“And where’d you obtain this alleged law degree?”
“Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. We’re ole homeys, looks like.”
Bullock cackled unconvincingly.
“Right there on Towerview Road, West Campus,” Brother Jobe continued. “Sound familiar? I remember it like it was yesterday. Across the street on one corner was the science lab building and the Panda Express on t’other. I guess that outfit ain’t there no longer. Well, far as I know the whole shootin’ match is done for, things being how they are these days. Yessir, I been through that mill. Of course, I done it some years after you was there, I suppose. Didn’t see you around, anyways.”
Bullock’s jaw had dropped sequentially lower as Brother Jobe spoke since the landmarks he described were indeed as things were at Duke Law.
“How in the hell did they let you in there?” Bullock said. “I mean . . . no offense.”
“I think it was the interview that clinched it,” Brother Jobe said.
The others around the table tried to conceal their enjoyment of Bullock’s discomfort.
“But you . . . you don’t talk like a lawyer.”
“I guess you never met too many Virginia country lawyers.”
“No I haven’t.”
“Well, I can serve up a casus belli from a priori to a posteriori all the livelong day when I want to.”
“And I suppose you practiced,” Bullock said.
“About eight months,” Brother Jobe said. “Scott County, V-A. It was mostly hillbilly law. Folks burning each other’s trailers, drug cookers, wife beaters, child rapers, and all like that. I didn’t take to it so well. Anyway the Lord Jesus saved me from a life of animus nocendi et alii. He saved me in more ways than one.”
“Can you act as prosecutor in this case?” Ben Deaver said.
Brother Jobe paused ruminatively before answering.
“I suppose,” he said.
Bullock shook his head and smiled, yet awash in incredulity.
“All right, then,” he said. “And you’ll defend, will you, Sam?”
“I will,” Sam said.
Bullock opened his leather folio with a flourish.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ve prepared all the necessary writs. We’ll arraign this poor girl this afternoon and proceed from there.” He looked over his reading glasses at Brother Jobe. “She’s held over at your compound, I understand.”
“That is correct.”
“Is it the appropriate place?”
“There’s no other secure place to confine her,” Robert said. “To use the old jail upstairs, we’d have to heat this whole building, and that would require cords of firewood and somebody standing by around the clock to keep it all going.”
“I’m told she’s not in her right mind,” Bullock said.
“That would be my observation,” the doctor said. “It’s in my notes.”
“Mine, too, at the scene of the crime,” Loren said.
“Obviously there’s no psychiatric facility with a locked ward,” Robert said.
“She’s safe and comfortable where we got her,” Brother Jobe said.
The doctor explained to Bullock the particulars of Mandy Stokes’s recent illness, and how it had affected her.
“Then it might seem this whole business will conclude in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity,” Bullock said, looking from one man to another around the table. None of them offered a comment or opinion. “Hasn’t that occurred to any of you? Okay, in that event what would we do with her then? Keep her locked up in a room at the old high school for the next fifty years like some crazy old aunt in the attic?”
“You’re putting the cart before the horse again, Stephen,” Deaver said.
“Why don’t we get on with the proceedings and take these things as they come,” Loren said.
“All I’m saying is that this case raises some very troubling issues,” Bullock said. “And I hope you’re all prepared for certain consequences.” He slapped his folio of writs shut. “Shall we get on with this arraignment then?”
Robert Earle, as nominal chair of the meeting, called to adjourn. Back outside on the street, before Bullock, Loren, and the two lawyers proceeded to the old high school, Bullock took Robert aside. A fine drizzle fell, glazing the sidewalk and making it slippery, and fewer people were out on Main Street than the day before.
“You know, sooner or later I’m going to have to adjudicate your role in the death of that other young man,” Bullock said. He referred to Shawn Watling, murdered in June at the town landfill, which operated as a salvage yard for building materials and other recycled manufactured goods no longer available. Robert had been in Shawn’s company at the time of the murder, and subsequently came to cohabit with Shawn’s widow, Britney Blieveldt. Aspersions were cast but no charges made against Robert. The matter had never been legally resolved.
“You do what you must,” Robert said.
“Of course, I could order a hearing and dismiss a complaint at any time.”
“Then why the hell don’t you, Stephen?” Robert said. “I thought we were friends. This is starting to get under my skin.”
“I understand. But all you people here in town, you wanted me to represent the law, to be the law, and the law doesn’t have friends. The way things look right now, I might have to hang this girl in the final end of all this. How is the town going to like that?” Then, loudly to the others, who stood at a remove, Bullock said, “Gentlemen, let’s go do our duty.”
Fifteen
The arraignment was conducted in the room where Mandy Stokes was confined. She sat on the edge of her bed, still in her nightclothes, staring blankly ahead into some indeterminate space between herself and her interlocutors, and barely responded to the recitation of charges against her except to glance up at Bullock when he spoke the name “Julian.” Sam Hutto, with his long flat face and sympathetic manner, was introduced as her court-appointed defense attorney. She said nothing to him. Bullock set bail at five gold ounces—a sum so high as to preclude any possibility of release—and a date was set for a preliminary hearing. When the ritual was complete Brother Jobe walked the others back to the old lobby of the former high school, where Brother Boaz waited with something in a picture frame.
