The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “I’m off.” He said it simply because Shade was blocking his path, and some exchange seemed to be called for.

  Shade stared at him, wondering if all the work he had just done on the trial photos had been a waste of time. “Is the trial over, Swann?”

  Swann took a deep drag on his cigarette and answered on a cloud of exhaled smoke. “No. I’m just fed up with being here. That other town was more my style.”

  “Abingdon?”

  “That’s it. I’m going to hole up there.”

  “But how can you cover the trial from there?”

  “As easy as here. They won’t let me talk to the girl anyhow. And now I’ve had a look at them, seen the town, so I don’t need to be here, do I?”

  “You’re going back to the city?”

  “Nope. I told you. Abingdon. The paper wants me on location, so I’ll stay here in ‘them thar hills,’ all right. I fixed it up with one of the locals so I can telephone them every night for the dirt.”

  Shade shook his head, not even knowing where to begin to point out the flaws in this plan. “But what if you get it wrong, Swann?”

  Luster Swann smiled. As he threw down the stub of his cigarette and ground it into the dirt, he said, “Compared to what?”

  WHEN SWANN HAD DISAPPEARED into the train station, Shade Baker started the Ford and headed out to take pictures. Gray clouds were hanging low over the valley, obscuring the hills beyond. It wasn’t raining, but a sharp wind cut through the narrow streets of Norton, sending dead leaves skittering across the road in his path. An overcast day was good for photography; it softened the shadows. He didn’t mind the weather, as long as it didn’t start snowing or come a cloudburst, but today was too cold. If he spent much time in this bitter wind, he’d be sick.

  He didn’t relish the thought of having to spend the afternoon trudging around in the cold, looking for strangers to interview. If he got sick, they wouldn’t let him go home. He would have to keep doing his job, despite the inevitable chills, fever, and the deep chest cough that would rattle his teeth. He dreaded illness, not for the discomfort, but for the implications. In every broken cough he heard his father’s voice. It wasn’t worth risking that misery just to talk to a few random locals, but he would give it a couple of hours.

  Once out of the gravel parking lot, he decided to take a look at the little town of Norton. He might get lucky and find a hovel full of poor folks close to the depot. If not, he could spend the three minutes required for a driving tour of the town contemplating his next move.

  Norton had not been what he expected to find in a rural mountain area. Even the modest frame and brick homes were neat and unremarkable. You could find their counterparts in any small town. They were all a sight better than the weathering wooden prairie house he had grown up in.

  Farther along he found streets of stately Edwardian houses, set back on well-tended lawns, and framed by ancient chestnut trees, bare now with the coming of winter. He supposed that the local gentry and the managers of area mining operations made their homes here, and perhaps some of the grander mansions were second homes for the mine owners themselves.

  If a mild sunny day ever coincided with some of his free time, Shade thought he’d like to come back here and photograph some of the grander houses. Not that the newspaper would ever run those photos, of course. Images of such prosperous dwellings would not jibe with the impression the reporters intended to convey about Virginia mountain towns. These homes would not do. Instead, they would send him out to find the most pitiful, ramshackle cabin in the area, even if he had to cover every dirt road from the deepest cove to the craggiest mountain to find it. And the newspaper would run just that one photograph of the shack, and none of the elegant mansions in town. No use confusing the salt-of-the-earth newspaper readers with mixed impressions about the local population around here. You had to tell them what to think.

  Newspapers were printed in black and white in more ways than one.

  It did not occur to Shade to refuse the photography assignment, or to question the ethics of it. This was his job, and, with times as hard as they were, jobs were hard to come by. If he objected to the work, there would be forty fellows ready to step in and take his place before the day was out. Of course he would find them a shack. He did as he was told. What did it matter anyhow, in the long run? This whole story was just a fairy tale to amuse the readers until the novelty wore off and they moved on to something else. Last year it had been the people living on Bruno Hauptmann’s street who had spun stories for the world about their sinister neighbor—behavior which, of course, they had noticed only after he had been arrested. Now that Hauptmann was weeks away from execution in New Jersey, it was briefly Erma Morton’s turn to writhe in the national spotlight. By April her story would be eclipsed by the spate of articles about Hauptmann’s last visitors, Hauptmann’s last meal, Hauptmann’s love letters to his wife . . . Whatever the press thought Mr. and Mrs. America wanted to read.

