There was a touch of plum shade creeping into Walsh’s face. “Might Your Honor entertain an early luncheon recess?”
“Mr. Walsh, if all your arguments were as direct and succinct as the one you just made, your track record would be truly one for the legal pantheon.”
Walsh beamed and said thank you, so I guess a pantheon was a good thing.
The gavel got hammered down once. “Lunch recess for an hour.”
“All rise,” Willard Ganeel called out, and everybody did, while the judge headed out to be the first in the buffet line Willard’s wife and some of the church ladies had set out in front.
Billy and me stayed in our chairs. He wanted to study on what he was going to be saying. I didn’t feel like going through a food line wearing manacles, looking like a staring target. I heard a noise off to one side, and saw Omar moving to the door. I spoke out his name. He turned around. “Thank you, Omar,” I said.
He just shook his head and went out of the building. It had been a hard thing for him to do.
Billy was reading some pages with his handwriting on them. I didn’t think he noticed me watching. “What’d you think of the character witnesses?” he said.
“Didn’t know I was such a helluva perfect fella.”
“You’re not; they lied.” He was smiling. He looked away from the pages. “Thanks for the stuff I didn’t know about.”
“Omar lied, too.”
We both smiled. He went back to his reading.
“He wrapped his hand around the butt of that revolver and pulled it clear of the holster. He took his thumb and brought back the hammer as far as it could go. That’s what proved premeditation. He had that fully cocked weapon free of the holster and in his hand when he took a step onto the front porch of Fergus Blackthorne’s home and knocked on the door and waited there for that unarmed man to come to the door, possibly expecting a visit from one of his many friends, possibly anticipating—”
“Counselor,” Judge Dewey said. “We know what got done to Mr. Blackthorne. We even know who did it. The defendant told us who did it. He did it. What we’re expecting you to deal with is why the State ought to put Mr. Moss to death.”
I hadn’t heard up until that minute anyone say it out loud, with its legal good clothes on. It made me cold.
Walsh poured himself a glass of water from the little pitcher on his desk. He took it down, dabbed off a tiny drop from his chin. “Your Honor, if I’ve gone off on a tangent here, I apologize to the court, but I felt the need to emphasize the especially cold-blooded and heartless nature of this murder. There was no woman being fought over, no gambling debt to be avenged. All there was was Fergus Blackthorne opening his door and finding a man there with a gun who put a bullet through the innocent man’s brain. Can you imagine the horrified last thought of poor Mr. Blackthorne? Why? Why me? What could I have possibly done to warrant such a brutish execution? He died never knowing, and that’s a harsh and horrible thing to have as your last conscious thought when you go, and that is why the State needs to extract the highest possible penalty from Mr. Wilbur Moss. He deserves, and should receive, not an ounce more mercy than he showed poor Fergus Blackthorne! He’s earned his own death, and we have a responsibility to make sure he gets paid and paid in full!”
He made a lot of sense. If I’d have had a vote, Lord knows I might have voted on his say-so. Found myself thinking on where little Nicholas might be along about now. And once I started thinking on little Nicholas, I took back my imaginary vote from Mr. Walsh.
“Is that it, Mr. Walsh?”
“Yes, Your Honor. Thank you.”
“How about you, Mr. Piper? You all ready to go?”
“I am, Your Honor. Thank you.” Billy gathered up those sheets of paper with his handwriting on them. He squared them off nice, put them on the corner of the desk where he could see them easy. While he was doing that, I swung around to look back into the back part of the room. At first I was surprised, being as the crowd had nearly doubled from what was there at the start of the day, even to a long line standing across the rear wall. Then it come to me that word had gone out that the plea was guilty and that there’d be some kind of ruling on how I was going to play out the rest of the game. Pearline was there now, standing next to the Arabian girl. Rooney was at the back wall, standing next to a ten-year-old girl; his daughter, I suppose. Heflin and the Dutchman and even Cookie were there next to Rooney’s kid. Mr. Starett was there sitting in the middle. There was a space next to him, saving the place for Miz Starett, I expect. There was a bunch there waiting to see if I was going to get the worst or only the second worst. I didn’t blame them. I was curious about it myself.