“Thank you, son,” Brother Jobe said.
Bullock acknowledged Boaz with a nod, but he wore a skeptical grin as if he suspected something was up.
“There she is, your honor,” Brother Jobe said as he handed over his framed diploma from the Duke University School of Law made out to one Lyle Beecham Wilsey, complete with stamped seals and signatures.
“Who’s this Wilsey?” Bullock said.
“That was my old times name. Our New Faith names are handpicked biblical. Ain’t that obvious?”
Bullock looked at the diploma and back at Brother Jobe several times.
“Don’t worry,” Brother Jobe said. “I got an old driver’s license and all kind of ID back in my quarters.” Bullock continued to stare at the document. “You think one of my people whipped this thing together on a computer the past hour since it first come up? Lookit here, this wax seal is the genuine article.”
Bullock handed it back.
“All I can say is, this world is just one astonishing goddamn thing after another.”
Brother Jobe appeared to take it as a compliment, but then the unusually small features of his large round face all bunched together fretfully.
“Uh, your honor, I’ll have to ask you to mind your language. This here is a sacred outfit.”
“Excuse me.”
Sixteen
Despite the tragedy in Mill Hollow of the night before, the Christmas Eve service, called Lessons and Carols, went on as scheduled at the First Congregational Church of Union Grove with the Reveren
d Loren Holder presiding and narrating the vignettes from the Nativity, and all the musical instruments and voices soaring between lessons, and the children of town acting out in costume the doings long ago in the Holy Land. The spacious nave of the austere white wooden church was warmed by more than three hundred bodies, including farmers, tradesmen, and their families who had come from miles around, as well as a score of visitors from the New Faith compound with their own shepherd, Brother Jobe. The formal program was followed in the large, adjacent community room by a potluck feast of roasts, hams, sausages, smoked trouts, braised pikes, puddings, fritters, creamed this and that, pickles, cheeses, corn breads and pones, brandied fruits, glacéed pears, prune whips, custards, honey cakes, and hickory nut macaroons, with eggnog, beer, and cider to wash it down.
When the convocation broke up, and wagons and carts were mounted for journeys home, and the people of town walked to their homes, the rain that started earlier turned again to snow, an exuberant snow of large fluffy flakes whose wondrous hexagonal patterns could be discerned when they landed on wool mittens. Robert walked home arm in arm with Britney and eight-year-old Sarah, marveling at how much in love he was with them, and how unlikely it was that he had come to have another family after losing his first family—wife, Sandy, daughter Genna, both killed by epidemic illnesses, and son Daniel, who had left home at nineteen with Loren and Jane Ann’s boy Evan, to see what had happened out in America. It disturbed Robert when he realized that he loved his new family as much as the one that he had lost, and he wondered whether his feeling for one was a betrayal of the other.
But his regret did not persist very long this holiday eve as they called good night to neighbors and entered the house with all the urgent need to stoke the stove and light some candles and heat some water for washing and get Sarah ready for bed so she would ride unicorns through dream forests and be rested for the morning, when Robert would present her with the violin he had found to buy in nearby Center Falls, a very nice one-hundred-year-old German violin that would be a pleasure to play, and would become a familiar extension of the girl’s hands and, if she was fortunate, of her heart as well in the years to come. And after she was tucked in, Robert read to her from Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, the Autobiography of a Horse, which had been one of his favorites as a child, and Daniel’s and Genna’s too. It was about a way of life that more resembled the new times of the present than Robert’s own boyhood in the days of Star Wars, computer gaming magic, and other techno-grandiosities that had come to such a shockingly abrupt end.
When Sarah slipped into sleep, Robert took the candle into the bathroom, where half a pail of warm water stood on the chest beside the sink waiting for him, and from there into his own bedroom where Britney waited for him naked beneath the quilt. He climbed in and gathered her in his arms, amazed at the generosity of the universe to have arranged things this way.
“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I had sneakers with little red lights on the edge of the soles. They twinkled whenever I took a step. I couldn’t get over how magical they were. I wore them one year to the big public Christmas breakfast when they used to hold it in the old theater on the top floor of the old town hall. Everybody followed my footsteps around the room while the high school kids sang carols on stage. It broke my heart when they wore out and the batteries stopped working.”
“Couldn’t you get another pair?”
“By then Daddy was gone and we were very poor. Everybody was poor. I used to be sorry that Sarah would never have a pair of magic sneakers like that, but I don’t think so anymore. There are other ways to feel special and other kinds of magic in the world. Merry Christmas, Robert.”
Britney slid on top of him and sat up with the quilt over her shoulders, a vision in the candlelight: compact, soft, fragrant, amorously ripe, and intent. Robert reached up and drew her face down to his.
