by Sally Wright
“At the end of the day, you would have a court order hanging over your head, and no employer, investor, or banker would ever touch you. If you were even to attempt to subsequently violate such a court order, you would be subject to contempt of court proceedings. The court has very broad powers in handling instances of contempt of court, and the violation of its own orders. You would risk having to pay additional damages, as well as Mr. Harrison’s legal costs.”
“And Mr. Harrison’s other option?” Carl was sitting on the sofa now, leaning back, blowing smoke toward the ceiling, holding an ashtray in his lap.
“His third option is to draw up a document such as I have here. In it you acknowledge that your employment at Equine Pharmaceuticals is terminated as of today’s date. You acknowledge that this agreement is binding and supersedes the employment contract you signed when you were first employed. You agree to abide by the following: For a period of ten years, in all of North America, you will not work for a manufacturer of equine pharmaceuticals and health care products, or any other enterprise which competes with Equine Pharmaceuticals, directly or indirectly. You will not start such a company or go into competition with Equine Pharmaceuticals in any manner whatsoever. You will not use, or disclose, any formulas, trade secrets or other information to which you were privy while employed at Equine Pharmaceuticals. You will acknowledge that if you violate this agreement, a court will immediately issue an order to enforce the restrictions and require you to pay the costs of such an action.”
“You expect me to sign that without seeing a lawyer?”
“Mr. Harrison is a man with many demands upon his time who wishes to reach a quick conclusion and put this matter behind him as rapidly as possible. He is consequently willing to extend the offer until six o’clock tomorrow evening. After that, Mr. Harrison will take the tapes he has in his possession and pursue his other options. We took the liberty of determining that Harold Rasmusson, whom you used when negotiating your first employment agreement, is in Versailles all day tomorrow, and has time available to meet with you. We have played the tape, and discussed the options with him, and shown him this contract. But if you wish to consult another attorney, that’s entirely up to you. If you wish to sign now, no other attorney need be subjected to hearing the tape Mr. Harrison has in his possession.”
“What about Butch?”
“That is not your concern.”
“So you’ll offer him the same deal?”
Garner didn’t answer.
And Carl stared at the fireplace as he stubbed his cigarette out and set the ashtray on the coffee table. “I suppose I might as well read the agreement.”
Garner Honeycutt handed a copy to Carl and another to Jane, then sat down again by the fireplace, where he thumbed through a National Geographic he’d picked up from a side table, while Bob Harrison put the cover on the tape recorder, and Carl and Jane read the contract.
Jane finished first. She was a university librarian who’d been reading since she was four, and she sat slumped against the blue flowered sofa, tears gathering in her eyes, her hands clenched on top of the contract in her lap.
When Carl looked up and lit another Lucky, Jane said, “You ought to sign it. It’s the best resolution you can hope for, and nobody else would have to know what it is you’ve done.”
“Don’t expect me to give in to this, simply because you—”
“I was born and raised here! You weren’t. I don’t want one more person to know what you’ve done. How could you do it!” Her face was flushed, but her lips looked bloodless, as she glared at Carl, on the other end of the sofa with a grim but petulant smile on his face.
No one else said anything. And Carl read the three page contract again, taking his time, glancing at Garner Honeycutt twice, before he said he’d try to reach Rasmusson at home.
He walked out to the front hall, then turned toward the rear of the house, and was gone for fifteen minutes. The other three sat in silence, unable to contemplate small talk, tapping feet and staring into space.
Carl came back in, and sat on the sofa, and crossed his legs before he spoke. “If you make one addition I will agree to sign this now.”
Bob said, “What is that?”
“That I will not be liable for legal costs, other than my own, pertaining to this document.”
Garner said, “We would not be willing to entertain such a requirement concerning action brought about by your possible infringement of this second document.”
“No, I mean at this time. Bob’s legal fees relating to the work you’ve done and are doing now. Drawing this up, evaluating the first contract. I want it stated clearly that you can’t come at me for costs.”
