Rose & Poe

by Jack Todd

  “How long did this go on, Poe? With you trapped and the victim not making a sound?”

  “I dunno. I ain’t real good with time. It seemed like a whole day. Then I put my arms up and I squeezed through, but some of the steps on the ladder busted and I fell real hard and it knocked the wind out of me. But I got up and I run at the sonofabitch fellow, hard. I run at him and I was hollerin. Then I grabbed holt of him and I throwed him.”

  “You threw him?”

  “Yessir. I throwed him. I throwed him away.”

  “You hauled him off her and you threw him to the side?”

  “Kinda. Only I throwed him more like up in the air, see. I didn’t see exactly where he went, but I heard him holler and then crash! like he hit somethin. I think he hit the windshield on his car.”

  “So his car was nearby?”

  “Yessir. Close to the blanket. Maybe about as far as I am tall. I hear crash when he hits somethin like maybe it could be the windshield, then I don’t hear no more, but I doesn’t look at him, ’cause I’m scared about her.”

  “Can you describe the car, Poe? What do you remember about the car?”

  “Only thing I know is it’s big and black. I ain’t real good with cars.”

  “At this point, you decided to carry her to the road, is that right?”

  “Yessir. First I checked she was breathing. Soon as I saw she was, I picked her up in my arms, like, and I started out tryin to run. I made it about as far as a football field is long, but I couldn’t go no more like that. So I put her down and catched my breath some, and then I took her up in what you call the fireman’s carry, like I learned in the army. Over the shoulders, kinda. It was pretty easy that way.”

  “You carried her all the way from the gravel pit to Highway 116, isn’t that right? About a mile and a half.”

  “I don’t have no idea how far it is, but it’s a long ways. I carried her, yessir.”

  “And you didn’t see the man again? He didn’t come after you, nothing like that?”

  “I expect not. I doesn’t think about him no more, nor see him. All I was thinkin was to get help.”

  Lambert Cain lets that sink in with the jury for a moment, then starts on a tack that seems strange at first. “I’d like to ask you about that orange suit you’re wearing, Poe. How do you find it? Is it comfortable?”

  “Yeah. It’s okay.”

  “When you put it on, say after a shower, does anyone help you?”

  “Nossir, I doesn’t need no help.”

  “And you have no difficulty with that big wide zipper, am I right?”

  “Nossir.”

  “And what about at home, Poe? What do you wear at home?”

  “I wears overalls. OshKosh B’gosh overalls, what you call bib overalls. And a work shirt.”

  “And you get dressed by yourself?”

  “I does, yeah.”

  “What about the work shirt, Poe? You button that yourself?”

  “Oh, no. Mama does that for me. I does everything else, but I can’t do them buttons.”

  Lambert Cain turns away to ask the judge about Exhibit Number Thirteen. Rose hears the judge say, “Remind me again, which exhibit is that?” Lambert says it’s the dress the victim was wearing when she was attacked. The judge asks what the purpose is, but Rose can’t hear Lambert’s answer.

  “I’ll allow it,” the judge says, “but no cheap stunts. I’ll ask the officer of the court to please remove state’s Exhibit Number Thirteen from its wrapping and to hand it to the attorney for the defense.”

  Rose wonders what Lambert could possibly have in mind. Maybe he’s trying to shock Poe into remembering something he’s forgotten. She watches as Lambert stands over Poe, holding the dress for him to see.

  “Alright, Poe. Now I’m going to ask you to look at this dress. Do you recognize this item?”

  “Sure, I do. That’s the dress she had on when that fella beat her.”

  “And what do you notice about it, Poe?”

  “Well, it’s real pretty, but it has blood on it.”

  “Yes. Anything else?”

  “It sure has got a lot of them little buttons.”

  “Yes, it has. I’ve taken the liberty to count them. In all, there are twenty-six buttons from the neck to the hem. Even if a few at the top and bottom might have been undone on a hot day, that still leaves quite a number of buttons. At present, they are all buttoned up. Now, I have a little task for you, Poe. I’d like you to undo these buttons for me, please.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’d like you to undo these buttons. Unbutton them. Do you understand?”

