On a red couch in the room's center sat two girls, one a slip of a thing in a yellow robe, and the other a larger girl cradling her. The smaller girl’s feet were tucked behind her and her head rested on her arm so that it was tilted away from him, and all he saw was her long straight, yellow hair, but when she raised her face to him it was bloody and red and sore.
"She don't want to talk to him," the other girl said.
Ernest White looked at the Judge. The Judge scowled but then cleared his throat. "Eilene, give him a minute."
His daughter girl stirred but kept one arm fast around the other girl. "All right, Judge, but you stay here."
"I have one question." Ernest said. "As God is your witness, did Asher Douglass do this to you, or did your boyfriend?"
The Judge’s eyes widened a little when he heard this, and he looked at the two girls hard. "Please answer his question."
The smaller girl looked away, and her eyes did not meet his own, but after a moment her voice came small and steady "As God is my witness, he did."
The Judge stood silent. His eyes lifted and wandered quietly at the gilt on the spines of his books and the few trophies of animals.
"That's all she has to say to him, Daddy," the Judge’s daughter said.
"Is there any evidence? Did anyone else see this? Do you have torn clothes, or any other sign of a scuffle?"
She shrank and began to cry.
"You have her answer," the Judge said. "Let's leave her alone."
They left the room then the Judge walked with him outside and onto the porch. They stood there in the moonlight and he looked at Ernest.
"I know what's going on town, and I know what you think of her story. But you have to understand, if you took her into town and twisted her arm and forced her to say what you want her to say, what you think is the truth, you’d stop nothing. You'd just end up ruining three lives instead of one." His eyes looked tired. "The mob will play out."
Ernest looked at him. "You can’t believe that."
The Judge drew himself up tall in the doorway. "Over the years I have seen the human heart for all its greatness and all its pettiness. I know it like a force of nature. You are an earnest young man, but you are naïve. What is going on tonight is too big for you to stop."
Ernest just looked at him.
"You have my council," the Judge said. And he slowly turned and shut the door.
Ernest walked back to his car. He climbed in beneath the gaping night and sparked the car back to life. He drove quickly and heedlessly to town, past the noise, past the light, past the mobs. He needed a place to be alone. He went into his law office but Constance was waiting there.
"You're not going to do anything rash," she said. Part question, part comment, part command.
"What are you doing here?"
"I realize you can be rash. I know you need protecting."
"Look, I don't have time to talk about it."
"I can forgive you."
He just stared at her. "What is it you don't understand..?"
Her face was pale as cream and her eyes were calm and hard. He turned his back to her, emptied some of the contents of his safe into his briefcase, grabbed some papers off his desk, and went out.
He went through the shadowed streets of the town. He saw Michael down one block looking fretful like a ghost in a cage so he gave him the slip. He needed to be alone. He turned here and there down dark streets and met other people, scared women and men just wanting scraps of news – odd eager faces poking suddenly out of the night, addled out of sleep and chiseled to a lean alacrity by contrasts of light and shadow. But now he'd finally found a quiet spot.
He sat on a low box in the quiet behind an old shack that used to be a livery, some distance from what was now the town center. At his feet was a shallow puddle of mud and stars. From the town center the voices of the crowds rose and fell. Light in flickers came from that direction.
He sat there in the warm and heard the voices in the distance. His father loved Ash, not him. That was his father’s fault. The old man had locked horns in struggles with these small-minded people all his life and all he got for his trouble was their hooks in his skin. It was not worth his energy.
Ernest sat and looked at puddles reflecting stars among the straw and mud. He sat until there was a rise and fall of sound, and then he got up and began walking toward the center of town.
He made a brief stop by Sheriff Noah Larr's house; the man stood in the doorway and looked down at Ernest like he had suddenly somehow become invincible, like he was looking down at an utter piece of trash, and he said he’d let him Ernest have five minutes of his time. At the end of it a deal had been made between them, and he directed Ernest to go to the jail, and he’d see what he could do.
Ernest ran to the jail and pushed through the crowd and was surprised to see Ben Sweet at the door.
"What do ya reckon, E.L.?" he grinned. "They made me a deputy."
"I need to go in and see Ash."
"No one goes in."
I'm his lawyer."
"He aint got a lawyer."
"Look, I talked to Sheriff Larr about it. He said he'd see to it Ash was safe. He’s sending someone with the message any second."
"Now why would he do that?"
"I sold him that strip of land."
"Smoke and blarney, E.L."
"He gave his word – he'll be letting you know soon enough."
"That's just your word, E.L. I’m sick of your words."
"And my word's good, but in any case, how about this?" Ernest White reluctantly opened the briefcase he'd brought with him from his office. There was cash inside.
"Okay, five minutes." Ben said. "You won't have much longer than that." Ben grabbed a key ring and led him back to one grey cell. A large, downcast black man sat inside. Ben opened the door and Mr. White went in and sat on a stool. After a minute the black man raised his head from his hands, and he began speaking.
