The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  We don’t have curfews for girls, or rules against using makeup or going without a bonnet, as if I’ve ever seen anyone under sixty wearing such a thing in the first place.

  To hear the reporters tell it, the county was supposed to be against me on account of this made-up mountain code, and I suppose that if making up such a lie would have got me acquitted, then I ought to be grateful for the deception. I tried to tell one of them that the effect would likely be just the opposite. It would put people’s backs up to have the community criticized on my account, and they would punish me for it by finding me guilty.

  The reporter assured me that such a thing would not happen. I don’t know why people think pleasant lies make things any better. It just makes you feel worse when you find out that you were right all along to fear the worst.

  But I don’t think those reporters really cared what happened to a friendless nobody named Erma Morton, a likely-looking hick from the back of beyond. Not really. I think all this was just a game they thought up to sell newspapers, and maybe to see if they could change the outcome of a jury trial. Or else they were practicing for bigger game.

  I thought it might have occurred to them that if they ever got good enough at making people believe their outlandish tales, then someday they might be powerful enough to start a war or choose a president, just by telling tales in their newspapers and bullying whoever didn’t go along with their version of “the truth.” I think they cared about power more than they cared about the outcome of this no-account backwoods trial.

  I don’t know. It is all over my head, but I cannot help feeling that none of this had anything to do with me, except for the fact that I happened to be pretty. They wouldn’t have bothered with me, otherwise.

  And yet, for all that, maybe those newspapermen were right in a way about a Code of the Hills, only it wasn’t anything like the one they invented themselves. If there is such a thing, it is just a collection of things that everybody in these parts knows without ever having to be told. The unwritten laws of the land that come as natural to us as breathing.

  You don’t take charity.

  You don’t meddle in your neighbors’ business.

  You take care of your own.

  And you don’t betray the family to outsiders. Ever.

  If you want to call that a code, then I reckon we do have one, and I followed it faithfully, but unfortunately the Code and the Law were at loggerheads this time. I got crushed between them, but I didn’t have much of a choice in that. You don’t betray the family to outsiders, ever.

  Well, what else could I have done?

  I came home that night, a little tipsy, and sure enough Daddy didn’t like it one bit that I was out late and smelled of beer, and he groused about it, but that didn’t make me no never mind. We none of us ever cared what he thought about anything. The other miners carried homemade dinners to eat on their lunch break, and Daddy made do with a cold baked potato. That’s what we thought of him.

  That night he couldn’t spare more than an offhand harsh word for me, anyhow, because when I got home, he and Mommy were already at it hammer and tongs over an entirely different matter, screeching at each other like a couple of scalded cats.

  Daddy was fixing to move out.

  I heard it all in the back and forth shouting that started right up again after I got told off for being late.

  Daddy was done with us. Said he had made plans to build himself a little frame house on the other side of the river, up near his mama’s house, and leave us all high and dry without him in this shabby old place that we were just renting.

  It wasn’t that we would have missed him all that much. We never took much notice of him, but if he had up and left Mommy, who would pay the rent? How would Mommy live? She couldn’t take a job, and my teacher’s pay would not stretch to support the family. Her people were well-to-do, but pride kept us at arm’s length from them. They always said that Mommy had married beneath her, and they’d be well satisfied if he up and left her, but it wasn’t likely they’d lift a finger to help her. Anyhow, there’s the code again.

  You don’t take charity.

  Mommy would starve before she would ask that stuck-up bunch for help, because they‘d be sure to leaven the handouts with I-told-you-so’s and make her feel like trash for having to ask. But the shame would kill her first, I reckon. For your husband to walk out on you, after twenty-eight years of marriage, is a shame and an insult. I reckon Mommy has been a good wife to him, for all that there was no sweetness between them, and for him to want to get shut of her now that she is old and tired is a cruel thing. She would never live down the shame in a village as little as Pound, where they don’t hold with divorce. She would have been better off in every way if he were to die and leave her a widow. There would be a little bit of insurance money, of course, but more important than that: she wouldn’t have anything to be ashamed of. As a widow, Mommy would have the sympathy of the community, and people willing to help her out if she needed it, and maybe even her well-heeled kinfolk would lend a hand. Mommy could feel kindly toward her late husband after he was gone. But if he was alive and well, residing over across the river, and up to lord knows what in the way of drinking and women, like as not—why, then he would be a constant shame to the family and no use or support to Mommy at all.

  After she left her well-to-do family and married a coal miner, she deserved better than that in her old age. I reckon she thought so, too.

  So there I was, tipsy and tired, dragging in near midnight, and I walk in the house to find Mommy and him in a set-to over whether or not he would leave her. All I wanted was dark and quiet. I sleep on the sofa in the parlor, so I’m up with the sun, and for that whole livelong day I’d done chores and picked berries, and then met my friends down in Wise. Ever since dark, when I’d hitched a ride back to Pound, I’d been going from one roadhouse to another with the fellow who was bringing me home but wasn’t in any hurry to do it. Well, I wasn’t in any hurry to get back home, either, if it comes to that. It’s hard enough to sleep on a lumpy sofa without having to listen to folks screeching at one another in the next room.

