The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

“Because I can’t control him, because he isn’t some defendant who only cares about being acquitted. Adam has too much pride to care about what might happen to him. He isn’t like anyone I’ve ever known. God knows what will happen if I put him on the stand. On the other hand, I’m afraid I know what will happen if I don’t.”

  “Then you don’t have any choice, do you?”

  “No, I don’t have any choice. I have to put him on the stand.”

  They did not talk about the trial again that night, but it was always there, just below the surface, giving what they said a forced, artificial quality. Summer spoke about her practice, or started to, but the words died on her lips. They ate in silence, each of them thinking the same thing. Darnell asked her about the book she had been reading and then drifted off into thoughts of his own when she began to tell him.

  “I told you,” he said glumly, as they left the restaurant, “I’m not fit to be around when I’m this far into a trial, especially when I haven’t been able to figure out how to win it.”

  There was nothing she could say. There was no point telling him that things would turn out all right. Things did not always turn out all right; sometimes they went horribly wrong and there was nothing anyone could do about it. You did everything you could to save a patient, or to save a client, but patients died and not every defendant walked out of court a free man. It was the beginning of wisdom to know there was a limit to what you could do, but because you could not know in advance where that limit was, it could also, if you were not careful, make you a little crazy, wondering whether you had reached it or had simply made a mistake, forgotten something you should have remembered, or done something you should not have tried.

  “We’ll go home,” she said, taking his arm to give him comfort. “We’ll go home and we’ll crawl into bed and we’ll get a good night’s sleep. Things will look different tomorrow. They always do when you’re back in court.”

  Darnell patted her hand. She was right: things always did look different when he was at work in trial.

  “I don’t have to think about anything then,” he remarked as they headed up the fog-bound street. “Everything just happens.”

  Summer kept her end of the bargain and tried to make him keep his. An hour after they got home, she crawled into bed next to him, read six dull pages and then turned off the light. A few minutes later she was fast asleep. Careful not to wake her, Darnell got up, went into the study and stared out the window, thinking about what he might have forgotten, what he might still try, or whether he had reached the limit of what he could do to save the life of a young man he did not pretend to understand.

  When Summer found him sitting there at dawn, she knew he had not slept. She had not thought he would, but she did not want him to know that. He was entitled to his own secrets, what he tried to keep from her so she would take care of herself instead of worrying about him.

  “You’re up early,” she said as she kissed him gently on his forehead. Then she went into the kitchen and made coffee.

  Darnell had reached certain conclusions about what he was going to do, conclusions which, though not much different from what he had decided at the beginning, had become more certain, more fixed in his mind, for the struggle he had had with himself. Adam was going to testify, and instead of trying to guide him, step by step, through the narrative of what had happened, he would let Adam take the lead. The more the jury heard things in Adam’s own voice, he believed, the greater the chance they would start to see things through Adam’s eyes. This was a trial not about facts, but about values, about whether there was something worse than murder.

  Darnell walked into court right on time. He had just taken his seat when the bailiff called out the presence of the judge and, as everyone rose to their feet, Evelyn Pierce strode briskly to the bench. The jury was just filing into the jury box, when she noticed.

  “Mr. Darnell, is there some reason the defendant isn’t here?”

  For an instant, he thought she must be mistaken, but then, embarrassed, he realized that the chair next to him was vacant. He fumbled for an explanation.

  “I’m sure he’s on his way, your Honor. Probably tied up in traffic.”

  Judge Pierce gave him a look of mild disappointment and then sat back in her high-backed black leather chair. She began to tap her fingers, counting off each passing moment, the rough addition of his negligence. Five minutes went by, and then five more.

  “Take the jury back,” she finally told the bailiff. “They might as well relax.” As soon as they were gone, she suggested that Darnell might want to make some inquiries. “Perhaps you might want to call your office – just in case something has happened.”

  No one had called his office. Darnell called Henry Hammersmith at home and was told that he and Adam had left more than an hour ago. They should have been there long before this.

  “Probably caught in traffic,” Darnell tried to assure Henry’s wife. “Road work, an accident – I’m sure they’ll be here any minute.”

  Hillary Clark had another theory. After Darnell reported to the judge in chambers what he had learned, Clark remarked that it would not be the first time someone out on bail had tried to run away.

  “And where exactly do you think he would run to?” asked Darnell, angered by her condescending tone. “The only place he’s ever been is San Francisco.”

  Clark raised an eyebrow and laughed.

  “Yes, well, he isn’t here, is he?”

  “He will be,” promised Darnell with firm insistence.

  An hour went by and there was still no sign of him. Darnell was worried, not that Adam had decided to run away, but that something had happened. He trusted Henry Hammersmith as much as he had ever trusted anyone. Henry had said he would have him here, and that meant Henry would.

  “Perhaps I better excuse the jury, send them home until tomorrow. We should know something by then, don’t you think?”

  Darnell was not sure what to do. He turned to Hillary Clark.

