Читать книгу Eden Rise - Robert Jeff Norrell - Страница 14

I had come with my father to Bebe’s for lunch. Joe Black Pell was due to arrive any minute. “Mama, it’s a mistake to use Pell to defend Tommy,” my father said. “I’ve talked to Harve Foster and he’s willing to help. Pell doesn’t have any principles.”

Bebe frowned. “Buddy, you’re just parroting your father, and he never liked Joe Black’s politics. Joe Black is very smart, tough as they come, and he’s loyal. If Harvey Foster took the case and some big shot said ‘boo’ to him, he’d drop Tommy in a second.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I think I do, and you know why? Harvey never uttered a cross word to your daddy, and a good lawyer will take his client on when he needs to.”

“A good lawyer does what his client wants.”

“Look, Buddy, Joe Black has already started defending Tommy. He jumped right in that night at the hospital, and we should be thankful to have him.”

Daddy sat back and scowled. “Well, I just don’t like the sonuvabitch.”

She winced as she leaned forward in her easy chair, her legs still propped on the ottoman. She pointed a bony finger at Daddy. “You know, Buddy, you may be forty-seven years old, and I may be about to die, but it’s still not all right for you to cuss in front of me.” They glared at each other for a moment before she spoke again. “Besides, it’s going to be expensive and I’m the one with the money to pay out for a lawyer.”

She had played her two trump cards—the fact of her advancing cancer, and her control over the McKee finances. As if that settled it, she turned and looked out the window. Fury filled Daddy’s eyes, and he suddenly pushed out of his chair and stomped from the room. I squirmed in discomfort as Bebe stared at the door that closed behind him.

The effect of disease on her appearance was profound. She had been a beautiful woman—willowy with high cheekbones and black-Irish coloring—and she had remained so until the past few months. Once when Cathy and I were examining a 1920s-era photograph of her in a family album, we agreed Bebe looked very like Audrey Hepburn. When Bebe and I were at the Elite Café in Montgomery once, an old man in a linen suit and white buck shoes had stopped at our table for a reunion with her. As he was leaving, he said to me, “You take good care of this girl, you hear, son? The old boys in Montgomery still say Brigid McCarthy is the rarest beauty of them all.”

I wanted to say something, anything, to reassure her about her decision on Joe Black. “Bebe, I think Mr. Pell is a very colorful character.”

A smile slowly came on her thin, gray face. “‘Colorful’ hardly captures Joe Black’s character. Colorful like Blackbeard the pirate.” She looked away for a moment and then returned my gaze with a twinkle in her dark eyes. “Actually, the more apt analogy would be to Huckleberry Finn.”

They had gone to Catholic school together in Montgomery, Bebe explained, and the young Joe Black was mischievous, funny, but also very smart. He always insisted he wanted to marry Bebe, but his family didn’t have much money and by the time he had worked his way through college and law school and established a law practice, she was already married to Granddaddy. Much later Joe Black married a nice but rather plain Methodist, Bebe told me, but they didn’t have children. Joe Black was active in the “loyalist” wing of the Democratic Party, the group that supported the national Democrats and opposed the more conservative Dixiecrats, a faction in which Granddaddy had been a prime mover. Because Granddaddy didn’t approve of Joe Black, Bebe went years without seeing him, but after Granddaddy died, she asked Joe Black to help with her business.

“I did what my husband wanted for almost fifty years,” she said, “and that strikes me as abundant wifely submission. I thought I needed an adviser who wouldn’t always be telling me what ‘the Judge’ would have wanted.” The confusion must have been apparent on my face, but she didn’t explain further except to say, “Joe Black has been very attentive over the recent months.”

He arrived and we had lunch. Daddy didn’t come back, and his absence shadowed the table. Bebe called for Orene. “Since Buddy’s not here, let’s seat Marvin at that place.” When Marvin appeared and was introduced, Joe Black said, “Chicago! Son, that’s ’bout my favorite city.” Marvin looked curiously at the little, old man and nodded with almost a smile.

When Joe Black took the last bite of his chess pie, he smiled up at Orene. “You outdid yourself, darlin’, with this effort. What’s yo’ secret?”

“Good buttermilk and fresh lard for the crust.” Orene leaned over and kissed the little man’s bald head. “I’m going to put the rest in a box for you to take home.”

