Cotton

by Paul Heald

  “You sound great,” she said seriously. “This is exactly what they need to hear.”

  “I suppose, but it’s really frustrating.” He shook his head and they drove in silence for a minute. “The CNN interview was the worst. For them, the big story was a legislator trying to bribe a WTO panel. Sure, that’s huge. I get it! But what’s behind the bribe? The whole fucking Congress giving away billions of dollars a year and still defying the decision of an organization it begged the world to create.”

  “NPR did a little better.” She smiled and straightened his crooked shirt collar. “Don’t get frustrated! It’s an amazing story, and you’re doing a great job. Having all this come out of Clarkeston is unreal, and you should be really proud of yourself. You’ve got your own voice. You don’t sound like some slick New Yorker expecting the world to be bedazzled by his scoop. You’re really authentic and thoughtful.” She laughed as they slowed in front of a large wood-frame house in the oldest neighborhood in Clarkeston. “And that little North Carolina mountain lilt in your voice doesn’t hurt one bit.”

  He laughed. “I admit that it does feel good to have written at least one big story in my life.”

  “There’ll be others,” she said with a curious certainty as they pulled into the driveway.

  James knew the neighborhood well but not the particular dwelling where Melanie had brought him. In years past, all of the town’s wealthiest citizens lived along these streets just west of downtown Clarkeston, but now the population was mixed, some living in expensively refurbished antebellum mansions complete with shining pillars and porticoes. Others, unable to modernize, did the best they could in shabbier circumstances. The house of Melanie’s friend was somewhere in between. It was large, with an inviting wraparound porch, but it needed a paint job and the driveway was so overgrown with grass that James could not tell whether it had originally been gravel or asphalt.

  Melanie knocked on the door, and it was opened by a middle-aged woman with a beautiful face and a riot of thick dark hair, streaked lightly with gray. She enveloped Melanie in a warm embrace and then reached her hand out to James. “I was so glad when Arthur said the two of you were coming to visit!” She introduced herself as Suzanne and then cried out to her husband to bring some tea as she led them to a comfortable, but mismatched, collection of furniture on the side porch of the house.

  A lean and attractive man arrived moments later bearing a tray with a pitcher and four glasses of sweet tea. Upon seeing Melanie, he set the tray down on the coffee table and hugged her awkwardly before she could fully stand up.

  “I couldn’t believe it when you told me you were in Atlanta!” he said. “You should have come to visit before now.” His voice was light and carefree, but his expression spoke volumes. He was connected to Melanie in some intimate way. He loved her but was not romantically drawn to her. And Melanie seemed weird and a little tentative, as if she were exorcizing some sort of ghost.

  “Well, I’ve been crazy busy getting the office running the way I want it,” she said in a sheepish voice that James had not heard before. “Arthur, I think you might have met James, whom you’ve recently been seeing on television.” His smile broadened as his hand enveloped James’s in a firm grip. “And James, I think I told you that Arthur and I clerked together for the Judge twenty years ago, but instead of running off to Washington like me, he stayed here with Suzanne and her daughter and teaches history at the college.”

  A look passed between the two former colleagues that James could not interpret, but there was something both ginger and comfortable in it. Suzanne noticed, too, and offered the reporter a cryptic smile as she handed him a glass from the tray. He suddenly recognized her from a story he had written on the volunteer efforts of women working at the local homeless shelter, and he asked her about her role there, while James and Melanie caught up on twenty years in an excited flurry of questions.

  When they finally paused to take a breath, Melanie’s expression became more serious. She looked first at James and then at Arthur. “Apart from the fact that you three are wonderful and all live in the same town and really should know each other better, I have an ulterior motive for getting you together today.”

  Her three friends refreshed their tea and leaned back on the sofa and the porch rocker as she began to speak. “On the way over here,” she continued, “James said that this cotton business was the only big story that he’d ever write.” She glanced at Arthur. “I’m thinking that he might be interested in something that you worked on when we were clerking for the Judge.”

