by Gerry Spence
At that moment, Murray heard the noisy, happy honking of low-flying Canada geese, the goslings nearly grown, the flock returning to their home, where they’d been safe all spring and summer. In horror, Murray saw the hunter pull down on the lead goose and fire. He saw the bird fall and flap crazily in the water. The man stood calmly by, waiting until the goose offered no further movement, its one good wing pointing skyward, the surrounding water stained red. Then he waded out, picked up the bird by its head, and, like a lion trainer cracking his whip, gave the goose a quick snap to break its neck.
The hunter headed to Murray’s side of the pond, his twelve-gauge shotgun in one hand and, in cadence with his steps, the dead goose limply swinging from his other.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Murray hollered.
Surprised, the hunter asked, “You talking to me?”
“Why would you shoot an innocent goose?”
“It’s goose season,” he replied.
“If you’d kill a beautiful goose, you’d kill anything and anybody,” Murray said. “Don’t you know that geese mate for life? Listen, for Christ sakes, listen!” He pointed to the single circling goose overhead that was calling.
Calling.
Calling.
The hunter stood staring at Murray.
“Geese don’t kill one another like us humans,” Murray said. “You must be one rotten son of a bitch.”
The man with the dead goose dangling in his hand stood glaring, silent, deciding whether or not he was in imminent danger at the hands of this lunatic with a fly rod in his hands.
The circling goose mate was calling.
Calling.
Calling.
“Surely you feel shame,” Murray said.
As if to prepare for an attack, the man transferred the dangling dead goose to his left hand and took the shotgun in his right. He cocked a fresh shell into the gun’s chamber. Then he said, coldly, calmly, “I have the same rights here as you, pal. Up yours, and your talking geese.” With that, he left Murray standing at the pond’s edge, his pole in his hand.
The man’s name was Haskins Sewell.
CHAPTER 7
SOME MONTHS LATER, Haskins Sewell found work as an assistant to Warren Garrison, who’d held the prosecutor job in Teton County for more than twenty years. He hired young Sewell with the encouragement of the county commissioners. Garrison was suffering from a terminal illness and needed help. The commissioners hoped he would train his successor to ensure that an uneventful succession would take place. Garrison resigned the following year. Sewell was appointed and sworn in to complete Garrison’s term.
“One thing you should always remember in Teton County,” Garrison counseled Sewell before departing the office. “The ranchers have the land, the money, and the power. Keep the ranchers happy, and you’ll keep the job as long as you want it.”
Sewell’s first case was the prosecution of an alleged hay thief by the name of Ezra Mills—at least that’s the name he went by, “a filthy ignoramus,” as Sewell called him, or, at times when Sewell felt more charitable, “a walking garbage can.”
The district judge, Robert R. Rose, let Ezra out on bond secured by his only asset, his team of old draft horses. He lived on twenty barren, rented acres, the grass bitten to the ground and clawed to the roots by his hungry horses. He made a few dollars in the spring plowing gardens and pulling a ditch or two.
True to the advice of Garrison, Sewell set out to bestow on the ranchers of Teton County the benefit of his prosecutorial powers. He directed the sheriff to bring Ezra in for interrogation. Later, none of the law-enforcement gang would talk about it, but it seems Ezra was treated with such a vicious series of assaults that he limped for a month from a police baton across his right knee.
Ezra was with it enough to conclude that his rights had been violated, and he contacted John Murray and Timothy Coker to represent him. “They beat me till I couldn’t see no more. And that guy Sewell was there, and once he told them to kick me in the belly, and that deputy kicked me, and I puked and I passed plumb out.”
“We can’t just turn our backs on this,” Coker said.
“Well, we got them to drop charges against Ezra, and he’s out there probably stealing more hay from his neighbor,” Murray said.
“But we can’t have a member of the bar, much less the prosecutor, taking part in such inhumane conduct. If we don’t stop this, none of us will be safe.” Coker gave his partner a long, hard look, and waited.
