The Blackstone Commentaries

by Rob Riggan

  Putting on that suit was like an invitation to violence, he once said.

  Her sister Sarah had called around lunchtime that second day and told her for the first time about Rachel and Elmore Willis. Afterward Dru had found herself thinking about Rachel, how even if she’d gotten her smarts from her mother, she’d always been restless, too—the Aunt Drusilla side. Dru wondered if that restlessness would have caught up with Rachel even if David hadn’t died.

  Then she remembered how she and Charlie got married in the field beside the cabin, she going barefoot, the grass wet and clingy between her toes. She’d worn a long, plain cotton dress that came to her ankles and nothing underneath, so all day she’d felt she was roaming the world naked, feeling beautiful because of it, and clean. Not even Charlie knew until that night. It upset him at first, mostly the surprise, like he’d just learned something else about her that had never occurred to him. It never hurt to keep a man on his toes.

  That day, Rachel had made her a garland of wild flowers. David was there, too. A year later, those two got married and Rachel got a job and he left college to go to Vietnam. Charlie loved Rachel, always had, like the uncle he was. No, it was more than that: Rachel was like a daughter to both of them. Drusilla was never able to have children—maybe a consequence of the way she’d treated her body—and had always regretted it. Rachel could talk to Charlie. After David died, she came by a couple nights a week for over a year, and the two of them talked while Dru got supper ready. Dru had loved him for it, because again it showed how open and understanding he could be.

  She remembered seeing Elmore for the first time at Doc Willis’s funeral, twenty years old, big and handsome. She had felt those Damascus society women nudging their daughters. “He’s so polite,” they said, like being a Yankee and being polite didn’t ordinarily mix. “And so well dressed. He says ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am.’ A football player, and planning to go to Yale Law School, too. My, haven’t we just about died and gone to heaven!” Why are people surprised some of those girls grow up feeling like whores, she’d thought, when their mothers are pimping for them from the cradle?

  Which was one thing she’d never had to worry about. Her mother was the bane of Babylon, religious to the core. Poor Sarah took the brunt of that. Then along came Rachel, hog wild and not about to be tamed by man or God. Surprise!

  It was at that same funeral Drusilla met Pemberton. Charlie introduced her, told Pemberton she was his wife, and the face almost dropped off the man. But Pemberton recovered and, standing right there with his wife, who was very pretty and wearing expensive, beautiful clothes and a sad expression, gave Dru the once-over, a look there was no mistaking. She didn’t need that sonuvabitch. She didn’t need anyone like him anymore. It made her feel like a slab of meat, ugly, and his wife standing right there. “Weren’t you a Conley?” he’d asked, suddenly thinking with his head instead of his penis. And when she’d nodded—she didn’t dare speak—he’d asked, “You’re Sarah Cady’s sister?” Then, “By God, Charlie, you just married into half of Blackstone County!” Despite it being a funeral, he’d laughed outright.

  “At least Pemberton was bound over,” she ventured when she and Charlie sat down at the dinner table that second night after the hearing. “Maybe there’s justice in that.”

  “You know better, Dru. It’s all or nothing,” he said. “If he walks free now, it’ll be worse than if he’d never been charged. Granted, they sure didn’t see Mary Stacy coming, and that felt real good for about two seconds. Just they won’t make that mistake again. If it was me, I’d know my defense now. I gave it to them. That was the other side of the coin of not going to the grand jury for a true bill—I have no more rabbits, unless I get lucky again. I’m supposed to go after this Ronnie Patton now, I suppose, wherever the hell he is. No one seems to know anything about him. And they’ll probably insist on a preliminary hearing for him first, to establish the event, as though they don’t have a car with holes in it and blown-out windows and a hurting family. That and maybe even a trial for Patton before they bring Pemberton to trial—just to be fair. If the law has its logic, power does, too. People are even beginning to look at the Carvers like they’re the troublemakers. Or moneygrubbers, though they haven’t asked for a red cent. ‘Poor Doc Pemberton.’ Doc, my ass.”

