Almost Paradise

by Corabel Shofner

  A man up front announced, “All rise.”

  We all rose.

  The judge walked in wearing a long black dress. He was short and his neck was skinny. Actually, he looked like Mr. Potato Head. When he sat down behind that big high desk, the rest of us sat down too. Judge Potato Head was mumbling into his microphone about calendars and who needed what and when and where.

  Finally the judge said, “Mr. Brewer, are you ready to bring the juror pool in?”

  I pictured the jurors all swimming in circles, like those synchronized (Wordly Wizard, shouted in my head) swimmers in flowery plastic caps.

  “Yes, your honor,” Joe Brewer said. “If it please the court.”

  Why should it not please the court, I thought. Wasn’t that why we were all there? What if the judge said, Now that you ask, it does not please the court?

  “Are you ready, A.D.A. Barber?”

  I later learned that stood for Assistant District Attorney Barber. But I heard Aging Barbie, and that is exactly what she looked like. An old-lady doll with blond hair flowing out in all directions. Aging Barbie wore a tight purple skirt and pointy heels so high she looked like a toe dancer.

  The judge ordered the bailiff to bring in the potential jurors.

  In marched about 150 people, and they crowded the rows. Judge Potato Head asked them some general questions about their health and stuff. Then the lawyers started spraying them with questions. The attorneys tried to guess which jurors would be on their side by asking things like which magazines they read. Joe Brewer had a kind voice, but Aging Barbie spoke like a machine, fast and monotone. Rat-a-tat-tat. She did this kind of thing all day every day. Send people to jail. What a job.

  You should have seen the jurors they ended up with. Twelve of them, plus two extras in case somebody fell out. There were some men and some women, white, brown, and one who was bluish green. And every one of them was a big-shouldered person. They made the jury box look kind of crowded.

  Joe Brewer was right. They never put my name on a witness list, so I could stay in the courtroom during the trial. I was glad. If they made me sit outside, I would have died of curiosity and anxiety and aloneness. Besides, I was sure that watching real hard would help us win. Still I worried one of the witnesses might see me and make trouble.

  Aging Barbie stood up on those high heels and explained about all the people she had found to testify against my mother, and she was just absolutely certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that anybody with an ounce of common sense would see that Barbara Henderson was guilty as charged. That lady was wrong, again. I had a pound of common sense, but common sense was not all it’s cracked up to be.

  Joe Brewer stood up and said just the opposite. Barbara Henderson was innocent until proven guilty and the State had no credible evidence, “No leg to stand on.” He threw out his chin in absolute certainty.

  First witness up was Gus Luna. It was a long ways to come from Arkansas, but coming to court must have made him feel important. And a man like Gus Luna didn’t have much opportunity to feel important, other than being the best doughnut cutter in Arkansas.

  He said, “That woman gave her boyfriend the money to buy her that gun.” That was so not true. Gus Luna was a big fat liar. But I was happy that he pointed right at Eleanor when he said that woman, even though her hair was chopped off. They had tricked him.

  What’s more, that fool looked right at me in the courtroom, but he didn’t recognize me, sitting there in that silly dress and bow. Not the Ruby Clyde he had seen back in Hot Springs, that’s for sure. That gave me a little confidence that I would be invisible for the rest of the trial.

  Then Aging Barbie, in her tight purple skirt, brought the Circus God from the IQ Zoo to testify. The jury smiled when he spoke. That surprised me. I guess he was pretty successful in show business, what with his daily performances at the IQ Zoo. He knew how to talk to people. Come to think of it, the jurors looked just like the people who had been in the IQ Zoo watching his Noah’s Ark show. Circus God told the jurors that my mother had threatened his entire family and all of his guests and that she was the most violent woman he had ever seen.

  Not a word of that was true; he was just embarrassed that we freed his pig. Some people can’t stand to be wrong.

  All at once the Circus God blurted out, “And what kind of woman gets her son involved in a pig robbery?”

