Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  The rain slapped at my sliders, hard as gravel. I thought about Cooper Hall's showing up at Cadmean's house and asking for a donation to With Liberty and Justice. I thought about his playing upon that old ruthless capitalist's squire-of-the-manor paternalism toward his workers and their families. “I’m Tim Hall's son. He worked for you.” (After all, because my father too had worked Cadmean's line, hadn’t Mr. C. actually come in person to my mother's funeral; a dazzling tribute, for which my father momentarily forgave him a quarter-century of low pay, long hours, and ruined lungs?) I thought of Cooper in the vaulted dark-paneled rooms of that brick mausoleum, listening to Cadmean's odes to textiles and North Carolina, his two passions—beyond himself and his daughter. Cooper had undoubtedly gotten into a fight with him about politics, and there was nothing Cadmean liked better than an antler-butting fight. You just never knew what side the old s.o.b. was going to take, because the notion of principle never entered his head, unless “I take care of my own” can be called a principle. With Cadmean, it was all personal. He’d liked Alice MacLeod and he’d liked the fact that she was Justin's wife, so he’d put money into her state legislature campaign. He hadn’t liked the pastor of his own church, so he’d left his house to Trinity Episcopal. And me? He’d liked me, so he’d bullied the city council into making me chief of police because he’d wanted somebody in Hillston to marry his daughter and keep her from leaving town, and at the time I’d wanted the same thing.

  Now apparently he hadn’t liked what he’d heard about the Haver House of Lords. So his death had come just in time for Haver University—because he might have revoked that new Textiles Institute. And just in time for Julian Lewis and Andy Brookside both—because he didn’t like either of them, and for half a century, it had been hard to carry the Piedmont unless Briggs Monmouth Cadmean was carrying you, and Mr. C. only carried folks he liked.

  I picked up the phone to see if Isaac was across the hall at Nora Howard's, so I could tell them about Cooper's inheritance. Nobody answered. I heated a can of chili, did my laundry, tried to get Martha to eat something, did my dishes, called again. Nobody answered. I called Bubba Percy back and told him I figured that Bunny Randolph (Atwater's middle-aged son) was the source behind his pieces on the House of Lords—in addition, of course, to what he’d ripped off from Cooper. I reminded him I was the one who’d given him Bunny's name in the first place, when Bubba was supposed to find out for me Bunny's connection to Hall, and that he’d stalled me about it for months. I said I now figured it had been old Cadmean who’d introduced Cooper to Bunny Randolph.

  “Assume you’re right,” said Bubba coyly.

  And that Bunny had blabbed the old college dirt to Cooper (either because he hadn’t liked Julian Lewis when they’d been in the House of Lords at Haver together; or because he hated his father, Atwater, a big Lewis supporter, for keeping him on the dole in Southern Pines).

  Bubba said, “Assume you’re right.”

  “So Bunny Randolph is feeding you information.”

  Bubba said, “I don’t reveal my sources. Now stop bugging me, Mangum. I’ve got a girl here halfway to the sack.”

  I said, “I’m tempted to send over a squad car to check her age. Or is it Edwina?”

  “Nah, it's your mother. She's a wild woman. Catch you later, pig.” He made a rooting noise into the phone and hung up. I wondered which was more likely—that he knew my mother was long dead, or didn’t.

  Under a coverlet of loose newspapers, I fell asleep on my denim couch listening to Dinah Washington, and when I woke up, the clouds were still black with rain. When I went out in the hall and knocked at Nora's door, a teenaged girl identified herself as the babysitter, to which phrase, the ten-year-old Laura strenuously objected. The sitter added that Nora was out. Laura, standing behind her, said, “Out on a date.”

  “It's not a date,” insisted her little brother Brian, darting forward and menacing her with a rubber tomahawk.

  “You’re a geek,” Laura informed him, and he ran away whooping down the hall, “Geek, geek, geek.” The babysitter chased after him.

  I said, “Laura, tell your mom I dropped by, okay?”

  “She’ll be out really, really late,” predicted Nora's daughter. “Can we go get Martha Mitchell and play with her?”

  “Oh, we ought to let her sleep, how ’bout? She's not feeling too well.”

