“Do you have a picture of Sarah?”
From my right hip pocket I tug out my wallet, which as usual is too full of laundry slips, business cards, and ancient notes to myself to make a smooth exit.
“This is Sarah last year,” I say handing her the wallet.
“She looks just like her mother when I met her in Colombia.”
Angela examines the photograph and winks at me.
“God, Gideon, no wonder you married Rosa.
She’s just stunning! I bet she has all the boys going crazy.”
She doesn’t know the half of it.
“Let’s see your boys,” I say, taking my wallet back. To be so serious, Angela could be a real flirt. Though it was the first time for both of us, sex was, I seem to recall, her idea. I thought I was going to hell.
Still, I can’t say I needed much encouragement.
“Sure,” she says, getting up.
“I’ve got my favorite picture of them in the bedroom.”
I watch her glide from the kitchen and wonder if she has begun to miss
sex. Maybe she isn’t missing it. Somehow, though? I don’t think Angela is much of a date these days. She seems too emotional. Still, I can’t deny that I’m interested in her.
When she returns, she hands me a framed picture.
“They look just like my dad. This is Brad on the left and Curt on the right.”
I study the photo and am reminded of her father’s square jaw. He was a bear of a man, and I was scared to death of him. If he had known what his daughter was doing in my mother’s ‘58 Fairlane all those summers, he would have killed me.
A widower himself, he died from a massive heart attack, my mother wrote me in Colombia, while Angela and Dwight were on their honeymoon.
“This is terrible to say, but when I heard he had died, I was a little relieved. I was scared shitless of him,” I admit.
“Even in South America I was afraid he would find out what we did those summers and come get me.”
“I remember how you used to worry,” Angela laughs, as she sits down across from me.
“Either God or Dad was going to get you. It was just a matter of time.”
There is a twinkle in her eye. I feel good, thinking this conversation must be providing some relief for her. Women allow themselves to grieve,
and it is obvious to me that Dwight’s death has affected her greatly. Still, she will have to make a living. She wrote in December that she had kept the books for the farm, but she had never worked in town. Who would hire a woman almost fifty with no skills? There were no jobs anyway.
“It’s not too late for God,” I say, pretending to look out the window.
“Are you still religious?” she asks, getting up again to warm up the soup which is in a pot on the kitchen counter.
“I’m more spiritual than formally religious, but Dwight went to the First Baptist Church every Sunday and Wednesday night until the month before he died. It didn’t seem to accomplish much.”
I watch as she takes two bowls from the cupboard above it and ladles soup into them. Angela seems to be swinging back and forth between bitterness and nostalgia. I know the feeling. Death is the ultimate thief.
“Rosa’s death cured me once and for all. I probably was looking for an excuse to give it up, and breast cancer was a real good one.”
As Angela places one of the bowls into the microwave above her, she says brightly, “You must not have heard our big news. Paul Taylor was charged yesterday with murdering Tommy Ting’s father. It’s the most incredible story you can imagine. Paul was supposed to have hired a worker in his meat-packing plant to cut his throat. It’s ridiculous!”
Angela’s face has become red with indignation.
I say, “I’m representing the plant worker.”
“You are?” she says, surprise giving way to enthusiasm.
“That’s wonderful. You can help Dick get this case dismissed against Paul.”
How strange! I realize now that I had unconsciously thought that I would get pressure from whites not to take Bledsoe’s case.
“How do you know Paul’s not guilty?” I ask.
“That summer we began going out, you regularly called the Taylors exhibit A of a bankrupt way of life.”
A faraway look steals over Angela’s face as she rearranges her mostly unused silverware on the mat.
“I doubt if they were any worse than anybody else.”
“They were, too!” I yelp, and tell her the story of Paul’s buying at a tax sale my mother’s eighty acres left to her by her father. I had lost contact with her during those years, and she probably never heard what had happened.
Angela had always liked my mother, and she murmurs sympathetically, “That was terrible, Gideon. Paul can be ruthless. I know that.”
“Ruthless, hell!” I exclaim, thoroughly worked up now.
“He threatened to kill that old man a month before he died,” I say and relate to her what I have learned at the prosecutor’s office.
Angela will keep anything secret I ask her.
Angela holds her face in her hands while I talk and responds when I am finished, “Surely he wouldn’t have someone murdered. Why would he do such a thing?”
“Greed!” I practically shout at her.
“They’ve always been like that. You know they have.
They’re so damn rich they just have to have more and more.”
Angela shakes her head.
“Not as rich now. Like a lot of people, Oscar and Paul overextended in the eighties and lost quite a bit of their land. It’s been really tough over here.”
“Well, that explains his motive then,” I say, understanding now why he was desperate enough to hire someone to kill to get his hands on the plant. God, I wish I had been around to see their faces when they realized what was happening to them. I still my right foot, which has been tapping the linoleum, and cross my legs.
Where is this acid surge of venom pumping from? It is as if a volcano has been waiting to erupt, and now that it has started, it won’t stop.
I’m not sure I want it to. After all these years, it feels good.