  “You used to believe in justice,” she said, alarmed and feeling like he’d hurt her somehow.

  “I still do,” he replied, “God knows.” But she didn’t hear any passion behind it. Maybe it was just fatigue. But then he reached for her face, and with her cheek in his hand, said, “You were crying last night at the table, weren’t you?”

  She fought back tears. “We need to talk,” she said. He rose from the table then and walked across the room to a window, where he stood looking out. “Charlie, this Carver mess is tearing us up! You come home depressed, or angry—you think I don’t see or feel it? I know it would be okay if we could just talk, but you’re not saying anything anymore.”

  “Well, it’s a goddamn mess,” he said to the window. Then, grudgingly, he muttered something about Skinner tooling around town in a flashy convertible and getting financial credit, like he was settling in for good. “And all for burying a boy alive,” he said. But disgusted as he sounded—at one time he would have shaken his head and just laughed—something else was eating him, she could tell.

  “What’s really on your mind?”

  “J. B. Fisher told me he’s been seeing Rachel’s car parked out in front of that house Willis rents—at six in the morning the other day.”

  “So? I knew something was going on, just I didn’t find out it was Elmore until today when I talked to Sarah. Rachel’s an adult, and so is Elmore—they can figure out their own lives.” Watching him closely, she added, “Rachel’s serious about this, Charlie. She’s already brought him home three times. You know it hasn’t been easy for her to break free of David, or Frank. And you can imagine how Frank was about her and Martin Pemberton. Sarah likes Elmore a lot, and even Frank’s beginning to soften.”

  “This sounds like an argument,” Charlie said.

  “Well, you brought it up, and I want you to know I think it’s great.” She was being too emphatic, and could hear it. “For a long time, we’ve being saying Rachel needs someone.”

  “And you actually think Willis is that person?”

  “I know Sarah is fine about it, so why can’t we be? I love my sister dearly. She was sweet to me all those hard years, not letting her judgment cloud her caring for me.”

  “What are you trying to say, Dru?”

  “Sarah told me she actually took Elmore aside the second visit, the first being a disaster, and said, ‘You haven’t had much experience with fathers of daughters, now, have you, Mr. Willis?’ And he said, ‘None, or never when it might be properly misconstrued, Mrs. Cady.’ She’s charmed, Charlie.” Though she’d been trying to find a way to talk to him about it for weeks—how she’d found Rachel crying again, then how maybe something good might be happening to her for once—now she had no damn intention of even alluding to it. Maybe that was what was really bugging her now, not just her not telling Charlie at the outset, to which she was unaccustomed, but knowing about Rachel when he didn’t. Like now she and Charlie had secrets.

  “It occurred to me today,” she said with an effort, “David would have been perfectly happy to get his education, then go back up on the mountain to work as an engineer for the power company and fish and hunt for the rest of his life. But not Rachel.” She saw she had his full attention, though his fatigue suddenly seemed greater, and she wondered why she couldn’t let it go. “You know, even though David had a calming effect on her, she pushed him, and did from the time they were kids, like somehow right off she made him her way off that mountain. Maybe that’s part of why he went to the war, to do something on his own for once.” The words just fell out. My God, what have I said? she wondered. Forgive me, Rachel! But then maybe you already know, and that just makes it all the worse,
trying to make love to someone when you feel like a spider. She glanced at her husband. He was frowning. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was, like she’d lost her bearings.

  “So, what are you trying to say?” he repeated.

  “I don’t know, Charlie. I really don’t.” She wiped her face with her hands. “I know you’ve been real upset since yesterday. Since well before that. I am, too! I think it’s this Carver thing, but I don’t know for sure. I just hate seeing you this way more and more, and us not being able to talk the way we usually do. And why does Elmore bother you so much? You weren’t this upset when Pemberton was taking her out.” Sniffing around, she wanted to say, her own anger rising. “You sure knew about that.”

  His face darkened. “Dru, I’m not going to have those two sonsuvbitches passing my niece back and forth like a piece of meat!”

