by Otto Penzler
“Yes sir. He hit me. I’m in good shape but he must’ve been boxing in that prison or something.”
Socrates’ eyes wandered over to the jurors’ box. They were mostly women and he could see that they were appalled by Lunge’s description of his broken nose and whiplash from just one swipe of the ex-convict’s fist.
“Thank you, Mr. Lunge.” MacAlister smiled at Brenda Marsh. “Your witness.”
Brenda Marsh got up purposefully and stalked over to Lunge. “Did you, Mr. Lunge, go up to where the dog lay with a brick in your hand?”
“No.”
“I see. Tell me, Mr. Lunge, what is your profession?”
“I sell sporting goods. My father owns a store on Rodeo Drive and I run it.”
“So,” asked Brenda. “Then you don’t have a medical background?”
“No.”
“But didn’t you tell Mr. Fortlow that the dog was done for and that he should be put out of his suffering? And don’t you think it was likely that the defendant thought that you intended to kill the dog with the brick you held?”
“Objection,” said Prosecutor MacAlister. “Mr. Lunge has already stated that he didn’t have a brick in his hand.”
“A stone then?” asked Ms. Marsh. “Did you have a stone, Mr. Lunge?”
“No.”
“Did you have anything in your hands when you approached the wounded dog and Mr. Fortlow on Olympic Boulevard?”
“Urn, well, I don’t remember. I, uh, I might have grabbed a, a, a, you know, a thing, a ten-pound weight I keep in the backseat.”
“A ten-pound weight? What was this weight made from?”
“Iron.”
“So, you approached Mr. Fortlow with ten pounds of iron in your hand?”
“How was I to know what would happen? For all I knew it was his dog. I wanted to help but I wanted to protect myself too. He looked, well, dangerous. And he was big. I knew I had to stop for hitting the dog but I wanted to protect myself too.”
“And did you say that you’d kill the dog with the weight? Didn’t you say that you wanted to stop his pain?”
“Absolutely not. I mean I never said that I wanted to kill the dog. I thought he was going to die, though, I mean you should have seen him. He was a mess.”
9
“That man right there,” said Marjorie Galesky. She was pointing at Benheim Lunge. Dolly Straight had already testified that Socrates Fortiow came to her clinic with the bleeding and crying black dog in his arms. He’d carried the sixty-two-pound dog eleven blocks to get him care.
“. . . I was sitting in my front yard,” seventy-nine-year-old Mrs. Galesky said, “like always when it’s over seventy-two degrees. It was getting colder and I was about to go in when I see this car run over that poor dog. It hit him and then the tires ran over his legs. This man,” she said, pointing at Socrates, “the black one, had gone up to help the dog when the other man, the one driving the car, comes running over with a brick in his hand. At least it looked like a brick. They say it was a weight, whatever that means, but it was big and that man came running over with it. He said something to the black man and then he tried to get at the dog. First off the black man pushed the white one and then he hauled off and hit him.” The old woman was a few inches under five feet and slight. She looked like an excited child up there on the stand. There was an ancient glee at the memory of the punch. Socrates tried to keep from smiling.
10
“Socrates Fortiow,” he answered when asked to identify himself.
‘Yes I did,” he said when asked if he struck Benheim Lunge. “He hit the dog and drove off for all I knew. I went up and was tryin’ to see what I could do when he come up with a chunk’a metal in his hand. He was lookin’ all over an’ said that it’d be better to put the dog outta his misery. Then he said that he wanted to take the dog in his car. I said I’d go along but he told me that there wasn’t room for me an’ the dog too. I told him that I’d seen a animal hospital not far and that I’d carry the dog there. He said no. Then I said no. He went for the dog an’ he still had the iron in his hand. I put up my hand to stop’im but he just kept cornin’. So I hit him once. You know I didn’t mean to do all that to Jiim but he wasn’t gonna take that dog. Uh-uh.”
11
“We find the defendant guilty of assault,” the foreman of the jury, a black woman, said. She seemed sorry but that was the decision and she stood with it.
