The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  The defendant was a beautiful young girl. The question, then, in this little backwoods trial was not innocent versus guilty, because, in Rose’s experience, no one qualified as completely without guilt. The most innocent-seeming individuals were often simply the best liars. She settled back in her seat and stared out at the bare November fields, as bleak and ugly as Truth.

  HENRY JERNIGAN’S SILVER FLASK was empty. He’d been forced to share its contents with the rabbity man to lull him back to sleep, and thus into blessed silence. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. They would have moonshine, he supposed, where they were going. He hoped so. It was hillbilly country, after all. Practically all he knew about the back of beyond was that its populace consisted of feuding clans of slack-jawed yokels, and that they distilled illicit corn liquor in metal contraptions concealed in the woods. One might bribe a hotel factotum to obtain some.

  Abingdon, their first stop, was civilized enough, he’d heard, but then it was on to Wise: a godforsaken little hamlet, no doubt, tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine . . . That phrase again, this time set to a singsong melody. The tune jangled through his brain in time with the throbbing of his headache, and the train clattered on.

  TWO

  WAITING FOR A TRAIN

  In death Pollock Morton would inconvenience a great many more people than he had in life.” A good lead, he thought, maybe even worth the smudge of ink his fountain pen had made on the cuff of his one good shirt. Writing in his notebook on the train passed the time, and, though he never would have admitted it, it made him feel important. He imagined his fellow passengers watching him scribbling away, and thinking that this was not just a scrawny adolescent on his way to visit kinfolks. In truth he wasn’t all that much older than his looks suggested, but he was a college graduate, and now he had a job that made him feel entitled to the occasional flash of self-importance.

  He looked up from his notes to watch the fields and woods flash by as the train rumbled along the river. The November day was dreary with its brown grass and clabbered sky, but the branches of the bare maples made a tracery of silver against the dark hills, and the mist hung between the folds of ridges, white patches on a quilted autumn landscape. The valley was tame land, sectioned into farms and villages, but its beauty lay in its setting, among wild mountains that must have looked just the same when Daniel Boone passed that way, a century and a half ago. Some of the old-timers swore they could remember when wolves and buffalo roamed these hills. He wished he could have been here then. In those days there were Indian raids and gold mines and an unbroken wilderness to be settled. But those days were gone for good. Nowadays, some hysterical female brains her daddy with a slipper, and they call it news.

  He tapped his pen on the lead sentence. Now what? At least it was a start. Most of the meat of the story would have to wait until he had seen the town and conducted some actual interviews, but he knew that a compelling beginning was essential to an in-depth story, and no matter what else he might learn, that sentence was inarguably true. The late Pollock Morton was causing a lot of trouble to a lot of people.

  Twenty years ago, murdered or not, that man would have lived and died in the obscurity of his little southwest Virginia coal town, and no one past the county line would have remarked on his passing. But the world was getting smaller, what with airplanes and telephones, so that now, in a manner of speaking, the whole country was looking over your back fence. One ordinary man who could have passed through life without once seeing his name in a newspaper was now a source of wonder to thousands, and to maybe a hundred people he was a downright inconvenience.

  To his daughter Erma, for instance, in jail for killing him. And then to a bunch of lawyers and witnesses whose lives were suddenly going to revolve around the investigation into the circumstances of his demise. It was funny how one death might cause ripples that spread out into widening circles until they touched even strangers who knew nothing of the dead man at all. Such musings had no place in a little Tennessee newspaper, though.

  He supposed that this conceit would cast him in the trifling role of a nosy neighbor, but he figured that a little humility was good for the soul. If he started giving himself airs about being the voice of truth or some such rubbish, he’d never hear the end of it back home.

  Gettin’ above your raisin’, are ye, Carl?

  A-lord, he hoped so. People always meant that remark as a dig, but Carl couldn’t see why they would think it so. His own never-expressed reply was: If some of us didn’t get above our raising, then all of us would still be living in caves.

  THE MORTON TRIAL would take him well above his raising in journalism, too. The big Eastern newspapers were all sending people to cover the story, and part of his joy in the assignment was the prospect of associating with these eminences of the fourth estate. When he was still in college, he began going to the library to read the works of the most celebrated journalists of the day: H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun; Fulton Lewis, Jr., of the Washington Herald; and the eloquent Henry Jernigan of the New York Herald-Tribune. Even the lady reporters Kathleen Norris and Rose Hanelon were streets ahead of him in experience, and he would have been honored beyond words to meet them. They were all familiar to him from their photographs, which appeared from time to time in their respective newspapers. In fact, so faithfully had he read their works over the years that he felt that he knew them already.

  He was only a newly minted reporter on a no-account paper in a one-horse town, but it was a start. He was still a long way from smoky bars in Paris, or from striding over battlefields in a trench coat and cavalry boots, but if he didn’t make a hash of this assignment, maybe someday he would get there.

  Right now, though, the extent of his “foreign correspondence” was crossing the Virginia state line. It wouldn’t be much of a train ride—Johnson City to Abingdon, Virginia. He’d pay for that one himself, since, strictly speaking, it was not part of his assignment. Then tomorrow another train ride—Abingdon to Kingsport, change trains, and then on to the small coal town of Wise, not more than four hours at most, even if the train made more stops than a dog at a tree farm.

