His rage withered in the face of her passivity. He let her go.
“You’d just like that, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“It’s what’s coming to me.”
He reached into her waistband and retrieved the picture.
“What’s coming to you,” he said, “is what you’re in now.”
He went direct from the Cropsey house to the nearest bar. Putting up a five dollar bill—half the money he had in the world—he told the man to keep the whiskey coming until it was gone.
On his third shot he took out Nell’s picture, laid it on the bar, and looked at it. Was finding it good news or bad news? He was, of course, exonerated. But the years the Cropsey’s lies had cost him were gone—and he always knew he was innocent. Proper vindication belonged in the eyes of the public, not his own. Yet how was he to proceed?
“That your girl?” asked the barkeep—one of the few in town who didn’t know him.
“Yeah. Once.”
Jim eyed him for a second. Then he simply told the man everything—his courtship of Nell, his last night with her, his indictment and trial, his incarceration, his pardon, and what he learned that very day. The barkeep’s eyes became wider with every turn of the story, until Jim came to the end and he shook his head as if to say “don’t that beat all?”
“I’ve heard my share of sob stories in my time, fella, but yours takes the cake.” And he stood him an extra drink for this honor.
“Thank you kindly,” Jim said. “But what do you think I should do about it?”
“How about gettin’ some iron and airing out the father’s guts?”
“The thought has crossed my mind. But I was thinking of something that doesn’t involve murder.”
“Well, you had a lawyer, didn’t you? Why not ask him?”
And Jim thought, why not indeed? The next day, after a good sleep in a run-in shed by the tracks, Jim dusted himself off and went into town. His father had hired Ed Aydlett before, so Jim was not sure how to approach him now. He decided to try a direct tack, showing up at the lawyer’s office on Main St.
“Do you have an appointment?” asked the young man at the desk.
“No. But he knows me.”
The clerk’s nostrils flared at the horse-stall stench of him. “He knows a lot of people. Would you like to leave a message?”
“Can I just talk to him for minute? He’ll want to hear what I have to tell him.”
“I’m sorry, no.”
“I was a client of his.”
“He has a lot of former clients.”
“I don’t think you understand—”
“I understand completely.”
“Just tell him Jim Wilcox is here. I only need two minutes of his time.”
“I’ve already told you—he doesn’t see just anyone off the street.”
“I’m not just anyone, you fool!”
The other picked up the telephone. “I’m calling the police if you don’t leave.”
“Damn it, why can’t you just shut your yap and listen…?”
The clerk started dialing. Then the door behind him opened, and Ed Aydlett stuck his head out.
“What’s going on out here?”
“This man insists on seeing you without an appointment.”
It took a moment for Aydlett to recognize the older, thinner figure in his shabby clothes.
“Jim,” he said.
“I keep telling this nincompoop you’ll see me, and he keeps telling me different…”
The lawyer came out from behind the door. He had long before entered his portly years, with his glasses perched atop his long, bald forehead. The glasses themselves looked the same.
“Of course I’ll see you. But I’m on long-distance to Raleigh right now. Please make an appointment for tomorrow. okay?”
“I suppose.”
The clerk opened his book. “Would eleven o’clock fit your schedule?”
The next morning Jim sat in a high-backed chair of red leather. He had fortified himself earlier with a couple of beers—just therapeutic enough to take off the morning edge. Aydlett, meanwhile, was slouched behind his desk, the photograph of Nell perched on his belly. As the sun poured and street sounds filtered up through the window, he stared at this face from his past with what seemed like pleasant distraction.
“She was certainly a handsome girl.”
“Yes, she was.”
Aydlett flipped the picture and read the inscription. His nostalgia evaporated.
“You should know I don’t do this kind of work much anymore. Too many years of it.”
“I might say the same,” replied Jim.
“And you got this straight from Miss Ollie?”
“More or less.”
“And how is she? She’s not seen around much these days.”
“A damn sight better than her sister.”
Aydlett made an appraising glance at Jim, then laid the picture on his desk.
“Well, Jim, this sure is something. And remarkable that Ollie would tell you that story. In all honesty, I can’t say I’m surprised. What do you imagine doing now?”
“I want my name cleared. And I want a lot of money.”
The lawyer laced his fingers over his vest and focused on empty space.
“Well, taking the latter first—how much money do you think you could get out of the Cropseys? The father sells turnips door-to-door.”
“They have a house.”
“I am entirely certain the bank owns the house. And do you really want to throw a family into the street? From what you tell me, Mary Cropsey had nothing to do with it.”
“What about the Brooklyn side of the family?”
“They also had nothing to do with it. They have connections in the legal world there, going way back. As your lawyer, I would be obliged to tell you your chances of success there are thin. Beanpole thin.”
They sat as Jim glowered and Aydlett checked his watch.
“What about getting the conviction thrown out?”
“It was already thrown out. You were pardoned by the Governor.”
“Yes,” replied Jim, impatient. “But I should never have been sent up in the first place.”
“You know I agree with you. I’m just not sure it is realistic to expect anything more.”
“That sounds like a load of hooey.”