  He sighed and turned his back on a castellated stone house. There was no use seeking man-on-the-street opinions there. When he questioned the locals, he also had to take their photographs, and he knew that the inhabitants of those fine homes wouldn’t fit the bill. Shade Baker went off in search of rustics.

  HENRY JERNIGAN LOOKED WITHOUT FAVOR at his shriveled pork chop with stringy green beans slopped over it and the runny mashed potatoes. It had been a long, monotonous morning, and he was tired. In his present mood even lunch at 21 might not suit his palate. He shouldn’t have decided to eat alone. A lively conversation with Rose would have been a welcome distraction from the cuisine. There were people dining at nearby tables, but he didn’t feel up to the task of cultivating strangers just for the sake of company while he dined. It might be difficult to get rid of them later. Some people see journalists as a God-given opportunity to get some family curiosity—Uncle Harry’s Spanish-American war story, Cousin Matilda’s hat pin collection—into print so that the whole world can marvel over it. They never seemed to realize how commonplace such marvels are.

  In his younger days, he had been more tolerant of strangers, but back then he had not been a journalist. And perhaps back then he saw people as new and interesting. Now he had met enough of them to know that meeting new people was mostly a matter of classification. He could do it almost without thinking, but he took no pleasure in it. He hadn’t seen enough of Erma Morton yet to classify her to his own satisfaction, but once she testified in court, he knew he would be able to work it out.

  Sometimes, though, he missed that youthful era when for him the world was new. Perhaps one of the charms of Japan had been that the culture there was so different from his own that nothing about people was obvious to him. At first he could not even spot the social classes or the stereotypes, and so he was interested in everyone, because being ignorant of the patterns of society made him feel as ignorant as not knowing the language.

  HENRY

  Ishi had been his cultural muse, a dark-eyed, solemn child of nine, but in a land of elfin people, she would be no one’s idea of a fairy princess. She was small, sturdy, and scholarly, with a pale owlish face that peered out from behind huge black-framed spectacles, and a black cropped curtain of hair that owed nothing to style or artifice. She blinked past the fringe that covered her forehead like a hedgehog peering out from under a leaf.

  Henry had been so struck by the resemblance that he took out his pen, sketched one on the back of a receipt, and pushed it toward her. “What is this?” he asked in halting Japanese.

  Ishi peered at it for a moment, and then nodded, recognizing his crude depiction. “Harinezumi.”

  Literally it meant “needle mouse,” a good description of her: shy and sharp. He had tried to tell her that, but she only nodded again, and he could not tell if he had conveyed his meaning or not.

  Henry could not imagine Ishi at any age other than the one she was. Impossible to picture her as an elegant and lovely young woman. He thought that she would go stumping throu
gh life staring myopically at the world as a detached observer until she was an old lady, looking much the same as she had at age nine.

  Her father taught biology at the university, and he spoke good British-accented English. The family owned a narrow old three-story brick building in a respectable but modest section of Tokyo, and they made their home in a ground-floor apartment, renting out the other rooms in the building to lodgers, mainly unmarried professors from the university, but occasionally a foreign scholar or businessman. Henry had been accepted on the recommendation of his student guide, who explained that the best way to improve his proficiency in the language was to lodge with a Japanese family, so that he would be forced to speak it.

  Sometimes he felt that with Ishi he was the object of study, rather than the student. She watched him with the clinical interest of a researcher who has discovered a new species of bear. He would be sitting at the little table in the garden reading Tokyo’s English-language newspaper, and Ishi would come and sit opposite him, sometimes bringing her homework, but even if she pretended to be studying, she would be covertly observing him.