Finally, Murray said, “Well, if we go to the bar association for his license, we may be starting something we’ll wish we never started.”
There were a couple of prosecutors on the bar committee, and the committee split, the prosecutors arguing that since Sewell dropped all charges against Ezra, even though Sewell’s conduct was unethical, it did not affect the outcome of the case. The other members of the bar argued that such inhumane conduct could not be condoned in the state of Wyoming, and that the bar had a duty to protect the reputation of the profession by issuing a severe punishment, if not disbarment. The committee finally agreed on a confidential reprimand of Sewell.
As Sewell left the hearing, Murray and Coker were following behind. Suddenly, Sewell stopped short. He turned to Murray, his face frozen in anger. “If it takes me the rest of my life, I will make you two curse the day you first heard my name.”
Two years later, Judge Rose retired and Haskins Sewell filed as a nonpartisan candidate for the judgeship.
“We can’t let that dried-up piece of dog shit take over the judgeship,” Coker said to Murray. “You’re a fair man, John, the kind who ought to be a judge. You have compassion, and you aren’t in this business for the money—that’s for sure.”
“I don’t want to be a judge,” Murray said. “I really never wanted to be a lawyer, either.”
“What do you mean?” Coker asked.
“I told you before. I don’t like all the fight and hate and hurt that comes with the legal business. Somebody wins. Somebody loses in every case. Somebody on one side of a case or the other always feels wronged.”
“Somebody has to do it,” Coker said.
“And somebody has to bury the dead.”
“Well, the dead are gonna be us for sure if Sewell gets elected.”
Murray was fixed on the ceiling, calculating his response. Finally, he said, “If I were given a second life, I’d never go to law school. I’d keep our cabin in the woods and study the language of birds. They have a language, you know, and…”
Coker laughed. “Yeah, like a rooster crows when he’s looking for a little piece of feathered pussy.”
“Yes,” Murray said, still looking up. “Chickens have the exact same feelings as we, and they talk about it. A hen sitting on her eggs actually growls words if you try to take her eggs out from under her, and she’ll fight you. A hen clucks certain words to call her chicks to where the corn’s on the ground. She has a warning call when there’s danger. Yes, and the rooster crows his joy to the rising sun.”
“God Almighty, John,” Coker said. “You know more about chickens than you do about people.” A few mornings later, Coker bumped up against the door to Murray’s office and the door swung open. Coker looked like he hadn’t slept; his eyes were red, his face hard. “We gave it a fair shot,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” Murray asked.
“John, we’ve been starving here for years. We’re like those chickens of yours, scratching in the chicken yard, where there’s nothing left to eat but chicken shit.”
“I’m getting used to it,” Murray said. He got up and walked over to his partner to console him.
“If it wasn’t for Betsy’s teaching, you’d have starved a long time ago. And I’ve used up everything my father left me. It’s all gone, John. All.”
Murray put a hand on his partner’s shoulder. “It’s got to get better. Can’t get worse. We’ve hit the nadir.”
“Yeah, like Ezra’s case,” Coker said. “
That was the last damned straw.”
Then Coker got head-to-head with Murray. “There isn’t enough in this business for both of us. Besides, it’s your duty. If you let Sewell take the judgeship, he and the sheriff are going to run this county, and it’s not going to be pretty for anybody. Either you run for the judgeship or I’m getting the hell out of Dodge. Sewell’s been laying in wait for us. One day, he’s going to get one or both of us. Mark my word.”
“Why don’t you run?” Murray asked. But he knew better. His partner, with his quick temper and yearning for combat, had not been gifted with a judicial temperament. Coker only had the temper.
Sewell understood county politics. The ranchers, the strongest political contingent in the county, considered hay stealing and cattle thievery on a par with rape and murder. The sheriff, a former rancher, bankrupt from the last drought, threw his support to Sewell for judge, as did the clergy of the Baptist church where Sewell claimed membership.