12
While waiting for his sentence Socrates would go to visit Bruno every day. Dolly had made a leash with a basket woven from leather straps to hold Bruno up from behind. If Socrates could heft the dog’s backside Bruno found that he could propel himself forward by walking with his front legs.
“You could put a clothesline up around your yard, Mr. Fortlow,” Dolly said. “And then attach his basket to it with a pulley. That way he could walk around without you having to help him all the time.”
“Yeah,” Socrates answered. “Dolly, what you put up behind the ten percent for my bail?”
“The house,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
Bruno was leaping from one paw to the other, yelping a little now and then because his hip still hurt, and licking the hands of the two new friends.
“If you run I don’t care,” Dolly said. “But you have to take Bruno with you.”
*3
Before the sentencing Brenda Marsh had a long meeting with Socrates. He cursed her and pounded his fist down on the table in the little room that the court let them use.
He refused to do what she asked of him.
‘You wanna take ev’rything from me?” he asked her.
“I’m trying to keep you out of jail,” she said in her annoying way. “Do you want to go to jail?”
“There’s a lotta things I don’t want. One of ’em is that I don’t get down on my knees to no man, woman, or child.”
Brenda Marsh did not respond. It was then that Socrates realized that she was probably a very good lawyer.
*4
Three days later, after the celebration for Socrates’ suspended sentence at Iula’s diner, Socrates went to his house with Right Burke, the maimed WWII veteran. They sat in Socrates’ poor kitchen while Bruno lay on the floor laughing and licking the air.
“I hate it, Right. I hate it.”
‘You free, ain’t ya?”
“Yeah, but I wake up mad as shit every day.”
Brenda Marsh had set up a private meeting with Judge Hemp. She’d pleaded for Socrates’ freedom. But the judge said that he’d been found guilty and what could she do?
That’s when Brenda revealed her plan for Socrates to apologize to the court, to Benheim Lunge, and to, the community. He’d promise to write a letter to be posted on the bus stop where he’d assaulted Benheim and to go to Benheim and ask his pardon. He’d make himself available to the juvenile court to talk to young black children and tell them how he had gone wrong but that he wouldn’t do it again.
He’d do an extra fifty hours of community service and for that they could suspend his sentence.
“But you free, Socco. Free, man,” said Right, his best friend. “That gal did you a favor. ’Cause you know she musta begged that judge. You know after that big trial they just had the court wanna put ev’ry black man they can in the can. Shit. Guilty? Go straight to jail!”
“But you know it’s just ’cause’a the dog, Right. It’s just ’cause’a the dog I said yeah.”
“How’s that?”
“He needs me out here. Him and Darryl and you too, brother. I ain’t gonna help nobody in that jail cell or on the run. You know I woulda let them take that white girl’s house if it wasn’t that I had obligations.”
The dog barked suddenly and put his nose out to be scratched.
‘You just a lucky fool, Socrates Fortiow,” Right said.
‘You got that right, man. I’m a fool to be who I am and I’m lucky I made it this far. Me an’ this black dog here. Shit. Me an’ this black dog.�
�
Faithless
from Kenyon Review
1
The last time my mother Cornelia Nissenbaum and her sister Constance saw their mother was the day before she vanished from their lives forever, April 11, 1923.
It was a rainy-misty morning. They’d been searching for their mother because something was wrong in the household; she hadn’t come downstairs to prepare breakfast so there wasn’t anything for them except what their father gave them, glutinous oatmeal from the previous morning hastily reheated on the stove sticking to the bottom of the pan and tasting of scorch. Their father had seemed strange to them, smiling but not-seeing in that way of his like Reverend Dieckman too fierce in his pulpit Sunday mornings, intoning the Word of God. His eyes were threaded with blood and his face was still pale from the winter but flushed, mottled. In those days he was a handsome man but stern-looking and severe. Gray-grizzled side-whiskers and a spade-shaped beard, coarse and grizzled too with gray, but thick springy-sleek black hair brushed back from his forehead in a crest. The sisters were fearful of their father without their mother to mediate among them, it was as if none of them knew who they were without her.
Connie chewed her lip and worked up her nerve to ask where was Momma? and their father said, hitching up his suspenders, on his way outside, “Your mother’s where you’ll find her.”
