”
I tossed a plastic bag on the table. In it was the wallet that had arrived throu
gh the mail this morning in a brown envelope addressed to MANGUM, HILLSTON POLICE DEPT—with no explanation, no return address, and no fingerprints. “I’ve got something you might want to look at, Isaac.”
“What's that?”
“Bobby Pym's wallet.”
“Ah!”
“Somebody mailed it to me anonymously. Funny, huh? Gilchrist steals it from Pym; years later, gives it to Coop Hall. Somebody steals it from Coop; months later, gives it to me. What I’d love to know is who and why.”
“You’re sure it's Pym's?”
“Yep. Driver's license, Master Card. Interesting piece of paper in there, a list with columns of money penciled in and initials beside them.”
Rosethorn's fat paw snatched at the package. “In here?”
“Don’t touch it! The contents are upstairs anyhow. And I’m turning the whole thing over to Bazemore. It's State's evidence.” “Bazemore! What if he withholds it from me!” The thought made him yank his hair straight up from his scalp.
“He won’t. It's not his style. But here…” I took an envelope from my jacket. “Here's a Xerox of the list for now. Never say the kindly, if thoroughly self-serving bread you cast upon the waters of a lonesome little boy has not returned to you many-fold.” He grabbed the thing out of my hand and read as I talked. “Appears to be sort of a casual statement about income and outgo—both of them pretty hefty for what looks like only one run of merchandise. I thought you’d be happy to know most of the initials are just the ones you’d expect to see. But I’m not so sure how happy you’re going to be about the initials of somebody who maybe got paid for doing something. ‘B’ (for Bobby) and ‘W’ (for Winston) get thirty-two hundred and fifty dollars each, and looks like Willie and Purley got twenty-seven hundred dollars each. But look down here, at the bottom. ‘Five hundred dollars. G.H.’ Counselor, I can’t help but think that G.H. refers to your current client, George Hall.”
The old man's face squinched like a bulldog's, but his moral disdain was not directed at George Hall. “Five hundred dollars. The lousy cheapskates!” he growled.
“No beer. Have a Guinness.” Isaac Rosethorn's voice boomed in at me from his kitchen alcove. “Anyhow, this Robert Elliot had been a professional executioner for decades. Three hundred and seventy souls he sent out of this world by his own hand. Even became a kind of celebrity, because he got the famous ones—Ruth Snyder. The Lindbergh baby's kidnapper. Sacco and Vanzetti. Anyhow, in the end, he fell apart, riddled with remorse, and spent his last days going around the country preaching against capital punishment.”
I yelled back, “Remorse about what? That he’d killed innocent people. Or that he’d killed people period?”
“Both.” Rosethorn waddled in with two brown bottles of Guinness Ale. “I was reading through the transcripts of the Sacco–Vanzetti trial last night. Tell me who said this: ‘Prejudice is not a specific violation of the Constitution and does not warrant taking jurisdiction away from the state.’”
“I have no idea.”
“Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, that's who. The great man Holmes! Denying that the judge's clear bias in the Sacco–Vanzetti trial was grounds for a reversal. It's enough to make you vomit, isn’t it?”
“Not really. Not as much as this egg roll. How long has it been lying here in this ashtray? Jesus!” I was cleaning debris from the floor of his Piedmont Hotel suite, a place that certainly had nothing to offer architecturally except that it looked out over Hillston's skyline—or would have if Isaac had ever washed the smoke stains off the windows. I could see a few smudged stars, the hulking back of Haver Tobacco Company, and down below, the neon locomotive on the Silver Comet Bar.
The fat old lawyer flopped down on his bed in a rising mist of dust motes, and sipped at his stout. “Because that's the problem, isn’t it? Hell, I know perfectly well that a homely person doesn’t have half the chance in court that a good-looking one has.”
I said, “Why do you keep expecting life to be fair?”
“I don’t. But I do have a perverse hope that Law could be fair.” His arm reached across the silver-framed photograph of Edith Keene, a dark-complexioned girl in her twenties, whose eyes looked smart and whose mouth looked scared. He pulled the chain on his bedside lamp. “I’m with old Earl Warren when he threw out ‘separate but equal,’ the question always has to be, is it—in the actual reality of its enforcement—fair?”
Isaac had apparently settled in for a “talk” of the sort we had been having together for a lot of years, the sort he much preferred to other social entertainment—he had no television and I’d never heard him mention going to a concert, a ball game, or a movie. After court tonight, I’d given him a ride home, then come up “just for a second,” because he’d wanted to talk. He’d already said, “Let's order up some Chinese,” and I’d already said, “Maybe another time.”