“Mr. Moss? Mind facing the bench, sir?”
I spun back to face Dewey. “Sorry. I’m new at this, Judge.”
Dewey nodded over to Billy. Billy took in a deep breath and cleared his throat. Him and me had an eye lock; then I looked at the desk. I folded my hands, kept my eyes down. I listened harder than I ever listened to anything before, and maybe I even prayed, as I always felt like those two things were some way pulling the same rig.
There was a long quiet before Billy Piper began to talk.
XI
“You got the right to kill Wilbur Moss, and you won’t hear anything out of me to say different. He’s done what he’s done and he’s said that he’s done it, and the law says that one of the things you can do is have Wilbur Moss taken out and killed. That’s your right.
“But having a right and using that right isn’t always the right thing that ought to get done. Even the law points down that road in a way; that’s why they say you don’t have to kill him, that there’s other ways and things to consider doing. That’s the law’s way of telling us to tread lightly around here, the law’s way of knowing as perfect as we might try to be, as perfect as some of us even think we are, that when it comes to taking a man’s life, to telling him there’s no more air on the face of the earth that’s fit for him to breathe, we need to move slow, cat-tracking slow.
“Because there’s a mystery about what happened to Fergus Blackthorne that night. And when there’s mysteries, we need to slow that pendulum in the clock and take all the time we need to get it sewed up with tight clean stitching.
“Here’s one thing we all know to be so; nobody does anything without there being a reason. You scratch your nose because of an itch. You slam a hunk of beef onto a piece of bread and take a bite because you’re hungry. A man looks at a pretty woman a certain way because he’s got another kinda itch with another kinda hunger. But none of it gets done for no reason; there’s always a reason.
“What earthly reason did Wilbur Moss have for doing what he did? You can turn it anyway you want, there’s still nothing that turns up easy that answers the question. Wilbur Moss was a man who didn’t start a fight unless he was rightfully fired up by what someone else spit out at him in the heat of drinking. And that’s happened to every cowboy in Salt Springs from time to time.
“Mr. Walsh over there, thank you very much, said there wasn’t any money debt between Fergus and Wilbur. There wasn’t any card that got turned the wrong way between Fergus and Wilbur. And Fergus couldn’t have had much of a land argument between him and Wilbur, being as Wilbur pretty much owns what he’s wearing and what he’s put on his horse’s back. And, like Mr. Walsh said, thank you very much, there wasn’t any women in the picture. Wilbur’s past the age for that and Fergus, even though he was past the grieving time for his wife, still was never seen to go in through Honey’s front doors. A man of some sizable willpower, it seems safe to say.
“Well, wait. Whoa now.
“Not right for me to point anybody off in the wrong direction, and I think I might have just done that very thing. Not that I meant to; I didn’t, but still, it’s something ought to be set right.
“Fergus Blackthorne never went into Honey’s for a fact, but there’s rumors that he had Honey’s best brought over to him.
“Mr. Walsh, you can sit dow
n. I’m not saying anything is a fact unless it’s a fact, but there’s a man dead and murdered and a man who might end up dead and executed, and there’s mysteries we need to deal with. Might not solve a thing, but at least we can talk about them, because it’ll help us understand why Mr. Moss did the terrible thing he did, and that could go a long way to helping Judge Dewey make up his mind about what ought to become of poor Wilbur. Might help Judge Dewey get some justice done. It’s a powerful terrible weight we’ve placed on his shoulders, and we need to do everything we can to lighten that load. I know you think so, too, sir.
“Where was I?
“Oh, yeah.