*
When Ernest tried to transcribe their conversation from memory years later, everything he could come up with was slightly off:
"Do you hear them out there? Goading each other on? Dozens of voices. There are good men out there. I know their voices. But tonight they have convinced each other to do something they would never do alone, and will regret years later, when they are separate and alone in their small corners of the world with time to think about things. They'll whisper their prayers like beaten dogs when their own time nears, even as their family gathers around convinced they're sending God an angel."
'That crippled boy thought you could help. Do you think the law will matter here? Do you think that sheriff will keep his word? If so then you’re a fool. This late at night and their voices still rising – the law won't matter. I don't think I'll leave this night alive. What do you think? Do I have hours left, or minutes? I wonder every time their shouts rise to a pitch. What should I do, now that I don't know how much time I have?"
"I'll use some time to tell you this, so you can remember and tell whoever cares: I'm not innocent, but I didn't do this."
"I'm a strong man – I was their best friend when they needed to get some things done on their farms – when I was young and happy and a man full of promise – they could smile at my smile so long as I pulled the stumps from their fields, built their fences, gutted their hogs, cleared their brush. But now I'm different – less talkative, not smiling, older, hard-worn but not ungrateful. They wonder about me, and when they wonder they tell stories. Their women tell stories.
"I'm a strong man – I'm 48 and still a bull. They got me into this cell with guns behind me. But once they get me out there, there won't be guns. They'll want me to suffer. They'll get mad when I won't beg. They'll want to use their confidence of numbers to beat on me. But I'm a strong man. How many do you think I can take? The Lord made me a bull – they want me to beg but I intend to see how many I can take."
"Lawyer, you could read to me. Book of Hosea – I remember liking
what I heard a preacher read from it. Yes – see? I know you're shaking like a leaf. But it's still me. More calluses, more layers, more hardness of scars from being in the world, but I still admire the things that show a power bigger than myself – power and a grace directing power. Like the stars. Like the words that flow like water from that book. No man could write that book."
"So maybe I've even killed a man. I did kill a man once, but it was in a place where they worked men like animals and misled them into spending their money on alcohol and whores til they had no choice but to stay where they are and work themselves to death while their bosses got fatter. Those bosses set men against each other. They liked to see them fight. The men with the fiercest spirits sink deepest, their own pride turned into a lodestone of despair at their misfortune. So I'd save money and when they'd spent theirs they'd want mine, and that would start the fights. I saved mine to make amends to a wife and little girl who didn't want to see me because of what I'd done to break their trust. Every trouble has a trouble before it, doesn't it? I had to fight back with my fists, and most would learn. But one man who didn't like getting humiliated in front of his friends came back with a knife when I was asleep. It's just the grace of God that I heard him, that I awoke and saw that knife in that dark room and grabbed it and turned it back on him even as he was lunging it at me. He died on his own knife.
"Is it funny, lawyer, that God didn't let me die then in my sleep? That he kept me alive until this day to die awake? Is it funny that I should die now that I tried to come back and make amends with the money I'd saved? Is it God's way of saying that no money can buy my forgiveness? And lawyer – the hardest thing is this – the girl who lied about me. The Lord would want me to forgive her before I died. But I can't. If you do anything before I die pray that I figure out how to forgive her. Pray that the fight lifts my spirits and fills me with an angry charity, and lets God roar through me what I can't say myself. Let the fight lift me, Lord, and stand at your side, and see that lying whore-girl as one of your own."
"...For I will be like a lion to E'phraim, and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will rend and go away, I will carry off, and none shall rescue. I will return again to my place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face, and in their distress they seek me, saying.."
He killed four men before the mob killed him.
*
Years later the woman who had falsely accused Asher confessed, in the throes of cancer. "It was that violent man who claimed to be my boyfriend who hit me, but it was Larr who saw in his slow reptilian mind the chance to cash in on the harm, the chance to get hold of a fortune and make himself big. He threatened me and threatened my family." she said. "He knew the skeletons in our family – the crimes my father had committed, and even the very things that I had done, though I was young, though not too young to have not done things I regretted. I left the state and had had an abortion once – he knew that. He knew more, and he twisted my secrets like a knife – he made me live with the blood of two lives on my hands and the fear that I could never tell anyone. When I found out I had cancer it was a greater relief than giving birth. I am about to die and here in this late hour telling this to you that you may know, and I pray that beyond any merit of my own God might forgive me, and my body is dead but I feel like a bird let out of its cage."
Ernest White nodded while his lawyers took her deposition.
*
When he heard news of what had happened to Asher, Ernest's father broke down and wept. He was inconsolable. His face twisted like a wadded dish rag. His wife was doing all she could to console him.
His voice hissed at Ernest. "You didn't do enough. If you sold him that land, you didn't do enough – you needed to hold it over his head!"
Ernest found no words.
"You've never tried hard enough – you never have! You gave him everything he wanted – what made you think he'd listen to you once you did that?"
Ernest said nothing. He let the sour waves flow over him. He was too tired to fight them.
The old man wept and wept. "You let him die to hurt me."
Ernest walked away into the half-light of one day bleeding into the next without sleep, the sobs and screams fading as he walked away. He felt deep inside himself and had no energy left, no resource for anything good. He unlocked the door to his rented office and threw himself into his chair. Constance appeared in the doorway and walked in beside him.
