by Gerry Spence
“In the name of justice, counsel is now testifying!” Sewell cried. “In the name of justice!”
“Sustained,” the judge ruled.
“Well, your question refreshes my memory after all,” Dr. Norton said. He put his fingers to his temple. “Yes, I believe that study showed that rigor mortis set in, in the greatest number of cases, within four hours. If one is to give an opinion, it should be based on the greatest weight of the facts. That is precisely what I’ve done here.”
“Well, you admit, do you not, that a substantial number of the dead do not go into rigor mortis until six or more hours after death?”
“It’s possible. But then, I am not testifying to possibilities. It’s possible that tomorrow a herd of giraffes might stampede down the main street of Jackson, but it is not probable. I’m testifying to reasonable medical probability.”
“That’s a weary cliché we’ve heard so many times, Doctor. Mr. Sewell told you to talk about giraffes on Main Street, didn’t he?”
No answer.
“Didn’t he!” Coker insisted, unbuttoning his suit jacket as if readying himself for a fight.
No answer.
“And aren’t you aware of the fact that rigor mortis sets in most rapidly in one who has had prolonged muscular activity, for example, exhaustion in battle?”
“I’ve heard of that.”
“And do you think that this two-hundred-fifty-pound man had been engaged in prolonged muscular activity, so that rigor mortis would set in rapidly?”
“Four hours isn’t rapidly.”
“Four hours is rapid compared to thirteen hours, as reported by Niderkorn, isn’t that true?”
“Argumentative,” Sewell objected.
“Overruled.” The law is in systemic rigor mortis, the judge thought.
“So you really don’t know when this man died, do you?” Coker asked.
“I have my opinion.”
“Could your opinion be wrong?”
“Perhaps. But not likely.”
“Turn to this jury and tell them, ‘I know that Mr. Adams was alive when his wife came home on the night in question.’”
“Objection!” cried Sewell.
“Overruled.” The judge knew his ruling was wrong, but he wanted to hear how Norton would handle this.
“Well,” the coroner began in a slow, almost melodious voice. He moistened his lips with a rapid tongue. “I think I could say that with reasonable medical probability.”
“Are you sure?” Coker demanded.
“Nothing is absolutely sure in this world except death.”
“Am I to take that as a no?”
“Take it any way you like.”
“As a matter of truth, Dr. Norton, we know very little about the passage we call death,” Coker said, as if to himself. He waited. A silence settled over the courtroom.
Finally, Judge Murray said in a near mumble, “We have no experience in dying, counsel. We get only one chance at it.”
“Yes,” Coker said.
The judge looked up at the chandelier again. “How does one focus on taking one’s last breath? How does it feel when the heart takes its last beat?”
“I beg your pardon, Your Honor?” said Sewell.
“How can one do a reasonable job of dying without any experience at it?” the judge asked.
“I think that is irrelevant, if I may say so,” Sewell said.
“Yes, of course it is,” the judge said. He glanced down at Lillian again. She seemed alone and fragile, her lawyer up there wrestling with the coroner. She began to shiver.
“Mr. Bailiff, what is the temperature in here?” the judge asked.
The bailiff toddled to the thermometer on the west wall.
“Are the jurors comfortable?” the judge asked. All nodded in the affirmative except the woman in the back row second on the left who gave no sign one way or the other. He peered down once more at Lillian Adams, who was shaking as if suffering fever chills. His watch told him it was only 11:15 in the morning. “The court will be in recess until nine tomorrow morning.” The sudden arrival of his words surprised him.
The judge rose and moved slowly, unsteadily down from the bench. “Mr. Bailiff, please see to the temperature in this courtroom. Perhaps we can thaw justice from these frozen walls.”
CHAPTER 21
THEY WATCHED THE old woman hobble, pushing her baby carriage down the alley.
“There are untold thousands like her, and nobody sees them,” Lillian said.
“They found my mother dead on a bench in the park. She froze to death. That old woman is going to die in the same way.” His eyes held Lillian’s. “How can it be that no one in the world, not one person out of billions, cared for my mother?” He said it again. “Not one. Not even me.”
“I could have been like her,” Lillian said. She looked at her hands and moved her fingers as if they’d become strangers. “I wanted to be a painter, but I didn’t have the courage to starve or sleep on the street day after day with my palette and paintbrushes, hoping that this is the day I’ll be discovered. I didn’t have a Theo van Gogh as a brother, and my father thought painting was just an excuse for not having a job.”
Suddenly his face lit up, and with a voice exploding with enthusiasm, he said, “Why not set up a charity to fight Fate? We could call it ‘Fate Fighters,’ or something. You want to be a Fate fighter?” His ignited passion surprised him. “And we could hire qualified lookouts to comb the streets for women who are Fate’s favorite victims—like her. Maybe she was a great painter, or dancer, or poet. We could take Fate head-on. Yes, we’ll become the founders of the Secret Society of Fate Fighters.”
Lillian smiled. “You always practice that uncomfortable art of sentimentality. But it’s one of the things I love about you.”
“I keep thinking of my mother,” he said.