  “You don’t know that, Charlie.” She still didn’t raise her voice, though she was in a rage now. Just say one more damn thing like that, she was thinking, because Rachel was her niece more than his. She didn’t like to think that way with Charlie, but she didn’t want anybody thinking any such thing about Rachel, much less saying it. Yet for the first time, too, Charlie scared her, because she’d never thought about Rachel being cheap like a piece of meat, or about herself that way either. When you’re like that, you’ve just got something in you to work out. It’s amazing, she thought, how people can make something that may well pass look really ugly, when all it is is sad. “Just what is your problem with Elmore?”

  “He and Pemberton are always out honky-tonking and whoring. I’ve got plenty of proof.”

  “I did a lot of that, too, Charlie.” She watched him choke on that. Obviously, he wanted to strike out at something, anything—probably her. He’d never hit her, and she’d never feared it from him. Still, he’d better not. “Rachel can take care of herself,” she continued, and how she knew! And even if Rachel couldn’t—and she couldn’t even think that because it would hurt too bad—there was nothing you could do but let it play out. Where on earth, she wondered, do men get the idea that somehow they can correct things with righteous fury, that they can control any outcome? But she saw he wasn’t listening.

  “And he’s a lawyer just like all the goddamn rest of them!”

  “No, he’s like you, and you know it. Sure, he’s been fumbling around a bit, but he believes in things, too, just the way you do. You can see it in the way he treats people, and the cases he takes on—he’s like his father. When he finds his footing, he’ll be fine. And he’s sure not getting rich.”

  “Leave his father out of this.” It sounded like a threat and drove her wild.

  “Why? Was he a saint? Can you imagine any son trying to live that down?”

  “Leave him out.” The room suddenly felt like a corked bottle over a fire.

  She took a deep breath. “Charlie, whatever’s got you by the tail, you’re just using Rachel as an excuse, you hear? That’s all. An excuse!”

  The phone rang. Charlie pushed out of his chair and stormed into the kitchen.

  “I have to go back in,” he said when he returned, holding his anger in check.

  “I thought you were free tonight,” she said, sounding bitter. He looked at her briefly, then turned away because, she saw, he couldn’t deal with her anymore.

  She felt cheated; she still wanted to push it. But deep down, she was relieved because she could see where their little evening at home was going. And what was new, anyhow? He always got called in. I’m not the only failure here.

  And with that thought, she grew furious with herself. She could see he’d only retreated even farther into that dark place. It was like she could only poke it and make it worse, when she wanted to make it better. Or ought to. She heard the car crunch down the drive. Then, suddenly recalling his tone of voice at the last, she knew what she’d heard in him was that coiled thing.

  Part Four

  XXIV

  Eddie

  Sometimes, Eddie was thinking, the fire’s bigger than you think, and what you stomp down just buys you time to turn to the flames crawling up your backside. Charlie bought time when the judge threw Martin Pemberton’s case into superior court, and he should have been cheered no matter what else was going on. By all calculations, the case wouldn’t go to trial for at least a year, given ordinary court delays, politics and who was being tried.

  But no. Charlie was in a cold fury when he returned from home the evening of the day Skinner blasted all over town in that bright red convertible, the day after Pemberton was bound over. Eddie had never seen him quite like that and had no idea what had set him off. Surely not Skinner.

  Junior Trainor’s getting a tip on a card game out at Rance’s Bottom was what brought Charlie back in. Junior was jumping around like a puppy, yapping, “I know Doc likes to play with them fellas.” Fact was, Doc did. That wasn’t news to Eddie nor anybody else, but Junior couldn’t say whether Doc was supposed to actually be there. Eddie even asked him point-blank, twice, and both times Trainor said he didn’t know, then right away declared, “But I know Doc likes to play with them fellas.” In fact, he must have said that at least a dozen times, the other boys nodding deferentially, like Junior was suddenly intelligent or something.

