The Blackstone Commentaries
Page 17
“Mrs. McPherson, that would be the last damn thing on earth I could do,” he said with a force of truth and a desire to convince he’d never felt in his life. It was a good feeling; he’d have to remember it. “Maybe you’d like to go for a walk. You know, neutral territory?”
“That might do,” she said.
So now here he was, unable to concentrate on the two cases he had to plead the first of the week. But his income, or lack thereof—he was bringing in barely enough to keep himself above water, despite attracting more clients—suddenly seemed immaterial. A few weeks earlier, he’d debated calling Claire, his mother, and asking for a loan. She’d have sent it, but at what price? Anyhow, he wouldn’t dream of it now. Beyond the three huge windows of his office, the evening sun had caught the courthouse cupola on fire. Sounds of traffic, women’s heels snapping along the sidewalk, voices without the harsh accents of the North drifted up the four stories into his room, muted, peacefully alive sounds. Phineas stirred on the sofa, sighed and relapsed into sleep. And he hadn’t wanted the dog—imagine!
His mind roamed back to earlier that afternoon. He’d been lying on the floor of his living room and laughing—just laughing. Rachel, straddling his chest, her legs pressed in on either side, bent over and gently pushed his hair off his brow, her eyes slowly moving close to his, as though she were looking into his soul. Her smile, suddenly serious, devoured him. He had let his finger slide along her finely sculpted, slightly protruding upper lip as he had once only dreamed. Then, reaching up with both hands, he closed his eyes and ran his fingers down the sides of her face. “I’ve wanted to do this so badly.”
“Shh!” She placed a finger on his mouth.
“No,” he said, feeling a surge of emotion such as he’d never imagined. “David’s part of you and that smile, and I want you to know that’s just fine with me.” Against his will, his eyes filled with tears. Embarrassed, he tried to look away and felt her lips brush his forehead.
He slipped his hands under her dress to clasp her hips, a gesture accompanied by a strange, oddly new sense of freedom. It was as though clothing, what people presented themselves in, had ceased to be anything more than a convention to satisfy the mores of some distant world, for he’d discovered that even without clothes, he couldn’t see enough of her. He needed to see through her skin into the workings of that smile. Even then, it would never be enough. “My God,” he had exclaimed, startled when he found nothing at all underneath but skin, “do you dress this way for school, teacher?”
Well, he couldn’t see her anymore that day, and the fire on the cupola was dying. Still, he wanted to remember and savor and dream. His desk chair creaked as he shifted his shoes on the blotter.
The door smashed open. Martin Pemberton thundered in, tie yanked down, shirt unbuttoned three buttons, hair askew. Elmore’s feet hit the floor. “They’re trying to fuck me for fair, Willis,” he snarled. The doctor flung himself on the unoccupied portion of the old leather sofa. “And don’t look so damn offended!” he snarled at Phineas.
The dog slid off the sofa and went to sit beside Elmore, where he eyed the doctor warily. Pemberton was even more distressed than usual. How many times in the past had Pemberton barged in, Elmore wondered, just to drag him out to some card game or to introduce him to still another unhappy woman trying to party her misery away? “I’ll bite. Who’s trying to fuck you for fair?” he said with a last, regretful glance out the window where the sun had dropped behind his building, leaving the cupola and the oak trees in blue shadow.
“Nice of you to let me in!” Pemberton let that sit a moment. “And you know damn good and well, Willis. It’s all over the papers and radio!”
Oh, Elmore certainly did, and even felt a certain guilty satisfaction. He couldn’t escape a sense of calculation in all Pemberton’s dealings, and it didn’t breed sympathy.
“You’ve got to patch old Doc up,” Pemberton went on in an easier manner. “I took a serious hit yesterday. Damn near sunk me. I know where there’s a card game—place called Rance’s Bottom.”
“I’m sure Dugan would like a little more ammunition.”
“I don’t know what the hell’s gotten into that sonuvabitch! I made him.”
“Pemberton, you think you might give it a rest? How about dinner instead?”
“Don’t you crap out on me, too, boy! I need some two-hundred-proof testosterone to assuage my soul.” He grinned a savage grin.
“Speak for yourself. I have two cases to prepare.”
“And the lord high sheriff’s niece to comfort.” Pemberton’s focus became catlike as he watched Elmore’s sudden dismay. “Come now, Elmore, you know there’s no privacy in this town.” He gave a little dismissive wave. “Anyhow, your papa loved work, but he loved whiskey and cards, too, and managed to do it all, and his patients loved him always.”
“He used to go honky-tonking? That right?”
“He got around,” Pemberton said vaguely. “Everybody knew it.”
Elmore thought of Dugan, of Harlan Monroe, then even of Frank Cady, Rachel’s father, people he was certain had been his father’s friends. Putting his hands behind his head, he studied the man in the shadows with something approaching detachment: You’re a damn liar.
“Well, you just going to sit there and think about it all night?” Irritably, Pemberton rose to his feet.
Elmore turned off the desk lamp.