“Your mother gave a gift to mankind and didn’t know it,” Lillian said. “If it weren’t for her, we’d never dream of establishing the Secret Society of Fate Fighters. Sometimes Fate gets fooled.”
They walked on.
“Fate!” he yelled, raising a fist in the air as if Fate resided up one of the great Teton canyons. “I’m coming after you. I’m going to cause you a lot of trouble.”
She watched, and was moved by his words. Yet her feelings for the man frightened her.
Still hollering at Fate, he said, “But this once, I’m also going to fight you for what I want.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
His eyes grew soft and his lips moved, but no words came. She knew what he wanted. “You want to get married,” she said.
“How did you know?” he said.
“Will you cook your seared salmon with caramelized onion and—”
“I promise,” he said.
“Will you love me as you’ve loved me—as nobody has ever loved me?”
“I promise,” he said again.
“Then I’m in, all in,” and they fell laughing into each other’s arms. As quickly, he drew back and grew serious.
They were silent again.
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Are you?”
“Yes. Can we trust Fate?”
“She brought us together,” he said. Then in a distant voice, he added, “If I were to lose it, you know, if I were ever to get to the place where I don’t know who I am or anything, would you put me out of my misery?”
She looked away.
Then he said, “I will love Tina as if she were my own blood.”
* * *
Tina.
Lillian was twenty-four when she married Tina’s father, Gordon Ford. She met him in New York, “a male debutante,” she used to call him. Never worked a day in his life. Why had she married him? Hunger for security? Loneliness? Her first encounter with the glamour of New York’s elite? Whatever the reason, after Tina was born, she soon divorced Ford. In ways, she and Tina were two girls growing up together.
By the time she met Horace Adams III, the luster of her work at the Belmont Advertising Agency had faded. She’d become reattached to the Tetons, and although she had no close friends there, the little hamlet of Jackson Hole seemed to call her home. She longed to escape the craziness and crime of the big city, yes, and she thought Jackson Hole was the right place to rear Tina. She was a difficult child, and she needed the security of a solid, isolated mountain community. And both Betsy and the judge had taken to Tina like adoring grandparents. That was the most enduring gift that Jackson Hole could offer.
Betsy taught Tina to cook the judge’s favorite chili, and in the summer Tina and the judge visited the lily pond to watch the wild geese and their gay gray goslings, who followed their mother, one gosling after another, like the cars of a child’s toy train. But what the judge once experienced there with Tina gave him pause.
“I saw them last night in my bedroom,” she said. “How did they get into my bedroom, Grandpa?”
“What did you see in your bedroom, honey?”
“The geese.”
The judge saw her eyes tinged with fear. “You were only dreaming, Tina. And your job is to learn how to separate what you dream from what is really happening. I have trouble like that sometimes, too. Do you know how to do that?” he asked.
She shook her head no.
“You jump up and down three times and wiggle your toes. If it’s a dream, you do not feel your feet or toes.” Then he laughed, and when he laughed, Tina laughed, too.
* * *
“Yes,” Lillian had said, “let’s get married. I think we can live our lives together better than we can live them separately.”
Horace wanted to be romantic.
Although at unexpected times Horace displayed an uncanny insight into “the human condition,” as he called it; what she liked most about him were his boyish ways. “I love you, and I don’t know how to say anything more about it,” he’d lament. “I’m not a poet. It’s not fair. I have all this money and I can’t write even a silly limerick. Poets have all those pretty words, but most can’t buy a decent meal. Life isn’t fair.” Then he said, “But I love you more than any poet would love you.”
“The poetry is in your eyes,” she said.
Neither of them had obligatory religious leanings, but they were married by the aged Episcopal priest, the Reverend Hamondtree. He sat Lillian and Horace down on the front pew of the church and began his standard inquiry. “Why are you marrying this woman?”
Horace looked out the north widow to the towering Grand Teton. He struggled for words. “I don’t know how to say it.”
The old priest waited with a curious frown.
“Frightens me,” Horace said. “I’ve never felt this way before. I am marrying her because…” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a folded paper, and began to read his poem to Lillian:
I was a lost person
And you found me.
I saw …
He stopped. Then he tore up the paper into small pieces and stuffed the pieces in his pants pocket. “I’m marrying her because I love her and can’t live without her. I wish I could say it better.” Embarrassed, he offered her an apologetic smile and looked down to the old worn plank floors of the church.
The small birds under the church eaves were singing.
Finally, the priest broke the silence. “A good marriage is a poem, Mr. Adams.”
Lillian grabbed Horace and kissed him.
“Hold on!” the priest said. “Save the kissing for after the vows.” He turned to Lillian.
“And why are you marrying this man?” the priest asked her.
“I never thought I would marry again,” she said. “I want a husband who loves me, and Tina needs a father who loves her.” She looked out at the Grand Teton. “Love is hard to find.”
“It’s everywhere,” the priest said.
“It’s been hard for me to find,” she said. “But he drowns me in his joy, and marrying Horace will not leave blisters on my soul.”
* * *
They bought the beaten-up old log house on the hill, and on seventeen acres at the edge of town they started the groundwork for building the new brewery for Jackson Hole. Pure water from a generous well. Good barley just over the pass in Idaho.
