The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  An appreciation of oriental music had also eluded him, but through some ex-pat acquaintances, he met Mr. Chiaki, who was an exporter with business interests in Philadelphia and a wish to perfect his English and enlarge upon his knowledge of western ways. This mutual cultural exchange pleased both of them, and an alliance of convenience was formed.

  “What instrument is that?” he had whispered to his host.

  “It is koto. You see it is in the shape of the dragon.”

  Henry had never pictured dragons as loglike creatures, but he nodded politely at this odd bit of information, while he tried to think of something else to say. “Is it made of elm wood?”

  His host shook his head. “Kiri.” He thought for a moment. “Gaijin say paulownia wood.”

  Henry had never heard of that, either, but he smiled and nodded.

  Mr. Chiaki pointed to the instrument. “You see the small standing-up pieces on the top? They can be moved to change the . . .” He groped for the word and failed to find it. “The high and low of the sound.”

  Henry nodded. “The pitch.”

  The master composer Michio Miyagi, blind from childhood, had played his new composition, Aki No Shirabe, on the koto. Henry had tried to pay attention to the music, but he found his mind wandering to other things. The unfamiliar sound of the koto failed to hold his attention. There was no discernible melody to follow, and nothing in the sound or the performance touched him emotionally. He sat politely in the concert hall and watched the man on the stage as he deftly touched the strings and shifted the bridges of the instrument. Certainly Henry admired the skill of the musician, because the koto appeared to be quite a difficult instrument to play, but its spell eluded him. Perhaps there are cultural divides that cannot be crossed, even with all the good will in the world. The strange sounds washed over him, and he found himself drifting away to thoughts of peaceful gardens and bright-eyed elfin people who seemed to have stepped out of a fairy tale.

  When he came to himself again, Henry was once again in the auditorium of WOPI, and the trio was blended in tight harmony on a refrain about thinking tonight of “My Blue-Eyes.” Neither the melody nor blue eyes touched Henry’s soul, but as he glanced down the row, he saw Rose wiping away tears with the back of her hand, and he knew whose blue eyes were making her weep. He sighed. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

  FOUR

  But follow anyone on this road, and the gods will see you through.

  —MATSUO BASH

  Saturday night in Abingdon, Virginia.

  Carl Jennings was determined not to waste it. He’d had no luck in finding the national reporters, but he still might be able to salvage some bit of profit from the excursion. According to the desk clerk at their hotel, the city people had rented a car and gone out for the evening. The clerk didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, where they had gone. Carl figured he had undertaken the cost of a train ride and a hotel room for nothing, but he was determined to make the best of this side trip to Abingdon by getting whatever information he could about the Wise County murder.

  Because neither his salary nor his meager expense account would cover the tab at the Martha Washington Inn, Carl had sought the advice of the Abingdon station agent, Mr. Ivin B. Wells (you never knew when some tidbit of information like that would come in handy), and on that worthy gentleman’s recommendation, he had checked into the Belmont Hotel, a stone’s throw from the railway station.

  After a meat and two veg dinner at the nearest diner, he had gone back to his chilly room in the Belmont to consider his options. He tossed his crumpled notes and newspaper clippings on the white chenille bedspread, kicked off his shoes, and draped his suit coat over the back of the room’s one straight-backed chair. He didn’t have anything new to write about, but it was still far too early to sleep. He wondered what else he could do. Anything but spend the evening in that musty little room. He didn’t mind the shabbiness of the place, but he did hope that the radiator worked. The room was hardly bigger than the sagging double bed, and the windows, fly-blown and hazy from dust and cigarette smoke, needed a scrubbing with vinegar water, but, considering the price, it would do. The brown carpet was threadbare, and the garish red patterned wallpaper probably glowed in the dark—which would be just as well, he thought, because the room’s single lightbulb certainly wasn’t providing much in the way of illumination. Idly, he wondered if Erma Morton, currently incarcerated in the Wise County Jail, had better accommodations than he did.

  The Belmont suited his budget for a night’s lodging, but still he wished he could have afforded to stay at the Martha. He wondered what those rooms were like. That afternoon when he had dropped off Mr. Jernigan’s suitcase, he had peeked into the graceful reception rooms, abashed by their restrained eighteenth-century grandeur. The well-bred elegance of the Martha Washington Inn had made him more discontented than he otherwise would have been with his shabby little room down the street. Maybe someday, with enough hard work and the right breaks, he might become important enough to merit deluxe accommodations, not that he cared about staying in such a place for the luxury it afforded, but he regarded such places as a way of keeping score, to show how far he had come. Which was not very far at the moment, if his lodgings were any indication of his progress.

  He looked around the dingy little bedroom, and sighed again. There was no sense in wasting a Saturday night sitting around in this cage for travelers. He should be making the most of this free time to get a head start on his assignment, but he had read over his notes until his head ached, and he was no further along than he had been back in Johnson City.

  He ought to go out and find some people to talk to. Small talk was an acquired skill for Carl. He still had to steel himself to attempt it. What was it the man in the café had said? “The pink tearoom.” He wondered if the fellow had been joking, but since that remark was the only lead he had, he decided to go downstairs and ask around. You never knew your luck.