  The only reason Carl got the assignment at all was because sending him would save money for the newspaper. His father’s first cousin Araby had married a much older man who had prospered in the timber business, and they lived in a large house in the town of Wise. Araby Minter, now a childless widow, had turned her home into a boardinghouse, taking in businessmen on mine-related business, and sometimes tourists or traveling clergymen. Because of the Morton trial, she would have more guests than she could handle, but since Carl was family, and could be accommodated in makeshift style, she agreed to make room for him, and, of course, she would not charge a relative for lodging. The fortunate coincidence of having a relative in Wise had won Carl the assignment over his more seasoned colleagues.

  He could have skipped Abingdon and headed straight to Wise, but his editor had said that the big-city journalists would probably stay over at the fancy new Martha Washington Hotel in Abingdon, just a block from the train station. Carl hoped he was right, because then he wanted a chance to meet them before the start of the trial. He figured he could learn a lot from the aristocrats of journalism, if he managed to ingratiate himself with them. If he could contrive to be friendly and natural in their presence. If he didn’t act like a tongue-tied hayseed. After all, this wasn’t just an excursion. He had a job to do. He was a man with a mission. And somebody else was paying his way.

  “A JOB.” The burly man at the news desk had eyed him skeptically. “You’re wanting a job. Well, who doesn’t these days, what with banks failing like houses of cards, and the government sitting on its hands while honest people starve. A job. Just how old are you, boy?”

  This was a sore point with Carl Jennings, who had not yet turned eighteen and who looked even younger. He decided on a diplomatic evasion. “Sir, I am a college graduate,” he said, drawing himsel
f up to his full five-feet-eight.

  He had tried to look both mature and presentable for the job interview, although his brown suit was a little short at the sleeves and ankles since his last growth spurt, and the collar of his Sunday-go-to-meeting shirt was frayed from four years of wear. But he had shaved twice, and slicked back his brown hair with the tiniest dab of lard from his mother’s kitchen. He hoped his diploma would count for more than his looks. He knew he was jug-eared and unprepossessing behind his rimless spectacles, but he was smart enough. He had managed to finish college at seventeen, by the simple expedient of skipping the first two grades of primary school. On his first day in grade one, when his teacher had caught him hiding a Zane Gray novel within the covers of his copy of Spelling Is Fun, she had promoted him to third grade on the spot. Perhaps he had not been mature enough to be up there with the nine-year-olds, but in a little country schoolroom nobody cared about that sort of thing. He could read, which qualified him for a desk with the third-graders, and that was that.

  He was accepted at East Tennessee State Teacher’s College in nearby Johnson City, but tuition was not within the family’s means. His father worked in the machine shop at the Clinchfield Railroad shops in Erwin, and he was lucky to still have a job, but his salary would not stretch to paying for an education. He had offered to speak to the shop foreman about getting Carl on at the railroad, but the boy would not be swayed, even by hints that another salary would be a godsend to the family. Instead, he had worked his way through college ten cents at a time. At night he set up pins in the bowling alley, and in the summer he picked blackberries for a dime a bucket, and he ate a lot of peanut butter on stale bread, but he made it through in three years because he couldn’t afford the luxury of taking four.

  Now he had a job and he paid his parents ten dollars a month rent for his old room. He was a dutiful son who was feeling more and more like a stranger. When he wanted to talk about ideas and books and the news of the world beyond the neighborhood, the person he chose to visit was his young cousin who lived back up the mountain. They were kindred spirits.

  THE WEEK BEFORE he got the assignment was clear and cold, with that sharp wind that people referred to as “the hawk flying low.” He had hitched a ride up to the Bonesteel farm on Ashe Mountain, because he was itching to talk to somebody about the world; that is, somebody who wouldn’t fuss over what he had for lunch, or ask him if the book he’d just read would put any extra money in his pay envelope. Nora wasn’t much more than a kid, but they saw things the same way. Carl thought of them as the family changelings.

  He had found her sitting on the velvet sofa in the parlor in front of a hickory log fire. She was bent over her needlework, and her dark hair glinted copper in the firelight.

  “Why are you making another old quilt, Nora?” he asked her. “You could buy a better bedspread in the Wish Book.”

  She glanced up from her sewing, but she didn’t smile. At twelve she had the fine-boned grace of the Bonesteels and a self-possession beyond her years. “I reckon you could if you had the money,” she said. “But this coverlet won’t cost a cent. I’m using scraps from old clothes. All the same, we are grateful to Mr. Sears Roebuck for sending us his catalogue. It lasts us a good couple of months in the outhouse.”

  Carl laughed. “Just as long as you all don’t use my newspaper out there.”

  “No.” A spark of mischief flashed in her eyes. “No, we generally light the kindling with it.” Seeing the look of chagrin on his face, Nora relented, “But we wouldn’t burn any page with a story written by you, Carl. I always check.”

