The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Junius Ryan took a moment to collect his thoughts, and then plowed back into his recital of the circumstances of Pollock Morton’s death. “Well, he was losing consciousness, but I revived him, but then he faded out again, and I couldn’t bring him back so much this time. He just kept getting weaker, and I stayed there with him until he died.”

  “How long was that?”

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  “What time of night did all this begin?”

  “Ten minutes past one. I looked at my bedroom clock.”

  “And what time was it when Pollock Morton died?”

  “Two-thirty.”

  “And did you make any inquiries to the family about how the deceased came by his injuries?”

  Again the judge interrupted. “We object to that question. Now if he posed the question in the presence of Erma, I’ll allow it. But not otherwise.”

  The attorney nodded, and tried again. “Did you ask Mrs. Morton or Sarah Beth Morton how Pollock Morton fell or what caused him to do so?”

  “I did not.”

  “Well, you previously mentioned that you were told that he fell against this wooden butcher block. Did you look it over?”

  “Yes, I did. Soon after Mr. Morton passed away.”

  “And did you find any blood or hair on the meat block, or any sign that he had hit his head anywhere on it?”

  “I found no such signs. But Erma said several times that he had fallen on it.”

  “Did she explain how it happened?”

  “No. But Mrs. Morton said that her husband was drunk, and that she had tried to get him into bed, but could not, and that he had started to go out of the house when he fell.”

  “Was that the whole of her explanation?”

  “That was it.”

  “What about the racket you heard? Did they have an explanation for that?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “While you were there, Mr. Ryan, did you look around the house for any signs of blood?”

  “I saw bloodstains on the floor of the kitchen and outside on the porch where he died.”

  “Did you see his clothing anywhere?”

  “No, sir. There was no sign of his shirt.”

  “How long were you in the residence?”

  “Well, about fifteen minutes up until he died, and another half an hour after that. I helped them lay him out.”

  “Well, did you see a butcher knife anywhere around?”

  “Not that I recall. But there was a coal axe. I mean, one of those short-handled axes that miners use. Mr. Morton was a miner, you know.”

  This remark set off an audible reaction in the courtroom. A glare from the judge made the murmuring subside, and he nodded for the attorney to continue questioning the witness.

  “Where did you see the axe?”

  “On the porch, just after daybreak. It was lying about eight feet from where his body had been.”

  “And did you find an axe or a hammer on the premises?”

  “No. I hunted for one, but I didn’t find an axe or a hammer.”

  “Mr. Morton was a miner. Did he also do carpentry work?”

  “Well, he did. He was building a house for himself, and I know that he owned a hatchet.”

  “And you searched the house for it?”

  “Yes, in a cursory fashion, but I did not find it.”

  “How close is the Morton house to the Pound River?”

  “Right on the riverbank. The back of the house can’t be more than two feet from the water.”

  The attorney nodded, turned to face the jury, and repeated thoughtfully, “Two feet from the water.”

  Carl looked at his watch. Nearly noon. He had to get to Norton to meet Nora’s train. As if in answer to prayer, the judge adjourned the court for the lunch recess, and Carl slipped through the milling crowd and sprinted for the stairs.

  TWELVE

  There is no sign now of that famous pine.

  —MATSUO BASH

  It doesn’t matter what we think, Shade. Trials are just opinion polls limited to twelve respondents.” In the hotel dining room, Rose Hanelon stirred her bowl of vegetable soup warily, bringing up little bits of potato or okra and studying them without favor. She had refused to consider crumbling a piece of cornbread into the mix as Shade had just done.

  “Henry picks up his soup bowl and drinks from it, like they do in Japan,” she told him. “So you see what comes of trying to follow local customs in dining.”