Seventeen
When Andrew Pendergast came back to his house after directing the musicians (and playing piano) for the Christmas Eve program of lessons and carols, there were candles burning in two of the front windows and the woodstove had been tended to keep the house warm for his return, as he had instructed Jack Harron to do. More than one clock ticked around the big old house and the split logs hissed as they burned in the stove. He put his hat and overcoat carefully in the hall closet and proceeded to the kitchen, placing a splint basket down on the big farmhouse table there.
“Jack,” he called into the darkness where the back room was.
Shortly, Jack Harron emerged from his room into the hallway squinting in the candlelight. He was physically transformed from the filthy furtive creature of the previous evening to at least the outward representation of a housebroken human being. He wore a pair of Andrew’s old wool pants, tattered from years of outdoor excursions in pursuit of minerals for his paints, botanicals for his health, and spring trout for his frying pan, and an old, frayed, lavender-colored Calvin Klein button-down shirt from days when Andrew reported to an office in New York City. Because Jack was so emaciated, the pants were cinched and scrunched at the waist with an old belt that he had punched some new holes in. And because he was shorter than Andrew he had rolled up each trouser leg. He had trimmed his beard, as Andrew told him to do, and bathed more than once in the past twenty-four hours until he’d scrubbed all the layers of grime and grease off himself.
“Were you asleep?”
“I guess so.”
“Not sure?”
“I was asleep. I haven’t slept hardly at all lately in the cold.”
“Thank you for tending the stove and lighting the candles.”
“It’s what you told me.”
“Thanks for doing what I told you.”
“It’s comfortable here. I forgot what that’s like.”
“Sit down,” Andrew said and Jack took a seat at the table. Andrew fetched a plate from a cupboard and some cutlery from a drawer. He removed various articles from the splint basket: slices of ham, corn bread, a deviled egg, dried fruit, and nut cookies. “Are you hungry?”
Jack shrugged his shoulders.
“Anyway, help yourself. I brought this back for you.”
Jack nodded. Andrew sat down across from him.
“Do you have any idea why I did that?” he said.
Jack appeared puzzled. “No,” he said.
“It’s called an act of kindness, the important part of being human. Has no one been kind to you?”
Jack began to weep quietly with his head hanging, eyes on the table.
“When I came here last night, I think I wanted to do you harm,” he said.
“I thought so too,” Andrew said.
“But I don’t know why. I’m so confused . . . about everything.”
“Do you still want to harm me?”
“No.”
“All right. Eat something.”
Jack hesitated as if struggling to work through a conundrum, before he picked up the slab of ham and began nibbling on it.
“I don’t understand what’s happened,” he said.
“Tell me who you are.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Start at whatever part makes sense.”
“Sometime this fall,” he said, “I stopped showing up for work at Mr. Schmidt’s farm. I was just a common laborer. If there was a hard or a filthy job to do, Mr. Schmidt put me to it. I don’t know why.”
“He’s not a bad man.”
“I was a bad worker. I know it. I showed up late. I didn’t care how I did anything. I had no gloves. My hands froze. I couldn’t stand another day of it. I walked away. I never expected it would go this way.”
“What would go what way?”
“My life. Working in mud, in frozen pig shit. I can’t believe what’s happened in the world. Now I can’t even take care of myself.”
“When the world wants to destroy you, what do you do?” Jack said.
“I don’t believe the world wants to destroy you. At the worst it’s indifferent to us.”
“That’s an evil thing. It brings us here. I didn’t ask to be born. Nobody does. You’d think the world would have some pity on its creations.”
“It’s up to people to care for other people,” Andrew said.
Their eyes met. Jack’s were moist with emotion.
“Why would you let me stay here?”
“I’m by myself and there’s a lot to do just to run this household. I could use help.”
“Why are you by yourself?”
“It’s how I am,” Andrew said.
“Then why let me stay here?”
“You asked to be fixed. In the meantime, I’ll ask you to do things. And you’ll get fixed.”
“I’ll do things,” Jack said. “I won’t do any . . . personal things.”
“I won’t ask you to do any personal things.”
“All right then.”
Jack ate the rest of the ham more earnestly and popped the deviled egg in his mouth.
“Do you mind if I ask,” Andrew said, “what you were before?”
“Before everything went to shit?”
“Yes.”
“A student at Adirondack. The community college up to Glens Falls.”
“Studying what?”
Jack laughed ruefully. “Communications,” he said. “After a certain point, I couldn’t drive up there anymore because of the gas shortage. Anyway, the school shut down, like everything else after a while. My mom lived here, over on Southside behind the Cumberland Farms store. She died. My older sister, she died too. You should have seen her in high school. Sizzling hot. She had a kid. The baby daddy was a useless piece of shit. Blew himself up in a trailer over to Battenville cooking drugs. In the last years of the old times, my sister got hugely fat. Like a cartoon. Then the world turned upside down. Her baby died the same year as Mom from the same disease. There was no food coming into the supermarket anymore. Not the stuff she ate, which was only stuff you could put into a microwave. Then she got to be skinny as a scarecrow. Her teeth fell out. Killed herself. Drank some old cleaner from under the sink. That’s my family.”
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