The Reservoir

  “Objection, Your Honor,” Meredith says.

  “I don’t mind,” Madison says. “No, I don’t think it’s strange atall. Mrs. Madison is a quiet woman who minds her own business. I had to speak out, though.”

  “And yet,” Evans says, “she didn’t marry him. In fact, she went off to Bath to teach. And there was never another mention of her marrying Mr. Cluverius?”

  “Not as I know of, no sir.” The tension has gone from Madison’s face. Before he steps down he takes a moment to glance over at Tommie and Willie. Willie catches the look, sees the smirk ripple across Madison’s features like a breath of wind on the water.

  • CHAPTER EIGHTEEN •

  THE DEFENSE BEGINS.

  Tyler Bagby swears to the good character of Thomas Cluverius and says that on the night of January 5 Tommie had dinner with him and his wife. Martin Harrison is a well-spoken young lawyer who says he talked with the prisoner at Schoen’s on March 13, and Bernard Henley saw him at the Dime Museum later that day. Crump tries to plant a subliminal idea. “So you saw him at the intermission of the evening performance—how did he seem to you?” Henley says they only waved across the lobby, but that Tommie seemed fine. “And he was alone?” Yes, he was alone.

  Meredith spots the trick and on cross-examination clarifies: “When you say evening performance you mean you saw him at the afternoon performance, is that not correct?” Henley says that it is. “So you never saw him that night after five o’clock?”

  “No sir, I did not.”

  A handful of friends come forward to say what an outstanding citizen Tommie is, how they’ve never known him to have anything but a sterling character. The Aylett brothers have, of course, not attended the trial, their father sitting on the side of the prosecution, but Randall Croxton stands up and avers that no matter what anybody says, Tommie is “a true-blue friend who couldn’t think a harmful thought if he tried.” At this, Tommie begins to tear up and has to fight to stop the flow. The prosecution doesn’t bother much with these witnesses. They have no evidence, and the jury knows they’re standing by their friend and kinsman.

  The next day Jane Tunstall takes the stand for the defense. She wears a black dress and veil, but the heat is such that after a while she takes the veil off. Her eyes are grief-worn, but she tries to smile. Crump asks her about Tommie’s watch keys. She says that the one with the amethyst had been her husband’s and that she gave it to Tommie when he went off to college. Then Crump wants to know about the nature of the trouble Lillian had with her parents.

  “I didn’t understand it exactly,” Jane says. “They thought she was out of control someway, so I let her come live with me. They didn’t have the money to send her to private school and I did, so I didn’t see anything wrong in that. But they seemed to resent me after that. I sent a dress to her one time, when she went home for a holiday, and they sent it back.”

  Crump then has Jane identify a letter written to her by Lillian shortly before she moved out of her parents’ house. He reads aloud, “ ‘It is my prayer tonight that the sun of tomorrow may shine on me a corpse. O if suicide were not a sin, how soon the lingering spark of my life would vanish.’ I realize she was very young when she wrote that, but she appeared to be capable of high-strung emotions. Would you agree with that?”

  Jane looks torn for the first time. “I loved my grandniece very much.” She dabs her eyes. “But, yes, she could be very flighty, and, as you say, high-strung.”

  On cross-examination Aylett asks, “Didn’t you think, ma’am, you might be spoiling Lillian? Making her unfit to be happy in her own home?”

  “No,” Jane says, quietly, fanning herself. She smiles, batting her eyelashes at Aylett. “She was just as unhappy there before she came to me as after.”

  “But by educating her at your own expense,” Aylett persists, “weren’t you giving her high aspirations and enabling her to move in a different circle from what she had been born and raised in?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “And so weren’t you teaching her to be disobedient to her own flesh and blood?”

  “No sir, I was not. I’m her own flesh and blood.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “None that have lived.”

  “By taking Lillie in weren’t you able to strike at her parents over her shoulders?”

  Jane cannot stifle a little laugh. “No, I don’t believe I was.”

  “Does that furnish an amusing idea to your mind?”

  “No, but it sounds funny.” When she has finished, she takes her place behind Tommie; she doesn’t touch him, but sits there watching her own hands, wondering what happened under her own roof that she might have been the cause of. It is too impossible to imagine, so she closes her eyes and sees her husband, sitting in a carriage waiting for her, his hand outstretched to help her up.

  Tommie’s brother comes to see him that evening at supper-time. He fills up the cell doorway with his broad shoulders and wide-brimmed straw hat, and Tommie feels a twinge of resentment at his brother’s health and freedom. No matter what happens, however careworn his face is now, he’ll go on and raise a family and live a full life.