  The Belmont’s clerk gave him a bewildered look, and mumbled that there weren’t any tearooms that he knew of in town, and was the gentleman sure it wasn’t moonshine he was a-hunting. Carl shook his head, and decided to go back to the café where he’d heard the phrase, and ask there.

  “Sure, I know the place.” The man in the dirty apron wiped down the counter with a wet rag as he spoke. “T’ain’t pink, and they don’t serve tea, but I don’t reckon you’ll object much to that. You’re a reporter, didn’t you say?”

  “That’s right,” said Carl. “Over from Johnson City.”

  The man nodded. “Didn’t take you for one of the big city fellers. That’s the outfit you’re looking for, right enough. You know where the Journal Virginian Weekly office is?”

  “I reckon I can find it,” said Carl.

  “T’aint far. Well, nothing in Abingdon is far, is it?”

  Carl smiled. “No, it’s a handy little place. Pretty town, though.”

  The counterman nodded. “There’s money here, and that’s a fact. Eleanor Roosevelt’s daddy lived right here on Main Street for a spell.”

  “He did? Why?”

  “You didn’t hear it from me, son, but that New York family of his sent him down here to dry out and to stop embarrassing them back home. Anyhow, right next to the Journal office is a little tinsmith’s shop, and it has a back room. That’s what you’re looking for.”

  A FEW MINUTES’ WALK in the biting wind brought him to the tinsmith’s shop. Although the lights were off in the shop itself, Carl found that the front door was ajar, and in the darkness he could make out a seam of light beneath the closed door of a back room. He pushed open the front door, dodging work tables and sheets of tin resting against the wall nearby. In the light from the front window, he could make out a collection of objects on the nearest work table, either newly fashioned or brought in to be repaired. He recognized tin coffee pots, milk pails, and cake pans. He almost stumbled over a pie safe, a large wooden cabinet whose door was a sheet of tin punched out in a design o
f hearts and willow fronds. The smith, whoever he was, seemed to be doing good business, despite the troubled economic times.

  Carl waited a moment for his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness before he walked quietly toward the back of the shop. From behind the door on the back wall he heard a murmur of voices. Carl wasn’t much for barging into strange places uninvited, but he told himself that if he wanted to be a journalist, he’d better toughen up some and forget his mother’s lessons on propriety. He took a deep breath and tapped gently on the door to the back room.

  The murmuring ceased, and after a moment the rasping voice of an older man called out, “Who’s out there?”

  “Carl Jennings. I’m a reporter,” he called back with as much authority as he could muster.

  He thought he heard muffled laughter, and more talking in an undertone. Then the same voice, closer to the door now, said, “Figured that! Where ye from?”

  “Johnson City.”

  After another pause that seemed longer to Carl than it actually was, the doorknob turned, and an eye peered at him through the crack. “Johnson City, eh? Well, that might be all right. We took you for one of them weasels from up north who think they walk on water. Come in, if you’re coming.”

  Easing past the grizzled doorkeeper, Carl stood uncertainly before the Abingdon council of elders. The sardonically named “pink tearoom” consisted of a semicircle of dilapidated straight-backed chairs around a pot-bellied stove in a dingy old store room. The occupants of those chairs would have been instantly recognizable to a young male of any species, Carl thought. In ancient Rome, at the New York Stock Exchange, or in a colony of walruses on a barren rock in an ocean: these were the tribal elders. In their southwest Virginia incarnation, the elders were men in late middle age, silver-haired or balding, in white shirtsleeves or suit coats, with skinny ties askew, and each one held a tumbler of whiskey. Most of them were smoking—cigarettes seemed the favorite, but there were a couple of cigars and a pipe—and the combined fumes from their tobacco products made the room hazy with smoke, and short on fresh air.

  He stood just inside the doorway, suddenly conscious of his too boyish face, his cheap overcoat, and the re-soled brown shoes from the mail order catalogue. In the dim light these men, the archons of Abingdon, were sizing him up, and they weren’t likely to be impressed by what they saw. His only hope of being tolerated in their presence was absolute deference.

  Carl knew the ritual well enough: he must be resolutely courteous to these men, regardless of provocation; he must not argue with the pronouncements made by any of the group; and he must affect gratitude for their tolerating his presence. In exchange for his deference, he would be granted whatever wisdom they had to offer.

  A cherubic-looking man, with rimless spectacles and wisps of white hair wreathed around a bald spot, motioned for him to drag another chair up to the stove. Carl took a spindly ladderback chair out of a corner next to some shelves, unobtrusively brushing away most of the cobwebs as he dragged it into the circle. Before he sat, though, he introduced himself and shook hands all around. He didn’t quite catch their names, and he got the impression that they hadn’t intended for him to, but his show of courtesy seemed to pass muster, because as soon as he was safely seated on the swaybacked chair, someone offered him a cigar, which he declined. The burly man beside him handed over a glass of bourbon, which he knew better than to refuse. Then the conversation resumed as if he were not there.

  After a few more minutes of desultory discussion about local politics and speculation about the weather, during which Carl tried to pretend he wasn’t there, they took pity on him and steered the talk into more useful channels.