  He smiled and stretched, leaning back against the back of the applewood rocker that their great-grandfather had made when he came back from the War. It was so peaceful up here on the mountain that he always hated to leave, but he wondered how he would have turned out if he had been brought up here so far from town.

  Carl’s father had grown up on a hill farm over the ridge from this one, but at eighteen he had moved down the valley to Erwin to work for the railroad, taking along his new bride, Sarah Bonesteel. He had known her all his life from school and church, and probably they were fourth or fifth cousins somewhere down the line, since all the residents of Ashe Mountain were descended from the same dozen pioneer families who had settled here in the 1790s. If you had to go and live in the town, it was a comfort to have with you someone who thought the same as you did.

  In the sepia photographs in the family album, Carl’s mother had the look of her niece Nora: the same wavy hair and cold blue eyes set in an angular face, striking without exactly being beautiful. It was a face you didn’t forget.

  Sam and Sarah Jennings had progressed from a rented wooden shanty near the railroad to a trim brick house on a corner lot in town, where Carl had grown up. If they missed that peaceful world high up the mountain, they never said so. From time to time they went back “up home” to visit the families, and every summer when the church had Homecoming Sunday, they always went with a basket of homemade pies, so that Carl never felt like too much of a stranger among his country kin. But he was always aware that he lived in a different world, although it was not as simple as “past” versus “present.” No one loved technology more than his uncles up the mountain.

  Back on the farm, his father’s eight brothers, the mechanically-minded Jennings boys, had produced their own electricity when the town was still making do with gaslights and coal oil lamps. The Jennings brothers had rigged up a generator to run on water power from the creek, and they had strung wires to the house and to all the outbuildings, so that even the cows and chickens had electric lights, which burned all the time, because they hadn’t installed any switches to turn them off.

  Carl’s uncles had a car long before most of the people in town had acquired one, but they seemed to think of it more as a toy than as a means of transportation. Before 1920 they pooled their money and bought a Model T Ford. When they got it back to the farm, they pushed it into the barn, broke out the tools, and proceeded to take it completely apart. Then they spent many happy hours figuring out how to put it back together. Once they had worked out how the car was assembled and what made it run, they took turns driving it around the pasture, dodging apple trees.

  There had been eight young uncles up on the farm when Carl was still a toddler, but most of them had moved away by now. One had married and stayed to farm the homeplace for his aging parents, and two got farms of their own, but the rest had found jobs in keeping with their mechanical inclinations. The twins worked in logging camps over on the North Carolina side of the mountain. One found a job in Erwin with the railroad, thanks to brother Sam. The two youngest boys had gone off to Detroit to work in the car factories. Life in a Michigan city seemed to Carl like the biggest possible change from the placid life on the mountain. What did they make of urban life? Were they content up there?

  Now the mountain settlements were mostly populated by the old folks and those of their children who were still too young to leave.

  Carl knew that his world would have been smaller if his parents had stayed up here on the mountain. He might have left school at fourteen as some of his cousins had. By sixteen they were married, and by the time they had reached his current age of twenty, they were well into middle age, with a growing family and a job that would lead them nowhere but the grave. It wasn’t that they were backward or unintelligent. Some of the folks up here were smarter than anybody he had met at the college, and they read everything they could find, so that they salted their conversations with phrases from Milton, Homer, and Shakespeare. So why were they content to remain here? He wasn’t sure, but if he had to put a name to his hunch, he might have called it shyness or, more precisely, since it was not fear, a disinclination to involve themselves in the machinations of society. They had no truck with currying favor with the powerful, or telling social lies in their own self-interest, or any of the other forms of artifice. More than they wanted wealth or comfort or security, they wanted to be left alone.
r />   There was a lot of that in him, too, but he considered it a fault, and he fought against that tendency to hang back, to be forever a stranger in any company. Perhaps he had chosen journalism for just that reason. Being a newspaperman forced him to talk to strangers, to encounter new people and new situations every day. Carl thought that if he kept at it long enough, he might be able to do it without having to force himself. He still wasn’t very good at ingratiating himself with people who outranked him, but he thought that maybe being smart and working hard would go part of the way toward making up for that.

  Now that he was a newspaper reporter, observing other people’s adventures if not having them himself, he felt he had gone a step beyond his father’s achievements, and miles past what some of the cousins had done. He hoped that little Nora would have more of a life than some of the other women he’d seen, old at thirty, living and dying without leaving so much as a ripple in their wake. Nora was too fine for that. He liked to stop in when he could, to tell her of the doings out in the world, to give her something to aspire to, something beyond this solitary mountain.

  NOW HE WAS SPRAWLED in his customary position in the applewood rocker, while Nora sat on the old sofa, with the quilt pieces spread across her lap. He set his glass of mulled cider on the floor and took a deep breath of mountain air, tinged with wood smoke and the beeswax from the newly polished furniture. From the kitchen came a hint of apples and cinnamon, which meant pies in the oven. Nora’s quilting was her way of passing the time of his visit until she was called to help with the supper preparations. Nora was always busy doing one chore or another, but as a visitor Carl felt no urge at all to turn his hand to anything. As far as he was concerned, this place was a respite from the real world. This was his sanctuary.