  Court was in recess for the lunch break, and the reporters had repaired to the hotel to discuss the morning testimony over a hot meal. Shade had sat in on the morning session, in order to gauge from the trial proceedings whose photograph he needed to take to augment the stories. The witness Junius Ryan was the obvious choice, but that gentleman had left the courtroom in the amiable company of some sheriff’s deputies, and he had staunchly refused to pose for a portrait in the hallway outside. Shade was thus forestalled but not deterred. After lunch he would go back to the courthouse and lurk in the hall until he caught Ryan either entering the courtroom or leaving it. The resulting photo of the witness would not be as well-crafted or as flattering as a posed shot would have been, but Shade didn’t think the reporters wanted Junius Ryan to look good anyhow.

  He said, “Luster Swann has left town.”

  Henry and Rose exchanged wary glances. Then Rose said lightly, “I knew I hadn’t seen him lurking around the courthouse. Did they ride him out on a rail for making advances to some local barmaid?”

  “No. I ran into him at the train station yesterday. Said he’d had enough of this place, and he was going to cover the trial from Abingdon.”

  Henry looked thoughtful. “How does he propose to file his stories, then?”

  “Well, he says he has seen all he needs to, and that someone from here will keep him up to date by telephone.” Shade paused for a moment, waiting for them to condemn Swann’s behavior, but they only shrugged and went on eating.

  After a few moments, Shade set down his roast pork sandwich and looked thoughtfully at Rose, who was wiping her butter-greased fingers on her napkin. “I realize that the jurors are the only people entitled to an opinion, like you said, but you have to admit that Mr. Ryan made things look pretty black for your damsel in distress.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, all that arguing that Ryan the neighbor claimed he overheard made me wonder what really happened that night. And he said he didn’t see any blood on the meat block. He also claimed that the dead man’s hatchet was missing. It made me think twice about the Morton women’s story.”

  Henry, who had heretofore been giving his full attention to a heaping plate of chicken and dumplings, looked at Shade with an indulgent smile. “Yes, we will have to be nimble to counteract the impression made by that worthy gentleman. But remember that our jury—the newspaper readership—numbers in the thousands, and I fancy that we can get them over to our way of thinking.”

  “How? He seemed like a fine upstanding fellow to me.”

  “Oh, we can get around that. You saw Ryan, but our readers did not. When we write this up, we’ll make snide remarks about his appearance, or we could refer to his Southern drawl. Maybe misspell a word or two to give the flavor of his accent. Then people will know not to pay him any mind.”

  Rose grinned. “Tell him about the horse race, Henry.”

  Henry sighed. “It’s a tale I heard in Japan—perhaps it is apocryphal, but the point is sound. It seems there was once a horse race between a Japanese horseman and a rider from Korea. There were only those two horses in the race, and the Korean horse won. So a Japanese newspaper reported this story by saying: ‘Japanese Horse Comes in Second in International Horse Race. Korean Horse Finishes Next to Last.’ ”

  It took Shade a moment to work that out, but then he gave Henry a rueful smile. “Well, Henry, I suppose that headline is correct but it ain’t right.”

  Henry raised his eyebrows. “Depends on your intentions. If you
wanted to foster national pride in Japan, then that account would be the correct approach to achieve your aim.”

  “Uh-huh.” Shade narrowed his eyes. “And just what are you trying to foster by making these people out to be ignorant yokels?”

  Henry ignored the scornful tone of the question. He thought for a moment, examining his reflection in the blade of his table knife. When he spoke, it was in a slow, meditative voice, as if the listeners didn’t matter. “What are we trying to foster here? Well . . . Two thousand years ago, when the Romans conquered Britain, they were invading an island with a complex civilization already in place. The Britons had their own language, religion, customs, modes of dress, system of government. Their customs, quite different from Roman ways, had evolved over centuries, and they had been the way of life in Britain for countless generations. And yet, within a hundred years of the Roman occupation, all that was swept away. The old gods yielded to the Roman pantheon; Latin became the lingua franca, and the empire’s customs and fashions prevailed in Albion, as it became an outpost of Rome. And do you know how this was accomplished?”