“God bless you.”

Bebe asked Joe Black what he knew about the charges against me. The court had set Buford Kyle’s trial for the second week in August, and I would testify then. I felt myself shiver a bit at the very idea of it.

“Brigid,” Joe Black said as he pushed away from the table, “the circuit solicitor told me this morning that he could see Tommy and me this afternoon to talk over the situation. We oughta go on down there and see can we talk some sense into this prosecutor, Cal Taliaferro. By the way, where is Buddy?”

She shrugged and glanced over at me. “I think you must go on without Buddy. You and Marvin can look after Tommy for me.” Joe Black smiled widely at the vote of confidence.

We had just driven out of Eden Rise when Joe Black asked what career interested me. It took a minute to respond because I was distracted by all that he was doing while he steered his Buick down the road. He took a cigar knife out of his pants pocket, carefully sliced the closed end of a large cigar, and then punched the thin rod up its center. He licked the twelve-inch cylinder all the way around twice, took out a box of matches, burned the cigar end for ten seconds, and finally put it in his mouth and puffed three times. While accomplishing these tasks mainly with his right hand, his left had been engaged in navigating past two trucks and a tractor on the narrow road, adjusting his outside mirror, and tapping time on the steering wheel to “King of the Road” playing on the radio. I had never seen such manual dexterity, and it was a good thing or we’d have been dead in the ditch.

I glanced over the seat at Marvin, who was shaking his head in disgust. I guessed that country novelty songs weren’t big in the Chicago ghetto.

“I like that Roger Miller, don’t you, son?” Joe Black said. “I kinda identify with that, drivin’ like I do from one courthouse to the next.” He puffed a couple of times. “I’m sorry, son. I interrupted you telling me about what kinda work you wanna do.”

“Well, Mr. Pell—”

“Son, call me Joe Black. I’ll let you know when I get old enough to have that ‘Mister.’”

“All right. I guess I might be interested in being a lawyer, although I’m not sure.”

“It’s a good profession if you willing to work hard. ’Course I worked hard a long time before I made any real money.” I asked if he defended many people charged with crimes. “I don’t do this kinda work anymore, except in this case as a favor to your grandmother. I mostly sue insurance companies and corporations”—he pronounced it caw-pra-shuns. “Lotta cases don’t go nowhere, but every now and then one pays well. I love being in the courtroom, trying to persuade twelve jurors to see the situation my way. I love getting money outa big companies.”

Cal Taliaferro, the circuit solicitor, was seated at a beat-up desk piled high with files in an office glaring with mid-afternoon sunlight bouncing off brassy honorary plaques when he received us. The solicitor was a stocky, red-faced man with strawberry blond hair glued down with Brylcreem. His voice made me think he’d been on the Camels for a long time, and the blood vessels on his face suggested a similar close relationship with Jack Daniels. He was the kind of man who could put a smile on his face and hold it well past the point at which you understood it represented not friendliness or mirth but only a politician’s habit.

Joe Black slapped Taliaferro on the back and made jokes about prosecutors. He asked Taliaferro if he expected opposition in next year’s elections. “Oh, there’s a little lawyer over in Selma, pretty wet behind the ears, who’s making some noise about going against me.” The smile widened. “Don’t think he’ll be too strong.”

“Now, Cal, you let me know if it gets serious,” Joe Black said. “I been known to put a little money behind good public servants, and I got a good many friends who’ll do the same if I squeeze just a little.”

“Well, I appreciate that, Joe Black, and I’ll sure remember it.” He pointed Joe Black and me to the two chairs across from him. Joe Black settled back into a chair with cracked leather upholstery and motioned me into its twin, which left Marvin standing at the door, unacknowledged by Taliaferro, who looked at me. “Tom, I’m real sorry about what happened down here, and I’m hopin’ we going to be able to get this matter taken care of without too much trouble in your life.”

I thanked him and looked over to Joe Black, who forged ahead. “Now, Cal, are you really going to have to go to trial in this case? Realistically, you ain’t going to get a conviction.”

I was startled to hear my lawyer make the suggestion that the man who killed Jackie should not even be prosecuted. Buford Kyle needed to be in prison for a long time. I knew I had to shut my mouth, but I could feel Taliaferro stiffen, suddenly wary in a whole new way.