  Arthur’s face darkened momentarily, and he took a deep breath. “Albert Gottlieb.”

  James recognized the name of the notorious serial killer from the late seventies and early eighties, executed in the Georgia electric chair.

  She nodded. “We had a pretty interesting year.”

  “That’s one word for it.”

  “Maybe you could tell James sometime about Gottlieb’s last appeal and maybe something about Averill Lee Jefferson too.”

  Arthur looked at her with something that could have been relief or resignation, and then glanced at Suzanne, who nodded her head gravely. “Maybe. Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea.” He brightened. “You do seem to understand how to tell a story.”

  * * *

  Melanie’s job involved prosecuting and punishing people who did bad things. As best she could, she tried to compartmentalize her public and private lives, tried to not be hardened by the inevitable result of a job well done—the incarceration of people who most decidedly did not want to be locked up. This was easier in the typical case, where she merely prosecuted, and juries and judges decided guilt and sanction.

  As she sat in her office, two weeks after the story of the cotton case had broken wide open, she stared at a New York Times article and worked through her feelings about informal punishment, about just desserts delivered off the books. The story detailed the sensational murder of a prominent cotton farmer named Cameron Swinton and his partner, a former legislative aide, Sharon Williams, as they vacationed together in Aruba. In what appeared to be a gangland-style execution, both had been shot in the head while they slept in a luxury suite in the most expensive hotel on the island.

  Melanie shook her head. As soon as she had read the first draft of James’s story, she knew Swinton and Williams were as good as dead. She had said nothing to James, not wanting to burden him with her foreknowledge, but she had dealt with violent criminals for two decades, and there was no way that Moro Zingales was going to let them live. He had been named in James’s article, and although the journalist had cleverly hidden the identities of his informants, she knew that Zingales would realize who was leaking information. After all, Williams had contacted him in order to discover the location of the bodies, and that request had surely signed her death warrant. Melanie knew it at the time, and the feeling was reaffirmed as soon as she saw the published article. Did that make her judge, jury, and executioner? Did it matter that Williams and Swinton themselves had been eager to put a bullet in her head? All to protect a corrupt farm subsidy?

  She sighed, closed her laptop, and looked out the window. She’d survive her misgivings, just as she survived the idiotic cases where frat boys snorting lines of cocaine got six months in the federal pen and homeboys smoking the same amount of crack got six years. She had no misgivings, however, about the email she had just sent the attorney general in Washington, DC. It contained a link to the data entry next to the name of Jacob Granville in the FBI database and enough information about the appended phone number to lead the Justice Department straight into the chambers of senator Elbert Randolph. Sharon Williams’s affidavit, the Mexican cell phone, and an annotated version of James’s news story would arrive under separate cover, and she had little doubt that the ensuing investigation would be enough to topple the senator from his snug Beltway perch.

  She felt good, but it was not enough. For the first time in years she craved a life outside her job. She wanted somet
hing more than law, and she had an idea where to look for it.

  * * *

  Father Thorsten Carter smiled as he saw Stanley Hopkins walking up the sidewalk to St. James Church carrying a blue Oriental vase in his hands. The sociology professor had called several days earlier and asked whether one needed to be a parishioner at St. James in order to inter a loved one in the columbarium in the western churchyard. Technically, the answer was yes, but the vestry had been showing Thor a bit of deference lately, and an exception had been made. James’s story had mentioned the priest by name several times and assigned an essential, albeit somewhat vague, role to him. The parish’s view of him was not quite heroic, but there was a real appreciation that he had helped clear the name of Jacob Granville and removed the whiff of scandal that had hung over the church for the last five years.

  Thor got up and greeted Stanley in the vestibule in front of his office, gave his friend’s hand a firm shake, and led him around the church and into a secluded garden separated from the neighborhood elementary school by a tall brick wall. Ten years earlier, the vestry had voted to set aside a large portion of the back churchyard for parishioners who wished to be cremated and make St. James their final resting place. Plenty of spots still remained among the azaleas, phlox, redbuds, and maple trees that shaded and colored the space. It was late afternoon and the sound of children playing floated over the wall, filling the place with life.