  He looked inquiringly at Rose and Shade, who shook their heads.

  “Not by torture or coercion. Such things would not be effective against a proud people. Violence would only create martyrs, making the natives more entrenched in their old traditions. No, the means of converting the conquered populace to the culture of Rome was much simpler. The Romans simply laughed at them.”

  Shade stared. “Laughed?”

  “Oh, yes. Ridicule. To the proud, it is quite poisonous. The Britons’ rustic accents were uncouth. Their clothes unfashionable. Their gods mere superstitions. They were yokels. Oh, it didn’t work with the old people, of course. One gets too old to change. But that scarcely mattered. The old would be gone soon enough, and the Romans built cultures as they built aqueducts—for the centuries. Among the young of Britain, Roman ridicule was as effective as a plague. It made them ashamed of their old-fashioned kinsmen. The young people wanted to be modern and sophisticated, and so they emulated the cosmopolitan Roman forces of the occupation. Within a century, as I say, the old ways were gone—laughed into oblivion. And the new generation of Britons were all good little Romans.”

  “Well, mostly,” drawled Rose. “As I recall, the Romans had to wall off Scotland, and they didn’t even try to colonize Ireland.”

  “Your people.” Henry was smiling. “Civilization-proof. Well, Rose, some things are beyond even the powers of a mighty empire.”

  “So, Henry, you think that what we’re doing here is forcing these people to adopt our superior form of culture.” Shade Baker shook his head. “The way you tell it, Henry, that would make us the Romans in this situation. I’m not sure I want to be a Roman putting somebody else’s civilization to the sword.”

  Henry gave him a pitying smile. “You made your choice a long time ago, Shade. When you left your home on the prairie and came to the big city, you made your choice. When you let your rustic accent erode, and you swapped your cowboy hat for a fedora, you made your choice.”

  THERE WAS JUST THAT MOMENT of uncertainty, when she stood there buffeted by the wind on the metal step of the passenger car, looking out at the little depot at Norton, and wondering what she would do if there was no one there to meet her. But in the next instant, she saw Carl running down the platform, with one hand waving and the other clamped to his new hat, to keep the fedora from blowing away in a gust of wind. He was so proud of that hat; thought it made him look like a real big-city reporter.

  Nora picked up her valise and stepped down to the platform, trying to compose her features into a dignified grown-up expression, instead of the grin of delight that was glowing on the inside. Carl was grinning, though. He hoisted up her bag, and let go of his precious hat just long enough to give her a one-armed hug.

  “Why that worried face, Nora? Surely you’d have known if I wasn’t coming?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Only ’cause I trust you. The Sight isn’t like getting tomorrow’s newspaper, Carl. It never tells me anything I want to know.”

  “Well, I hope it’ll tell me something I want to know. How are you? Did you get anything to eat?”

  She nodded. “Mama packed me a lunch in a paper sack, same as if I was going to school. A piece of fried chicken and a couple of biscuits. I’m good until suppertime.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it.” Carl looked at his watch. “I wouldn’t have let you go hungry, but since we have most of an hour before I’m due back in court to cover the trial, I was hoping to take you somewhere first, even if it makes me a tad late getting back.”

  Nora followed him along the platform, taking two steps to every one of his to keep up. “Take me somewhere? But it must be five miles over to Wise from here. We’ll have to walk awful fast to make it in an hour.”

  “Walk! An important newspaperman like me? Not a chance.” He laughed at her bewilderment. “Okay, the truth is that Cousin Araby very kindly lent me her late husband’s old flivver, which hardly ever gets out of the garage these days, so we can have ourselves a little excursion before we head back to town. I want to show you something.”

  Nora nodded. She knew she wasn’t going to get the scenic tour of the county, but that was all right. Carl had an important job now, and he had to give it everything he had. If she could help him, she would. It was why she had come.