  “Could you have someone in your office call the police to find out if there’s been an accident? I can’t think of any other reason why Mr. Hammersmith wouldn’t have had him here by now.”

  Clark now seemed to share his concern.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “I’ll do it right away.”

  But just as she got to her feet, the door opened and the judge’s clerk, a small, mouse-like woman who without her glasses always squinted, announced that the defendant had finally arrived.

  “He seems to be in rather bad shape,” she added. “He has blood on his face and his clothes are torn.”

  Darnell dashed into the courtroom and found Adam, seemingly quite calm and collected, in his usual place at the counsel table. The clerk’s observation had been correct. He had a gash along his left cheek and the sleeve on his jacket, as well as the front of his shirt, had jagged tears. Then Darnell noticed that Adam was clutching his arm to stop the blood slowly trickling down his wrist and onto his left hand.

  “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “We had a small adventure,” said Adam, who looked as if he had actually enjoyed it. “A car decided to take a shortcut across two lanes of traffic. Unfortunately, we were in the way.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Darnell saw Henry Hammersmith standing just inside the doorway at the back. Evelyn Pierce had returned to the bench. One look at Adam and she told the bailiff to get him medical attention.

  “I’m all right,” Adam told Darnell. “A few cuts and bruises, nothing serious - I don’t need any help.”

  “You’re going to get some anyway. You need to get cleaned up. I can’t put you on the stand looking like that now, can I?”

  Still insisting that it was really nothing, Adam followed the bailiff into another room to wait for a medic to see to his injuries. Darnell caught up with Henry Hammersmith in the corridor outside.

  “Adam saved my life,” said Hammersmith, his eyes wide with amazement. “Some idiot came flying out of
nowhere, ran the light and crashed right into us. I didn’t see him coming, but Adam did. He threw himself in front of me, protected me from the crash. It all happened in an instant. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t think about himself, just did it! Look at me! Not a cut on me, and he was cut all over. Broke his arm, too, I think; but he wouldn’t hear about it when I said we had to get him to a hospital to see a doctor. He just kept saying that he wasn’t hurt, that he was fine, that we had other things to do. Other things to do? He saved my life, Bill – that’s the fact of it, and you’d think he hadn’t done anything except tripped and stumbled and scraped his knee.”

  Within the hour, Adam looked as good as new. The blood was gone and Darnell had found him a clean shirt. With some thread, borrowed from the judge’s clerk, the jacket sleeve had been repaired and, at least from a distance, no one could tell it had been torn. Adam seemed amused by all the fuss.

  “You were almost killed,” Darnell reminded him as they sat at the counsel table, waiting for the judge finally to start the day’s proceedings.

  Adam turned a glittering eye on the much older man.

  “It’s the ‘almost’ that matters, isn’t it? Why worry about what didn’t happen, when you couldn’t worry if it had?”

  There was something wrong with that, but Darnell did not have time to figure out what it was. There were only a few minutes left before Adam would have his only chance – his last chance – to convince the jury that what he did had been what any one of them, in the same circumstances, would have done.

  “Tell them, not just what happened, but what you felt about it. Tell them that you would have died yourself if that would have given the child a chance to live.”

  The judge came in, the jury came in; everyone was ready. The courtroom, packed with spectators eager to see whether William Darnell had another trick up his sleeve, one of his famous last-minute maneuvers by which he had won unwinable cases before, became as silent and self-possessed as a crowded church. Evelyn Pierce looked at Darnell.

  “You may call your next witness.”

  Darnell was on his feet. In a gesture of confidence and encouragement, he put his soft, pale hand on Adam’s shoulder.

  “The defense calls the defendant, Adam.”

  The clerk told Adam to put his hand on the bible and repeat after her. The prosecution immediately objected. Both arms on the bench, Evelyn Pierce moved her bulky frame forward.

  “You object to the defendant taking the oath?”

  “I object to having the witness sworn on the bible. From what we heard the other day from the young woman involved in this case, the bible has no significance for the people of that island. They have a different religion.”

  “Yes, I see your point,” said Judge Pierce thoughtfully. She turned to the clerk. “You don’t need to use the bible; it’s sufficient that the witness swear to tell the truth.”

  Hillary Clark was as good as any one Darnell had gone up against. How many other prosecutors would have thought to use a simple technical point, a procedural nicety, to remind a jury that whatever else they might think of the defendant, he was an alien creature who did not believe in either the god of the Christians or the god of the Jews? Darnell tried to repair the damage.

  “When you took the oath you understood that, by all you hold sacred, you promise to tell the truth?”

  Adam seemed almost offended by the question.

  “I never lie.”

  “I know that. I want the jury to know that. Let’s start with something I’ve never had to ask anyone on the witness stand before. Your name – what is it? You’ve been called Adam all through these proceedings, but it’s the name you were given after you were taken from the island where you live. Your language is difficult, almost impossible, for us; but you’ve learned English better than most Americans. In English, then, as best you can make the translation, what should you be called?”

  A look of gratitude, as of a burden lifted, came into his eyes.