  “All of ’em?”

  “Yes, please. All of them.”

  “Well, I can’t promise nothin, but I’ll sure try. I expect it will take a while.”

  The lawyer hands the dress to Poe. Poe bends over it, his tongue thrust out to the side. He begins to work on the top button. A minute passes, and another, and he’s still on the same button. Beads of sweat stand out on his forehead. He keeps trying, but his fingers, each as thick as a child’s wrist, can’t be brought to bear on the tiny buttons, which look like pearl-colored teardrops. The usual buzz and rustle in the courtroom hushes as the spectators, journalists, members of the jury, the judge, and even the court reporter and the bailiffs lean forward to watch Poe’s struggle. Five minutes go by and he still hasn’t managed to undo a single button. Lambert Cain has seen enough.

  “That will do, Poe,” he says. “In an emergency, can you think of any way you could get those buttons undone, if you absolutely had to do so?”

  “I expect I’d have to tear up that dress, Mister Cain. Don’t see no other way. And that would be a darned shame, it bein a real pretty dress and all.”

  “Thank you, Poe, that’s all I have for you now.”

  Rose looks to the jury to try to gauge their reaction, searching for clues to Poe’s fate, reflected in a dozen faces. A few she knows slightly. Steve Lynch, who runs a french-fry stand with a carnival and travels all summer. Bernie Michaels, who works the night shift at the 7/11. Candace Flynn, a teacher at the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow grade school. Try as she might, Rose can’t read their faces. The one who worries her most is Grace Nagel, a thickset woman who is head cashier at the Grand Union. Grace is a hard woman to get along with. If Rose wants to use coupons when she buys groceries, Grace acts like Rose is trying to pay with cow patties. She always seems to have it in for Poe, and now she’s the boss woman of the jury with power over Poe’s life.

  As she’s leaving the courthouse, Rose sees a big shambling man in an expensive camel-hair coat walking ahead of her. It occurs to her that he had been there most days during the trial, but she has been so focused on Poe that she barely noticed. There’s something familiar about him, but it’s not until he opens the door of his car and turns briefly to face her that she realizes who it is: Rafe Skilling. Dr. Rafe Skilling now. His hair is mostly gray, but he’s still a big strong handsome man. He smiles and Rose smiles back, but she makes no attempt to talk to him, because she understands. It wouldn’t do.

  ~

  Imaginary friend

  Poe stares at the mouth of the state’s attorney as the man questions him. He’s never seen a fellow with lips like that before. It’s almost like he has no lips, only gums and teeth. He gets to looking at that mouth and he misses the question, and the prosecutor has to ask it again, and Poe can see that makes him mad.

  “Poe, you understand what it means when you put your hand on the Bible and swear to tell the whole truth, don’t you?”

  “Yessir. It means I got to tell the truth.”

  “You have to tell the truth or what, Poe? What are the consequences if you don’t tell the truth?”

  “You mean what’s gonna happen?”

  “Yes, Poe. What do you understand the oath to mean, in terms of wh
at is going to happen if you swear on the Bible but you don’t tell the truth?”

  “Um, I don’t understand what you’re sayin.”

  “If you swear on the Bible and you tell a lie, what will happen?”

  “Oh, that. Well, Mama says I’ll go straight to Hell do not pass Go.”

  “And you believe it?”

  “I got to. She said it was gonna rain cats and dogs the night before we got them floods, and sure enough they came and like to washed the whole county away.”

  “Alright. I’m going to ask you some questions, and we’ll trust you to tell the truth, alright?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I want to go back to what happened when you were in the tower. You said you had fallen asleep, yes?”

  “Yessir. And when I woke up, them fish was stinkin to high heaven.”

  “When you were sleeping, did you have a dream?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what a dream is? Like when you sleep at night, and you think something is happening, but it isn’t real?”

  “Uh-huh. I dreams that I can fly like a great big eagle. But then somethin happens, and I falls on my butt.”