  I liked to died. Jittered up my neck to the back of my ears.

  “Objection!” Joe Brewer leaped to his feet. “The defendant has no son. And if she did it would be irrelevant to the case at hand.”

  “Sustained,” the judge said. And that meant it was okay, but I still felt sickish.

  Then old Jerry Smith, the owner of the Okay Corral Gas and Food Mart, sat up there by the judge and told everybody what had happened when the Catfish came into his store. I wasn’t worried even a titch because he had never seen me. Old Jerry Smith said he was up at the cash register by himself, counting out the coins and putting them into bank bags. He was sipping on a cold beer when in walks the Catfish. Jerry didn’t think there was going to be trouble because the Catfish was friendly and scrawny, so Jerry went back to counting. The Catfish strolled up and down every single aisle, picking up one product from each one: motor oil, Q-tips, pork rinds, and a cigarette lighter. Finally, Catfish marched up to Jerry Smith at the cash register and said, “You got any fresh fruit?” Then he pointed the gun at old Jerry’s face, smiled, and cackled, “Fruitcake.” Which made no sense at all, but Jerry got the idea he was being robbed.

  Then he pointed a finger at Eleanor. “And that woman helped him.” He bought it too. Whew.

  Judge Potato Head laughed and shook his head like maybe what Old Jerry had said was funny. The jury looked at him, then shook their heads and smiled. I saw what Joe Brewer meant. That judge had an attitude and the jury was catching it like a virus.

  Aging Barbie then called her last witness: the Catfish, in all his whiskered glory. Shameless, he looked around the room like he was walking onstage. Some kind of policeman escorted him to the witness stand. He swore on the Bible, sat down, and eyeballed the courtroom some more.

  His gaze hung on “Eleanor,” and he looked surprised and sad at her short hair. He didn’t seem to notice that Mother and Eleanor had swapped places. Whew.

  But he found me in the first row—glanced at the nun, and then locked eyes with me. I could see the machinery in his mind. The nun in her habit (the one we had talked about in the car), me looking like a girly fool, and the damning testimony he was about to give against my mother. I held my breath, wondering if he was going to call me out.

  He looked unhappy for just a flash, then he wiggled, and right up there in front of God and country, he said that my mother had asked him to steal the pig (which was true) and lied that she had ordered him to rob the Okay Corral because she didn’t want to ask her sister for a place to stay (which was so not true).

  I about came out of my seat. Selling Mother down the creek, for five crummy years off his sentence. He couldn’t look at Mother again after telling those lies but he did look at me. And I tried to kill him with my eyes, he could see that, and he knew he was condemning my mother and leaving me alone in the world, going to an orphanage like he had said on the car ride. What kind of man would do that for five years off the crime he commited himself? A stinky catfish, that’s what.

  But he wrinkled up his brow and turned away, pulled on his nose like he was about to cry. He had no business being sad, but at least he hadn’t mentioned my name. I guess he had one decent bone in his body, but it was extremely well hidden.

  Joe Brewer cross-examined the Catfish and asked him if he’d made a deal with the State to reduce his sentence in exchange for his testimony.

  “What if I did?” The cocky Catfish slung his elbow over the back of his chair and stuck out his chest. “I wouldn’t lie.”

  Wouldn’t lie? I thought. Not only does he tell big fat ones, but he gives liars a bad name.

  �
�And how many times have you been arrested?”

  “Objection,” shouted Aging Barbie. “Irrelevant.”

  “Sustained.” The judge leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.

  Joe Brewer came again with a slightly different question. “How many times have you been in prison?”

  “Your honor, please,” Aging Barbie cried out again. “Move to strike.”

  “Move along, Mr. Brewer.” The judge lowered his face into his hands in complete exasperation.

  Joe Brewer argued with Judge Potato Head about what could and couldn’t be said in court. And the judge never agreed with him. Some judges are just determined to send everybody to prison.

