The Evangeline

by D. W. Buffa

  ‘I can’t tell you what he said to me; I can’t break his confidence. But I can tell you that he has never told me anything about what happened. God knows, I’ve tried; but the only response I ever get is a silence as profound as anything I have ever seen. It was that silence, the depth of it, that made me realise that beyond everything else that had happened out there, he had lost that connection with other human beings, that sense of being a part of what we all assume to be normal life. He was an outcast, an exile, and the only way he could get back was to pay the price that civilisation demands when someone breaks its law, even though he was so far from civilisation that, in a real sense, there was no law to break.’

  ‘If he just wants redemption,’ said Roberts,‘if he just wants to pay the price for breaking the law, why didn’t he take the offer, plead guilty, and be done with it? He could have done it when he was first arraigned.Why does he want to go to trial?’

  ‘For his confession; but confession to what, I’m not sure. He knows something, though. I can see it in his eyes.’

  ‘Something worse than what we know already?’

  Darnell looked away. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this, putting all of this on trial. No good will come of it, none that I can see.We’re in the same situation as Marlowe, you and I. Neither of us has any choice: you have to prosecute a man who wants you to convict him; I have to defend a man who does not want to be saved.We all do what we have to; but then, that’s the point, isn’t it? What we have to do, what we have no choice but to do.’

  ‘The law says—and not just the law, every moral code—that no one can take the life of another human being.’

  ‘There are exceptions,’ replied Darnell.

  ‘Self-defence, or the defence of others; but they only allow you to kill someone who is trying to kill someone else.’

  ‘And the case of necessity.’

  ‘But in Holmes, remember, the defendants were convicted,’ replied Roberts.

  ‘Yes, but the cases are not the same. Even if they were, it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Remember when you started law school, almost the first thing they talked about in criminal law?’

  Roberts nodded in recognition. ‘When causing another’s death is not a crime. A mountain climber falls, the others above him can’t hold the rope. If they cut the rope, he dies; if they don’t, he takes all of them to their deaths. They sacrifice his life to save theirs. But the difference is that he was dead either way; the only question was whether they were going to die, too.’

  ‘That isn’t that far from what happened here, is it?’

  Roberts put down his glass.‘Those law school examples were always so glib. They didn’t allow for shades of grey. Mountain climbers on a rope, the one at the bottom falls, the others can’t hold him. But how hard did they try? Did they wait as long as they could? Did they try everything they knew to save his life? Doesn’t that make some difference—how far they were willing to risk their own lives to save his? And what about the one hanging there, holding on—isn’t there some choice in all of this for him? Doesn’t he at least get to decide to cut the rope himself, to die so the others can live? Doesn’t that make all the difference in the way we think of his death? And doesn’t it teach us something important about how we should live?’

  ‘That is what you’re going to have to argue, isn’t it?’ asked Darnell. ‘That there is something more important than our own survival. The strangest part of this case is that Marlowe agrees with you. He believes that more than anything. He would have given his own life to save any one of those people, but what was he to do? It was not just his survival at stake. There were others, and what was he supposed to do about them?’

  ‘The law is going to lead us to perdition if it teaches us to think like that,’ insisted Roberts. ‘Human life reduced to a question of mathematics. Someone has to die so others can live.Where do you think that ends? We can’t start trading lives.’

  Darnell rose from his chair and began to move about the room. It was almost as if he were still in court, arguing to a jury. ‘What does that tell you about the anguish of Marlowe’s soul? The awful courage—the unforgivable courage—of what he did, what he had to do?’ Darnell looked back at Roberts.‘Was he right to do what he did? Of course he was.Was he wrong to do what he did? Yes, he was that, too. And damned forever because the choice between good and evil was never the choice he had.

  ‘We’re going to ruin a lot of people’s lives, you and I. And just like Marlowe, there is nothing we can do to stop it. That’s why I asked you to come here today, to tell you that. This is my last case. There won’t be any trials after this. But you have quite a few years left.Whatever happens, whether Marlowe is convicted or the jury lets him go, walk away from it when it is over. Don’t let this case ruin you.’

  ‘Ruin me?’ asked Roberts, touched by the old man’s concern, and puzzled, too.

  ‘I had a case once, years ago, when I was just starting out. I knew he was innocent, but I could not save him. I had to watch his execution. There has not been a day I haven’t thought about that, not one! You have to learn to live with the knowledge that sometimes, for all our questioning, we’ll never find the answers.’

  Chapter Four

  HOMER MAITLAND TOOK HIS PLACE ON THE bench, looked around the courtroom, as crowded as it had been every day since the trial started, and instructed the prosecution to call its next witness.

  Michael Roberts made a half turn towards the double doors at the back.

  ‘The People call Thomas Balfour.’

  Thomas Balfour had broad, burly shoulders and a face burned red by the sea. He walked with his feet wide apart, a habit become instinct even on dry land.

  ‘You’re the captain of the freighter, the White Rose?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ the witness replied in a British accent that had been dulled by thirty years’ contact with other languages and other races around the globe.

  ‘Were you on a voyage last July that took you into the south Atlantic?’