Aydlett picked up the photo. “I’m sorry Jim, but this picture proves nothing. Any lawyer would simply argue that it was in your possession the whole time. That you took it with you the night of. When it comes down to it, it’s still your word against the Cropseys’. We’ve already been down that road—twice.”
Jim might have insisted that Ollie would testify to the truth. The words refused to come, because he could not swear to know for certain what Ollie would do. He once thought he knew her, but she was an enigma to him now.
“So tell me, counsellor: where do I go to get my twenty years back?”
As the clock ticked and the traffic signal chimed on the intersection below, Aydlett looked at him. There was affliction in his eyes.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But you at least take some satisfaction in hearing the truth at last, direct from the source. Yes?”
“Yeah, I guess,” said Jim. He leaned back, broke into a crooked smile. “It might have been better if I’d kept my date with that gooseberry bush.”
The lawyer slid the photo back across the desk.
“So tell me, how are you keeping body and soul together these days?”
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that.”
“You fixed for a place to stay…?”
“I’m getting along.”
“…’cause there’s a former client of mine who might have some space for you to set up, long-term. He runs a garage on the south side. I told him you were good with your hands, so there might be work too. Can I introduce you?”
Jim took the picture and stuffed it in his shirt.
“That’s awful nice o
f you, Ed. Sure, a nice warm garage sounds good.”
Aydlett’s client was John Tuttle, proprietor of the repair shop on South Road Street. He was a pious, round-faced fellow whose heart was as spotless as his fingernails were permanently black with grease. For reasons he could not fathom, Tuttle concerned himself immediately with Jim’s welfare. He wasn’t interested in the details of his story; when Jim tried to account for his innocence, Tuttle waved him away.
Within a half hour of knowing him, Tuttle invited him to his house to meet his wife and three children. Over cow’s tongue and cabbage—but no wine or liquor of any kind—they joined hands for the benediction. After the meal, they sang hymns and shared Bible verses. When it came around to Jim’s turn, he shook his head.
“Sorry to say I don’t have a favorite.”
“That’s all right,” said Tuttle’s wife Evelyn. “Let us all join hands and pray for our guest.” And Jim had to sit through two solid minutes of silence in his honor. In that time his primary thought was when and where he would get his next drink.
Jim could not help but be touched by this hospitality. Yet he was also irritated by it. Tuttle was another in a line of benefactors, from Hank Peoples to Jerry Flora, whose largesse he had repaid by letting them down, time and again.
His quarters were in the back of the garage, set off by a plywood partition. There was a narrow bed, and a board stretched between two sawhorses, and a framed picture of a lion and a lamb lying together, cut out of a magazine. The room was windowless. Evelyn provided fresh linens and a blanket every Monday, but there was the persistent smell of rubber and oil from beyond the partition. The shop opened early, so he was often awakened by the sounds of car doors slamming and steel tools hitting the shop floor.
Jim made his drinking money by doing odd tasks for Tuttle. Out of respect, he tried to make this, his main preoccupation, unobtrusive. When he came back to the garage from the saloon, he straightened his posture, and made the slops on his back as neat as possible. But as Tuttle rolled out from under a car and looked at him, anointed with God’s grease, that look of sufferance on his face, Jim could see he knew what he had been up to. He knew, and Jim resented him for his knowledge. But most of all, Jim despised himself for his weakness.
When he could take this guilt no longer, he would wander over to Baxter Street to see his sister. When the kids were at school and Sam Sr. was working, Annie Mae would invite him to sit in the kitchen as she went about her housekeeping. If he stank of alcohol, or things worse, she put on a pot of boiling water with a stick of vanilla. When late afternoon rolled around, she became uncomfortable, as if worried he would still be there when the rest of the family came home. He took the hint.
The time came when his thoughts and regrets were so oppressive he drank up his last penny. He remembered that Annie Mae kept a store of drinkables in the sideboard. When she was outside with the washing, he sneaked to the dining room and examined this trove. There was a bottle of whiskey, and rye, and bourbon, and some fancy fruit liqueur whose name he couldn’t pronounce. The whiskey and rye were at about the same level, so he guzzled about a third of both, then added water. He arranged the bottles exactly the way he found them. But she was too long getting back, so Jim went back and sampled the fruit stuff. It was raspberry-flavored and sickly sweet and made him queasy.
Annie Mae returned, calling his name. Jim replaced the bottle, but in his haste he forgot to shut it. He left the cork on the sideboard.
The next time he came over his brother-in-law was there.
“Hello, Sam!” said Jim, content and properly inebriated at ten in the morning.
“Good morning Jim. Can I help you?”
“You surely could, if you would inform my sister I am here.”
“I will not.”
“I’m sorry…what?”
“I’m telling you not to come back here. We don’t host thieves.”
“Thieves!” cried Jim. Of all the unjust accusations, he was used to ‘murderer’, but not ‘thief.’
“You stole from this house. I found the cork. Do you deny it?”
Jim just stood there, dumbfounded. In fact, he wasn’t sure he left the bottle open or not. He was a damn fool if he did so.
“I said, do you deny it?” Sam repeated.