“Well, Joe Black, as you know, this Kyle fellow is white trash and should be in the penitentiary for killing the nigger boy, but I agree with you ain’t no jury in Yancey County going to send him there.” Taliaferro shook his head perfunctorily. “But I’ve already heard from the Attorney General that I gotta prosecute Kyle.”

Joe Black nodded. “All right, I understand that situation, but assuming a Yancey County jury acquits Kyle, this whole business oughta be over. No point in prosecuting this boy here for defending himself once the man who killed an innocent colored boy has been let go.”

Taliaferro’s smile twitched. “Well, we going to have to see. Folks here don’t think the Herndon boy was innocent—he was an agitator and Kyle was defending himself.”

This was too wrong to ignore. “But Mr. Taliaferro, I was defending myself. He was trying to kill us all.” Taliaferro started in surprise, and Joe Black shot me a warning look, then moved in. “Cal, just because they some hotheads around who mad at Tommy here, that doesn’t mean you gotta go along with ’em. You bigger than that.”

There was no smile now, not the least remnant of one. Taliaferro gazed at Joe Black but wouldn’t look my way. “We just going to have to see about that.” He busied himself with a bunch of scribbled notes. “Now, Mr. McKee, if we could go over some of the questions I’ll be asking you on the witness stand—what happened at the store, why you were going through Yancey County that day.”

Joe Black raised his hand. “I’ll get the boy ready, Cal. Don’t you worry.”

Taliaferro shrugged and we left. I felt the eyes of the solicitor’s office workers boring into my back as we left and went out into the hall.

Joe Black was uncharacteristically silent on the drive back to Eden Rise. At one point I looked over the back seat at Marvin, who shrugged at me as if to say, “What shut him up?”

“Taliaferro’s going to try to get me,” I said.

Joe Black’s voice lacked all its normal geniality. “Taliaferro best be sure he’s on solid ground, because by God he’ll have some nasty enemies if he keeps after you.”

“Well, it sounded like you promised to help him get re-elected.”

“Shit, boy”—he spat the words at me—“I was just telling him I’m going to be paying attention to his political future. He don’t do right by you, that boy from Selma going to have the best-funded damn circuit solicitor campaign we ever saw in Alabama, and I don’t even know his damn name yet. I raise $25,000 for Mr. X ’fore Cal Taliaferro gets his ass wiped from tomorrow morning’s crap. You understan’?” His face was hard and still but for the flexing jaw muscle as he chewed the stub of a cigar.

His courtly way returned when he reported the unhappy outcome of our meeting to Bebe. Was there any possibility, she asked, that the Alabama attorney general might overrule Taliaferro?

“I don’t think so, darlin’. Richmond Flowers says the dove-shoot of nigras in Alabama is over. We going to stop people from killing ’em just ’cause they feel like it. Richmond said it was ‘morally and politically impossible’ when I made the suggestion they drop it.” He shrugged. “Wouldn’t even listen to some incentives I was about to propose to him.”

Bebe looked a little startled. “Joe Black, do you mean a bribe?”

“Certainly not. I mean a five-figure donation, in cash, to his campaign for governor next year, and much more from other friends of mine. But like I say, he wasn’t listening.”

“Joe, why does Taliaferro want to keep after Tommy?”

“Pressure from the segregationists. They trying to jerk a young nigger lover in line. Taliaferro’s being real political. Because the AG’s office is pressuring him to go after Kyle, he’s trying to cover hisself with the local folks by equating Tommy shooting Kyle with the death of Jackie Herndon. I explained how they weren’t equivalent, but he couldn’t be told.”

She flinched. I couldn’t tell if it was physical pain or a response to what Joe Black had just said. “If Tommy’s tried, a white jury might convict him.”

“It’s quite possible.”

They discussed my fate with such matter-of-factness that my gut twisted in fear and I wanted to run out of the room—run out of Eden Rise forever. But I tried to keep my voice as steady as theirs. “What exactly will happen if I’m convicted?”

“We get you bonded out while I negotiate a reasonable penalty.”

“What you mean, ‘reasonable penalty?’ The law says up to 10 years.” Now my voice was quavering.

“A little incarceration, or better, no jail and some probation.”