XXII
Drusilla
Fixing supper, Drusilla heard on the radio that Pemberton had been bound over to superior court and for a moment felt such a sudden, deep relief she was startled. Could it really be such good news? Until then, she hadn’t known how much of her worries she’d kept hidden from herself. But she began to wonder how Charlie felt, because nothing about the Carver case was proving simple. Then she became apprehensive. When he came through the door, she knew why: he looked embattled and weary, like he knew he would never know rest again.
“How was your day?” he asked before she could speak a word, by his look all but begging her not to ask him in turn, to cheer him instead. Charlie, never a fool about events, saw them and usually himself in them with amazing clearness. Some said it was his saving grace, that and a sense of humor, though many never saw the humor. If he didn’t act jubilant or even pleased that night, she knew he had his reasons.
Charlie was a man who put himself in front of loaded guns, she reminded herself, but not even that stress compared to what she was seeing now. This was new; this Carver trouble had gone to his soul. His going to Pinetown and talking to that black who ran the gambling place had cinched it somehow. It had always bothered him trying to talk to those people, the coloreds, but up to then he’d still had his doubts about the case. It was like a cancer, this Carver thing. It was ugly, and if you touched it, you began to feel ugly, too, and do ugly things. Or stupid things.
For the first time in their years together, brooding and bad-tempered talk had started coming out of him, drenched with self-contempt for even wanting to risk something he might not be able to succeed at, like it was an illusion, like everything was an illusion. But he didn’t say that, because she saw he still wanted to believe. Such talk as occurred between them about the Carver case, and there seemed to be less and less, would go on and on, round and round fruitlessly, sometimes until the small hours of the morning, when the demon at last grew quiet and Charlie could finally sleep. “I might have made a bad bargain,” he had said a couple of mornings before, and she hadn’t know whether he meant the Carver business or becoming sheriff. It appeared that he could see no way clear to anything anymore, no solutions. That demon wouldn’t be vanquished. Each time he wrestled it, it left both him and Dru a little more exhausted.
And what could she say to him? That it was his battle, and she loved him for it. But what else? He had to believe in himself like he did when she first met him, had to believe in his vision of the law and fairness. She might remind him, but she couldn’t give it to him. It was always his to lose.
She heard the real question behind it: How can you love me?
He asked it about the time that Skinner, the one who buried the boy at the fair, began to get under his skin. She’d known Skinners all her life, and they all were miserable and enjoyed making others feel that way. Usually that didn’t bother Charlie. It was what he expected of some people, even if it disappointed him and ran counter to what he wanted to believe. So that question was an indication.
But he still hadn’t reached bottom—they hadn’t reached bottom. Yet with that question, he’d ventured into a place they’d never gone before, never had cause to wonder at, and even if he could see it had no bottom and didn’t want to venture there again, that it was something of his own he was wrestling, it showed her how deep it had already gone. She realized then that he was in battle not just with everything he believed, but with everything he’d ever known.
So that night after Pemberton was bound over, despite her curiosity about the preliminary hearing and her instinct to talk the whole mess out, she backed away. Then all at once, she found herself reaching for his face, wanting him to know she was there, that she cared for him beyond all words. But in the next instant, she knew she was reaching for herself, that like someone blind, she was trying to determine if the man she thought she’d married was there. She always had faith that she could get beyond that practiced calm of his, that soft-spokenness that was his ordinary way with people, his defense as well as his control. Until then, she had never felt lost in her marriage, that piercing loneliness that suddenly comes from realizing all you can never know about the other person in your life, and wondering what’s next because of the not knowing. She yanked her hand back like she’d burned it. Suddenly in tears, she remained mute. Eyes on his food, he took no notice.
Getting a grip on herself, she watched him awhile, and while she watched, she recalled the springtime years before when he had finally asked her if she wanted to see where he lived, that cabin in the meadow high in the mountains. She’d known by then how he loved it. “I’d like to,” she’d said, swallowing her excitement.
So he took her there, and they found themselves talking to each other in a way neither one had to anyone before. He always felt free there, free to be himself, free to dream and believe. Sitting on the edge of the porch, they talked and talked while the sunny afternoon turned to fire over the mountains and violet shadows crept out of the valleys like mist. He talked about Alabama for the first time, and about the wagon mines—though not all of that yet—and about fishing with his uncle up at Muscle Shoals. He talked about his time with the preacher and why he’d stayed on in Blackstone County. He talked about old Doc Willis, his good friend, who had taught him to use a fly rod, the two of them regularly disappearing into the mountains just to fish. And he told her about Pemberton’s suggestion, proposal, temptation—whatever it was—and she saw how deeply it had touched him. He told her that if there were an honorable way, he would like to be sheriff of Blackstone County someday, to restore some fairness and respect not to the office so much as to the people, to make the law resemble once again what he believed it was supposed to be—something applied equally in such a manner that everybody knew it was theirs, that they might trust it. “You can’t make it perfect, but you can make it a damn sight better,” he told her.
That Charlie had charisma was already plain as day to a lot of people, but especially to Pemberton, who had been dreaming about a Republican county government a lot longer than Charlie’d been around. All he lacked was a Charlie with his larger-than-life honesty and fearlessness to get things rolling.