"Now do you see?" she said. "You don't have the thing inside she needs. I can be that thing with no attachments – the thing that can't be broken because it's already been broken."
He sank down and said nothing, and she put his head in her lap.
"One of us has got to be the stable one."
"I’m the stable one. I’m going to get Atalanta and get out of here."
"Ernest..."
"Get out of here, Constance. Get out of here."
She left and he fell into a deep sleep. He woke up in the morning and his head was clouded with the webs of a blind spider. That afternoon he went to meet Atalanta in the garden by the courthouse.
"I’ve got to get out of here," he told her.
"Ernest, I can’t leave. I have my father to take care of. And if you leave you’ll never come back."
"I will. I promise."
"No you won’t - you’ll leave and play the fool again and bury yourself in distractions. You have to fight now."
"I can’t stay here!"
"Every square inch of earth is soaked in blood, Ernest. What makes you think any scrap of earth is different? You have to learn to overcome it. I will help you overcome it."
"I hate these people."
"You can’t run to another spot and make it better."
"I’ll leave for six months – only for six months. Then I’ll come back for you. I’ve got to get this place behind me."
"You won’t come back."
"That's not true!"
"I love you Ernest, but I’m sorry. You do what you have to do, but I will, too."
White sealed himself in his rented house, drank himself into a stupor for three days, and then emerged as the white suit man for the first time. He purchased a ticket and waited patiently for the train. When it came he slumped into a berth and wondered through the grey brutal oppression of his broken will and patchwork thoughts if he was doing the right thing, but a voice laughed back that there is no right thing, just the least amount of pain, and he had no strength to disagree, and he was on the verge of sleep when heard a passenger remark that they'd found that crippled boy's metal braces in the mud down by the river like an empty cocoon.
Chapter 10
August 1939, Continued
"Some farmer dropped you off, Mr. White – some farmer."
"Nonsense – I was ministered to by angels!"
"His wife cleaned up your suit with Boraxo and plastered your head."
"Trite and untrue."
But in time he began to question his own thoughts in the relentless onslaught of Otto’s empiricism, and he recalled his fight in town and how he had fallen down the hillside while Otto fixed the tire, and in any case he knew what a concussion could do.
His entire body hurt but once he was back in his own bed he slept profoundly. He awakened in a much darker and more objective mood. He took a deep breath but winced sharply. Otto came in, set a cup of coffee on the nightstand, and opened the window. Yellow-blue light came in.
"That welt on your forehead looks awful," Otto said. "Had enough of this town yet?" he asked.
Mr. White did not reply. He felt sour. He did not get out of bed until much later, and when he did, Otto noticed that his employer had started re-packing things, slowly and silently, returning books and knick-knacks to moving boxes that still lay around. Mr. White was holding a book in his hands when a knock came to the front door.
"Don't answer it," he told Otto.
But Otto had already parted the curtains and looked out at the porch. "It's Dr. Stewa
rt," he said.
Mr. White sat down in his favorite red chair in the living room. "All right, let him in."
Otto opened the door. The doctor had grey hair slicked back from his narrow head, round silver glasses on his nose, and wore an old houndstooth jacket over a rumpled white shirt. He set his bag down on an ottoman and looked up at Mr. White as his hands fumbled for his instruments.
The doctor squinted into his face. "You don't look so bad for someone who got his tail kicked," he said while shaking down a thermometer.
"Well I feel bad. I'm worn out. I'm fed up."
"Folks like you with too much time on their hands get pretty good at taking an inventory of all their aches and pains. Roll up your sleeve."
Mr. White started to mumble something but the doctor shoved the thermometer in his mouth. He placed a blood pressure cuff on his arm and felt the pulse in his wrist. As he let the pressure out of the cuff he took the thermometer out of Mr. White's mouth.
"...I was saying that this place might be bad for my health," Mr. White said.
"Well you're strong as an ox, considering all the abuse you've subjected your body to with cigarettes and alcohol and foreign food. Does it hurt here?" he poked him in the ribs "and here?" in the abdomen "and here?" in the back.
"Yes, yes, and yes."
"Well that's to be expected. No broken bones. Some hematomas - some 'bruises' - but they'll heal."
"I know what hematomas are."
"I'm sure you do. You've been letting people know how smart you are your whole life."
"Thank you," White said icily.
The doctor was putting his instruments back in his bag. "One more thing," he said without looking up. "I want to tell you something. Or show you something. Have you got a few minutes to drive down the road with me?"
"Why? What's this about?"
The man snapped his satchel shut and looked at him. "Let's just say that a doctor hears a lot of things in the course of his rounds, and over the years. People who are dying or think they're dying always have something they want to get off their chest, or out of their conscience. I have someone I’ve been pulling through months of weakness after a heart attack who'd like to talk to you. He'd come see you in person but he can't get out of the house yet."
"Who is he?"
"Good Lord, I actually put on something other than pajamas to come out here and you have the temerity to give me the third degree? I sometimes wonder just how much you've learned from all your travels and esoteric studies. Not manners, in any case. Look, you wouldn't know this man's name if I told you. Now come with me. This'll be good for you. If nothing else, this will convince you that not everyone around this town despises you."