  The Catfish was excused from the stand and was escorted out of the court by that policeman, and that was the last time I saw his sorry self. Good riddance. If I see him in fifteen years, when I am twenty-seven years old, I might just put a hook in his mouth and use him for bait.

  That was the end of witnesses.

  Then Aging Barbie did what is called closing argument, where she stood up and said every horrible thing she could think of about my mother. And she finished by saying, “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then you have to find that it is a duck.” She was getting ducks and facts mixed up, but that didn’t bother her one little bit. Joe Brewer got up when it was his turn and did just the opposite. He used his whole body and heart to tell the jurors that Mother was innocent. He convinced me, but I was already on his side.

  Then bang, went the judge’s hammer. “Bailiff, take the jury out now.”

  * * *

  “You need to prepare yourself, Ruby Clyde. It is not going our way.” He’d read them all—the judge, the jurors. At least Joe Brewer was telling me the truth, most adults wouldn’t have. They would have pumped up a lot of hope words. But he just said it: we were losing.

  Sure enough the jury came back two and a half hours later and said Mother was guilty. She would be taken into custody right away, and transported to the Mountain View Prison for Women.

  Only it wasn’t Mother who was going to Mountain View. Mother was sitting beside me in Eleanor’s nun habit, with her little square face and big black glasses. The woman they led out of the courtroom was my aunt Eleanor, former nun, current prisoner for ten long years.

  I stood up, perfectly still, with my arms by my sides, watching as they led Aunt Eleanor toward the side door.

  She was polite to the guard who took her by the elbow, turned her, and put her in handcuffs. I was afraid that she wouldn’t turn back and look at me. She was brave and calm so that meant I had to be brave and calm too, but if she walked out of that courtroom without looking at me, I’d scream my head off. I held my breath and watched.

  Just before disappearing into the side room filled with holding cages for criminals, my aunt Eleanor Rose looked over her shoulder and blew me a kiss.

  I felt like we were a piece of paper being torn in two.

  Later, one of the jurors told Joe Brewer that it wouldn’t have taken that long but they wanted to stay and get the free lunch.

  * * *

  We were all stunned. No entire clue what to do with ourselves.

  It was late afternoon. Joe Brewer took us over to the park by the river, there by the bat bridge. It was one of the largest bat colonies in the world, and we were going to watch the bats come out of their sleeping holes under the bridge. It happened every evening.

  As the sun went down, the little bodies began to fall out and sail up the river. At first I only saw a few zippy shapes, then I saw more and more and more, until bats swarmed the sky. All the while dark was closing in around us like a fog.

  Finally it got so dark I couldn’t see the bats, and I thought maybe they had all come out and gone, but somebody standing on the bridge turned on a big spotlight. Bats were everywhere. They flew through the cone of light like spirits racing from the dead.

  “Do they fly back like this in the morning?” I asked.

  Joe Brewer said no, they flew home one at a time.

  FORTY

  We spent the month living with Joe Brewer in town, me in my new school and Mother doing some kind of training with Joe Brewer so she could get a job. I was broken in unspeakable ways. Mother was better, but I worried where we would go, or what we would do. I wasn’t entirely sure Eleanor had trained Mother enough to take care of me all by herself. I missed Eleanor Rose so much it hurt my heart, the real one beating in my chest.

  I often wandered around the apartment pointlessly, trying to be grateful because I knew that was what Eleanor would have wanted. I wanted to please her; after all, I had made that bargain with God, but I didn’t recognize the bargain anymore. She was alive, but in prison. What kind of deal was that?

  One night I was particularly restless; I had done my homework and gone back to the kitchen to wash the dinner dishes. The hot water on my hands calmed me. I wondered why I had ever thought I had healing hands. Who had I ever healed, really, medically? I couldn’t even heal myself into hope. While the water ran, reddening my hands, I told myself that healing takes time.

  Joe Brewer came up from behind. He reached over my shoulder and turned the water off. He hugged me.

  I wiggled away and walked out to the terrace. He followed me. The constant thought of my Eleanor Rose in prison cut like razors at my heart.