True, a few of the townspeople urged John Murray to run, even a rancher who’d strayed from the flock. And Coker kept the pressure on Murray to throw his hat in the ring. Murray resisted. Finally, Coker put it to his partner straight: “Run for judge, or I’m vacating the premises.”
Murray felt as if he were being drafted into a war he didn’t want to fight. He complained to Betsy. “Fate is dragging me into a corner and spitting in my eye. I don’t want to be a judge.”
“You’d be a good judge,” she said. “You’re a fair man—at least most of the time.” Sounding like a judge herself, she added, “The question comes down to this: You get to be judge and we stay put, or Sewell gets to be judge and you’ll never win another case. In fact, he’ll probably find a way to get you disbarred or jailed, or worse.”
On the last day, John Murray filed for the judgeship, and the next week Sewell and Murray met in a debate sponsored by the Lion’s Club Youth Betterment Committee held in the high school auditorium. The town was suffering what many of the townsfolk considered a rash of juvenile crime—mostly kids raising hell for lack of something better to occupy their time. There’d been a street fight one Saturday—mostly for entertainment. One kid got drunk and ran his parents’ cars into an irrigation ditch, and another kid got the mayor’s daughter pregnant.
“No babying these kids,” Sewell argued to a nearly empty room of fewer than a hundred seats. Sewell was on a roll and his high nasal voice was sharp enough to scrape paint off the ceiling. “Get ’em out of our town so they can’t hurt innocent people again. If they’re going to be babied, let ’em be babied at the Boys’ Reformatory in Worland.” He got a good hand on that from a couple of retired ranchers sitting in the front row. “We’re in harm’s way as much from criminal juveniles as we are from criminal adults.” With a small, tight smile on his stony face, he bowed to the several clapping hands.
“Well, that may be so,” Murray said when it was his turn. “But I don’t want to give up on our kids, even those who go astray and commit crimes. We only have one real chance to save them, and that’s now.”
Silence from the front row.
“Once they’re behind bars, we’ve lost that chance,” Murray argued, “and when they get out, they’ll be worse than when they went in. I say guidance and caring always trump punishment.” He heard a single person clapping in the back. It was Betsy.
Timothy Coker and a handful of friends did a door-to-door campaign for John Murray. Sewell hadn’t let the ranchers forget that Murray had represented the convicted hay thief, Ezra Mills, and he put a couple of ads in the local paper about being tough on criminals, young and old. The ranchers and the church came down solidly for Sewell, but John Murray beat him by twenty-three votes. He thought they were probably Betsy’s friends. Everybody loved Betsy.
CHAPTER 8
LILLY MORTENSEN WAS seven when Betsy first encountered her in the second grade. “This child is touched with genius,” Betsy told the judge. Betsy viewed the girl as one might have viewed the young Mozart, who at five was already proficient at both the keyboard and the violin.
“What do you mean, ‘genius’?” the judge asked Betsy. “That’s a careless word people use about those whose native gifts differ from the rest of ours.”
“It’s like meeting a wizard in the closet,” Betsy said. “She’s already painting, while the rest of her classmates scribble with their crayons. And sometimes the child frightens me—what she paints is so beautiful, so wild and unseen. Yesterday she was standing over her painting, which she’d laid on the floor. She was looking down at it and crying. ‘Why are you weeping, Lilly?’ I asked.”
She didn’t answer, but kept slashing at the canvas with purple paint.
“What are you painting?”
“I don’t know,” she finally said.
Depending on the psychological stew of the viewer, the emerging face on Lilly’s painting could be seen as a demon or as an old man about to recite his daily prayers.
As an art teacher, Betsy claimed she was an accomplice in aiding the child to pry open the locked door of the self. “What right do any of us have to declare that when the child’s inner self comes rolling out, screaming out, weeping or laughing out on the canvas, it is not art?”
Over the years, Betsy had become attached to the child, as if, at last, the daughter she’d always missed had finally come home. Jim and Helen Mortensen, Lilly’s parents, were elated that their daughter was often with Betsy after school, or in the evenings at the Murrays’ house. Jim Mortensen usually came by to pick her up, or Betsy drove her home before bedtime.