  As far as Henry could tell from the expressionless gaze, there was nothing sentimental or even particularly affectionate in Ishi’s opinion of him. He was simply an intriguing specimen that fate had set within her purview, and so she watched him, as if he were simply another assignment.

  He did not flatter himself that her interest in him was any species of a schoolgirl crush. She seldom smiled at him, and she did not act in the way he had seen flirtatious females act with men. No one bothered to flirt with portly, pasty Henry. But he felt that little hedgehog Ishi had also been born middle-aged, and so they were kindred spirits.

  She asked very few questions at first, so perhaps she had been shy with a stranger, and she was unfailingly polite, but sometimes he had the impression that she might as well be taking him around the city on a leash, as if he were indeed a trained bear. When she was not otherwise occupied at school or in doing her studies or her home chores, her parents permitted Ishi to accompany Henry on various excursions around the city, serving as his guide and interpreter at museums, shrines, and other points of interest, usually those recommended by her father. She was tolerant of Henry’s fascination with folklore and dashing tales of yore, but she did not share his interest.

  It was as if their roles were reversed. Henry was the child filled with wonder for tales of magic and high adventure, and she was the serious little scientist who humored her fanciful charge with patience and courtesy instead of enthusiasm.

  In order to help him understand the plot of the most famous of Japan’s dramas, Ishi had accompanied him to the Takanawa neighborhood to visit the small temple of Sengakuji, set on a low bluff overlooking the bay. The grounds of the temple are a cemetery, containing the graves of the forty-seven ronin.

  “It’s their Alamo,” another American had told him once.

  When Henry tracked down the story, he realized that the man had meant the remark symbolically, rather than suggesting a real parallel between the two national icons.

  Ishi stood stiffly in front of the grave of Oishi Kuranosuke, the leader of the ronin, with her head bowed, as if he were being buried today, instead of two centuries earlier. “You know who he is?”

  “Hai,” said Henry cautiously, knowing what was coming next.

  Ishi inclined her head, acknowledging that his answer was acceptable. “Then tell me, please, this story in Japanese.”

  His skill in language was not equal to the task of making a stirring tale of it, but in a halting narrative, punctuated by Ishi’s soft-spoken corrections to his pronunciation or his grammar, he managed to stammer out the story to her satisfaction. He didn’t know why he put his hand on the plinth of the statue—for inspiration, perhaps.

  He began, “Before Meiji . . .” Because he didn’t know who the emperors had been before 1868, he could not express the date 1701 in proper Japanese form, which counted the years in the reign of the emperor of the time.

  Ishi understood. “Genroku fourteen,” she said, nodding for him to continue.

  Henry paused for a moment, searching his memory for the Japanese word for a feudal lord. “There was a daimyo named Asano, who was a sanka . . .” He had heard this last word on his travels, and he thought it meant something akin to “hillbilly.” Anyhow, he recalled that Asano was a daimyo from a rural area, which is probably what started the trouble when he arrived at the court of the shogun.

  Ishi wrinkled her nose when he said that word. “Inakamono,” she said. Country boy. But she seemed pleased that he had grasped the general idea, and with a series of quick nods, she urged him on.

  “Asano is insulted many times by Kira, a court official. When he finally fought back, the court took the side of Kira, and forced Asano to . . . seppuku.” Henry pantomimed the motion of disemboweling oneself with a sword.

  Behind her spectacles, Ishi’s dark eyes did not waver. “Continue.”

  “So the warrior followers of Asano are now samurai without master . . .”

  “Ronin.”

  “Thank you, Ishi-san. Ronin. The forty-seven ronin wish to avenge the death of their master, but it would be difficult to get into the shogun’s palace and kill Kira. So they make long plan.” Henry’s words came hesitantly now, as he put small words together to make up for the more complex terms that he did not know. This language was much more difficult than French, where, between schoolboy Latin and a sufficiently large vocabulary in English, you could usually improvise an intelligible word. “These ronin . . . They pretend to be samurai no more. They take jobs as laborers or become monks. Oishi, the leader, becomes a drunk. He does no work. Everybody laughs at these men. People think they are without honor.” He broke off then and looked at her stern little face, still staring at the statue of the samurai. “That would have been most difficult,” he said.