  When I slipped in after eleven, hoping to find them all asleep, they were in the kitchen and the argument was in full swing. I distracted Daddy just long enough for him to give me a hard time for being late, but I told him to give it a rest. I paid room and board, didn’t I? They’d have a hard time making ends meet if I went elsewhere.

  I was used to the hollering, but I couldn’t sleep through it. And I reckoned that as long as they were yelling at one another, things were staying the same as they had always been. But then all of a sudden Daddy got quiet, and he said, “I’m done.” Mommy was still carrying on, but he just turned his back on her like he couldn’t even hear her anymore.

  Then he started crying out, different from the yelling he was doing before. Saying, “Oh, lordy, lordy!” Too loud.

  I ran in the kitchen and saw him down on the floor, bleeding. And Mommy was standing over him with a little hatchet we kept in a drawer to use when we cut up chicken. She looked at me and I looked back, and not a word passed between us. Didn’t have to.

  I went back in the parlor and turned up the radio to some dance music, but it was too late. That nosy pest of a neighbor was banging on the front door, wanting to know about the moans he was hearing from the house, and could he be of any assistance. I packed him off with a flea in his ear and slammed the door on him before he was even off the porch.

  We had to call him back just before sunup, when we knew Daddy was dying, but at least by then Daddy was past telling anybody what had happened.

  He fell and hit his head, we said. And I thought that would be the end of it. But the law kept worrying the story like a starving dog with one dry bone, and, when we knew that somebody would have to stand trial for it, it just naturally ended up being me.

  Mommy couldn’t stand being shut up in jail, and I thought that being young and likely-looking I had a better chance of getting a
cquitted. Until those outlander reporters showed up and took my side by making the rest of the county look like backwoods fools. After that I didn’t have a chance.

  That was Harley’s fault. He came swanning down here from New York, so sure that he knew best for everybody. He lured those journalists down here to get them to pay the expenses of my defense, but I would have been better off without them. Folks around here don’t like people who hide behind the coattails of condescending, know-nothing Eastern in-tel-lec-tu-als. And Harley was no better than they were. All of them so sure that we knew nothing and they knew everything.

  But the jury couldn’t send Harley and the reporters to prison, so I paid the price instead.

  Life.

  I wonder who will take care of Mommy now. Not Harley. He will be heading back to his fancy life in New York, trading on the notoriety of being the brother of the murderess. And I reckon the reporters forgot about us before the train pulled out of the station.

  But Mommy had suffered enough, and now she is free.

  There are still outlanders championing my cause. Moony-eyed men who see me as a princess in a tower, and hawk-faced ladies who want to pin Women’s Rights to my skirts. Everybody on my side is after something.

  So I will be who they want me to be, and I’ll tell them what they want to hear, and if their petitions and their prayers ever get me sprung from this prison, then I will vanish off the face of the earth, and no one will ever find me again.

  EPILOGUE

  ASHE MOUNTAIN, TENNESSEE, 2009

  One of the advantages of living to a great age is that you get to know how everything ends.

  In her little house on Ashe Mountain, Nora Bonesteel, who had seen one century go and another one come, was sifting through a lifetime of memories. She was on her knees in the spare room she used for sewing, searching through the brass-bound trunk that held old family scrapbooks, letters, and the detritus of a lifetime that, increasingly, she lived alone.

  Today she was expecting a visitor.

  She had polished the round oak table with beeswax, and cleaned the already spotless parlor with vinegar and ammonia until it shone. A freshly baked scripture cake sat cooling on the chestnut sideboard, and beside it she set a fresh pot of sourwood honey, in case the visitor wanted a cup of hot tea instead of spring water or cider.

  She looked at the clock on the mantel. Nearly four o’clock. He would be here soon, and she had promised to locate what material she could pertaining to the events of that fateful November in Wise, Virginia. It was a lifetime ago now, and she remembered it all with perfect clarity, but also with a sense of distance, as if it had been a black-and-white film she had seen as a young girl. When she looked in the photo album at pictures of herself taken in that year, she had no sense of looking at herself.

  She set the little pile of yellowed newspaper clippings and faded photographs on the table next to the cake, but she would not look at them just yet.

  This interview might prove to be painful, but she had consented to it anyway, because she didn’t have all the answers, and this might be her only chance to discover them.

  The letter had arrived two weeks ago. A student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy was researching the old Erma Morton case for a course in the history of Virginia law. Nothing in that research should have led him to Nora, but he had kinfolks in east Tennessee, and, although his parents had moved away when he was a baby, he was descended from one of Nora’s Bonesteel cousins. True to his word, Carl had not mentioned Nora in his news stories on the Morton case, but he had talked about it with some of his relatives, and, since rural families are like kudzu, the word had got around.

  The trail of half-remembered stories had eventually led to an old woman on Ashe Mountain, who had been in Wise for the trial, and had actually spoken to the defendant.

  “You are the only living witness,” the law student had written.

  HE ARRIVED A FEW MINUTES PAST the appointed hour of four o’clock—it was hard to match time and distance on winding mountain roads—and she had the door open before he even reached the porch.