The sisters watched their father cross the mud-puddled yard to where a crew of hired men was waiting in the doorway of the big
barn. It was rye-planting season and always in spring in the Chautauqua Valley there was worry about rain: too much rain and the seed would be washed away or rot in the soil before it could sprout. My mother Cornelia would grow to adulthood thinking how blessings and curses fell from the sky with equal authority, like hard-pelting rain. There was God, who set the world in motion, and who intervened sometimes in the affairs of men, for reasons no one could know. If you lived on a farm there was weather, always weather, every morning was weather and every evening at sundown calculating the next day’s, the sky’s moods meant too much. Always casting your glance upward, outward, your heart set to quicken.
That morning. The sisters would never forget that morning. We knew something was wrong, we thought Momma was sick. The night before having heard — what, exactly? Voices. Voices mixed with dreams, and the wind. On that farm, at the brink of a ten-mile descent to the Chautauqua River, it was always windy — on the worst days the wind could literally suck your breath away! — like a ghost, a goblin. An invisible being pushing up close beside you, sometimes even inside the house, even in your bed, pushing his mouth (or muzzle) to yours and sucking out the breath.
Connie thought Nelia was silly, a silly-baby, to believe such. She was eight years old and skeptical-minded. Yet maybe she believed it, too? Liked to scare herself, the way you could almost tickle yourself, with such wild thoughts.
Connie, who was always famished, and after that morning would be famished for years, sat at the oilcloth-covered table and ate the oatmeal her father had spooned out for her, devoured it, scorch-clots and all, her head of fair-frizzy braids lowered and her jaws working quickly. Oatmeal sweetened with top-milk on the very edge of turning sour, and coarse brown sugar. Nelia, who was fretting, wasn’t able to swallow down more than a spoon or two of hers so Connie devoured that, too. She would remember that part of the oatmeal was hot enough to burn her tongue and other parts were icebox-cold. She would remember that it was all delicious.
The girls washed their dishes in the cold-water sink and let the oatmeal pan soak in scummy soapsuds. It was time for Connie to leave for school but both knew she could not go, not today. She could not leave to walk two miles to the school with that feeling something is wrong, nor could she leave her little sister behind.
Though when Nelia snuffled and wiped her nose on both her hands Connie cuffed her on the shoulder and scolded, “Piggy-
Pw”
This, a habit of their mother’s when they did something that was only mildly disgusting.
Connie led the way upstairs to the big bedroom at the front of the house that was Momma and Pappa’s room and that they were forbidden to enter unless specifically invited; for instance if the door was open and Momma was cleaning inside, changing bedclothes so she’d call out Come in, girls! smiling in her happy mood so it was all right and they would not be scolded. Come in, give me a hand, which turned into a game shaking out sheets, fluffing out pillowcases to stuff heavy goosefeather pillows inside, Momma and Connie and Nelia laughing together. But this morning the door was shut. There was no sound of Momma inside. Connie dared to turn the doorknob, push the door open slowly, and they saw, yes, to their surprise there was their mother lying on top of the unmade bed, partly dressed, wrapped in an afghan. My God, it was scary to see Momma like that, lying down at such an hour of the morning! Momma, who was so brisk and capable and who routed them out of bed if they lingered, Momma with little patience for Connie’s lazy-tricks as she called them or for Nelia’s sniffles, tummyaches, and baby-fears.
“Momma?” — Connie’s voice was cracked.
“Mom-ma?” — Nelia whimpered.
Their mother groaned and flung an arm across one of the pillows lying crooked beside her. She was breathing hard, like a winded horse, her chest rising and falling so you could see it and her head was flung back on a pillow and she’d placed a wetted cloth across her eyes mask-like so half her face was hidden. Her dark-blond hair was disheveled, unplaited, coarse and lustreless as a horse’s mane, unwashed for days. That rich rank smell of Momma’s hair when it needed washing. You remember such smells, the sisters would say, some of them not-so-nice smells, all your life. And the smell in their parents’ forbidden room of — was it talcum powder, sweaty armpits, a sourish-sweet fragrance of bedclothes that no matter how frequently laundered with detergent and bleach were never truly fresh. A smell of bodies. Adult bodies. Yeasty, stale. Pappa’s tobacco (he rolled his own crude paper cigarettes, he chewed tobacco in a thick tarry-black wad) and Pappa’s hair oil and that special smell of Pappa’s shoes, the black Sunday shoes always kept polished. (His work-boots, etc., he kept downstairs in the closed-in porch by the rear door called the “entry.”) In the step-in closet close by the bed, behind an unhemmed length of chintz, was a blue-speckled porcelain chamberpot with a detachable lid and a rim that curled neatly under it, like a lip.