  Balfour’s face was large, with heavy lips and a thick nose, all of it framed by a grey close-clipped beard. His blue eyes, set well back behind heavy lids, had a shrewdness about them that seemed deliberate, as if he had trained himself to judge things by a standard more rigorous than a native tendency to take the world as it came.

  ‘Yes, we had left Punta Arenas on our way back to Bordeaux.’

  ‘Punta Arenas? Could you explain to the jury exactly where that is?’

  Balfour bent forward at the waist, his thick-fingered hands clasped together. When he shifted his weight you could almost hear the leather chair crack. ‘Punta Arenas is in Chile, on the western shore of the Straits of Magellan. It’s the most southerly port in South America. We had brought out a cargo of French manufactured goods; we were taking back a load of copper tubing.’

  Roberts, wearing one of the handful of striped ties he regularly wore to court, walked to an easel that had been set up midway between the bench, where Maitland sat, and the two counsel tables, three feet apart from each other.

  ‘That would be here,’ he said, using a wooden pointer on a map that included South America and the Atlantic.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘On your way back to Bordeaux?’ He drew an imaginary line from the tip of South America to the coast of France. ‘And what happened—after you left Punta Arenas?’

  Balfour craned his neck to get a better view.

  ‘Out there, not quite a thousand miles east of Rio de Janeiro—990 miles, to be exact; our position was 24 degrees, 28 minutes South and 27 degrees, 22 minutes West—that’s where we found them.’

  ‘Found who? Could you be more precise?’ asked Roberts as he stepped away from the map.

  ‘The survivors—what was left of them.’ A look of disgust swept across Balfour’s nearly hidden eyes.

  If Roberts felt any emotion, he did not show it. His face was a blank sheet on which an observer was free to write anything he wished, and no doubt all o
f it wrong.

  ‘You’re referring to the survivors of the Evangeline?’

  ‘Yes, that was the name they told me, the name of the boat that went down some forty days before we found them—those that were left—nearly dead.’

  ‘Just stay with the facts, if you would, Mr Balfour,’ said Roberts, suppressing a moment’s irritation. ‘Tell us how you happened to find them.Was there some kind of signal?’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ replied Balfour, shaking his head.‘How did we happen to find them, you ask? Chance. That was all, chance. If we had passed that spot an hour later, after the sun was down, we would not have seen them; and if we had not seen them, probably no one would have. That part of the ocean isn’t travelled much.’

  Roberts turned towards the jury and was about to ask the next question.

  ‘We saw them; they did not see us. Or perhaps they did, but they made no sign. They were too far gone for that.’

  Roberts wheeled around, but Balfour was not about to be stopped.

  ‘Close to dead, they were; a couple of them out of their heads with hunger and thirst. It made you wonder if they were really human, the way they looked,’ he added with a shudder. ‘Hope to God I never seen anything like that again.’

  ‘Yes, I’m certain they were all in a deplorable state. But tell us this, Captain Balfour, if you would: exactly how many survivors were there? How many people did you rescue from the sea?’

  ‘Six. There were six still alive.’

  Roberts raised an eyebrow. ‘Six still alive. Do you mean you found some who were not alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Roberts waited, expecting more.

  Balfour, with a look that almost seemed a warning, retreated into silence.

  ‘How many?’ Roberts asked with quiet insistence.

  ‘One.’

  Again Roberts waited, and again there was no response beyond that bare minimum one-word answer.

  ‘Captain Balfour, I realise that you come to this with a certain reluctance, and that you may have opinions of your own about what happened, but you’re here to tell us what you know. All we are trying to do is get at the truth.’

  Balfour raised his chin. He looked hard at Roberts. ‘The truth? The sea has a truth of its own.You can’t judge it from here. Marlowe there,’ he said, nodding with a kind of formal respect towards the counsel table where the defendant sat next to William Darnell, ‘he knows it, and so do I.’

  Roberts knew better than to argue the point. He let Balfour’s words echo into the courtroom silence and then started again. ‘Would you please describe for the jury the condition of the dead body you found?’

  ‘The condition? There was no condition.’

  ‘What was left of the body?’ asked Roberts, losing all patience. ‘Did it have a head?’

  ‘No, sir, it did not. Nor hands, nor feet either.’

  Roberts gripped the jury box railing. He peered intently into Balfour’s eyes.

  ‘The hands, the feet, the head—had all been severed?’

  ‘Yes, sir, so it appeared.’

  ‘What was left of the trunk? And what was the condition of that?’

  ‘Sir?’

  Roberts clenched his jaw. His eyes narrowed into a warning of their own.‘You’re under oath, Mr Balfour. Answer the question.’

  Balfour glared at him, and then relented. He nodded his head slowly, as if he had resigned himself to playing a part in a game he despised. ‘It had been cut open from the sternum to the navel, disembowelled.’

  Roberts walked the short distance from the jury box to the counsel table. He picked up a black folder and removed a three-page document. He asked Balfour if he recognised it.

  ‘It’s the list of what was found in the lifeboat. The names of the six survivors and…’

  ‘And the other name, the name that went with what was left of the body you were just describing?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know that. No one told me.’