“Bob?” Garner Honeycutt looked at Bob, his eyebrows raised inquisitively, making him look like a wild hare for a moment, nose quivering in the air.
“That’s okay with me.” Bob sat upright in his side chair, his spine a steel rod, his hands gripping the arms of his chair as though he needed to control them, his feet set squarely on the floor, ready to move fast.
“In that case, with Mr. Harrison’s consent, I shall compose a draft of an addendum for consideration.” Garner pulled a legal pad from his briefcase and wrote for a moment with a ballpoint pen.
No one said a word while Garner handed his draft to Bob first, and then Carl.
Both nodded, and Carl handed it back. Honeycutt asked if there were a typewriter in the house.
Jane said, “I’ll show you,” and led him across the hall to the study on the other side of the front door.
When Garner came back, he stapled addendums to the two originals and three copies, which Carl and Bob both signed. He had them both initial every page in every copy, and then Jane signed the bottom of the last page of the contract, and the addendum as well, as a witness. Garner handed an original to Carl and another to Bob, then put the others in a folder and slipped it into his briefcase.
Bob stood and picked up the tape recorder, and started toward the door—before he stopped and turned and looked Carl in the eye. “You fooled me. I’ll give you that.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you admit a mistake!”
Bob stared at him and shook his head as though that didn’t deserve a reply. Then he and Garner walked out the front door, closing it quickly behind them.
Jane was standing, clutching her apron, her eyes burning into Carl’s. “I wish I could say I was as surprised as Bob.”
“Shut up! You don’t know what I’ve had to put up with, with Alan Munro, and the—”
“Oh, I knew there’d be an excuse!”
“Easy for you! Your father didn’t—”
“Walk out. And my mother didn’t clean houses like yours, or die when I was sixteen. None of that justifies what it is you’ve done!” Jane stalked out through the archway into the front hall, then turned left past the stairs and rushed on into the kitchen.
Carl heard the back door slam and gardening tools getting thrown in the wheelbarrow she’d left by the back door. He heard it thumping across the flagstones toward the garage—just as Cassandra sprinted into the living room from the front hall.
She rubbed against Carl’s ankles, till he picked her up and stroked her throat as he stared across the street at Elinor Nevilleson, pretending to dead-head a rose bush while she watched Harrison’s car turn toward the light at Main Street.
Carl said, “Bitch!” before he kissed Cassandra’s forehead and carried her across the hall to the study.
He still held her while he dialed the phone and waited. “Terry, it’s Carl. … Oh, not bad. Though I’m actually calling on a matter of conscience. … No, you heard me. I’ve decided to leave Equine Pharmaceuticals. I can’t go into it in any detail, but there’re practices being condoned there that I can’t stomach. … I’ve also decided that it’s my duty to tell you that you ought to investigate Equine’s taxes. Bob Harrison’s not doing business on the up-and-up. … I assume IRS auditors still get to keep a percentage of the unpaid
taxes you uncover? … Good. So how soon can you start? … Well, even if you can’t for a couple of months, it’ll be worth your while when you do. … Okay. Sure. You wantta tee off at eight? … Good. Believe me, you won’t regret looking at Harrison’s books.”
Carl smiled when he put down the receiver, as Cassandra jumped to the floor.
Butch Morgan was leaning back in a worn green velvet chair, his feet on the matching footstool, the sound off on the baseball game on the TV across the room, a beer cupped in his left hand, his wife on the phone in his right.