  “Miz Bonesteel? I’m Kyle Holloway. I suppose if we sat down and did the begats, we could figure out how we’re connected. Thank you for seeing me.”

  Nora shook his hand. It was hard for her to tell people’s ages anymore. Although she never felt any older than she had ever been, policemen and doctors looked like teenagers to her nowadays. This smiling boy was somewhere in his twenties, she supposed. He had the familiar look of many folks in these parts: dark hair and blue eyes, set in sharply sculpted features. He had a forthright handshake and a sunny smile, but for all that, he was nervous. Interviewing people was still new to him, and like the rest of the family, he had to steel himself to talk to strangers.

  She settled him on the sofa, and sat in the big wing chair with her yarn basket beside it. If his questions troubled her, she would take up her knitting. She thought they ought to talk a bit first, without the distraction of tea and cake.

  “This won’t be in a newspaper, will it?” she asked when he took out his notebook.

  “No, ma’am. It’s only a law school research paper. I doubt many people will read it, but I’ve always been fascinated by the Morton case, and I was glad to have an excuse to pursue it.”

  “Why?” said Nora.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Why were you fascinated by it?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, I don’t suppose it amounts to much, as disputed cases go. Not like the princes in the tower or the Lizzie Borden case, but a ton of books have been written on them. Erma Morton was a local girl, and people still argue about what really happened. And there’s no getting away from the fact that she was beautiful. You met her, didn’t you?”

  “Once. Have you gone to Pound to look at the place where it happened?”

  “No, ma’am. I didn’t see the point. They tore that building down years ago.”

  She nodded. “You’ve heard about my cousin Carl, I suppose? The one who covered the case for the newspaper here.”

  “Oh, yes. From family stories, and then I read his articles, of course. I guess you could say this case changed his life.”

  For a moment her eyes glistened, and she reached down for her basket of knitting.

  Kyle looked up from his notes in time to see her stricken expression. He put down his pen. “I’m sorry,” he said. “To me it seems like ancient history, but, of course, not to you. I guess you could also say that the circumstances set things in motion that led to the end of his life.”

  “Yes.”

  “But, surely, he always meant to leave here? Even if they hadn’t fired him?”

  She nodded, intent upon the skein of yarn. Yes, she thought, one day he would have gone, but chance is a fragile thing. Even an hour can make all the difference between one future and another.

  “They shouldn’t have fired him, of course. His stories were less sensational than the national coverage, but then the truth often is. I know that he took you with him to Wise, and that you were quite young at the time. Why did he do that?”

  Nora looked up from the square of knitting. “If you’re part of this family, I think you know.”

  He smiled. “I guess you mean he thought you had some kind of supernatural powers to tell if Erma Morton was guilty.”

  She took a deep breath and waited long enough to count to ten before she answered. “He may have thought that. It didn’t do him any good, though. If he had tracked down a sweetheart or found the murder weapon, that might have counted for something with his newspaper, but one more opinion hardly counted among so many.”

  “But you did visit the jail, and you spoke to Erma Morton?”

  “Only for a few minutes. From what she said, I thought she was protecting her mother. Maybe she didn’t hit her father, but she was involved in the death. Not that it mattered much. She was sentenced to life in prison, but she didn’t serve it. She got out.”

  “Oh, I know that. Public opinion se
rved her well. I’ve read the letter that Eleanor Roosevelt sent to the governor of Virginia in 1941. When a First Lady asks you to pardon a criminal, I guess you don’t have much choice.”

  Nora Bonesteel barely heard him. After the Johnson City Staff fired him, Carl Jennings went off to Nashville for a year, and from there to New York, still trying to make a name for himself in journalism. Funny thing, though, the Staff went out of business only a few months after they fired him, so maybe they did him a favor.

  She still had the postcards Carl had sent her from the 1939 World’s Fair out in Flushing Meadows. Wish you were here.

  A year later, when the war broke out in Europe, the Associated Press sent him to London. “Just in time for the Blitz!” he had written her, as if that had been a stroke of great good fortune. He reveled in the adventures of the war, taking every narrow escape as proof of his luck, and always looking for the story that would make him a household name.

  When the Eighth Air Force units first arrived in England in May of ’42, Carl began to cover the war in earnest, but his letters to her were still full of the wondrous places and things he had encountered in the world beyond the mountains. Castles and storybook villages and the sights of London. He would go on and on about scones and clotted cream, toad-in-the-hole, and Yorkshire pudding, saying he hoped she would get to try these strange foods one day, but she never had.

  Late in 1942 his letters began to fill up with descriptions of the preparations for war, excitement spilling out of every line. He frequented the U.S. military base in High Wycombe, and confided in her his hopes of being a war correspondent at the front.

  On April 17, 1943, Carl managed to talk himself onto a B-17 as a war correspondent observer. One hundred fifteen Flying Fortresses were making a raid over Bremen. The details of the sortie never mattered to her, and by the time Carl’s parents received the news and the gold star for their window, she already knew more than they ever would about what happened on that day. He was never coming back, anyhow. She knew that. But it would have been nice to imagine him having many years of adventures in exotic corners of the world instead of going down in flames before he ever had a chance to live.