  “That’s a common dream. So when you fell asleep in the tower, did you have a dream?”

  “I dunno. I don’t remember nothin about no dream. All I remember is that I wakes up and them fish is stinkin, and I thinks how Mama is goin to be plenty mad.”

  “So you don’t think it’s possible this man you’re talking about was actually in your dream? The man you say was attacking the young woman?”

  “I don’t know about no dream like that.”

  “Are you sure, Poe? Because this man seems to be someone you’d encounter in a dream — he has no face, no identity. Is it possible he didn’t exist?”

  Lambert Cain rises then. “I’m going to have to object, Your Honor. Poe has already stated quite clearly that he didn’t have a dream when he slept in the tower.”

  “Yes, counselor. Let’s move this forward.”

  The state’s attorney gathers himself. “Now, I’d like to move on to another issue,” he says. “You are unable to read, is that right, Poe?”

  “No, sir. I can’t read no words.”

  “And you can’t add or subtract numbers? You can’t do basic math?”

  “Nope. I ain’t got no editions nor suttractions.”

  “And yet you have an extraordinary memory for colors and events?”

  “I don’t know that word, extra-something.”

  “Unusual, special. You have a very good memory for things that happened, and you can remember the date by recalling something else that happened, like the day of a thunderstorm or the day a pickup truck was stuck in the mud, is that right?”

  “Yeah. I does that real good.”

  “And your memory functions particularly well when it comes to the victim, whom you’ve known for many years, is that right also?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You even remember the color of her toenails?”

  “Oh, yessir. Unless she’s got on regular shoes, I mean. Then I doesn’t see her toes.”

  “Can you tell us what you remember about her toenails?”

  “Well, sometimes they was red, and sometimes green, and sometimes she didn’t have no paint on them at all.”

  “Can you give us specific examples?”

  “Like on the day we had the big thunderstorm, her toenails was red. She has two pair flip-flops, one green, one blue. The thunderstorm day, it was green flip-flops and red toenails. She brought me a piece of cake on account it was her birthday, and that day they was blue flip-flops and she didn’t have no paint on her toenails. Then the day Wild Bill’s pickup truck got stuck in a mudhole, she had the green flip-flops and her toenails was green. We was both gonna push the truck while she drove, but I hoisted it outa there myself.”

  “Can you recall anything else about her dress on those occasions?”

  “She wasn’t wearin no dress.”

  “I’m sorry, can you tell us how she was dressed? What was she wearing?”

  “The day of the big thunderstorm, I remember that, ’cause there was a mess of ravens flyin over. She was wearin them jeans that is cut off like shorts and a white T-shirt that said somethin on it in red letters, but I don’t know what it said. The day it was her birthday, she had on long pants the color of skin and a black shirt with long sleeves and the two buttons at the top wasn’t buttoned.”

  “That’s an awful lot to remember about a woman and her clothes, Poe. A lot of men can’t even tell you what their wives were wearing when they left for work.”

  “Well, I aint got no wife.”

  “We understand that, Poe. Now you can do that for the whole summer, remember everything she wore?”

  “Yessir. Pretty much, I can. Maybe I forgets one or two. I don’t think so.”

  “That’s still remarkable. Poe, do you know what the word ‘obsession’ means?”

  “No, sir. I doesn’t.”

  “Well, obsession is when we think about something really a lot. Usually it’s a person we think about, though it could be something else. We think about it all the time, until we almost don’t think about anything else. Is this how you would describe yourself with her? Do you think about her all the time, and you think about almost nothing else?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I thinks about lots a things. Not only her. But say at night before bed, yeah, I thinks about her. I goes through everything she wore all summer and I thinks about it. How she looks. How she looks when she bends over.”

  “And you want to do things to her?”

  “Sure, I does. Who don’t?”

  “When you think about her at night, the things she wore, you want to have sex with her?”

  “Does that mean screwin her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damned right. Real bad. It’s worse now I’m in jail, ’cause I got nothin else to think about.”

  “And yet you want us to believe that when you had the opportunity, you did not attack this young woman on the afternoon of Sunday, August twentieth, is that correct?”

