The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Damn right, you’re not. You’re paid to report the facts. Nobody cares what you think.”

  “I know. But I just wonder if she is guilty.”

  The judge shook his head. “Start looking for an angel, then. Because all a jury’s going to tell you is which side won the legal chess game. Which is not the same as revealing the truth. Don’t forget that. What the world knows is this: a pretty young schoolteacher came home after ten o’clock one night last July, and her intoxicated father pitched into her about it. They had a screaming fight. A neighbor claimed to overhear cries in the night, and the next morning the old man is found dead in his house with a wound on his temple. The rest is conjecture.”

  “But maybe the townspeople know something that hasn’t made the newspapers. Maybe there’s a boyfriend or some enemy of the family.” It sounded unlikely, even to Carl, but he was reluctant to abandon hope of an inside source.

  The patrician reached for the bottle to refill his glass. “Well, you journalists should take to heart the motto of the mongoose, young man. That’s my advice to you.”

  Carl recognized the quotation, because from the time he could read, Rudyard Kilpling had been among his favorite authors. The motto of the mongoose is, “Run and find out.”

  ERMA

  At least she was pretty enough. With her big dark eyes, and her thick black hair, she was someone that people noticed. After the first glance they would see her good straight nose and the graceful swan neck that showed she had breeding—those were the signs of a real lady. There was class in her mother’s bloodline, and it showed in her fine features. There was no shame in being a spinster at twenty-one, not if you looked like she did.

  She could have got married at fifteen if she’d a mind to, but she didn’t want to end up like some of the girls she had gone to school with: old at thirty, bedraggled in faded print dresses and down-at-heel shoes, with babies hanging all over them like leeches. She repressed a shudder. No man was worth that. That was one thing her mother had taught her without meaning to. There must have been some reason her pretty, well-born mama had married that lout—some spark of passion in a long-ago summer. But whatever momentary joy Mama had found with him, she had repented for in the leisure of the next twenty years. Youthful passion was not worth what it would cost you over the course of a lifetime. Mama was living proof of that.

  She had wanted to get out of this world’s end village. She wanted an education and a little independence, which was funny when you thought about it, because all she had now was the freedom of a ten-by-twelve-foot jail cell. Well, she’d never had much space to call her own, anyhow.

  Half a dormitory room at Radford Teachers College, shared with a cousin, and then back home to live with her folks again, in a rented house sandwiched between the road and the river. They had four rooms, opening into one another without even a hallway between them. She had slept on the sofa bed in the front room. There wasn’t much less privacy than that in a jail cell.

  Anyhow, she reckoned it was easier to get out of prison than it was to get out of a child-ridden marriage. Now that would be a life sentence. But she was pretty. That beauty had led her into the temptation of making an early and improvident marriage, and she had sometimes wished she could dispense with it to strengthen her sense of purpose. But now it mattered.

  You could get a husband, even if you were as plain as pig tracks, and a pretty girl could get one in a heartbeat, but it was important for a defendant to be pretty. Your life depended on it. Her lawyer had said so. Because all the jurors would be men, of course, and they would be more inclined to be merciful to a “looker,” especially one who was young and unmarried.

  “So they’ll think I’m innocent because of that?” she asked him.

  The lawyer smiled. “Well, maybe some of them will. Or they might think what a waste it would be to lock a lovely girl away forever, but their reasons don’t concern us. Just as long as they vote ‘not guilty,’ they can think what they like.”

  Some of the reporters even said she was pretty enough to be in the movies—although they probably only said that to sell more newspapers. Well, maybe she’d think about that if she got acquitted. She had never wanted to be famous, but now that she was, she might as well get some good out of it. A star in Hollywood. Imagine.

  She had wanted to be a nurse. What was wrong with that? She couldn’t see anything uppity in the desire to help people who were suffering. Or perhaps her parents had thought it indelicate that she would want to soil her hands with the blood and feces and bedsores of sick strangers. Your obligation is to family, not to people you don’t know. You come home and take care of your own.

  Her becoming a teacher: that was their choice. She could get her two-year certificate in East Radford, come home, and get a job right there in the community. Live at home for six dollars a week room and board, and then she could look after her parents and her younger sister. Her parents took these plans as a matter of course: the sensible, inevitable thing to do.

  Well, why?

  She had an older sister living up north, and another one married and living a stone’s throw away from Mama and Daddy, so what did they need her for? For twenty-four dollars a month? Now that she considered it with the acuity of hindsight—now that it was too late—she thought she could have gone somewhere else and simply mailed the money home, if they needed it so much. It would have been a small price to pay for her freedom, then and now.

  She had not thought it through. It is always easier to do what you’re told than to decide for yourself. She wished she had listened to Harley. He was the smartest person in the family, anyhow, and he had told her to get out and to stay out. He had done that when he was only sixteen, and he had never looked back.