  The girl looked at me with a sharp suspicion. “Is Martha Mitchell going to die?”

  “Well, in time she will. It's natural. She's a pretty old dog.” Laura frowned. “My dad wasn’t old, but he died.”

  “I know.…You must miss him a lot.”

  “I do. But sometimes I can’t remember.”

  I leaned down to hug her, and her small thin arms brushed against my neck. She squeezed them around me hard for a second, then she quickly let go and ran to help the sitter herd her brother home.

  Downtown across the street from the municipal building was the sheriff's office and the county jail. Sheriff Louge and I were not friends, but he had finally stopped reminding me that he’d been elected to office six times and stopped treating the city police like a bench of second-string substitutes there to back up the county team. The sheriff still thought of Hillston as a little warehouse town in the middle of his big farming county. He hadn’t figured out yet that everybody in the county had moved into the city, and so had a fast stream of white-collar Yankees. But over the years Louge and I had learned to save our guns for the big battles; day-to-day, we were superficially cordial. And so his deputy went so far as to stand up and suck in his gut when I dropped by the jail Sunday night. There was no objection to my having a talk with the prisoner George Hall at this late hour. With a protective squeeze of the heavy .357 that dragged his belt down low on his hips, the deputy even invited me to walk back with him to get Hall. I followed him through the steel door, down the dark corridor, and into the smell of urine and stale sweat. There were fourteen men in the eight cells, most of them were young and black, some of them were snoring, one had a harmonica, one sat hunched in a corner talking to himself. George Hall stood in a T-shirt and cotton pants, leaning his arms out through the bars, looking out at the window down at the end of the corridor.

  The deputy shook the keys in his face and said, “George, Captain Mangum from HPD's here to see you. You wanna step away and I’ll unlock you.”

  George turned his eyes to me. I’d only been this close to him twice before—once at his brother's funeral, once that night on the sidewalk outside Smoke's Bar. In fact, other than those brief minutes, and in the courtroom, I had never been around George Hall. Now I noticed little traces of Cooper in his features. I said, “You mind a few minutes’ talk, George?”

  Cooper would have probably said, “About what?” or “Do I have a choice?” or “What's a few minutes to me?” All George said was, “No, I don’t mind.” And he pushed back from the cell door with arms so thickly muscled, they pressed the sides of the bars as they slid away. He took a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket, put them on, then waited quietly for the deputy to slide open the steel door.

  As soon as we sat down in the cramped, dingy “conference room,” George lit an unfiltered Camel cigarette; I suppose if the government keeps telling you they’re going to gas you to death in two months, or two weeks, or two days, on this date, or that date, then the government's warnings about tobacco don’t have much effect. Nor do you lose track of time—as he smoked, he sat watching the black arrow of the minute hand click up the face of the oak regulator clock that was on the wall beside the NO SMOKING, NO BEVERAGES sign. Opening the bag I’d brought, I set out two coffees and four glazed doughnuts.

  George's hair was gray. His brother had been murdered; he’d been in combat for two years, and on death row for seven; I’d say that was enough to do it. He sat there smoking while I offered my sympathy about Cooper, and asked if Louge was treating him all right. I said Isaac had told me how Russell had threatened his family's lives after the Pym shooting.
He kept his eyes on mine, he replied politely and succinctly, he drank the coffee, ate a doughnut, and showed no interest in whether I spoke or not. Finally I said, “And Isaac says he's talked to you about how, thanks to all the work Cooper did, we were able to locate two witnesses who’ll testify that Russell was at the scene that night at Smoke's?”

  “He told me about all that, yes.”

  Another silence, then I said, “George, you’ve declined to talk to the police. I’m not saying that's not your privilege, but if you were making truck drops for those scum, and you told us where, it might help us track Russell to whoever's hiding him.” No answer.

  “It would help us if you gave me the names of any Dollard inmates who passed on Russell's threats to you.” No answer. I shoved back my chair. “Do you believe Winston Russell killed your brother?”

  Carefully stubbing out his second cigarette in the tin-foil ashtray, he said in a voice lower and softer than Cooper's, “Yes, I do. Believed it a long time before it happened.” Leaning over, he emptied the ashtray into the wastebasket.