Angela looks worried instead of indignant as I thought she would be.
Maturity has made her cautious.
“Gideon, you need to be careful about what you’re getting into. Paul is still very powerful here. Taylor Realty probably still holds half the mortgages on the square even though they’re not worth much because the economy’s so depressed.”
I am pleased by the concern in her voice. I think I like this older version better. She was so sure of herself as a teenager it used to bug me.
“Tell me what he’s been up to,” I say, dredging up a spoonful of corn, green beans, onion, and beef from the bottom of the bowl. It has been almost thirty years since we have had an extended conversation, yet I sense I would have been comfortable if I had married this woman. Living with Rosa on a daily basis was sometimes like having a Roman candle go off daily in the house. Rain or shine, I could count on several bursts of heat and light. If I was within earshot, she could turn the job of scrubbing the sink into the Passion Play.
For the most part, I loved it. Older now, I could enjoy somebody less wired.
“Until yesterday, Paul Taylor,” Angela declares, pushing away her untouched bowl and dabbing needlessly at her mouth with a paper napkin,
“could have been elected governor. He’s got that much energy. He’s smart, well-read, and interested in everything.”
She smiles at some private memory, and, irrationally, I wonder just how well she knows him.
Still, this is a small town. Bear Creek numbers barely six thousand people and more than half of them are black. Subtract them, the kids, old folks, and women, and there can’t be too many men in her age group.
They couldn’t help being at least acquaintances even if they hated each other.
“How’s he holding up?” I ask.
“His father put on some weight as he
got older.”
Angela glances up at a calendar on the GE.
“He runs in the Dallas Marathon every year. He looks good. He stays in shape.”
I finger the roll around my gut and decide against another bowl, though I could eat the whole crock pot.
“It sounds like you keep up with him pretty good,” I say, chagrined by the irritation I’m beginning to feel. God, I’m glad I don’t live here anymore. I haven’t been in Bear Creek two hours, and already my nose is out of joint.
“You know what it’s like here,” Angela says, cheerfully, not issuing a denial.
“You can’t hide anything in Bear Creek. He’s been having an affair with Mae Terry off and on for years, and everybody in town knows it, including Jill.”
“Mae Terry?” I exclaim, my memory kicking into overdrive.
“She’s been in a wheelchair since we were in high school!”
Angela takes my cup for a refill.
“Paul is absolutely crazy about her. It obviously can’t be the sex.”
I study her face, thinking I detected a hint of protectiveness in her voice. For all I know, Angela had just climbed out of bed with him before I drove up.
“Angela, he’s an asshole!” I say, not even bothering to try to hide my hostility. Actually, I’ve kept up with Bear Creek more than I thought I had. Bits and pieces of gossip have made their way to me for years from eastern Arkansas, and I only pretended I wasn’t paying attention.
Though I haven’t heard about Paul’s sex life, I’ve known Jill and Mae forever. Both passed as small town beauty queens in high school until Mae was in an automobile accident her senior year that left her a paraplegic. She was, and is, I guess, the smartest person ever to come out of Bear Creek. Blessed or cursed with a photographic memory and supposedly an un testable IQ, until a decade ago she taught English at
Duke, and then abruptly quit and came home to Bear Creek. I heard stories years ago she had been suspected of major plagiarism and cut a deal to retire with full benefits.
“Jill is cold as Christmas, Gideon. You remember how she was. She could divorce Paul in a second and clean his clock in the process,” Angela says breezily.
“But Sean is only twelve, and she’s afraid he’d choose to go with his father and a judge would let him. Paul takes him practically everywhere with him. Actually, he’s a wonderful father.”
I wipe my mouth with a paper napkin.
“Jesus, you make Pml sound like a role model.”
Angela takes her bowl over to the sink and begins to rinse it out.
“Paul obviously isn’t a saint. I suspect you’ve probably got some woman hanging all over you, too.”
“I do,” I blurt, “but she’s practically young enough to be my daughter.”
Angela laughs at my admission, her voice booming all over her kitchen.
“Poor Gideon.
What a tragic figure you’ve become.”
I smile. She is mocking me, but it takes me back thirty years when she
used to tease me.
“You know what I mean,” I say, feeling this conversation about to turn even more awkward than it already is.
“I’m sure you haven’t started going out, but it’s not easy to find somebody you’re comfortable with.”
“I don’t expect to find a man,” she says, her voice suddenly faltering.
“Living with Dwight was so simple and easy it was like being in a different century. He was good to the boys, good to me, good to his brother and his family. He worked hard, believed in God, believed in helping others, he never cheated another man, never cheated on me. All he wanted to do was farm, but no matter how long and hard he worked, we rarely had a good year, especially in the last decade. I’m glad he died before he lost it. You know, there is something terribly wrong with this country if a man like Dwight can’t make a living growing food.”
There is a surprising amount of bitterness in her voice I have never heard before, but I suppose it is understandable. She’s lived almost two generations through not much thick and a lot of thin.