“Come on, Frannie. You know you don’t want a divorce. You know you don’t. You know how good we can be. ’Member before the babies were born when we’d go out to the river and take a … Okay, so you’ve filed, but you can stop it if you want. I can make you happy, honey, you know I can. … Yeah, I’m drinkin’ a beer. One, that’s all. I can quit whenever I want. … No! Why would I want to talk about Korea with some stooge in a white coat who’s never fired a shot? I wantta forget Korea, okay? And bring you and the girls back home. …
“Anyway, I’m fixin’ to pick ’em up tomorrow mornin’ about nine. I thought we could go see the Clark Museum there in Louavull, and take a picnic lunch. ’Course, one day I’d like to take ’em to see Harrodsburg and show ’em where I grew up, but there won’t be time tomorrow if we …
“What d’ya mean? Why don’t they want me to pick ’em up? … I don’t. Not every time. … Well, are you helpin’ ’em to want to, or are you criticizing me behind my back, so that … Then I’ll just come up there tomorrow mornin’, and we can all spend the day and go out to supper. … I finished fixing up the kitchen. Tiling the floor, that’s done, and I … I gotta go, Frannie. Somebody’s at the door.”
Garner Honeycutt and Bob Harrison had told Butch everything they’d told Carl, and he’d listened to them and the tape, sitting in the big green chair in the family room he’d added on at the back with a slider out to a side porch. He was holding a cup of coffee, staring at the slippery looking surface as though matters of consequence depended on how well he concentrated.
He asked questions about the options he was given, and eventually told them he’d sign the new agreement. And he did, the same one they’d offered Carl, all the copies and the addendums, once he’d called his next-door neighbor over to witness them too.
Then he sat, his square face sunken and crushed looking, his eyes tired and red rimmed, his dark hair thick and coarse, brushed straight back from his face, his heavy muscled shoulders straining against the back of the chair, while he stared at the turned off TV.
Bob Harrison watched him for a minute, then asked him in a neutral voice why he’d gone along with Carl.
“It wasn’t you. I respect you a whole lot. You were real good to me right from the start. You didn’t care that I dropped outta college, and it seemed like you trusted me to do things right.”
“I did. Until this happened. But that doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be new things that we’d all have to learn to keep the business growing. You can’t stay the same in business. You either grow, or shrink, or go out of business altogether.”
“It was Alan Munro changin’ everything. You started talkin’ to him and not me when we was trying to figure somethin’ out. It’s been him standin’ in between us, actin’ like he knows it all, and I got real tired of it. I figured I couldn’t stick it out much longer, and if Carl and me had a business goin’, there’d be some way for me to make a livin’.”
“There’d be lots of ways for you to make a living if you hadn’t done what you did. Then I could’ve given you a good recommendation. You’re a hard worker, and you’re very mechanical. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just come and talk to me, if you were having trouble working with Alan.”
“I wouldda looked like a cry baby. I was hopin’ to be successful, and work on new products with Carl, and then you’d see I could do it without help from you or Alan.”
“And you didn’t see that taking the formulas was dishonest?”
“Carl said he’d checked with his lawyer. That he owned the formulas, for having done the work, and it wasn’t wrong for us to benefit too.”
Garner Honeycutt smiled and shook his head. “I very much doubt that he talked to his attorney. Harry Rasmusson wouldn’t have said any such thing. Not if he’d consulted Mr. Seeger’s signed employment agreement, which he had a hand in drafting.”
Bob Harrison set his coffee cup on the table beside him and looked across it at Butch. “Carl did the experiments we asked him to do. Lab-bench-level experiments designed by Alan or me. That’s not the same as designing the experiments, or doing the formulating, or creating a product. And even so, any work done at Equine legally belongs to me as sole owner and proprietor. That’s absolutely standard. It’s stated right in your contracts. What I did that most people don’t was to give you and Carl bonuses when a new product did well. Even so, there’s a difference between what’s right and what’s legal. Taking those formulas was wrong.”
Butch set his coffee on the telephone table, just as Garner Honeycutt thanked him for the coffee, and stood up and walked toward the door.
Butch stood too, and faced Bob Harrison, then dropped his eyes toward the floor. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harrison. I can see it better from your side now. And I wish I hadn’t done it.”
“I do too. I really do. I thought we could all work together.”