“Mothers need daughters like fathers need sons,” Betsy said more than once. Now Betsy had Lilly. During the summers, the child began to accompany Betsy to the pond, where, in the early morning, they painted together. She often brought Lilly home to the judge, who, infected by Betsy’s love for Lilly, soon found himself also captured by the child. “Well, fathers need daughters, too,” the judge proclaimed one day.
The judge, Betsy, and the gifted but somehow disturbing Lilly were gathered at the dinner table on an early-summer evening.
“So, you are going to be a great painter?” the judge asked Lilly matter-of-factly.
“I already am one,” she said.
By this time, Betsy and the judge had completed an emotional adoption of Lilly “by order of the heart,” as the judge termed it.
“I’ve heard that great painters have special eyes,” the judge once said. “They see what ordinary people do not see. What do your eyes see that mine do not?”
“I see pretty diamonds up there. Look!” She jumped from the table and ran to the window. “See them?”
“I don’t see them,” he said.
“They are all colors. They’re beautiful. They’re hanging from those trees over there.”
“Ah, yes,” the judge finally said. “I see them. They are raindrops. It rained this afternoon.”
“No,” Lilly said. “They’re diamonds, and we are all very rich.” Then she laughed, and the judge, unable to resist, pulled the child to him and kissed her lightly on the top of her head.
* * *
Years later, on a crisp, clear early-spring evening, the judge arrived at the cabin with a fresh cutting of pussy willows, faint green life shyly showing through furry, silvery buds. They grew wild along the road. “I had Lilly in Juvenile Court today,” the judge said offhandedly, handing Betsy the bouquet. Lilly was sixteen.
Betsy, stunned, stood frozen, the willow branches clutched in her hands.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Lilly’s just temporarily insane. She’s in love.” He took the bouquet from Betsy and settled the wickers into a slender green vase on the kitchen table. “She’s been charged in my juvenile court with stealing her father’s car. What am I supposed to do with her? She’s fallen in love for the first time. She demonstrates all the classic signs of libidinal insanity.”
“Were we insane?” Betsy asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I thought Lilly made a decent argu
ment. She said, ‘There’s no law against being in love. It ought to be the other way around: Everybody should be required to fall in love. And if they refuse, send ’em to jail. The world isn’t safe with people running around who can’t fall in love.’”
“She’s got something there,” Betsy said. “My God, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to do nothing,” the judge replied. “This is the time in Lilly’s life when she has to find her own way. Everybody, including us, has to let go and make room, and hope.”
“And pray,” Betsy added.
Lilly Mortensen left the court with her parents, but that same night she ran back to Billy. She dropped out of high school and got a job at Ralph’s City Cleaners, doing hand-spotting. She learned to iron and to sack up the suits for delivery. She and Billy got married, rented a basement apartment in the west end for thirty dollars a month and skipped along, laughing, through life, their noses lifted at the boring townsfolk, whom they believed knew nothing of love and, therefore, nothing about life. And in the evenings while Billy was pumping gas, Lilly studied the masters from a book that Betsy had lent her, and she painted over a dozen portraits of her love, Billy Banister, one in the style of van Gogh’s Portrait of Armand Roulin, and one reminiscent of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy.
In the heat of August, and on the couple’s first anniversary, Lilly’s boss at the dry cleaner’s gave her the afternoon off to celebrate. Lilly had picked a bouquet of late-blooming purple iris that grew in the shade of an abandoned shack once occupied by an old Irish couple, both now long buried. With flowers in hand, she rushed into the apartment to surprise Billy, only to find her love mate in bed with the landlady, an overnourished forty-year-old with poor teeth and pumpkin orange hair.
Lilly jerked a brass vase off the bed stand. “Honey,” Billy muttered, “I—” But before she allowed another word to escape his adulterous lips, she struck him—the dull, ominous sound of the hard metal against his skull, the blood rushing from the wound above his left temple. She then threw the bouquet of iris at his head.