“Incarceration” sounded like the second-worst word in the world. “What do you guess about jail time?”

“You’re under twenty-one, no previous convictions for anything. Could be six months or a year.”

“Where would he serve it?” Bebe said, her voice soft.

“Crucial thing is to get somewhere other than ‘hard-case’ prisons like Atmore.”

Images of knife fights and homosexual rapes were flashing through my mind and I was trying to swallow my fear when Joe Black led me out to the front porch so we could start getting ready for the trials. He said the issue in Kyle’s trial would be his motive, what provoked him to shoot. There might only be two witnesses, Kyle and me. When I asked about Alma, he said Taliaferro hadn’t located her. “Which is good. I mean, I would find her if I thought it’d help, even if I had had to hire that Jew who found Eichmann. But she puts a face on the outside agitator defense they going to use. From what you’ve said, she probably be a terrible witness.”

His look was sober. “You, on the other hand, going to be a good witness. You going to tell the truth, but I want you to tell the ‘lean truth.’ I mean not everything you know but what is most relevant to the question. Ya understan’?”

I wasn’t sure but I nodded like I did.

“So, Tommy, now tell me, you and this boy Jackie, how’d y’all get to be friends, or were y’all really friends?”

I then told him about Jackie, beginning with the first week of school when I was shooting baskets on the courts behind the dorm and was surprised when this very tall colored boy suddenly appeared. He had close-cropped hair that accentuated the delicate shape of his head. Jackie had asked politely if he could shoot with me. The first time I bounced him the ball he took three dribbles and then went up for a jump shot higher than anyone I had ever seen. He caught the ball on the first bounce and leaped again, this time twisting around in mid-air and laying the ball high against the backboard with a reverse spin. During the next week Jackie and I fell into the habit of playing pick-up basketball games every afternoon. We chose the teams, deciding after a while it would be more fun to be on opposite sides and guard each other. After two hard hours of running and jumping, we would go sweatily to the cafeteria. Jackie was a favorite of the black women who worked on the cafeteria line. They always asked how he was feeling and didn’t he want a little more mashed potatoes or an extra piece of cornbread. As Jackie’s constant supper companion, I got their favor, too: “Tommy, let me put this other chicken leg on top for you, honey.”

Joe Black was nodding. “Aw right. So y’all big friends from the basketball court. That’s good. Playground friends. Now, Tommy, the circuit solicitor going to ask you why you were driving through Yancey County that evening. What would you say to that?”

The true answer went back to my failed relationship with Beth Kaplan, whom I had dated through the fall and into the winter. My dorm mate Jeffrey, Beth’s childhood friend from Long Island, had introduced us. Short and buxom with a wild mop of kinky black hair, Beth kept up a steady flow of nosy questions, sharp opinions, and witty barbs on our first date to a Duke football game—she had asked me out—and then she bedded me that same night. I was taken aback and delighted. We dated all that fall, but after Christmas she began to withdraw and then she dumped me. She said she was tired of it. I was angry, hurt, and made to feel boring. I told her I loved her. “You’re not in love,” she retorted. “Just in heat.” I was devastated.

Her rejection made me look hard at who I was. I had gone to college thinking everyone would be like me—the best people from their hometown, learning and having fun together. But it wasn’t like that. Instead of a collection of high school stars like I’d been in Eden Rise, each one was unique—and in one way or another, superior to me. Compared to Jackie’s, my athletic skills were pitiful. Kids in every class were much smarter, and my grades reflected my mediocrity—mostly Cs. I couldn’t crack jokes or make funny comebacks the way Jeffrey and Beth did. I was a star in Eden Rise, but in the major leagues of Duke, I was barely even on the bench. I thought for a time I would stand out by becoming a party guy in a fraternity. The Sigma Nu house was full of good-looking, wealthy Southern boys who had grown up fishing, hunting, and watching football—a perfect fit for me, I thought. But I discovered I couldn’t conform to what they wanted. I knew it as soon as one of them said Beth’s last name, “Kaplan,” in a derisive snicker to her face. Worse, being Jackie’s friend made me as welcome in the frat as Martin Luther King. On a pledge workday when I was mopping the party room floor and several brothers were hazing pledges, Frank Strother, a senior from Birmingham who had rushed me very hard, had sneered at me. “McKee, you mop good. Just like a nigger.” Strother’s face dared me to say something, but I didn’t. “But you ought to be good with a mop, McKee, being a nigger lover like you are.” My hands tightened on the mop. “You hang around with that nigger all the time in the cafeteria. White folks not good enough for you?”