But listening to him now, I realized it had been a long while since I’d sat in his crammed, messy rooms and “talked.” I’d grown up and gotten too busy for long conversations with Isaac Rosethorn. And thinking about this, I realized that back when I was a boy (when this congestion of law briefs, bird's nests, stamps, pottery shards, chess sets, and mounted insects had all glittered in my eyes like Aladdin's cave), that back then, this man had never once said he didn’t have time for me. He was never too busy to say, “Let's order in some Chinese food”—when both the notion of “ordering in” and the strange food itself were irresistibly exotic to me—“and you and I’ll sit and have us a discussion, Slim.”
I looked over at him lying on the bed now, fat, rumpled, holes in his socks, his old plaid bathrobe bunched around his worn baggy trousers. His face was old. Not just the jowls, the pouches under the sad spaniel eyes, but really old. When had it gotten that way? Had he always had those discolored spots on his cheeks and hands? Had his hair been that white when I met him? I couldn’t even remember.
On the day I graduated from Hillston High School, three large crates arrived UPS at our duplex in East Hillston. They were from Isaac, and they were filled with books. Four hundred and thirty-eight books, on all kinds of subjects that he’d picked out himself and that I was sure he’d already read himself. The card that came with them was scrawled in his large, tilted upward script.
Cuddy. Congratulations. Being valedictorian, you already know, I bet, that the word educate means “to lead out.” Here in these cartons are a few scouts for the trip. Let it be a long, happy one. Keep going, keep going, beyond the hills. There are no edges where the world ends. Keep going, and you’ll come back home a man who can then lead others out a few steps further from the night.
Your friend, Isaac Rosethorn.
I wonder if he believes I’ve become that man. I know he's proud of the work I’ve gotten so busy at that I never noticed when his hair turned white. I know that had he not been in my life, I might never have traveled into any hills at all, much less beyond them.
Sitting back down in the pockmarked armchair, I said, “Hey, Isaac. I am hungry. How about we call Buddha's Garden? Shrimp with lobster sauce? And some cashew chicken, a quart of won ton, and spareribs?”
“I thought you had to go.”
“What's the point of being chief if you can’t decide you don’t have to show up?”
“And egg rolls,” he smiled. “Call it in. Nine six five, two two one one.”
I called it in. Then I said, “Well, Isaac, look at it the other way. We did get rid of ‘separate but equal.’ We do keep hedging the law in toward fairness, don’t we?”
Isaac grinned happily. “Ah! Now he lectures me with wisdom I had to prize into his calcified skull with the wedge of bribery. An Almond Joy here. An illicit sip of beer there.” He began patting aimlessly around the pillows and on the bedside table. I tossed him the pack of Chesterfields I spotted under the long, littered desk. As he searched for an unbroken cigarette, he said, “Yes. We hedge law in. But the hedges don’t always last. Like the one stopping the death penalty. Because it's people
that plant hedges, and people that rip them out.” He squirmed around, patting some more, and I found a matchbook and threw that at him too. Smoke blew to the ceiling, ashes floated onto his chest. “I know Bazemore's going to wave that ‘malice aforethought, appreciable time’ flag in the jury's face. If George had to do it, I just wish to hell he’d shot Pym the second he grabbed the gun out of his hand.” Isaac wiggled himself slowly off the bed, and shuffled toward his desk. “Now where's that damn pad!” Watching him riffle through papers on his heaped desk, I noticed a little tremor in his hands I hadn’t seen before. “Shirley Hilliardson on the bench. Interesting. Ah! No, that's not it. All right, here we are.” Holding the legal pad, he started patting his pockets.
I picked up his bifocals beside the telephone, handed them to him, and he ran his plump finger down the page. “Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. Okay. This is Hilliardson: ‘From the use of a deadly weapon, the law presumes malice but not premeditation. Premeditation and deliberation are questions of fact, not law.’ Okay. Blah-blah-blah-blah. ‘It is the duty not of the judge, but of the jury alone to determine whether the homicide was of the first or second degree.’” The old lawyer pushed his glasses down his nose, and frowned at me. “Say, God help me, I don’t get the acquittal, and we go to the sentencing phase. Well, I’m going to hand Shirley Hilliardson his own instructions, and he's going to tell my jury, they don’t have to send George to the gas chamber.”
“They don’t have to. But they can if they want to. Can you stop them from wanting to?”
Isaac looked at the blackboard on which he's already scrawled circles around the names of the twelve chosen jurors. “I just have to make one of them not want to, not want to so absolutely that no amount of bullying or pleading by the others can change his mind…or her mind. I think I can.”
I sat forward in the chair. “Isaac, tell me. Was George involved in the smuggling?”
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