  ‘No one told you? I see. Look at the list again, if you would. In addition to the names of the survivors, you also list the other things you found. How much food did you find on board?’

  ‘Food? There was no food. I mean…’

  ‘And water? How much water did they have left?’

  With a grim expression, Captain Balfour shook his head. ‘There was no water, not a drop.’

  ‘No food, no water. And no clothing, either, I assume—except what they wore?’

  The two men stared at each other. The silence was ominous, profound.

  ‘There was clothing other than that.’

  ‘Extra clothing they had brought with them?’

  ‘No, I would not think they had time to bring anything except what they wore. It belonged to the others, the ones who did not make it.’

  Roberts blinked his eyes, nodded quickly, and looked away. ‘You’ve listed it there,’ he said, gesturing with his hand as he began to pace back and forth.‘There was clothing for how many people?’

  ‘It would appear there were eight.’

  ‘Eight?’ said Roberts, as he stopped in mid-stride.‘Eight who did not make it? What kind of clothing?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Men’s clothing? Women’s clothing? Which?’

  ‘Both. Five jackets that, from their size and style, belonged to men; three coats that belonged to women.’

  ‘And what purpose did they serve?’

  ‘You mean to the survivors? It’s bitter cold at night in the south Atlantic, especially that time of year. July is winter there.’

  Roberts was thinking of something else. ‘There were six survivors, and clothing for eight others. Fourteen people were in that lifeboat—fourteen!—but only six survived. And you found no food and no water—no provisions of any kind?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘How long had they been out there? How many days again?’

  ‘We picked them up the twenty-ninth day of July. From what I gather, the Evangeline went down the nineteenth of June. Forty days.’

  ‘Forty days in a lifeboat … What was the capacity of that lifeboat, Captain? How many people was it supposed to hold?’

  ‘Eight; ten at the most. How he kept her afloat with fourteen, in seas like that, I’ll never know.’

  ‘Yes, but there were only six left when you found it—and the remains of one other.You’re aware that the Evangeline went down off the coast of Africa.You’ve been advised of the general location. What is the approximate distance from there to where you found them, Captain Marlowe and the other survivors?’

  ‘A little more than a thousand miles.’

  ‘In forty days. Roughly twenty-five miles a day, in an open boat, during winter in the Southern Hemisphere. And you found no food, no water, but the clothing of eight other people, all of whom—or, rather, all but one of whom—seem to have disappeared without a trace. Do you think they each of them decided to take their own lives, end this ordeal of hunger and thirst and exposure to the elements by jumping into the sea, but out of consideration for the others did it naked so their clothing could be of some use?’

  ‘Objection, your Honour!’William Darnell had risen slowly to his feet. ‘There must be a question in there somewhere, your Honour, but I’m afraid I can’t find it, and I doubt the witness can either.’

  Roberts reddened. ‘I’m sorry, your Honour; perhaps I got a little carried away. In a case like this, it’s difficult not to.’ He exchanged a glance with Darnell, remembering what they had talked about in private, before turning back to the witness.‘No one wants to be here, Mr Balfour. But there isn’t any choice. Let me ask the question this way: do you have any doubt that there were fourteen people in that lifeboat and that eight of them are dead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have any knowledge as to how they died?’

  ‘Direct knowledge? No, none; I was not there.’

  ‘But you do have direct knowledge of how one of them died. You saw the body; the head had b
een cut off. Isn’t that correct?’

  ‘That isn’t how he died.’

  Roberts had just turned to the jury. He immediately looked back. ‘Then you do know how he died?’

  ‘No, only that he was already dead when the head was taken off.’

  ‘And why would anyone do that?’ he asked, eyeing him cautiously. ‘ Someone dies, but instead of throwing the body overboard, to make more room for the others, the body is left there—but the head is removed,and the hands and feet as well.Why do you imagine that was done, Captain Balfour? What purpose would it serve?’

  Balfour tensed. His eyes drew back until a bare glimmer of their bluish light could be seen.

  ‘I could not rightly say. All I know is what I found.’

  ‘And just to be sure that we have not misunderstood, what you found were six survivors, what was left of a seventh, and the clothing of the deceased and seven others. And there was no food and no water. When you say that, Captain Balfour, do you mean that there was no sign that they had ever had any?’

  ‘No, when they started out—when they were first in the lifeboat—they had a little water and they had some food. Not much: a few tins of beef, a gallon or two of water. The empty containers were still there. They used them to catch what rainwater they could.’

  ‘Given what they had, was it your impression when you rescued them that they had just run out?’

  ‘What they had might have lasted a few days, a week at most.’

  ‘Fourteen people?’ asked Roberts, his voice filled with scepticism.

  ‘Fourteen, no. The water might have lasted, depending; but the food—a few tins like that—probably not. Although you never know what you can get by on until you have to. And then sometimes you can get things from the sea, and—’

  Roberts stopped him with a look. ‘They had only enough food and water for a few days at most; seven people missing and the disembowelled body of another. Isn’t it true, Captain Balfour, that at least one or two of the survivors told you how they did it, what they had to do to stay alive?’