I feel a pang of jealousy toward St. Dwight. He probably never had a doubt in his life about anything, but what did it get him? Damn, the poor sucker’s only been dead three months, and I’m ready to go drive a nail into his coffin to make sure he doesn’t try to get out.
“What they say about nice guys is undoubtedly true,” I say, knowing any words of praise I could add would ring hollow. I ask again, “What do you
think you’ll do?”
“You want to buy a farm?” she asks, giving me a wintry smile.
What a ludicrous image that conjures up. I can’t really see myself taking a tractor apart. The last light bulb I tried to unscrew somehow got stuck in the socket, so I just left it for the new owners. At least I left them with a working heating system.
“Even if you don’t sell to Cecil, will you be able to make enough,” I ask, “to get your boys through school?”
From across the kitchen she eyes me suspiciously as if I’m some rich sugar daddy about to make her an offer she doesn’t want to hear.
“I’ll be all right,” she says, closing down suddenly. I feel I can trust her, but for good reason she obviously isn’t ready to go too far with me.
“Does Paul really own half the town?” I ask, deciding to ratchet down this conversation a notch or two. Though I think I understand, it is safer for the moment to talk about the present than the past. Besides, I’m here to learn about the case, not take a trip down memory lane, aren’t I?
My question pulls Angela back to the table.
She wets her lips with her tongue and swallows like a child taking medicine that isn’t as bad as she feared.
“Maybe all of it,” she says ruefully.
“After the boycott by the blacks, people who had been here for decades began to leave Bear Creek.
Oscar had brought Paul in with him by then, and they bought property downtown dirt cheap. Even though it’s been almost twenty-five years a lot of it is still just sitting there. On the other hand, Paul doesn’t seem desperate enough to kill anybody over another business. From the way he travels, he appears to have plenty of money.”
I sip my coffee, now cold, wondering not for the first time today how much time has changed Angela.
“Do other people admire Paul,” I ask, “or are they just afraid of him?”
Angela hunches her shoulders.
“To the white population he’s the air we breathe. He could raise the rents on his buildings, and close the doors on twenty businesses, black and white. The town would almost die completely, and it’s not because we don’t have some talented people here. But all the whites are, by necessity, in bed together. The blacks have unified whites like nothing else could. We’ve got the worst schools in the state, the highest rate of teen pregnancy, the highest infant mortality rate. And the blacks are not going to rest until they’ve taken over politically.”
As she talks about the political gains made by blacks recently in Bear Creek, I remember again how idealistic she was as a teenager. At eighteen Angela said that if the whites in Bear Creek would be willing
to compromise, everything would work out just fine. Doubtless, that was part of her attraction for me. She couldn’t have been more different from the local girls if she had come from Mars. If I preached that summer to her about the virtues of Catholicism, her text was the evils of Southern racism. According to her, blacks had been the victims of slavery, rape, peonage, segregation, usury, in a word or two, total economic and political exploitation, but she hadn’t even gotten warmed up. Separate wasn’t equal, and all she had to do was point to the crumbling school and the gravel streets in the Negro sections of Bear Creek. It was the denial, Angela preached, of basic political rights in a so-called democracy that should shame me the most. Free speech, the right to vote, the right to hold office, these were just empty words in Bear Creek for over half the population. The only Negro in city hall, she pointed out, pushed a
broom. We had treated Negroes worse than our dogs, and because it was coming from Angela, and not the NAACP, SNCC, SCLC, or some other civil rights group, I could see for the first time in my life that every word was true. By the time I left for the University of Arkansas I had become that rare animal—a Southern liberal. I didn’t know then that things weren’t exactly wonderful for blacks in the North. It took the TV images of Louise Day Hicks and South Boston years later before it sank in how segregated things were north of the Mason-Dixon line. But no wonder we fell in love that summer! Who could have withstood all that sincerity?
“The county’s now seventy percent black,” she tells me as if she were some big-city ward politician.
“It took that high a percentage before they could really begin to take over.”
I try not to sound snide, but I can’t help but comment, “You don’t seem quite as sympathetic to blacks as you were that summer before we went off to college.”
It is as if I have slapped her in the face.
“You don’t live here,” she begins automatically, but already I see color in her cheeks.
“It’s changed; they’re violent, they use drugs…”
“Whites do, too,” I bait her.
“You can’t have forgotten how you used to rake the South over the coals for keeping blacks down.”
“You’re absolutely right. I did,” she says flatly.
“I must seem like a terrible hypocrite, don’t I?”
She smiles, reminding me of how quickly she used to give in on the few occasions I convinced her that she was wrong. A delightful quality in anybody, but especially in a dogmatic eighteen-year-old from New Jersey. It made me respect her.
“Thanks to you,” I say, winking at her, “I went off to save the world.
Talk about hubris!”
Her eyes shine with the memory of the power she had over me.
“I really admired you for joining the Peace Corps. I would have written, but Dwight got jealous every time your name came up.”
St. Dwight jealous? How nice!
“I thought he was perfect,” I say maliciously. What an advantage the living have over the dead! Short-term, of course, but even if all you have is the last word, it’s still satisfying.
Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement Page 5