  “That’s right. I doesn’t attack nobody. Well, except for the sonofabitch fellow, when I throws him.”

  “You did not hurt her? You didn’t attempt to rape her?”

  “Nossir. No way.”

  “Then how did she get these terrible injuries? Injuries that almost threatened her life?”

  “The guy done it.”

  “The guy. Here we are, back with this mystery man, Poe. Can you describe him for us again, please?”

  “Well, he was wearin a hat.”

  “A hat. You told us that.”

  “Yep.”

  “And that’s as far as we can get. With your remarkable memory, which we have already established, you can tell us what color the girl’s toenails were on a day when there was a thunderstorm last June, but you can’t tell us anything about the man who was supposedly attacking her in August, except that he was wearing a hat. You can tell us about the hat and nothing else.”

  “No, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “And we’re supposed to believe that? That a man with your uncanny memory can’t even recall whether the man was young or old?”

  “I’m right sorry. I wasn’t paying no attention to him, that’s all. I was scared about the girl.”

  “I find this hard to believe, Poe. I think this mystery man is like an imaginary friend. Do you know what an imaginary friend is, Poe?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s like make-believe. I know ’cause Mama says she had one of them when she was little.”

  “A make-believe imaginary friend. Exactly. So are we playing make-believe, Poe? Is this a make-believe man? An imaginary friend, so you can blame him for what happened?”

  �
�Nope. That was a real fellow out at the pit. Sonofabitch fellow. I throwed him away.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s okay you don’t believe me; I know lots of folks don’t. Mama says it’s on account of I’m so big and kinda scary lookin. But I didn’t hurt nobody. Was the sonofabitch fella done that.”

  ~

  “Is Mr. Didelot guilty?”

  There’s a hard wind blowing outside when the state’s attorney stands to deliver his closing statement to the jury. Gusts hurl sleet against the courthouse windows, a sound like sand hitting glass. Poe hears something about serious crimes, before the lawyer says: “Your concern is to determine the simple matter of guilt or innocence. Is Mr. Didelot guilty, or is he not guilty?”

  “I ain’t guilty,” Poe says. The jurors grin. The judge threatens again to have Poe escorted from the courtroom. The attorney glares at Poe and turns back to face the jury, rocking back and forth on his toes as he speaks. After that, all Poe can make out is a lot of stuff he doesn’t understand. His mind drifts. He watches Rose, who watches him. The lawyer keeps talking, striding back and forth. He brings up Elmer Hepp and a crime that was seen and a big black car, but mostly he sticks to somebody beating Miranda almost to death. The lawyer says the jurors have to find Poe guilty, and he pronounces the words with such drama that Poe feels like he ought to clap at the end, but he can’t manage it with the handcuffs. Then it’s Lambert’s turn.

  By the time Lambert Cain begins to speak, the noise of the sleet rattling on the courthouse windows is so loud that if not for his strong baritone voice, he wouldn’t be heard at all. As it is, he has to pause to let the wind die down now and then before he resumes his oration. After one especially ferocious gust, he grins and shakes his head.

  “I think that wind is going to huff and puff and blow this old courthouse down before I’m through. Maybe that’s God’s way of telling me to hurry this along so you can get on with your lives.” A few of the jurors smile. Jurors have always liked Lambert Cain, because he never gets too big for his britches.

  “Let us begin by stating the obvious,” he says. “The defendant in this criminal case, Poe Revere Didelot, is not at all like you or me. He’s more than a foot taller than I am, and I’m considered a tall man. He weighs more than the two lawyers arguing this case put together. He has a port-wine stain on his face and neck and a hump on his back. His eyes are two different colors. He has six fingers on each hand, and six toes on each foot. He is strong in a way that most of us cannot even comprehend. He can lift the back end of a pickup and heave it out of the mud, or he can heft a two-hundred-pound stone without assistance and place it exactly where he wants it on a stone wall. I confess that Poe has even given me a fright a time or two, when he appeared unexpectedly on a darkened street.