I charged him but the other so-called brothers pulled me away. After that day, I began to drift away from Sigma Nu, and maybe because of that, I’d had drifted into involvement with civil rights protest. I didn’t do it out of any great moral commitment. It was more that I hated the Frank Strothers of the world. And I needed Jackie’s friendship, especially after losing everybody else’s.

All this ran through my mind as I sat before Joe Black, but I couldn’t speak. How would this old man understand this convoluted story? It wouldn’t make sense to anybody else. So Joe Black plunged ahead on his own. “As I understand it, you were giving two friends a ride to their summer job. It’s what folks in Ruffin County are taught is the polite thing—give somebody a ride if they ask. Period. You follow me?”

I nodded. The lean truth.

“He’s going to ask you if you ever participated in any civil rights protests.” When I didn’t answer right away, Joe Black waited a moment. “Son, if you did, I need to know now. It’ll come out anyway.”

Alma Jones had stopped Jackie in the cafeteria and demanded that he participate in a march at the Durham town square in sympathy with the Selma voting protests. Jackie had gazed down at his sneakers. “Oh, come on, boy!” she had said angrily. “Last night they showed on TV how those Alabama police just beat hell outa those poor folks on a bridge. You gotta help!” She shot me a hard stare. “You too.”

I had seen the beating on the Sigma Nu television—my last time at the fraternity house—and listened to comments from Strother and others about “niggers getting what they deserved.” I was thinking of that when Alma demanded that I march, too. In downtown Durham the next afternoon, Jackie and I had joined about fifty people walking slowly down a commercial block. Alma spotted us and came over with a placard that read: “Selma: Let the Negroes Vote.” Jackie and I walked side-by-side up and down the block. There were more police and reporters than there were protesters. The next morning the student newspaper ran a story with pictures of the protest. There Jackie and I were in the background of one picture.

When I recounted this to Joe Black, he nodded. “Aw right, aw right. Let’s move on. The circuit solicitor’s going to ask why you took Kyle’s shotgun.” I just stared blankly at Joe Black for a while.

“You didn’t wanta take the chance of him start shooting at you again. Then he’s going to ask why you threw it away. You probably threw it away ’cause it wasn’t yours and you didn’t want some policeman to see it and keep you from getting this boy to the hospital. Ya understan’?”

Those were pretty good answers—better than the truth, because I didn’t really know why I did some of what I did.

“See, son, in this Kyle trial, your testimony is going to be a kinda dry run for when you get tried. You going to tell yo’ story in such a convincing way that some of those jurors going to believe you, even though they don’t want to.” He smiled. “Word going to get around the county the boy is telling the truth, and then they going to acquit you two weeks later in your trial. You hear me?”

I wanted to believe Joe Black, but I knew I was simply too scared to be a good witness. I couldn’t say that, though, because the little man with the big smile on his craggy face was willing me to think something else about myself.

When we finally went back inside, Bebe was dozing in her chair. Joe Black and I were tiptoeing through the den when she raised her head.

“Joe, dear, don’t go yet. I have one more bit of business to ask you about. Tommy, will you go get that pie from Orene and put it in Joe Black’s car so that it won’t spill?”

When I came back, Joe Black was sitting on the ottoman, leaning in toward Bebe, talking in a very low voice. I could make out only a few words of what he was saying: “two ex-wives . . . goes to Las Vegas . . . circuit solicitors don’t make that kind of money.” Bebe arched her eyebrows. “Must have some powerful good credit.”

As I walked Joe Black to his car, I said something about appreciating his work on my behalf. “I really don’t know why you’re taking on all this trouble.”

He pulled a pure white handkerchief from his back pocket, bowed his head, and coughed into it. When he looked at me again, he wore a wistful smile and his cloudy blue eyes were wet. He leaned his head toward Bebe’s den and nodded slowly at me. “Son, I been in love with that girl in there since I was eight years old. I do anything in the world for her before she goes. Ya understan’? Anything.”