Butch stood on the side porch after they’d gone, a bottle of twelve-year-old Jefferson bourbon open on the table by the hammock, a cocktail glass with an inch in the bottom hanging loose in his hand. He sipped at it again, then drank the rest down, and wiped his mouth on the rolled-up sleeve of his denim work shirt.
He stood and stared at the big old elms, tall and wide and half dead most of them, twisted gray arms sticking up toward the sky in the darkening dusk. He watched the old willow too, weeping across the ground, being torn by the wind on the far side of the creek just past the edge of his land.
A storm had come up, rolling in fast, whipping leaves across the lawn as the first flash of lightning lit the night somewhere off on the west. He counted seconds till he shuddered from the crash that must’ve been five miles away.
The next bolt exploded closer, and he jumped before he could stop himself. He closed his eyes and shouted at himself, saying what he needed to hear, hoping that this time it might even work. Knowing it wouldn’t in the long run. Because by then he was crawling up a hill in Korea, icy rain pouring down his neck, mud sliding under his hands, slipping away from his knees, slithering under his cold soaked boots while artillery shrieked, splitting the sky, as it pounded the world all around him.
Butch pitched his glass at the porch step, watching it shatter, as another flash of lightning hit off to his left, still flying in from the west with a freight train screaming wind. He held his hands over his ears, and waited for the next crash that didn’t come. Then he pushed his hair back with both hands and lifted his face to the rain, shouting “Damn Alan Munro! He’s gettin’ just what he wants!”
Saturday, August 10th, 1963
Carl woke up on the sofa just before six, Cassandra curled on his chest, the ashtray overturned on the floor beside him. He sat up, as Cassandra jumped, and rubbed his eyes with both hands.
The house was silent, which was unexpected. Janie was always up by five, making coffee and fixing breakfast, or working in the study—and he called her name on his way to the bathroom, but didn’t get a reply.
She could’ve been in the garden already, getting a start before it got hot, and he didn’t give it much thought.
She wasn’t in the bedroom, but her closet door was ajar, and when he opened it all the way, he saw most of her clothes were gone. Her suitcases weren’t on the upper shelf, and her two favorite pillows were missing from the unmade bed.
Carl walked into the kitchen to see if her car was on the apron next to the unattached garage—but it wasn’t. Which by that time was no surprise.
He splashed his face in the kitchen sink, looking out at the gardens she’d made, at the star-shaped leaves of the clematis vine getting tossed against the screen in a soft northerly breeze.
He grabbed a dish towel and patted his face, then went to the fridge for the can of Folgers, and noticed an envelope waiting on the counter addressed to him in her hand.
He turned it over, but laid it down again, then started the percolator, and made himself toast, and poured a glass of orange juice.
He ate the toast and drank the juice, glancing through the Herald Leader he hadn’t read the day before, and finished his first cup of coffee too, and lit his second Lucky, before he poured another cup, and slit the back of the envelope.
Carl,
I have left you not simply because of the revelations of last evening, but because it served as confirmation of the character traits I have observed in the course of our years together.
When we first met in Bloomington, I felt great compassion for you because of the deprivations you had faced as a child, and your determination to work two jobs to save funds for college.
What I came to see after we married was that you take whatever help you are given as your rightful due because of what you lived through. You were not grateful to the pharmacist who took you into his home and gave you a job in the Depression, any more than you were my brother-in-law for arranging a Chemistry scholarship at IU, and letting us live rent free.
Even so, I was proud of you for completing your degree, and being promoted to the lab at the dairy. Then, totally unexpectedly, in 1939, I was introduced to the pharmacist who had taken you in. I have never spoken of our conversation. I have tried to thrust it from my mind. He told me that when he had asked you the year before if you would help run the pharmacy for a week while his wife had surgery, you “preferred not to use vacation days coming to you at the dairy.” You never returned his phone calls after that. And yet he spoke of you with sadness and confusion, rather than bitter resentment.