“I was saying about Fergus not having any woman trouble that could have somehow set Wilbur off. Even when a woman got sent over by Honey to visit Fergus, she was never over there alone, because there was always Nicholas, the little colored boy, going along there with her. It looks to me like Fergus wasn’t only a gentleman, he was one who loved his music, because as most of you know, Nicholas always carried that sweet potato of his everywhere he went, so maybe Fergus asked little Nicholas to use his gifts to help the nighttime pass sweet. But we don’t know, do we, so we can’t talk about anything like it’s a truthful fact. Nothing.
“All we know for sure is that Fergus is dead and Wilbur Moss admits pulling the trigger that did the deed.
“Oh. And that little Nicholas ran off from Salt Springs. No one knows where he is. And no one knows why he decided to leave town. No one alive knows, at any rate. No living person knows. No living person.
“I said before, the law’s got the power. Still true. And it’s got power in all directions, too. That means that not every case on trial gets ended up the same way, because the cases are different and the justice that gets handed out is different for the very same reason.
“There’s some who’ll think that if Wilbur gets a burlap hood placed over his head and a hemp rope tied around his neck and is standing on the trap when it gets sprung, that the world they live in is going to be a safer place. Doesn’t matter to them whether the rope snaps his neck bone like a hickory branch, or whether he’s left to choke and gag and gargle his own blood. Once he’s dead, they’ll say they put the monster in the ground and a stone on top of the tomb door.
“And they’ll be half right. See, there won’t be any monster in the ground. Only one there will be poor old Wilbur Moss, and that ain’t no monster by anyone’s stretch.
“You take Wilbur Moss off and kill him, you’ll be taking away a touch of kindness in this world. Not from me, not from anyone sitting here in this schoolhouse. You’ll be taking a touch of kindness away from one of the coldest places there is, a prison where a man’s world gets shrunk down to the space of a double coffin, the very place where a kind word is more precious and rare than gold its ownself. You won’t be any safer on account of Wilbur Moss being behind those walls. He won’t ever get out and he knows that better than anybody. Wilbur’s an old cuss and they put those old cusses to work in the infirmary or the library, if they even got one, or in any place behind the walls where an old man might keep his heart pumping. The punishment’s going to go to the ones Wilbur could help, especially the young ones, the ones who think harder is better and life’s a rassling wreck. Wilbur can tell those young men different, so that when they get out, they might not be thinking the way ahead amounts to finding the blood trail and following it hard. But if Wilbur’s there to pass a word, they might not get to that fork, and if they turn the right way on account of something he said, then you might be living in a safer world. And your wife and kids and everyone you smile at on the street. You send Wilbur there for life, there’s a chance your own very life might get better. You send him there to die, a little bit of you is going to die, too. And there’s none of us gets enough life, so do any of us want to throw away even the least little bit?
“I said it’s all about the mysteries, and that’s still so. I don’t know why the pastures get green in the spring and what makes the melt seem just the right size for the river and the stream. Don’t know how a duck knows its momma the second it comes out of the shell. I been trying to read every book I can get my hands on, but there’s no eternity long enough for me to read so many books that I’ll know more than I don’t know. That’s a hard thing to settle with. We don’t like not knowing. We don’t like mysteries in our lives. We want the figures to add up just so in order for us to move on with things. And if we can’t find the answer, we’ll just make one up. The Indians got their spirit world that controls things, and gamblers carry rabbits’ feet, and in other parts of the world they got Buddhas and holy cows, and it’s all a way to get answers for things they don’t have answers to.
“What we’re dealing with here has mysteries about it, too. To some people, it’s a mystery why a man like Wilbur Moss would go to Fergus Blackthorne’s and put a bullet through his brain. There’s others still wondering why that little Nicholas went running off into somewheres a few days before this very trial. Well, maybe we’ll never know the answers. Maybe we’ll just have to accept that there’s some things we’ll never be able to define the way you’d look a word up in a dictionary.
“But there are some things we know for sure.
“We know killing Wilbur Moss won’t make the world one lick better, safer, or wiser. We know putting a man behind bars for the rest of his life, especially when the man is one who’s lived a life that’s all taken place in front of a horizon that’s got no boundaries, that’s a punishment that drills through to the marrow. And lastly, we know there’s a chance here to do a right thing and doing things right is pretty much how anyone makes tomorrow a good fit.
