A Gathering of Old Men
Page 20
“You ain’t taking this gun,” Luke Will called back to him.
It was quiet a little while. Charlie was smoking the cigarette, smoking it hard, like he had to hurry up and finish with it. Then I saw him getting up. I whispered to him to get back down, but he kept on getting up. I heard Lou hollering to him to stay down, but Charlie wasn’t listening to anybody. He was headed straight toward that tractor. And he hadn’t made more than two, three, maybe four steps when I heard the first shot. I saw him staggering but he didn’t go down; I saw him shooting but not sighting. I saw Lou out there waving his hands, telling everybody to stop, stop, stop. He was running all over the place, saying stop, stop, stop. I saw Charlie still going toward that tractor, but he wasn’t shooting now, just falling, slowly, slowly, slowly till he had hit the ground. Then you had nothing but shooting from then on. I was shooting, and it sounded like everybody in the world was shooting. It went on like that for about a minute. Then it was quiet, quieter than you ever heard in your life.
Then we all gathered out in the road. Over by the tractor, I saw Lou standing over somebody laying back against one of the tractor wheels. I heard somebody saying that we had got the son of a bitch.
But we had all gathered around Charlie. Mathu had knelt down ’side him and raised his head out of the dust. They had really got him. Right in the belly. He laid there like a big old bear looking up at us. He was trying to say something, but it never came out. He kept on looking at us, but after a while you could tell he wasn’t seeing us no more. I leaned over and touched him, hoping that some of that stuff he had found back there in the swamps might rub off on me. After I touched him, the rest of the men did the same. Then the women, even Candy. Then Glo told her grandchildren they must touch him, too.
Lou Dimes
There were three funerals two days later. Beau and Luke Will were buried in Bayonne; Charlie was buried at Marshall. The trial took place the following week, lasting three days. Candy hired her own lawyer, Clinton, to defend the blacks. The Klans defended Luke Will’s friends. And you’ve never seen a sadder bunch of killers in all your life—on either side. Everybody had something wrong with him—scratches, bruises, cuts, gashes. They had cut themselves on barbed wire, tin cans, broken bottles—you name it. Some had sprained their ankles jumping over ditches; others had sprained their wrists falling down on the ground. And some had just run into each other. Everybody was either limping, his arm in a sling, or there was a bandage round his head or some other part of his body. Out of all that, only one had been shot—Leroy.
They had all taken baths, and wore their best clothes. For three days, if you sat close enough to the front, you smelled nothing but Lifebuoy soap and mothballs.
The courthouse was packed every day, about an equal number of blacks and whites, with nearly half being people from the news media. They had come from all over the South. Even the national press was represented. Fix was there with his crowd—including Gil, who sat with the family. (By the way LSU beat Ole Miss, twenty-one to thirteen. Both Gil and Cal had over a hundred yards each.) The Klans and the Nazi Party were there to lend moral support to Luke Will’s friends. The NAACP was there, some black militants were there, and so were the state troopers, who stood by watching all and searching most of those who went in. Judge Ford Reynolds presided. Judge Reynolds is seventy, hair white as snow, face perpetually red from drinking, and he looks like the archetypical grandfather, or what you would want your grandfather to look like. He is very rich, always happy, vain about his good looks, and has a great sense of humor. And he admitted from the beginning that not only had he never presided over a case quite like this one, but that he had never heard of one like this in all his thirty-five years on the bench. He warned that the trial would be conducted orderly. And he further warned the court that they should not mistake that old white-headed man on the bench as soft, because he could be as hard as anyone else, and harder if need be.
“All right,” he said. “Swear in your first witness. Let’s get started.”
As I said, the trial went on for three days, and it was orderly most of the time. But every now and then one of the old black fellows, arm in sling, or forehead bandaged, knowing he was in the public eye, would go just a little overboard describing what had happened. Besides, he would use all nicknames for his compatriots—Clabber, Dirty Red, Coot, Chimley, Rooster. This would bring the court to laughing, especially the news people, who took the whole thing as something astonishing but not serious. No one else laughed nearly as much as the news people did; that is, until Mapes took the stand a second time to explain exactly where he was during the shooting. Before, he had told the court that he was somewhere in the yard. But now the D.A. wanted to know exactly where in the yard. Mapes refused to answer. Judge Reynolds cautioned that if he did not answer he could be charged with negligence of duty, seeing that two men had been killed. Mapes answered, but only for the D.A. to hear. The D.A. demanded that he speak loud enough so that the entire court could hear him. Mapes looked at the D.A. with those hard gray eyes, as if he were about to spring out of that chair and punch him, but instead said: “The whole fight, I was sitting on my ass in the middle of the walk. Luke Will shot me, and I was sitting on my ass in the middle of the walk. Now, is that loud enough?” And he got up from the witness chair and returned to the other seat. That’s when everyone in the courtroom started laughing, including Judge Reynolds. The people passing by out on the street must have thought we were showing a Charlie Chaplin movie in there. That happened the morning of the third day, and until that evening when the trial finally ended, people were still laughing. Mapes, with his left arm in a sling, stayed red all day, and would probably stay red for years to come.
The jury deliberated three hours, then returned with the verdict. After reading it and studying it for a moment, the judge told all defendants to rise, black and white alike. He said since the two men who had killed were both dead, being the same two who had killed Beau and shot Mapes, he could not pass judgment over them, but ask that their souls rest in peace. But for the others, he said he was putting all of them on probation for the next five years, or until their deaths—whichever came first. He said that meant he was taking away their privilege of carrying any kind of firing arm, rifle, shotgun, or pistol, or being within ten feet of anyone else with such weapons. (That was like telling a Louisianian never to say Mardi Gras or Huey Long.) He said if he heard once that any of the defendants picked up a gun, or was within ten feet of anyone with such weapon, he would send that person to prison for the rest of his natural-born life. He asked if there were any questions. There were no questions, and he slammed down the gavel and said court was adjourned.
Candy and I went out of the courtroom and stood out on the steps and watched the people leave. She asked Mathu if he wanted her to take him back home. He told her no; he told her Clatoo was there in the truck, and he would go back with Clatoo and the rest of the people. The old truck was parked in front of the courthouse, and we watched them all pile in. Candy waved goodbye to them. I felt her other hand against me, searching for my hand; then I felt her squeezing my fingers.
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