  “When Russell told you if you didn’t keep his name out of your first trial, he’d—well, what did he say? Did he explicitly say he’d kill someone in your family?”

  George looked past me, out the small high window. “He said I’d wish he’d shot them.” He was watching the rain. “Winston's a killer. Just that way….”

  “Sometimes I think Winston was born that way. With him at large, does it worry you for your mother? Because—”

  “No. He's through with me and mine. He can’t hide nothing now but himself. You already told it all to the papers. Seems like maybe you ought to worry about you.”

  “Why do you think he shot Cooper when he did?”

  He walked over to a yellowed philodendron plant in a plastic pot on top of a metal shelf. “Because he figured I’d talked, and that's how I got my reprieve.”

  “I don’t think so. I think it had to do with what Cooper was finding out, and the importance of the people he was finding it out about. I think Winston was told to get rid of Cooper.”

  Gently pulling off dead leaves one by one, he said, “You’re testifying for the prosecutor tomorrow.”

  “Not for the prosecutor. As a policeman at the scene. Is that it? You won’t help me because I might pass on information to the D.A. that would affect your defense?”

  “I got nothing that’ll help you.”

  “I think you have a lot.”

  He slowly turned the pot, separating out a dried vine. “Like what?”

  I said, “I want to know how much Russell, Pym, and the rest were smuggling not just stuff like cigarettes and videotapes, but guns. How a group like the Carolina Patriots was involved. If Otis Newsome, or anybody else in the Constitution Club, was involved, and how.”

  “I don’t know a Constitution Club.…Look, I gave my promise to Isaac I wouldn’t talk to people ’bout anything ’less he was here.”

  One thing was certain; if George Hall said he wouldn’t talk, then he wouldn’t. He had already been within twenty-four hours of the gas chamber, already been given the new shirt and trousers to wear to his execution, already been moved to the special last-night cell with its bare mattress on the stone floor—and he hadn’t talked.

  The deputy opened the door, looked disapprovingly at the coffee cups, and asked if we were almost done. I told him I’d let him know when we were. Hall never looked in his direction. After the deputy left, I said, “I’m just sorry, George, you didn’t feel like there was somebody you could trust to tell this whole thing to, way back then. Told me about Pym and Russell. There’re laws to—”

  His thick body hardened with anger so fast that I instinctively stood up. He said, “They was the law. So was you.”

  “No, they weren’t. Neither am I. The law isn’t people.” I held my hands up. “All right, people fuck with it so bad, I agree it's hard to hang on to the difference.”

  With long deliberate breaths, he relaxed his body. Then he dropped one handful of dead leaves into the wastebasket by the long scarred table. He nodded. “It's harder for some folks to hang on than others.”

  “That's true.”

  His other palm tilted, letting the leaves fall. His unhurried voice was quiet again. When he spoke. “Isaac said your daddy worked the line at Cadmean Mills, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So did mine. One time my daddy got taken on a joyride by some men that worked there. He said something they didn’t like.” George walked without haste around the room. “They took him on this ride, and when they brought him back, he couldn’t get his eyes to open, or get his mouth to swallow food for ’bout a week. My mama got on him bad, said, ‘Go to the law, Tim, go tell ’em.’ So he went to the law, and he got beat some more. Lost a week off his job. Next time something bad happened, he said to Mama, ‘You asking too much. Let it alone, and just go along.’ He went on along, and along, and along, ’til he died.”

  “My father did too. Just went along that way ’til he died.”

  George nodded. “I seen a lot of men die fast, didn’t even know it. And I seen men die yelling, crawling in mud. Two years back, I watched them strap a man in a wheelbarrow and take him down the row to the gas chamber, had to strap him, he was carrying on so, crying like a baby. But my daddy, he died the slowest, just going along.” He stopped at the window to watch the rain.

  I said, “Now I think my dad was trying hard to do the best he could. I’m sure yours did too.”

  George was looking out the window into memory. “Cooper was just a little boy, nine or ten, when Daddy died. The preacher says to him, ‘You grow up a good man like your papa.’ And Cooper says, ‘I don’t want to. I don’t want to grow up scared.’ He told the preacher that, right there at the grave, his face mad and crying both.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I never saw Cooper Hall scared of anything. Your brother had great courage. So do you.”