  Thor waved Stanley around a large tree, and they found James standing next to a small hole in the ground. Stanley smiled and gave his friend a bear hug.

  “This is beyond lovely,” James said, “much better than my idea.”

  “Yeah,” Stanley replied, “but you got me thinking on the right track.”

  Thor gave the two men a puzzled look and James explained. “I went online and found this website that lists temporary resting places for urns. Basically, you can be about anywhere in the US—well, anywhere pretty urban—and have ashes transported from columbarium to columbarium as you move around. I forwarded the link to Stanley, figuring that might be better than what he was doing.”

  “It wasn’t quite what I wanted,” the professor said to Thor, lifting the vase slightly. “They need a permanent space. I should be the one doing the moving, so I got to thinking where I would like to visit. Where would I enjoy going to? Why not Clarkeston? I’m not sure that I have a much better friend now than James, and he’s not going anywhere. And you literally saved my life. I know you won’t be here forever, but the town is lovely and it’s always going to hold great memories for me.”

  Stanley gestured to the garden and turned to James. “And Angela’s mother is in Atlanta. What a beautiful place for her to come and visit her daughter and granddaughter. She’s out of the country now, but Thor is going to show her when she gets back.”

  He handed the vase to the priest.

  The service of committal of remains in the Book of Common Prayer is brief and to the point, and when Thor was done reading, he slipped the vase into the small hole and covered it with a shovelful of dirt. The two other men took their turns, and then the priest marked the spot temporarily with a small wooden cross. James and Thor walked back to wait in his office while Stanley stood quietly over the freshly turned soil.

  The professor knocked on the door later and offered a smile to let them know that he was okay. Thor led them several blocks away to a small pub with a shady back patio, for lunch.

  The weather was warm, the beer was sweet, and eventually the conversation turned to Thor and Miriam. The priest blushed as the two older men pushed him for details and accused him of making the attractive and intelligent young woman his concubine. “What about you two?” he stammered at James, trying to deflect attention away from his own love life. “Has Sondra seen the error of her ways?”

  James laughed. “Sort of.” He took a large draught from his third beer. “It’s as over as it could be, and that’s fine. It really is.” He centered the glass precisely on the cardboard coaster and paused. “In fact, I’m going into Atlanta on Friday to have dinner with Melanie and see a play.”

  “We could see that coming a mile away.” Stanley grinned at Thor, who nodded his head vigorously. “The Boss had the hots for you from day one.”

  “Uh, I doubt that,” the reporter blushed and struggled to find a response to the laughter. “She’s easy to talk to. We have good conversations.”

  “Oh, God,” Stanley grinned. “Are you serious? You crack me up!”

  More beer and burgeoning thoughts of food. The heat of the day starting to fade. Thor felt fuzzy, a bit sloppy, in the nicest way imaginable. “How long are you going to stay, Stanley? When do you head back to California?”

  The professor took a moment to reply. “I’m not going back for a while. Unlike you guys, I don’t like talking to television reporters about my astounding exploits. I’m heading off to Europe again. I’m going to go to Geneva and tell Elisa the whole story. She deserves to hear it all in person, I think.” He smiled wistfully and raised his glass one more time. “She deserves a nice dinner, too.”

  POSTSCRIPT

  After the US lost the cotton case in 2009, the WTO approved massive trade sanctions against the US in favor of Brazil, the main complainant. Instead of changing its cotton-subsidy program to comply with the WTO decision, the US government chose to pay $147 million a year to Brazil, a legal bribe that allowed Congress to keep billions of dollars of cotton subsidies in place from 2010 to 2013. Tired of making the payments to Brazil, but unwilling to drop its support for cotton growers, Congress in 2014 adopted an insurance scheme in the yearly farm bill, called the Stacked Income Protection Plan, to ensure profits for American cotton growers. Brazil and impoverished cotton-producing African countries vow to fight on.