“I think I’m done.
“Thank you.”
The look on Judge Dewey’s face was one I saw flicker around the edges all the while Billy was talking. It wasn’t the one eye squeezed shut you see looking down a rifle barrel, but the eye squeezed shut and the rifle barrel was the only thing missing. He took off his little half-glasses and put them in a fancy cloth case that fit into his inside coat pocket. He kept looking at Billy all the time he was putting the little glasses away.
“Mr. Piper,” he said, “if there had been a jury present, I would not have allowed you to proceed in the manner you did. Implication and innuendo and facts never entered into evidence have no place in a summation, even under the most lenient of standards. But being as I’m a jurist and not prone to make the legal missteps a layman might make as a result of your presentation, I decided to let you play the hand out. We’re going to clear the courtroom now so I can do some reflecting about the appropriate penalty to be levied upon Mr. Moss.” He looked over to Willard. “Marshal?”
“All rise!”
Everybody did, and we all stood there for a couple of ticks. Dewey looked over at Willard again. “Marshal, I’m staying. The spectators are leaving.”
“Oh.” Willard started waving people out the door, while Omar showed up with the handcuffs dangling in tow. He clamped them on me, and me and Billy started down the center aisle, last ones out. Pearline fell into step next to us, Omar close behind as we made our way out to the buckboard that brought us out. Mrs. Ganeel and her ladies were quick out of the chute, putting out coffee and fried bread and biscuits. It would have been awkward for Pearline to go through the line with the ladies on the other side of the table, so Billy went to get us something. I looked over at the schoolhouse. One boy was perched on the shoulders of another, peeking in through the window, like Dewey was going to signal them what he had decided. I felt a pressure on my hand. It was Pearline’s hand lighting like a feather on mine.
“Wilbur,” she said, “I should have said this at the very start, at the very next morning after Fergus died, but I want to tell you thank you, that I know you saved Billy’s life.”
“I just got there first, Pearline. Fergus needed killing. We all three know that.”
She shook her head. “But he was going to do it, the same thing you did, and if you hadn’t stepped in, Bi
lly would be where you are now, and facing the very same thing. You saved his life.”
“And he’s trying to do the very same thing for me now, so we’re all even up.” I looked down at her hand on mine, and tried not to think the thought that was trying to swim up to the surface.
Billy came back with four cups of coffee. Omar came up and took his, then backed off to give some room. His grip never left the butt of his gun.
We blew on the coffee and sipped a little. If there was any coffee left over, we could grease the wagon axles. Every once in awhile, we’d look over in the direction of the schoolhouse, and we’d see Dewey moving past the window, hands behind him at the small of his back, a commander reviewing a battalion of troops who weren’t there.
“Waiting to hear, Wilbur,” said Billy.
“Waiting to hear what?”
“How you think I did.” He took a sip, looking at me over the edge of the cup. He wanted to know and it mattered to him.
“Straight up?”
“Straight up.”
“Well, Billy,” I said, “I don’t know if we’ll ever get a chance to do something like this again, but if we do, I’d appreciate you doing me a little favor.”
“What favor is that?”
“If we come down this trail again, I don’t never want to hear you talking about me as ‘poor old Wilbur.’”
He grinned and coughed, spitting out some bad coffee, and Pearline clapped her hands like a little girl.
Then the rope from back inside the schoolhouse creaked and the bell started to ring. It had an edge to the clang; it had a tooth-paining flange to the tone. Didn’t have to be pretty. Had to do the job. The job was to let us know that Judge Dewey was done with his pacing and he was ready to tell us what was what.
Wood squeaks and clothes rustles and throat coughs and foot scrapes behind us, like a strong oak tree shedding its leaves all at once till it stands etched naked, with a pillow of crackling orange around the hem. We stood there at our table till Judge Dewey looked over the room and nodded in a formal sort of way and everybody sat down, wood squeaks and foot scrapes again.
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