  All of which made Eddie recall walking in on Junior, J. B. Fisher and Ranny Hollar several days before, three grown men with pistols on their belts, Trainor holding some magazine open, the three arguing about Big Foot. They weren’t arguing whether there was a Big Foot, but whether it was a Blue Ridge Big Foot that had been spotted up near Banner Elk, as Junior was hotly claiming, based on a picture in that magazine, or a wampus cat, some half-bear, half-cougar creature Ranny insisted some of his kin had seen. “There’s sure no telling what you might find in these mountains,” J. B. had chimed in just as Eddie hurried out, lest they make the mistake of asking him his opinion.

  Now, watching the evening develop, Eddie wondered why no one seemed to realize Junior was just the kind who would go off half-cocked and get other men killed. To Eddie, Junior always had that bad-luck smell about him. But then most of them had never gotten over the fact of Charlie’s hiring Eddie, a Democrat.

  Charlie usually kept Junior at arm’s length, controlling him as much as anyone can control a beagle that thinks he’s hot on a trail—you have to wait till he circles around and slam him hard to get his attention. So that night, Eddie waited, but nothing of the sort happened. Finally he got Charlie off in a corner. He was worried. “This feels bad. Why don’t you just bag this one, sheriff?” he said quietly.

  “Why?” Charlie replied in a cold anger. It wasn’t really a question, and he didn’t wait for an answer. Turning his back on Eddie, he shouted, “Where’s Fillmore? He’s supposed to be on the radio!” like Eddie didn’t exist. The way he turned his back hurt even more than his words, the rejection. No, Eddie thought, rejection’s too tame. It’s repudiation. He’d never felt anything like it in his life, especially not after all the trust between him and Charlie. He must have blushed, but he didn’t think anyone noticed. The boys—at least a dozen of them, including some specials Charlie had Trainor call in—were high with the anticipation that always boiled up before raids, particularly when Charlie was there to lead them. Going after game. “Where the hell is Fillmore?”

  “Boys were acting up downstairs,” Junior said, thumbs hooked in his belt like he was second in command. He nodded toward the open door to the basement with its Authorized Personnel Only sign and gave Charlie a little wink. The jail and the sheriff’s office were on the main floor—really the second floor, reached only by the outside steps. The bottom floor—where the furnace and the coal were, and where the dozen or so regular Damascus winos slept when it was cold or rainy outside or when they just wanted out of sight, their entry being the coal chute off South Charlotte Street—was reached by ordinary people down an interior stairway. The only light down there was a bulb beside the boiler turned on with a string, and it was always broken or missing.
It was automatic: the repairman got a new bulb whenever he went down.

  Back when Eddie was with Mac, he used to hear the winos from time to time when he was sitting at the radio right above the chute. Some winter nights, they got so noisy down there around a quart or two of Blackstone County Sauvignon that he had to go down and roust them, opening the locked steel door and making a show of clanging his way down the steel steps, his flashlight wagging here and there until he found them, wide-eyed and innocent as little lambs, stinking in their pee.

  The winos were scared only of Charlie, who never went down there. They were cautious with Eddie and never gave him any lip the way they did other deputies, especially the ones trying so hard to fill their uniforms, Joe Blow’s nephew or son-in-law, Joe Blow having delivered votes or contributed money, or being a county commissioner, businessman, chamber of commerce member, you name it. It was instructive to Eddie how a bunch of half-pickled winos saw right through the bullshit.

  Junior Trainor, now, they hated him with a passion! They’d go all out just to get him cranked up, and even had special names for him. One time, they got him so upset he arrested the lot of them, dragged them upstairs and threw them in the tank, where they hollered and carried on, yelling “Deputy Dog!” and “Deputy Dick!”—only pronouncing it “Deputy DICK!”—and swaggered around with their thumbs hooked in their pants like Junior, and laughed and made a general nuisance of themselves until Junior wanted to kill them. But Charlie came and freed them “on their own recognizance”—that was the phrase he used with them, and did so very politely. They were grateful for his trust. With a little nod of the head and a “Gentlemen,” he even held the basement door open for them while they descended, muttering all kinds of imprecations against their tormentor.