“I feel like a salmon that’s migrated back to the place where it was spawned,” Lillian said. “But not to die.”
The sound of her words made him afraid. “I’ll never let you die,” he said.
“Promise?”
“Not as long as I’m alive.”
“Then we’ll have to die together,” she said, and kissed him deeply, and then again.
CHAPTER 22
TINA VIEWED HER mother’s romance with Horace as a hostile act. Worse, she thought they were engaged in a conspiracy to abandon her. She referred to him as “that stupid beast.”
When Horace and Lillian were dating, Tina said, “Why do you spend so much time with him, Mother? We don’t need him.” The girl was nearing six feet, with her mother’s dark hair, her father’s ivory skin. Her large black eyes seemed to be searching for prey, or, at times, beseeching her mother’s succor. She presented herself as a confused adolescent warrior ready to attack, but on the edge of crying, her mouth pouty and puckered.
“He’s a client,” Lillian said.
Tina stuck her head into the bathroom, where Lillian was putting on her morning makeup. “You don’t spend time like that with your other clients, Mother. You didn’t get home until one this morning. I think you should go see our shrink, Dr. Brady.”
“Well, I happen to like Horace,” Lillian said. “And I would remind you: You are not my mother.”
“Why would you possibly like him, Mother? He’s really old and really weird.”
Lillian called after her, “Lots of good people seem weird until you get to know them, Tina. Some people probably think we’re weird.”
Morning was the worst part of Lillian’s day—herding Tina through her toiletry, and into her clothes, and all the time fighting off her barrages of insecurity and anger, her begging and blustering, and the nearly physical effort required to launch her off to school, after which Lillian prepared herself to take on demanding clients and a gang of smart-asses at the office. She hurriedly contained her hair in a classic ponytail that confessed she had no time for the frills and fluffs of the vainglorious.
“I hate him, Mother. He acts like I’m not even alive.”
“Horace has never had any children. And growing up, you never had a father to speak of. Maybe you could teach each other.”
“I don’t want him as a father!”
“None of us gets to choose a father. You never chose yours, and I never chose mine.” She hastened to blunt any suggestion of disrespect for her own father. “I was lucky,” Lillian said. “Your grandfather is a fine man. Whatever strength I have, I got from him.”
“I don’t want you choosing someone to play being my father,” Tina said.
“And I don’t want you choosing the men I go with, either. So how are we going to solve this problem?”
“You should choose me first,” Tina said. “I’ve been with you the longest, and I love you the most.”
“You don’t know him.”
“I think he’s just a rich, grubby old primate.”
“Where did you learn to talk like that?”
“I love you more than he could ever love you,” Tina said, gathering up her homework and stuffing it in her book bag.
“And I love you more than anyone in the world, Tina. It’s a mother’s love. It’s not the same as love for a mate.”
Lillian led her to the door and gave her a mother’s kiss. Before Lillian could close the door, the girl said, “I saw you kissing him in the car when you came home last night. It made me want to puke.”
* * *
After Lillian and Horace were married, they flew to Bermuda for a short honeymoon. He had investments there he’d never mentioned. Boring place, Lillian thought—b
eaches with fat old men and women with unapologetic bulges pretending not to desecrate the pure white sand and the innocent blue sea. Still, she absorbed the sea’s silence and felt its nourishing peace, which was interrupted only by the lapping of small, hesitant waves at the shore.
At times, without announcement, Horace would drift off to some undefined island of his own. He said there was nothing awry. He refused to see a doctor. To reassure her, he reached over and kissed her lightly. He said that when he was with her, he was in heaven, and maybe that was where he’d been. She’d come to dismiss those excursions into another place as his “rich inner life,” as she’d come to call it.
During their honeymoon, Lillian left Tina with Tina’s grandfather, Jim Mortensen. He was eager to teach his granddaughter how to shoot a pistol, just as he’d once taught Lillian. “Women need to know how to take care of themselves,” Mortensen proclaimed. “Nowadays most men don’t know how to defend themselves or anybody else. They’re little frogs that croak and hop, and that’s about all. They couldn’t protect you, and it’s getting dangerous out there.” Tina said she and her grandfather were “a unit.” They belonged together.
With his pistol in both hands, and with Tina watching carefully, Mortensen held his arm out in shooting position. “You don’t lock your arm. Remember, it’s got to handle the pistol’s kick. And you cradle your shooting hand in your other hand, just like they love each other. See?” He held the empty pistol in both hands to illustrate. Then he stood behind Tina as she pushed the gun in front of her and took aim.
“Keep both eyes open,” he said. “Only amateurs and phonies in cowboy movies shoot with one eye closed. You need ’em both open for perspective.”
Tina was pointing the pistol at a photo of General George Custer hanging on the living room wall.
“Now there was one hell of a soldier,” Jim Mortensen said. “The know-nothing historians make Custer out to be a fool, and praise the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and the rest of those yappin’ redskins like they were the heroes. Well, I’ll tell you one thing: If I wanted a man to lead a buncha men into battle, it’d be George Custer. He didn’t run from nobody, including a thousand whooping injuns on horseback.”