All at once, she sensed Charlie was trying to retreat from the talk that had gushed out of him, as though afraid she might violate his trust and dream. Maybe by just telling her, he had violated it already. But she turned away and looked toward Damascus, winking beads of light in the darkness, and waited. She’d never known that patience in herself before.
At long last, he said that on still nights like that one, if he listened, he could hear cars thump across the wooden deck of the bridge spanning the deep gorge at Terpville, where the Creek River tore through. He thought he’d just heard one. “Some nights,” he said quietly, “when the air is just right, I can hear the whistles of the trains rolling down to Damascus. Now, that is the most lonely music I know—it tears me all up, that sense of life rolling past, leaving me behind. I want to be out in it, feeling it.”
She shivered at what he’d said, that depth of heart; there had been no retreat from her after all. Thinking her chilled, he started to rise. “No, Charlie, don’t stop talking,” she said, seizing his hand.
Later that night when he stood over her, the glow of the fireplace playing over her body, and said, “You will have to marry me if we do this,” he was way beyond fever, the fire inside him wild.
“I’m a grown woman. I want this, too,” she replied. All she wanted at that moment was to slide her hands down his lean, hard body, to take in all that courage and fearlessness and need, and she was about to die of frustration.
“No, you will have to marry me.” He’d almost been in tears, dreading having to walk away, but she’d known he would.
All of that she remembered like it had just happened, remembered while watching him eat his food the evening after they bound Pemberton over, eating as though she weren’t there. They’d been married over ten years, and no person, nothing, had ever mattered to her the way he did. Her life had never mattered so much. She was so proud of him and what he was trying to do and what he believed in. But now she felt fear as well, sensing a coiled quality she hadn’t encountered in him before. Then she knew it was what she’d felt him resisting those first days after the Carver shooting, and what he must have been struggling with ever since, but especially now.
She must have been dreading it. Why else hadn’t she admitted it was there? She’d known it in other men, Lord knew, disillusionment and frustration, a fear of hopelessness, or worse, hopelessness itself. She had come across it in bars and beds from Atlanta to Nashville—no one in her family knew the half of what she did in those days, thank you. In all those places with all those men, that coiled quality had been a given, like an intimation of their inevitable defeat and failure. Yet it was something in themselves they never questioned because it had been there unchallenged all their lives, as was the blind, useless, self-destructive rage it could provoke. It was a legacy, she thought, wondering if it was just a Southern thing.
But in those days before Charlie, she’d thought it exciting, too, because it was male and dangerous, because it was unacknowledged and unpredictable, because it could reach out and damage, even destroy, anything around it. Particularly something or someone loved, or at least someone acting warm and soft in a loving way. Like fire, it was beautiful, fascinating and repulsive all at once, and a woman—always on an altar, she had learned, and maybe because of that always on the verge of being held to blame—if she were so inclined, could blow the slightest ember into white flame. Oh, she knew.
But until that evening after Pemberton was bound over, she’d been unable to imagine Charlie being that way, nor her being that way with him. He’d known it, that ugliness in men, and worse. It had made him leave Alabama and take that job with the preacher and travel from town to town for most of a year wrestling it, crazy with it. It didn’t grow quiet until he came to Damascus and met Martin Pemberton, and Martin, no matter what his motives or whatever else you might say about him, unlocked that place where Charlie might not only believe in something but actually try to live that belief and breathe pure air.
She fully understood that it was a man who had confronted the coiled thing in himself she’d seen that first day on the courthouse lawn—blushing an
d foolish looking in all the power of his office and reputation, in all his physical strength and manhood—a man who would take risks with his soul. That was the man who had stolen her heart. She had realized even then that she could love a man like that because he might love himself, and therefore her.
XXIII
Drusilla
He looked angry when he came home the second night after the hearing. She wasn’t doing much better herself. The night before, they’d watched a little TV after dinner, then gone to bed with nothing said about what mattered. She never pushed it but wished she had, particularly after the paper that morning, the Pemberton story smeared all over the front page, and her with a whole day to herself to stew about all that wasn’t working between them. And of course recollecting more.
She couldn’t stop the memories. Like how from the outset they’d been a team. Because Drusilla had grown up in the county, she knew the people and their particulars, so when Mac made all that fuss after Charlie beat him in the first election, saying he was some kind of Bat Masterson gone bad—like Mac was someone’s sainted aunt—it was she who told Charlie to go buy himself a suit and derby and wear it on his next still raid.
But power like that called up enemies, the biggest enemy sometimes oneself. Pretending to be one thing in order to reach a goal, a place of clarity, and doing things for the sake of that clarity you might not otherwise do, you might soon lose sight of the heart and the clarity itself. Charlie had always been deliberate in his use of violence. You had to get people’s attention, especially in Blackstone County. But violence ate at him. Sometimes it was so bad by the time he reached her, he’d be all lathered up and trembling like a badly ridden horse, and he’d talk and talk about those pictures in the paper, all the show he had made dumping liquor, and the people he met and the things he had to do to them. He worked in a violent world where people got shot and died—in Blackstone County, someone nearly every week.