  Willie takes off his hat and comes in. “Are you eating enough, Tommie?” he asks.

  “Yes, fine.” The truth is, he feels weaker than he ever has in his life. The lack of exercise and sunlight, the strain of the trial, are beginning to take a toll. He wakes up nights, his heart banging in his ears, his eyes sand-filled sockets searching the darkness for what woke him—a dream? a terrified outburst down the hall?—and then he lies awake for hours, afraid to go back to sleep.

  “I want you to think about something,” Willie says, sitting down. “You know I was awfully keen on Lillian. I’d like to—I want to take your place, Tommie. You have the bright future; I’m just a laborer, always will be.”

  Tommie shakes his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That could have been my child she was carrying.”

  Tommie eyes him sharply, waiting.

  “I mean it may have been. How do you know it wasn’t? She wrote me asking for some help back in February.”

  “I don’t believe you. You weren’t intimate with her. Not like that.” And yet he’s not sure, and it seems that this rope his brother is throwing him may be real enough to grasp.

  “She did write me,” Willie insists. “She asked for money. She said she was in trouble. She didn’t say what kind, but she said she wanted to see me.”

  “Did she mention me?”

  “Not a word.”

  But Tommie can tell by the way he tongues his lower lip and shakes his head that his brother is, at least in part, lying. “I still have the letter,” Willie says. “It’s proof I was involved—I can bring it to you. I can give it to Colonel Aylett and make a confession. There’d be nothing you could do about it.”

  “I’d say you were lying. I’d confess myself.”

  “Would you?”

  They look at each other. The guard at the end of the hall coughs; somewhere nearby a spoon scrapes against a metal bowl. Tommie glances at Forney’s Anecdotes of Public Men in his stack of books, and an old image of himself addressing the general assembly flickers in his brain. “I honestly don’t know what I’d do,” he says.

  “I’ve thought about it,” Willie says. “I could take my chances. I’d be out in ten years, at the most. My whole life ahead of me. I could survive in here. I don’t know if you can.”

  “Ten years,” Tommie says. “Is that what you think I’ll get?”

  “I think you’ll walk out of here. But why risk it?”

  “You can’t save me, Willie. There’s nothing you can do anymore, except what you’ve been doing.”

  “It’s not too late for me to get up there. I want to do it.”

  “No,” Tommie says, but he won’t look at his brother, because Willie will see that he desperately wants to say yes.

  “But it’s not right. You didn
’t do this. She killed herself. God knows it, and he won’t let you be punished for it. I know he won’t, Tommie. I’m going to confess.”

  Tommie puts a hand on his arm. “No, you’re not. You wouldn’t get away with it. You can’t prove you were in Richmond. You’d just look like a liar, like you’re trying to cover up my tracks.”

  Willie considers a minute, then nods. “All right, then. Are you sure there’s nothing you want? Do you have enough blankets?”

  “It’s not cold anymore. A little more light would help, but they won’t let you bring a lantern in.”

  Now Willie leans in and whispers, “I could help you get out of here. It wouldn’t be that hard—nobody expects you to run. I’ve studied the walls, and there’s a place over in the southwest corner where the barbed wire sags. You can’t tell from inside the yard. You’d have to figure out when the guard is watching. The bars in here are practically rusted out at the top. We’d pick a dark night in the rain. I’d throw a rope over at your signal and a piece of saddle leather so you won’t cut yourself. We’d go down by the creek, and get you on a freight train.”

  Tommie smiles. “You have it all figured out.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it hasn’t come to that yet, but it’ll give me something to think about at night.”

  Willie goes and looks up and down the corridor. “Listen, Tommie, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he says. “It’s about Mr. Madison.” Tommie looks alarmed, and Willie wonders if his brother already knows. “He threatened to get up in that box and say you and Lillie were involved if I didn’t pay him two hundred dollars. I can’t prove that he said it, but he did. I want to get up there and tell the jury.”

  “They’ll think you’re lying to protect me.”

  “So what if they do? Isn’t that better than letting him get away with a real lie?” Willie looks at his brother, trying to pry out what might be hidden there.

  “He wanted money?” Tommie says. He gets up and grips the bars on his gate. He turns and squats, facing Willie. “He’s crazy, Willie. He’s liable to do anything.”

  “I know it. He was mean to Lillie, and now here he is trying to extract money for her sake.” Again, Willie regards his brother, trying to figure if he wants to say something else. “What do you mean, he’s liable to do anything?”

  “I don’t know. Just don’t give him any money.”

  “The only thing he’ll get from me is a fist in the face if he ever speaks to me again on this earth.”