  “Naw.” Hall's eyes blinked; taking off his glasses, he rubbed them. He came back to the table and quietly sat down. “Cooper was a teenager, he called me just a worthless nigger headed for jail. Said, ‘You’re too dumb to tell the difference in your kind of fightin’ and my kind.’ Told me my bad-assin’ was just another way of going along.”

  I sat down across from him. “You didn’t go along with a guilty plea. To protect your folks, you were willing to take Russell's deal. Why didn’t you take the D.A.'s deal, at least protect yourself from the risk of a death penalty?”

  Looking at his hands spread open on the table, he thought awhile. Finally he replied, “Some things you can make yourself say, and some things you can’t. It's just that way.”

  When I was growing up in the small dark kitchen of that Mill Street duplex, my daddy said a lot of things for which my mama never “got on him bad” at all, though I knew she didn’t agree with them. He was a scared, unhappy man, but he wasn’t a cruel man— he was gentle to my mother, my sister, and, except when we fought, to me. And he didn’t rant or yell; he just said ugly things that the world he lived in believed were true. He just repeated things he’d been told—about jungle-bunnies, eggheads, long-hairs, bra-burners, draft-dodgers, Pope-worshippers, queers, Jews, Northern agitators, and atheists. He talked a lot about the conspiracies of Cadmean Textiles, landlords, stores, bills, and banks to work, freeze, starve, and cheat him to death. But mostly he talked about all the things that were wrong with black people.

  When I was old enough to understand what he was saying, I talked back. I told my daddy he was a stupid bigot. I told him his facts were wrong and his theories were wrong. He whipped me. When I was fourteen, he said he’d take his belt to me if he ever caught me hanging around that coonloving kike Rosethorn again. I hit him in the face. Mama cried and begged us to stop.

  The day I graduated from high school, Daddy and I had another fight because I wouldn’t return those crates of books Isaac had sent me. I told him that Isaac Rosethorn was more of a man and more of a father to me than he wo
uld ever be. When he raised his hand, I grabbed his wrist and threw him against the kitchen table. I left before the fear in his eyes made me hit him again. This time Mama followed me back into my room, stood crying by the door, and asked if she could say something. I glared at her. She struggled with her breath, and then she told me, “You got to forgive your daddy. You got to ask him for his forgiveness. Can’t you tell the way it tears him up how we can’t give you fancy books like Mr. Rosethorn, ’cause we don’t know enough and we ain’t got enough?”

  I was still shaking as I yanked my graduation robe off its hanger. I said, “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you have to be an ignorant racist redneck!” I grabbed my valedictorian speech off my bureau top, and shook it at her. “I’m poor!”

  “No, Cuddy. You ain’t cold and you ain’t hungry, and you’ve gone on through school, and nobody ever said to you, you got to stop going. You got so much more than he did. He's worked and worked so you and Vivian could do better than us.” She stood there a long time in tears, squeezing the cheap plastic belt buckle of her new dress. Finally she said, “Cuddy, please. Please, don’t take this day from Malcolm. He's so proud of you. Please, tell him you’re sorry.” I didn’t answer. Her birthmark flushed dark red; she hid it with her hand, and whispered, “If you can’t find it in you to do it for him, son, I’m asking you if you’ll please do it for me. He's out to the garage.” Then she quietly closed the door behind her. It was one of the few hard things she ever asked of me. I walked out to the garage where he sat in his car rubbing at some dirt on the dashboard, and I apologized.

  He and I never fought like that again. But from time to time I’d still get angry. Once I asked him if he’d ever been in the Klan. He denied it, and now I’m sure that when he’d spent evenings with the neighbor who worked the Cadmean line with him, he was doing just what he claimed: “watching the ball game,” or “going out for a beer,” and not plotting black genocide, not burning crosses, or taking Tim Hall on a midnight ride. But my father's unreasonable remarks, his unreasoning prejudices, went on alternately enraging and saddening me until I left home. After I joined the force, when I would go to visit him alone in that duplex, when he would wander from one small dark room to another as if he were looking in them for my dead mother and my dead sister, after that, he just made me sad.