  She climbed into the passenger seat of Cousin Araby’s ’27 Model T, and watched as Carl pushed down the ignition pedal, and set the car in gear. They rolled away from the station, heading up the road toward Pound. As they passed through the streets of Norton, Nora looked around her, taking in the sights, but it didn’t look much different from home, or at least from the little railroad towns in the valley that she visited every now and again. Little wood frame houses nestled under big trees, and, beyond the cross-stitch of streets and lawns, the dark mountains loomed like a curtain.

  “Puts me in mind of Erwin,” she said. “I guess railroad towns all favor one another. Where are we going now?”

  “To another little town. Just a wide place in the road, really, a few miles up the mountain. Tell me about your trip.”

  As they chugged along the winding blacktop, Nora stared out at the wet woods lining the slopes on either side of the road. This was coal country, she knew, and her region of east Tennessee was not, but on the surface, the landscape looked much the same to her: bare hardwood trees, here and there a dense thicket of laurel, and at the very bottom of the steep embankment a narrow creek cutting through the bedrock on its way down to the valley. The woods seemed strangely lifeless this time of year. Most of the songbirds had flown away for the winter, and while the squirrels and rabbits must still be about, you didn’t see them much. Deer were scarce. Hard times had made hunters out of everybody.

  She talked about her train journey, trying to make it seem like a commonplace event for her, but there wasn’t much good or bad about it to make a tale of, so presently she lapsed into silence. She opened the paper sack and handed Carl the last biscuit. “Tell me about this story you’re covering for the paper.”

  Carl made short work of the dry biscuit that was the sum total of his lunch, while he considered how best to sum up Erma Morton’s story. “You probably know the gist of it, Nora. We ran stories about it in Johnson City, and you’ll have read those.”

  “I did. When I heard you were coming here, I dug them out of the kindling pile and read them again. They say a schoolteacher murdered her father.”

  “Right. The prosecution claims she hit him in the head with something. Well, everybody says that, really. Only the defense contends it was a shoe, and I think the prosecuting attorney is trying to prove she hit him with an ax or some such.”

  “What do you think?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think yet. I just write it all down. But I’d better come up with something brilliant before it’s over, because from the way the editor was talking, I think my job may be riding on this.”
>
  “I saw a newspaper in the train. Seems like all the big-city writers think Erma Morton is innocent, and I get the feeling that you don’t agree. Do you reckon she meant to kill him?”

  “It’s not up to me to say,” said Carl. “Directly, we’ll go back to the courthouse and you can take a look at her yourself. If any bells go off when you see her, you be sure to let me know.”

  Nora opened her mouth to say it doesn’t work like that, but since it wasn’t her business to discourage him, she amended it to, “So this place we’re headed to now—is it where it happened?”

  “It’s a long shot, I know. But it’s about the only trump card I have. They won’t let me interview the defendant or talk to the family, unless I pay them, so I’m hoping you can help me come up with some other angle, so I can hold my own. It means an awful lot to me, Nora. It’s my chance to make something of myself someday.”

  Nora stared out the window in silence for the rest of the drive, because she could think of nothing to say except what he didn’t want to hear. It doesn’t work like that. She thought about some lines from Julius Caesar that she’d had to learn for a recitation in school: “ ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in misery . . . ’ ” Having never seen an ocean, Nora didn’t know much about tides, but she thought that this must be the sort of life tide that Shakespeare was talking about. This was Carl’s chance, and it might not come again.

  “THIS IS IT.” Carl parked the car at one end of the row of buildings beside the river. “It will be the building to the right of the post office, so let’s look for that.”

  Nora, whose day had started before sunup, had been dozing, but she opened her eyes and looked out at the jumble of shops and houses straddling the riverbank between two high wooded ridges. It’s just a place, she thought. It didn’t seem any different from the little communities that dotted the hills back home, and she didn’t suppose the people would be much different, either. Carl had come around and opened the door for her, so she stepped out into the wide main road and looked around.