  She looked up, surprised. “What?”

  “To pretend dishonor and to allow all the world to laugh at you for more than a year. I have read that a man once spat on Oishi and said he was a disgrace to his old master. It must have been very difficult for the ronin.”

  “Hai,” said Ishi, nodding. Her expression did not change, but he thought that beneath the folds of her silk child’s kimono, her chubby sparrow body stiffened to imagine such an ordeal. Henry thought that you could bounce pebbles off Ishi’s pride.

  “It must have been hard for them, but their plan worked. At first Kira had expected Asano’s men to attack him out of revenge, but after a year of having spies watch them, he decided that they were no danger to him. He stopped being careful. And then the forty-seven ronin got into the house of Kira to kill him. He did not act with honor. He hid with the women and the servants. He allowed his followers to die trying to protect him.”

  Another curt nod from Ishi. “It is taking you longer to tell this than it took the ronin to find Kira.”

  “Yes. Japanese is very difficult for me. Not only the words but the way of thinking.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I see why the ronin would kill Kira to—” here Ishi supplied the word for avenge “—their master, but I do not understand what came after.”

  “To place the severed head of Kira on the grave of Asano?”

  “No. That was—” He gestured that it was satisfactory, because he had no idea how to say “poetic justice” in Japanese. He didn’t even know if the concept would translate from English. “After that, Ishi, the ronin gave themselves up to the police, and after a trial, they were ordered to kill themselves, and they did.” Something in his voice must have told her that he was uneasy with the way the story ended.

  The little girl peered up at him with her solemn stare. “What would you have them do?”

  Henry had not thought that far ahead, and he wasn’t sure that he was up to expressing an alternative in Japanese. With a few words accompanied by many gestures he conveyed his thoughts. Run . . . Go to the mountains . . . to a village by the sea . .
. Become farmers . . . or monks . . . or fishermen . . . Live.

  Ishi blinked. “But this is not honorable. Better to die a samurai.”

  “But Kira won. Yes, he was killed, but all his enemies died, too.”

  Ishi gave him one of her rare smiles, and swept her arm outward to indicate the temple and the cemetery. “But all this is for them. They are remembered with honor.”

  She led him inside the temple then, and he stood by respectfully while she pointed out to him the clothes and the homemade armor worn by the forty-seven ronin on the night of their attack on the great house of Kira. He put a few coins in the offering box, wondering if prayers were still said for the repose of their souls, as they would have been in a Christian cathedral.

  But the logic of the story escaped Henry. He couldn’t help feeling that, despite all the trappings of honor and courage, the daimyo Asano had ultimately gotten a lot of people killed by being touchy about the fact that he was a hillbilly. Henry thought that if Asano had killed Kira himself in the first place, it would have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble. But then there would not have been so many songs and poems and Kabuki plays to tell the story down through the centuries. Common sense does not make for enduring legends.

  Henry came to himself then, staring at the bare trees on the mountains encircling the town of Wise. He had not thought of that visit to Sengakuji for many years, but it occurred to him that the people here might have understood the forty-seven ronin better than he did.

  SHADE BAKER HAD FINALLY GIVEN up finding a suitably rustic dwelling in Norton, and he had spent the better part of an hour riding up and down country roads in the Tudor in search of a shack that would meet the reporters’ approval. He had finally decided that he would have to venture down a dirt road, and hope that he did not get stuck in the mud and have to walk back to civilization. The wind was still sharp and it looked like rain again, and a five-mile hike under such conditions would either kill him or make him wish that it had. Finally, though, his persistence paid off. A rattling mile back on a rutted clay road, and a hundred yards back into a rock-studded pasture, he spotted the perfect place: a ramshackle wooden cabin with a sagging porch. In the gray half-light of a winter afternoon, the forlorn little shack looked bleak and cold, but there were two laughing children playing in the dry grass of the yard, next to the grubby remains of a headless snowman, the only trace of a snowfall earlier in the week.