  “Lethe,” he replied.

  “That sounds close to what the young woman is called.”

  “Our names, like our lives, are intertwined.” He said this in a way that made Darnell suspect that this was no passing observation, that there was some deeper meaning involved, but this was not the time to pursue it.

  “Lethe, then, is what we’ll call you. We’ve already heard testimony from Alethia about why the two of you were living alone, and what happened when the child was born. Is there anything she said that wasn’t true, anything you would like to correct?”

  Lethe shook his head emphatically.

  “The girl doesn’t know how to lie.”

  “She was telling the truth when she said that you put an end to the suffering of the child?”

  “The child couldn’t live; it couldn’t grow to be a man. There was no choice but to kill it.”

  The way he said it, the absence of any feeling of regret, much less remorse; the sense that what he had done was no different than putting down an injured animal; made the jury, and not just the jury, look at him as if more than his religion set him apart from what they thought everyone should be. Darnell did what he could.

  “But you didn’t want to do this, kill your own child; and you wouldn’t have, if there had been anyway to save it.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t have done that, if he had been born healthy and able to become what a human being should be. That’s what we wanted, a child that could later have children of his own, another link in the generations.”

  “Was there any way to save the child? Was there anything that could have been done to keep the child from suffering until it died?”

  “We know nothing of how to keep alive what is not born strong enough to do it.”

  “You mean you don’t have our kind of medicine, our ability to provide life by artificial means?”

  “Yes, all we know is nature; which is the reason, I think, that we hold life in greater respect than it appears to me you do.”

  Darnell nodded as if he understood, though the truth was that he had no idea what Lethe was going to say next, or even what he should ask him. At this point, all he could do was to let him say what he wanted and hope that something might still be salvaged out of what was quickly becoming a disaster.

  “And you say that for what reason?’ he asked cautiously.

  “Because from what I’ve been able to observe, you seem to think that the battle against death and disease is more important than the kind of lives people lead. That’s what I meant when I said we have the greater respect for life: we believe it means something more than just the fact of staying alive.” In deep earnest, he turned to the jury. “The child might have lived for a long time, months perhaps, in agony. If life is the only measure of what you think important, I’m guilty the way Ms. Clark there says I am. But if I hadn’t done what I did, I would be guilty of something worse, a kind of cruelty that only a barbarous people could forgive.”

  There was nothing more Darnell could do, no more questions he could ask. The last answer was the last thing anyone could say. Hillary Clark had a different point of view.

  “By your own admission, then, the child would have lived?

  “For a while, yes.”

  “Months, you said.”

  “Months, perhaps, for all I know.”

  “Yes – for all you know. Because you don’t know, do you? All you know is that the child was alive and you killed it, didn’t you?”

  “I killed the child – our child – yes.”

  Clark stood next to the counsel table, drumming her fingers. Her nails were painted a hard, shiny red. She was dressed in black.

  “And you say you did this – killed a child - to end the child’s suffering?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “But you would have killed it anyway, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you -”

  “You would have killed it even if it hadn’t been suffering!”

  “But it was suffering. Y
ou could tell by the way it had to struggle for every breath it took.”

  “Struggle for every breath – because it wanted to stay alive! It had a heart condition; it wasn’t getting enough blood – that’s why it was blue. That’s what the child’s mother told us. A child with a heart condition wouldn’t be able to function in what you consider the normal way, and that’s the reason you would need to kill it – isn’t that true? – Adam, or Lethe, or whatever your name is – a child born with any disease or defect, a child that isn’t normal, isn’t allowed to live – shouldn’t be allowed to live, according to what you and this sun-god of yours believe! Don’t try to deny it. You as good as admitted it just a few minutes ago, when your lawyer asked you – tried to get you to agree – that you wouldn’t have killed the child if there had been any way to save it. Don’t you remember what you said? Do you want me to ask the court reporter to read it back to you? You said that you wouldn’t have killed it if it had been ‘born healthy and able to become what a human being should be’ – whatever that means. And then, moments later, when you tried to tell us how barbaric we were, with our concern for the life of everyone and not just those with some higher claim to be alive, you said that you and the people you come from knew nothing of ‘how to keep alive what is not born strong enough to do it.’ The point is that as far as you’re concerned a child who isn’t born perfect shouldn’t be born at all, should it? A child who isn’t born perfect is, as far as you’re concerned, a child you ought to kill!”

  Darnell shot out of his chair, objecting as vociferously as he could, but the courtroom was in turmoil, everyone talking at once, and Judge Pierce was too busy trying to restore order to pay attention to what he wanted. He looked across at Hillary Clark, her eyes feverish with excitement at the lethal blow she thought she had struck. He looked at Adam, the name he had used too long to give up, and had to marvel at how little any of this seemed to affect him. The only thing that mattered, the only interest he had, was that he had been truthful in everything he said. He smiled at Darnell, as if to tell him not to worry, but Darnell could not bring himself to smile back. For one of the very few times in his long career, William Darnell knew for certain that he was going to lose.