  I said, “I thought trusting would make a happy ending. But I didn’t know that I would lose Eleanor…”

  “Trust is stepping into the unknown,” he said.

  “I do that,” I said. “I step into the unknown all the time.”

  “I know you do. But trust is stepping into the unknown with another person. Together. Trusting the other to have your back. I have your back.”

  Joe Brewer took my hand and held it to his heart. We stood looking at the sparkling lights, which were so very beautiful, painfully beautiful.

  I realized for the first time that I wasn’t dizzy in his apartment anymore. The floor didn’t feel like it was swaying beneath my feet. I was on solid ground, sort of. Solid ground up in the sky.

  That’s when Joe Brewer told me that he had found another place for us to live, a place where Mother and he could both find work and we could start over.

  “You’re coming with us?” I asked.

  Joe Brewer said, “I couldn’t control the case, Ruby Clyde. But caring for you is something I have complete control over. You and your mother will never be alone.”

  “I like that,” I said. “And so would Eleanor.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “She was counting on it. That was part of her plan.”

  * * *

  Joe Brewer was moving us to St. Louis. Of course we had to go. We couldn’t stay anywhere else in Texas. But I knew that I would keep the Hill Country in my heart forever. Turtles carry their homes with them, why couldn’t I? Besides, my home was no longer a place, it was my people. People heal each other, and it takes time.

  I was not certain that I knew what to do with a fresh start. Trouble was familiar. Trouble had seemed to be my destiny. I had embraced trouble and survived. A new and unfamiliar life was coming. The gift of a new life—freely given from Eleanor to the three of us—was the last thing I ever expected. Every day would be a gift.

  Joe Brewer got a job in St. Louis. St. Joe, he was.

  “You’d give up your job here, for us?” I asked, when he first explained it to me. He wasn’t giving up anything, he said. He was gaining everything.

  “Besides,” he spoke slowly as if he were working it out in his head, “I don’t feel that I can be an officer of the Texas court any longer. I didn’t plan this, but I turned a blind eye and allowed it to happen.”

  “Are you sorry?” I asked.

  “Heavens no! I’d do it again. Listen to me, Ruby. I have given this much thought. Certain people will think that what I have done is wrong. And they would be correct. Other people will think that what I have done is right. And they would also be correct. Sometimes
we are faced with impossible choices. And that is life. But I can’t stand up in the same Texas court in good conscience, as if nothing has occurred. That would be a lie. We know the truth. We will go forth and build our new life on the truth. I will be like your uncle. Would you like that?”

  My uncle? Joe Brewer may not have known it but he would be more than my uncle soon enough. I’d seen his eyes when he looked at Mother. I knew the extra hours he gave us. He’d given up his job. Joe Brewer could say whatever he wanted, but I knew better. I was no fool. And frankly, I liked getting back to knowing more about adults than they knew about themselves.

  And wouldn’t you know it, even though he’d given up the practice of law in Texas, Joe Brewer could still teach it in Missouri. He had a job teaching legal ethics in St. Louis and running a clinic for the downtrodden. We’d go there, to St. Louis, and be a family: an uncle, a mother, a little girl.

  Joe Brewer had everything in his apartment packed up by professional movers. Mother and I had very little of our own. We left the household items at the ranch for the next nun. Eleanor Rose had few worldly possessions, as she called them, only the books by Charles Dickens, which she wanted me to have and made me promise to read, every one of them.

  Nobody was at the ranch on the day we stopped by to pick up the books that Eleanor Rose had insisted we take with us. I lifted them off the shelf one by one, dusting them and placing them in a cardboard box. “Be sure to look at Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities,” she said twice, and she made Joe Brewer promise to remember. “I’ve left messages for you there,” she said.

  When I opened Oliver Twist, an envelope fell out. Eleanor had written Barbara across the front. I picked it up from the floor and shook the book, hoping to find a letter for me. There wasn’t one, but Eleanor had written in the front of the book: