by Rodney Jones
“‘There is one more thing. The money. Buy yourself a fine horse. Sincerely, John S. Bartley.’” Liz let out a sigh and an airy, “Wow.”
Mrs. Parker placed a hand against her cheek. “Such a strange… fascinating story. And here I’ve been given the honor of sharing it with the great-great-niece of the woman for whom it was intended. How incredibly serendipitous.”
“Wow,” Liz repeated, still staring at the letter.
“And you having her name,” Mrs. Parker said, “and so close to the age she was.” She patted me on the shoulder. “This must be overwhelming for you.”
I nodded.
Liz pulled her phone out of her purse. “Can we take pictures of this stuff?”
“Oh, certainly. Would you like for me to remove anything from its storage bag?”
With Mrs. Parker’s help, Liz took photos of the letter, the envelope, and the court documents. I was grateful for her help because I couldn’t have held the camera steady.
As Liz snapped pictures, I sat there, going back over the letter in my mind, picturing John sitting in a dank prison cell. And in his last hours, he’d thought of me and written me a message. For over a hundred thirty years, that letter had probably been shuffled from place to place, buried deep within the archives of one institution then another—long forgotten.
I had to believe. No one could deny the evidence we’d just found. Even Liz seemed to finally be convinced.
“This has been a most symbiotic endeavor, don’t you agree?” Mrs. Parker beamed at us. “I am always pleased to meet young people who take an interest in their family histories. But this, I must say, has been particularly rewarding. You two have made my day.”
I fought the urge to cry.
chapter eighteen
John
The moment we arrived at the Woodstock jailhouse, McNeil disappeared and left his deputy, Albert Hoffman—a barrel-chested, bearded fellow—in charge. He took us to a twelve-by-twelve-foot cell—one of four along a narrow corridor that extended from the back of the sheriff’s office. The outside wall of the corridor was whitewashed brick topped by a row of narrow windows almost at the ceiling.
The cells were separated, one from the next, by red-brick walls, each containing two bunks, which were hinged wooden shelves mounted to the brick. The floor was rough-cut oak planking—a bit grimy in spots, especially in the vicinity of the two bunks where prior prisoners had apparently paced in their dirty, bare feet.
We’d been there for about an hour when Deputy Hoffman returned and unlocked the cell door. He set a lit lamp down inside the door then perched on a stool in the corridor. An older fellow entered and set a polished leather bag down on the floor. In his spotless shirt and crisply pressed trousers, he appeared dressed for Sunday services.
He removed his bowler and glanced about for a place to hang it. When he saw there was no such place, he set it back on his head and turned to me. “Your pa’s ill, I’m told?”
“My uncle, sir.”
The man extended a hand. “Pliny White’s the name.”
Mr. White looked a few years older than my uncle. He wore his gray hair a bit long, pulled back. His bushy sideburns and mustache seemed to hang from his ears like the drooping handle of a watering pail. Spectacles covered his bloodshot, gray-blue eyes.
I shook his hand. “John Bartley.” I nodded at my uncle’s bunk. “He’s burning up with a fever.”
“What happened to his shoulder?”
“A bullet got him.”
“He has a bullet in him?”
“I believe Dr. Woodman dug it out.”
“Oh.” He knelt down beside my uncle and placed a hand on his forehead. “Sir, I’m a doctor… Pliny White.”
My uncle’s eyes cracked open. He squinted up at the doctor.
“Seems you’ve got yourself a bit of fever.” The doctor opened his leather case and pulled out a thermometer. “I’m going to put this under your tongue. Just let it be a few minutes while I look at this mess.”
I stepped closer.
“Get on back, boy.” The deputy pointed toward the bunk I’d just left.
“He’s no bother, Albert,” Doctor White said.
The deputy smirked. “I don’t believe I’d want him standing over my bag of knives like that.”
The doctor took a pair of scissors from his case and cut away my uncle’s bandages. “Hmm. What’d Dr. Woodman use to extract that slug?”
Uncle Ed replied with an incoherent mumble. The doctor removed the thermometer from his mouth and studied the glass tube.
“I don’t know,” my uncle said. “My eyes were closed.”
“From the looks of it, I’m guessing a pinch bar.” Mr. White took a strip of cloth from his bag, folded it several times, and dabbed at my uncle’s shoulder. “Inflammation.” He shook his head. “That, along with the fever, are signs of infection, I’m afraid.”
I couldn’t really see much from where I sat, but my uncle’s legs tensed as the doctor attended to him. He grunted once, too.
“Sorry. I know that’s gotta smart.” The doctor turned toward the deputy. “Albert, you mind getting me a cup of clean water?”
“Me?”
“Well, I’d send Mr. Bartley here”—he nodded toward me—“but I figured you’d have some objections to that.”
“There’s water right there.” The deputy waved a finger at a jug on the floor.
The doctor glanced that way. “How long’s it been sitting there?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“For the love of God.” Hoffman stood and turned to me. “Fetch me that jug, son.”
I jumped up, grabbed the jug, handed it to him, then immediately returned to my bunk. I didn’t want to do anything that would take the focus from my uncle’s healing.
The deputy put his hand on the cell door. “I’m gonna have to lock up, Pliny. You’ll have to wait out here.”
“I’ll be fine, Albert. Go on.”
Hoffman hesitated then said, “Suit yourself.” He locked the door then trotted down the hallway.
The doctor leaned in over my uncle and held out the lamp to me. “Son, you mind holding this?”
I jumped up, took the light, and held it over my uncle.
The doctor dabbed at the wound—a small dark hole, about the size of a fat spider, five inches below the left shoulder. An ugly, inch-long tear extended to the right of it, and a clear pinkish fluid oozed from the cavity.
Hoffman returned and opened the cell door. “This ain’t gonna do, me a-runnin’ after water, while you kneel there between two killers, like you was beggin’ to be next. If McNeil was to get wind of this, he’d have my tail on a spit.”
“Death doesn’t scare me so much as it once did,” Dr. White said.
“Well, it should. Doctors don’t grow on trees, ya know.” He set the water jug just inside the cell then returned to his stool.
Dr. White poured water into a tin cup then mixed in a dash of white powder. A sizzling sound, like opening a can of Coke drink, emanated from the cup. “Carbolic acid,” he explained.
He took another small piece of fabric, dipped it into the cup, and dabbed at the wound. The blood and pus that had coagulated around the edge of the hole bubbled as if it were being cooked. Uncle Ed twisted his head to the side and squeezed his eyes shut. An odor, which reminded me of burnt hair and rendered hog fat, filled the cell.
After wrapping the shoulder in clean bandages, the doctor collected his things. “That’s about all we can do for you at the moment.”
chapter nineteen
Tess
Saturday night, after going to bed, I heard Mom. She was drunk, laughing in the kitchen with Mick. They’d been at it since returning from wherever. Mom hadn’t bothered telling me.
I hated i
t when she drank. Without fail, she’d bring up the topic of my dad: what a loser he was, how abusive he was, and—her favorite—what a narcissist he was. Perhaps he was those things, but I didn’t understand why she felt the need to judge him again and again, especially when her conclusions never changed.
I wondered how long it would be before Mick grew impatient with her and became her next narcissistic loser and abuser. I grew up accepting her judgments and agreeing with her in an attempt to appease her. But once, I had attempted to point out that her drinking consistently ended in her being more miserable. That did not go over well.
The laughter drifted in and out like the buzz of a mosquito in the dark—its bite nearly inevitable. Unable to sleep, I turned on my lamp and read John’s letter again, first inflating my ego with thoughts of his admiration. He loves me. That felt weird. I had this guy who claimed he was in love with me before we’d even met—love at pre-first sight.
Next came guilt. I had been such a brutal skeptic and so impatient with him. More than ever, I felt pulled to him. I missed him, missed having breakfast with him, the way he oversimplified everything, his ridiculous compliments. John had only been gone a week, but I thought of him all the time.
I wondered if I was falling in love with him, as he apparently already was with me. Perhaps I was subconsciously manufacturing the attraction in an attempt to fill a hole in my life. That was what children of divorced parents did, according to all the daytime TV talk shows.
I heard Mom yelling and cussing, then the front door slammed. Soon afterward, the deep rumble of Mick’s pickup truck as he drove away came through my open window. I climbed out of bed and cracked open my bedroom door. My mom was in the kitchen, complaining and mumbling to herself. I went down to the end of the hall to check on her. No matter what, she was still my mom, the only one I had. She was standing at the counter, emptying a wine bottle into a glass.
“Mom? You okay?”
“I’m fine.” She raised the glass and took a drink. “He’s no different than…” She shook her head. “All men are the same. All they care about is themselves.”
“Why don’t you go to bed, Mom? It’s late.”
“Oh, so now you’re the parent? Is it my bedtime?”
“Mom, I’m just—”
“Quit staring at me like, like I’m a… like I’m some stupid child. Oh, the bad irre… irrespicable… I can see the judgment in your eyes. Don’t even… I’m the mother in this house. Get out of here. Get out. Leave me alone.”
I went back to my room and crawled into bed.
The next morning, I got up and made breakfast. I left the empty wine bottles on the counter for my mom to find—not that it would make a difference. Mom would likely say, “It’s who I am. If you don’t like it, that’s your problem.”
She was still in bed when I left the house to drive over to Liz’s. I wanted to pore over the documents she’d photographed without the risk of interruption from my mom. We examined one after another, debating the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences. Between the dense, esoteric language and the cursive handwriting, we extracted very little information. And the trial transcripts, which would’ve provided word-for-word testimonies from the witnesses, seemed to be missing.
At one point, I threw my hands up and whined, “Who testified in John’s defense?”
Liz clicked back to one of the earlier files and pointed at the left edge of the computer screen. “Alan Stewart?”
“I think he was the preacher. He was with the sheriff the night of the fire, if I remember right. He was probably a prosecution witness, but I’m not sure.”
“We should be able to get that from the witness examinations. If we can find them,” Liz said.
“Maybe it didn’t work that way back then.”
“What do you mean? They had to have interrogated witnesses.”
I pointed at the top of the document. “SAP? What is that? Someone’s initials?”
“An acronym. Seriously Asinine Publication, I think,” she said.
In one document, it appeared that the judge had assigned someone to defend John, a man named Charles Morse. The documents offered nothing about the guy—his age, education, title, background.
“I’ve heard of that,” Liz said. “A public defender. Same thing as a lawyer, I think.”
“All this legal crap…” I went on to the next confusing document.
“Well, keep in mind it was over a hundred years ago. They probably did things differently back then. Do you know any lawyers?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“What about your mom? She does, doesn’t she?”
“Oh, like I’d ask her.”
“Well, it looks like this Charles dude made pizza casserole of the whole thing, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, because John didn’t have money for a real lawyer. I have it all.”
When I got home that afternoon, Mom was sitting on the couch, watching golf. She didn’t play golf, so I had no idea why she’d be watching it on TV.
“You left a mess in the kitchen this morning,” she said.
“I did?”
“Am I supposed to find a moral lesson in there or something?” She was wearing the ratty mint-green robe she often wore on weekend mornings—a small hole in the butt, where it was worn thin.
“I got up early. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Well, I work a stressful job, Tess, forty hours a week, so you can hopefully have a better life than me. By the end of the week, I sometimes need to unwind. I’ll have a drink or two to calm my nerves. I don’t need a kid following me around, making sure I’m behaving to her superior moral standards. How I spend my free time is none of your business.”
“You’re right. It’s not. I’m sorry.”
“The lawn needs to be mowed.”
“I was about to do that.”
I went to my room, shut the door, and called Liz. When she answered, I said, “Ugh! I want to strangle her.”
“Your mom?”
“Yeah. Is that bad?”
“No, it’s cute, Tess, Care Bear cute.”
“Hey. Come with me tomorrow.”
“Where are you going?”
“Woodstock.”
“I’ve got bathroom duty tomorrow, remember? And I was thinking of inviting you over for a special friend activity.”
“What? Like scrubbing your toilet?”
“Damn, you’re good.”
“Do the bathrooms now,” I said, “so you can come with me tomorrow.”
“Oh, duh, like it’s just that simple, like I can switch gears in an instant. It takes me at least a day to mentally prepare myself for work.”
“I’m calling Mrs. Parker to see if we can have another crack at those court records—the testimonies.”
“We already looked over all that stuff, didn’t we? It’s a bunch of gobbledygook.”
“I think we missed something,” I said.
Liz moaned. “Where’s the friggin’ rubber gloves?”
Mrs. Parker gave us a lesson in handling historical documents. She explained why cotton gloves were used and the purposes behind the various archival storage materials. She reminded me of my grandmother—everything just so.
I pointed at the document Liz and I had looked at the previous day. “Mrs. Parker, can you tell whether this guy Charles Morse was an attorney? It looks like the court assigned him, doesn’t it?”
She studied the paper. “A public defender, maybe?”
I nodded. “I looked it up last night, and the earliest case I could find of public defenders being used was in the 1930s.”
“I have no idea,” Mrs. Parker said, “but I know someone who might.”
She called Lucia Brown, a retired criminal lawyer. They had become good friends in the years since Lucia had moved from Alba
ny and bought the house next door to Mrs. Parker’s. It didn’t take much to entice her to join us—a question about something called prima facie did the trick.
Lucia looked around sixty. She was tall and stout, built like one of those TV wrestlers—Olga the Undertaker’s Daughter.
After the three of us filled her in, she said, “So you think this Bartley fellow may have gotten the butt end of the stick? It could be. See, this Morse fellow wasn’t necessarily an attorney. The record should’ve indicated that here.” She pointed at one of the court documents. “He was possibly an intern. Who knows? Back in those days, it was fairly common for the poor to be assigned a defender by the judge, especially in rural areas. In some instances, that might have been a barely literate county employee with absolutely no experience in law.”
Mrs. Brown glanced over a few more documents. She explained that they were most likely nothing more than random trial notes scribbled by the judge. “The courts didn’t record testimonies back then, not like today, anyway. There wasn’t much of a need for that, as there was no court of appeals. Trials were rarely ever reviewed.” She put two of the pages next to each other. “See? The handwriting matches the writing on this form signed by the judge.” She brought a hand to her chin. “Are you wanting to determine whether or not they hanged the wrong man?”
I wasn’t entirely certain what I wanted. “Well, yes. But I’m mostly wondering if he had a good defense.”
“If he had had an attorney at all, he could’ve gotten away with murder, or he might’ve been justly acquitted and lived happily ever after. Either way…”
“What if my aunt wasn’t really dead? I mean, the sheriff supposedly left her body buried up on the mountain.”
“Where did you get that?”
“An old newspaper clipping.”
“Well, yeah, but there were witnesses, too,” Liz said.
Mrs. Brown said, “If she wasn’t dead, they couldn’t have had a murder trial. But that’s a whole different matter. The thing I’m curious about is the body being left. Where was this? Do you know?”