  “Good thing the trial is in Wise,” one of them said. “That’s as close as those New York fellers will ever get to experiencing that condition.”

  The remark drew laughs and nods of agreement, but Carl suspected that the quip was a standard jest made by the local wits, and that it had been trotted out solely for his benefit.

  The grizzled old fellow in rimless spectacles turned to Carl. “So you’re covering this trial, too, are you?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a wonderful chance for me. First big story.”

  “But are you lost, son?” His smirk drew answering smiles from the other elders. “I ask only because the trial is taking place over in Wise, and here you are, sitting smack dab in the middle of Abingdon, which is a couple of counties away, doncha know. I hope you noticed that the trains don’t even run from here to Wise.”

  It seemed to Carl that the elders went very still, waiting for his answer.

  “No, sir, I know they don’t.”

  “You could have got there directly from Johnson City, though,” another man called out.

  A silver-haired man who looked accustomed to command summoned a mirthless smile. “It’s not that we doubt your veracity, young man. No, indeed. It is your common sense that we are questioning.”

  Since no plausible face-saving lie occurred to him under this sudden cross-examination, Carl settled for the embarrassing truth. “I came here to Abingdon on purpose, sir. I heard that the famous journalists were staying here at the Martha Washington Inn.”

  The silver-haired man nodded, and his expression indicated that he had already guessed that. “And yet here you are in the back room of a tin shop which has heretofore not been mistaken for that renowned establishment, the Martha Washington Inn.”

  Another of the men waved a cigar in the general direction of his companions. “And you have our solemn word that not a soul among us can lay claim to being a northern newspaperman. We are none of us as drunk as that.”

  “Nor as uneducated.”

  The elders were having a joke at his expense, a test to see how he would react to the provocation, but Carl thought that he probably deserved the ribbing, because, in retrospect, he realized that coming to Abingdon to hobnob with the famous reporters had indeed been a fool’s errand. He saw that now, so he let them laugh, and made no move to excuse his behavior.

  “Just as well you didn’t find them, boy,” said the silver-haired patrician, when the merriment subsided. “I don’t think you would have learned much from that bunch, anyhow.”

  The others nodded. “I reckon you’re better off going with what you already know,” said another. “At least you’re acquainted with mountain ways, which is more than any of them can claim.”

  “Of course, that won’t stop them from claiming it. I’m sure that every one of them will trump up some excuse for declaring brotherhood with the good citizens of Wise, so that they can attest to the wherewithal to get at the truth of the case.”

  “Or at least the most popular lies.”

  “Now, you might be the one to get to the bottom of it, young man. At least you know this part of the world, instead of making it up as you go along.”

  Carl took a fortifying sip of Washington County bourbon. “Yes, sir.”

  “And they’ll be quoting that infernal book as if it was Holy Scripture.”

  “Mr. John Fox, Jr.’s book, do you mean, sir?”

  “I do. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, published in 1906, and set even earlier, but that’s the world those buzzards came looking for, and they won’t rest until they’ve found it.”

  The patrician scowled. “I don’t reckon those big-time reporters can be trusted any farther than you could throw one. Are you old enough to remember the Floyd Collins story, son?”

  Carl nodded, knowing that this was not an invitation to speak but a preamble to a long story that he was not to spoil by admitting that he already knew it. The tale was not going to be trotted out solely for his benefit, but he would serve as the excuse for the telling of it, and, familiar or not, he would be obliged to find it fascinating.

  Carl did remember the case, though. He had been ten years old in 1926, when an obscure Kentucky farmer, whose hobby was cave exploring, had got himself trapped underground, capturing the attention of the entire country. Maybe it was the first news story t
hat ever did unite the nation, thanks to the relatively new mediums of radio, telegraph, and telephones, spreading the news faster than it had ever been sent before. Since that event nearly ten years ago, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby might have gripped the nation longer and harder, but, before that trial, Floyd Collins had become a national sensation overnight, just by getting stuck in a cave.

  Collins, a tall, spare farmhand in his late thirties, had lived in the limestone region of western Kentucky, south of Louisville, only a few miles from Mammoth Cave. For years he had been spending his spare time in the fields and woods, crawling into holes in the ground, in hopes of finding a subterranean route that connected to the nearby Mammoth system of caves.

  Floyd Collins’s luck ran out on a soggy day in January, when, burrowing deep into a narrow hillside passageway, he dislodged a ham-sized rock that pinned his foot to the cave floor, trapping him alone underground. When he didn’t come home by morning, his family and neighbors managed to locate the missing man, but he was deep underground, and they had difficulty getting to him. His foot was caught under that slab of rock, and they couldn’t get him out.

  Collins wasn’t badly hurt. He just couldn’t dislodge the rock that pinned his leg, and the long passageway in which he was trapped was so steep and narrow that it was difficult—and terrifying—to try to reach him. He was at least two hundred feet from the entrance, in a narrow channel of rock perhaps two feet high, and only a little wider than the body of a man. Anyone who managed to reach him found that there was no space to use tools to free him. Another concern was that any activity in the passage would set off another rock fall, perhaps trapping the rescuer as well as Collins himself.