Behind him, from the dark inside the house, Jim could hear Annie Mae weeping.
“I don’t know,” said Jim.
“Well, I do. Don’t darken our door again. Don’t bring your corruption around our children. Do you understand?”
“Sam.”
“‘Cause if you do, I won’t answer for the consequences. Now get the hell off my porch.”
He shut the door. Jim stood for a moment, confused.
“But I didn’t kill her,” he muttered. “I can prove it.”
He took Nell’s picture out of his shirt. It was creased now, and stained with his sweat. He smoothed it and pressed it against the screen.
“Here she is. You can see her,” he said.
But no one came to the door. He looked at the photo again, admiring the blue of Nell’s eyes. Were her eyes really that blue, like raspberry liqueur? She was so lovely, staring straight out at him with dimpled mouth and those eyes that were two. He stuffed the picture back in his shirt—an act that almost cost him his balance. He stood up erect and lurched off the porch. All the unpleasantness had cost him his precious stupor, and it needed tending.
He woke up the next day and remembered every detail. Loathing surged through him like an electric charge; he felt so low that he covered his head with his pillow, and didn’t get out of bed until noon.
That was when he made his decision: from that day forward, he would not touch a drop of alcohol.
In the shop, Tuttle and his employee Gene Betts were hoisting an engine. Jim grabbed the chain without needing an invitation, and in his new resolution to clean up his life, found some of his old strength.
“Thank you,” said Tuttle.
“I’m a new man as of today, Johnny. I’m off the sauce!”
“Well, that’s great, Jim.”
“Yeah, have one on me to celebrate…” said Betts.
To which Jim offered him the finger.
If Jim expected sobriety to make him feel better, he was soon disappointed. That very morning, he was afflicted with a severe headache that was only sharpened by his new clarity of mind. Colors, sounds, voices—all of them seemed a bit too loud. His damnable coughing was like hammer-blows to his temple.
Water didn’t help, nor did black coffee. He was tempted to have a shot just to take the edge off, so he would have the strength to continue the struggle. But he knew this would be a mistake.
He took a day job spreading gravel along a railroad embankment. After an hour working in the sun, his head swam, and the shovel seemed as heavy as a keel. He sat. He was down for only a few moments when the foreman yelled at him,
“You! Get to work or take a walk!”
Jim, his skull splitting, flung the shovel to the ground.
“Guess I’ll walk then!”
He marched away, dignity intact. But he only got fifty yards until he remembered his pockets were light.
“Hey there!” he called the foreman. “Can I get paid for the hour?”
On this way to nowhere, he drifted past a graveyard. He wandered inside and walked among the headstones. Flowers wilted on the recent graves, while others were so neglected that they were unreadable with coal soot. Trash from family picnics was scattered on the grass. He had always been more partial to adventure stories than romances, but he was not immune to the sentimentality of his times; he thought it might befit his state of mind to have a nap on one of the plots.
He stretched out on one with healthy grass and a clean headstone to a woman — “Eugenia Cobb, who went to the Lord in her twenty-fifth year, 1879.” His rolled-up jacket made a decent pillow, and the sun was warm enough to keep him comfortable for a good snooze. He was out for some time—he wasn’t sure how long—when h
e felt someone poking at him.
When he opened his eyes there was an old man standing there. He was leaning against a rake, staring down at Jim from under a hat so wide his broad, white mustache was the only feature visible beyond its brim.
“We like to keep visitors off the graves,” the caretaker said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Jim, sitting up.
“It’s all right. I don’t think Miss Eugenia minds. Closest she’s been to a man in years.”
Then he pulled a flask out of his vest, tilted himself a swallow, and held it out. Jim looked at it for a moment, knowing full well that he should decline. But the man’s kindness seemed to demand an agreeable response. Indeed, his head pounded so much, and he was only a mortal, and wasn’t there always time to quit later?
Jim obliged.
And in that one irresolute moment, he was back on the sauce.
“How much will you give me for cleaning up all this trash?”
The caretaker looked around. “I don’t know. Two bits?”
“Deal,” said Jim, and creaked to his feet.
When he came back to the garage that evening he could barely walk a straight line.
“Hello there, fellows!” he saluted Tuttle and Gene Betts, who were working on the engine they had pulled that morning. Looking up at Jim, the latter smiled and shook his head. Tuttle, for his part, gazed on him with his usual resignation, and went back to work.
Something about that look rubbed Jim the wrong way.
“God damn you, John Tuttle,” he said. “Your shit stinks, like everybody else.”
Tuttle raised an eyebrow. “That’s right, Jim. It does.”
“Your Bible won’t keep nobody out of Hell.”
“Few of us are worthy.”
“Well, see that you remember that,” snarled Jim, and slammed his plywood door after him.
It was all Jim could do the next month to keep his routine: rise in the morning, scare up some work somewhere, drink until he forgot his name, wake up in an alley or under a bridge, stagger back to the shop, and sleep the dreamless sleep of the dead. If he still had headaches, he didn’t feel them anymore. If his coughing was worse, he had the comfort of knowing it would not kill him first.
Ella Maud Page 25