The sisters had their own chamberpot — their potty, as it was called. There was no indoor plumbing in John Nissenbaum’s farmhouse as in any farmhouse in the Chautauqua Valley well into the 1930s and in poorer homes well into the 1940s, and even beyond. One hundred yards behind the house, beyond the silo, was the outhouse, the latrine, the “privy.” But you would not want to make that trip in cold weather or in rain or in the pitch-black of night, not if you could help it.
Of course the smell of urine and a fainter smell of excrement must have been everywhere, the sisters conceded, years later. As adults, reminiscing. But it was masked by the barnyard smell, probably. Nothing worse than pig manure, after all!
At least, we weren’t pigs.
Anyway, there was Momma, on the bed. The bed that was so high from the floor you had to raise a knee to slide up on it, and grab on to whatever you could. And the horsehair mattress, so hard and ungiving. The cloth over Momma’s eyes she hadn’t removed and beside Momma in the rumpled bedclothes her Bible. Face down. Pages bent. That Bible her mother-in-law Grandma Nissenbaum had given her for a wedding present, seeing she hadn’t one of her own. It was smaller than the heavy black family Bible and it was made of limp ivory-leather covers and had onionskin pages the girls were allowed to examine but not to turn without Momma’s supervision; the Bible that would disappear with Gretel Nissenbaum, forever.
The girls begged, whimpered. “Momma? Momma, are you sick?”
At first there was no answer. Just Momma’s breath coming quick and hard and uneven. And her olive-pale skin oily with heat like fever. Her legs were tangled in the afghan, her hair was
strewn across the pillow. They saw the glint of Momma’s gold cross on a thin gold chain around her neck, almost lost in her hair. (Not only a cross but a locket, too: when Momma opened it there was, inside, a tiny strand of silver hair once belonging to a woman the sisters had never known, Momma’s own grandmother she’d loved so when she was a little girl.) And there were Momma’s breasts, almost exposed! — heavy, lush, beautiful almost spilling out of a white eyelet slip, rounded like sacs holding warm liquid, and the nipples dark and big as eyes. You weren’t supposed to stare at any part of a person’s body but how could you help it? — especially Connie who was fascinated by such, guessing how one day she’d inhabit a body like Momma’s. Years ago she’d peeked at her mother’s big milk-swollen breasts when Nelia was still nursing, jealous, awed. Nelia was now five years old and could not herself recall nursing at all; would come one day to believe, stubborn and disdainful, that she had never nursed, had only been bottle-fed.
At last Momma snatched the cloth off her face. ‘You! Damn you! What do you want?” She stared at the girls as if, clutching hands and gaping at her, they were strangers. Her right eye was bruised and swollen and there were raw red marks on her forehead and first Nelia then Connie began to cry and Momma said, “Constance, why aren’t you in school? Why can’t you let me alone? God help me —■ always ‘Momma’ — ‘Momma’ — ‘Momma.’” Connie whimpered, “Momma, did you hurt yourself?” and Nelia moaned, sucking a corner of the afghan like a deranged baby and Momma ignored the question, as Momma often ignored questions she thought nosy, none of your business; her hand lifted as if she meant to slap them but then fell wearily, as if this had happened many times before, this exchange, this emotion, and it was her fate that it would happen many times again. A close sweet-stale blood-odor lifted from Momma’s lower body, out of the folds of the soiled afghan, that odor neither of the little girls could have identified except in retrospect, in adolescence at last detecting it in themselves: shamed, discomforted, the secret of their bodies at what was called, invariably in embarrassed undertones, that certain time of the month.