  One night when Daddy was drunk, Harley had done something to make him mad, and he’d whupped him—for the last time, as it turned out, because Harley had hopped a train the next day, saying he was never coming back. He’d stayed in touch, though. And one time, after she’d gone off to Radford College, Harley sent her money to come and spend a few days with him in Cincinnati, and they went out on the town. Harley had come a long way in a short time, and he was right at home with supper clubs and taxi cabs. He wanted to show her that even if you came from a backwoods village, you could still go out into the wide world and look like you belonged there. She’d had a wonderful time in Cincinnati, going to movies, eating fancy food she’d never tasted before, and looking at all the fine things in the big stores. Harley had bought her an elegant evening dress, the kind you see city girls wearing in the movies, and he told her she looked like a real lady in it.

  She found herself thinking about the small things that could have changed the course of her life. If she had chosen to study nursing instead of teaching. The whole world needed nurses. She could have worked anywhere she liked. Or if she had tried to find a teaching job somewhere other than Wise County. Harley would have helped her, surely. She could have gone to New York and lived with him, at least at first, until she was financially able to get a place of her own. Harley himself had suggested as much when she first told him that she was going off to college.

  Had she been afraid back then to leave the comforting familiarity of Wise County? Perhaps. Why not go home where she knew everyone, instead of having to deal with strangers at every turn? It was difficult to deal with strangers when, in the first eighteen years of your life, you had hardly ever met one.

  How had Harley managed to transform himself so thoroughly? She had been only a little girl when he left home, vowing that their father would never beat him again. When he reappeared, he was all grown up, in fancy city duds, with the corners knocked off his accent and a successful sales career under his belt. From Chicago he moved on to New York, going from job to job, always learning, always prospering. He had started with nothing, and now he was as at home in big cities as a bear in the woods. Harley was smart, like her lawyer uncle, like her mama’s well-to-do family who thought she’d married beneath her when she
wed Pollock Morton the coal miner.

  She thought she was smart, too, going off to college and getting a degree. But she had come back to the mountains, ignoring Harley’s urging to strike out on her own. If only she had listened to him before it was too late. Well, she would listen now. Harley had taken the first train home when he heard about the death of Pollock Morton, and straight away he put himself in charge of the defense of his dear little sister.

  He even bought a bed for her jail cell, so that she wouldn’t have to sleep on that rickety old camp bed, and he went around three counties interviewing lawyers in order to put together a top-notch legal team for her defense.

  Harley was taking care of his little sister. And there it was. That’s why she went home. Because there was an even younger sister at home—Sarah Beth, who was only twelve—and somebody had to look out for her. That’s what you did, if you were family: you took care of your own, even if it killed you.

  FIVE

  Sick to the bone / If I should fall / I’ll lie in fields of clover.

  —MATSUO BASH

  Henry Jernigan was alone in his hotel room, wishing he had spent the evening tracking down the local moonshine instead of listening to music. He draped his damp suit and tie over the back of the chair by the lukewarm radiator, hoping that they would dry by morning, and that the evening’s excursion would not make him ill. From his open suitcase, he took out a keepsake from his sojourn in Japan, the black silk juban that he customarily wore when he was alone. He always took it when he traveled, because no matter how pedestrian the accommodations, the comforting warmth and smoothness of the silk robe soothed him with memories of the simple elegance of his days in Japan.

  The night air had chilled him, and, tired and sore from the long train ride, he was dreading sleep. Shade Baker, too, had been affected by the cold, and he had coughed steadily for most of the drive back from the radio station, while in the passenger seat, Rose had dozed off, neglecting her duties as navigator. Fortunately Shade was one of those people who could always find his way back on a route once traveled, so they arrived back at the Martha Washington Inn well after midnight, but without incident.

  He was not thinking about the case in Wise County or the work that lay ahead of him. Why should he? What was one more tragedy among so many?

  Alone now in his old-fashioned, chilly room—he would not have a fire—Henry was afraid that he would dream about that vanished world of his youth, and that his mother would come to him in his reverie. Sometimes she would be reproachful in his imaginings; sometimes, pale and emaciated—as he had never seen her in life—she would stretch out her arms to him and beg for his help: Henry dreaded both these visions equally. He hoped that exhaustion would send him into a sleep too deep for dreams.

  HENRY

  By the time the news from Philadelphia had reached him, it was over.

  The day he received his mother’s letter had been magical, but now he could not bring himself to take pleasure in the memory. From the ship that morning he had caught his first sight of Japan—a golden vision of Mount Fuji at dawn, wreathed in snow and glowing like a pinnacle of heaven. He had been enchanted by that sight, and by his first glimpse of the strange new place. When his fellow passengers heard that this was his first trip to the Orient, they regaled him at every meal with descriptions of their own first reactions upon visiting the country. Every one of them made the same comparison, until he wearied of hearing it. Like fairyland, they all said. A land of enchantment, peopled by elfin inhabitants. Privately, he was scornful of their effusive imagery. The place would be alien to western eyes, but surely it was a quaint, rural place inhabited by an alien people, nothing more. But as soon as the ship docked in Yokohama, he discovered that his shipboard acquaintances had been right. Everything seemed smaller and more delicate than the world he knew, and the gentle, soft-voiced people who smiled shyly as they glided past in their silken garments had an aura of serenity and grace that made him feel as if he had ventured into the fairy mound of the old folk tales. He found himself thinking of Oisin and Thomas the Rhymer. Henry was enchanted.

  The spell was broken that afternoon, when he called at the offices of Thomas Cook & Son on Water Street to cash traveler’s checks and inquire for mail. His mother’s letter was waiting for him, a maze of tightly-spaced lines, tiny script on nearly transparent blue paper. He walked out into the sunshine to decipher the familiar spidery scrawl.

  My dear Henry,

  The weather continues fine here in the city, and the roses are past their peak but still making a brave show in the last days of summer. Many friends have asked to be remembered to you—too many to name in the brief span of this missive. You are sorely missed, dear Henry, but I am more than ever thankful that we sent you away from Philadelphia when we did. Grief-stricken as I was to see you go, I now see that your going was a blessing conferred upon us by Divine Providence, for you have been spared the terrible times here. A deadly pestilence has wracked the city—indeed the whole of the country, I’m told. Everyone is being wonderfully brave, but do keep us in your prayers, for I fear there is worse to come.

  The week after Henry set sail, the Philadelphia Navy Yard received three hundred seamen, transferred down from Boston. A week later twice that many sailors fell ill to a mysterious sickness with flu-like symptoms that killed young and healthy people in a matter of hours. From the naval base, the disease spread to the city hospitals, where doctors and nurses were the first civilians to succumb. Reports of an epidemic were coming in from other military installations, but it was three weeks before the disease spread to Philadelphia’s civilian population—a day or so after the big War Bond Rally, which drew thousands of citizens into the crowded streets, exposing them to the pestilence. After that, it was too late to stem the tide of infection, and life in the city became a nightmare.

  Before his mother’s letters caught up with him in Yokohama, Henry had heard about this new and mysterious plague, which, after all, had begun months before in the Orient. Many had died, although the initial symptoms did not sound particularly menacing: headache, fever, fatigue, sometimes a cough, sometimes aching muscles. The ague, people used to call it, and it had been around for a long time. You got it. You took to your bed for a week, feeling ghastly and subsisting on milk tea and broth, and then you got well.

  But not this time. Not this strain of the malady. This one was new. From those first innocuously familiar symptoms, this influenza made a lethal progression through high fever, blinding headaches, increasing, strangling congestion, and finally a swift and painful death. Fluid accumulated in the lungs, and the patients drowned in their beds, gasping for breaths that would not come.

  Henry heard these tales on shipboard from missionaries who were returning to their posts in Asia, but if he gave any thought at all to them, it was only to feel a grudging pity for the poor wretches who lived in overcrowded slums in tropical countries, doomed to contagion by their poor diets, their lack of sanitation, and the haphazard medical care accorded to the poor. It would not have occurred to him that an epidemic could strike closer to home, or that people who were neither poor nor weak could succumb.

  Philadelphia was half the world away, and if the thought of danger had ever entered Henry’s mind, it would have centered on himself. Here he was, in a country with a volcano that could awaken at any time: a strange land, where he might be robbed or set upon, where he might be taken ill and be unable to communicate with the doctor. A typhoon might engulf the island; fire could break out in his lodgings. But his elderly parents, drifting through the summer with their roses in their great stone house in the City of Brotherly Love, were surely cushioned by wealth and respectability from any inconvenience, and immune from any disaster. When you’re young, you can go out into the world and have adventures, because you know that your home will always be there, dull and unchanging, and therefore a safety net if you should come to grief in your search for adventure.

  There had been three more letters from his mother,
and then nothing. “Your father has died . . . But you must not come home . . .” She had been afraid for him. Even then, with her husband lying in his coffin in the green drawing room, with the city ground to a halt by contagion, and perhaps even when her head began to ache and the coughs punctuated her breaths, when she knew that she, too, would be dying soon—all her fears had been centered on Henry, half a world away. He must not come back on account of his father, nor out of concern for her. The authorities might still prosecute him for his anti-war cartoon. He might succumb to the influenza himself. The Jernigans would manage, as they always did, with dignity and without fuss. They had servants, attorneys, and the best doctors money could buy. There was nothing Henry could do beyond what these paid retainers could effect.

  The final missive from Philadelphia arrived in late October, in a thick typewritten envelope with the return address of his father’s bank. With restrained professional regret, the family lawyer informed Henry of his mother’s death from influenza, and of her final wish that he not return on her account. The letter contained information about his parents’ estate, detailing the various investments and properties that comprised the family wealth. The executors would continue to oversee the business affairs in Henry’s absence. They would deposit regular sums into an account that he could draw from to support himself during his travels. Periodically, discreet inquiries would be made in U.S. judicial circles in order to determine if it was safe for Henry to return home. They would let him know.

  The first pang of wanting to go home passed in a matter of weeks. His parents were dead and buried, beyond his help. But he discovered that as long as he was on the other side of the world, the finality of his loss could be postponed. From ten thousand miles away, he could tell himself that his parents were at home, as safe and dull as ever in their chintz and mahogany sanctuary, and that only he was out in harm’s way. He pretended that he could write or telegraph them, if only he had the time, and that if he should take a notion to return to Philadelphia, then all would be as it was before.