  “Willie, if I don’t get out of here … well, there’s some things you should know. I don’t want to tell you everything now, but there’s some important things you should know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Not everything is as I’ve told it. There’s some missing pieces that I can’t talk about. You’re the only one I’ll tell, but not yet.”

  “What are you waiting for, Tommie? If there’s something that can save you, what could you possibly be waiting for?”

  “I can’t say that either. The jury doesn’t want to hear things. Nobody wants to hear certain things, because nobody can believe certain things even if they hear them. There’s strange things that happen in the world sometimes, I’ve come to understand that, and they don’t fit in with the rest of our lives. These things, they’re like a burl in a tree, Willie—they don’t belong there. They get in somehow and the tree has to work around it. Or else die.”

  “Burls won’t hurt anything. Some people think they’re pretty. Mighty hard to work with though.”

  “Okay, Willie, but my point is that not everybody thinks they’re pretty.”

  Willie rises from the little fanback chair. “You get some sleep. Things are going to turn around, I can feel it in my marrow.”

  In the morning Willie takes his turn. Tommie can hardly bear to look, and for the second time in as many days he feels his eyes welling. He has never been prouder of his brother, sitting there in the witness chair looking so confident and friendly—the man Tommie has always looked up to, and, as he once told Lillie, would trust with his life. He answers Evans’s questions in an unhesitating, forthright, clear voice. No, it was not strange that Tommie went out the night he was arrested wearing his brother’s hat—there was no effort to conceal anything. No, he never wore a mustache. Tommie traveled to Richmond March 12 on business pertaining to a land suit in a bankruptcy court, representing Mr. Bray. He often went to Richmond for such matters.

  “Tell the jury,” Mr. Evans says, “whether Miss Madison was able to swim.”

  “She couldn’t swim to save herself,” Willie says. “She fell in the river when we were out boating and I had to jump in and rescue her.”

  “So if she had thrown herself into the reservoir she couldn’t have changed her mind and gotten out?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  Evans shows him a gold watch key similar to the one found at the reservoir. It’s an inch-long gold cylinder, but the top is inset with a hexagonal amethyst. “Do you recognize this key?” Evans asks.

  “It’s my brother’s,” he says.

  “Did you bring this to your brother after his arrest?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “He sent word he needed it, to clear his name.”

  “And where did you get it?”

  “From his desk at home where he left it. It didn’t work well, so he was using his steel keys.”

  “I see.” Now he shows him the reservoir key. “Have you ever seen this key before?”

  Willie studies it. “No, sir, not before it was shown in this courtroom.”

  Aylett then gets up and says, “Your Honor, it might be instructive to the jury to see how well this new key fits on the prisoner’s watch.” Hill nods his assent, and the clerk brings out Tommie’s pocket watch. Aylett offers to let the defense try it.

  “This is your show,” Crump says.

  Aylett inserts the key and attempts to wind the watch. “Well, it’s not turning anything, it’s just spinning.” He shows the judge as if asking for help.

  “Our witness just explained it was worn out,” Crump says. “Of course it doesn’t work.”

  “Could we try the reservoir key while we’re at it?” Aylett says, casually, as if he had not been awaiting this moment. Since there is no objection, he inserts the heart-crowned key. It fits but the watch will not wind. “It appears to be fully wound already,” Aylett says, looking around and raising an eyebrow at his law clerks.

  Crump’s belly bounces in mirth. “Must’ve been back there trying out a bunch of keys,” he says audibly to his team. “I don’t know what keys they were using.”

  Aylett quickly moves on. He asks Willie if he was aware of his brother’s private life.

  “I knew that on occasion he had paid to lie with a woman.”

  “Did you know that he sometimes went about as Walter Merton?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know that he was a frequenter of Richmond taverns?”

  “I object to all this,” Evans says, genuinely annoyed. But Judge Hill rules that since these points have already been testified to by other witnesses, Willie has to answer.

  Willie considers. “I don’t think he went frequently anywhere, except to church and to visit his parents.”

  A dog fight erupts out in the hallway, nearly drowning out the end of Willie’s statement. Evans says, “I couldn’t hear that. Would the witness mind repeating it?”

  When Willie sits down he catches his brother’s eye, and there’s a faint smile between them. Willie has considered the possibility that Tommie never gave Lillian a watch key, that Tommie himself lost a gold key out there … that, in fact, he was with her at the reservoir. But the thought sickens him, so he pushes it out of his mind.

  Tommie’s father has not been able to come back since that first week. Mrs. Cluverius could not be by herself for so long. She sent a message saying she would come and get
up on the stand for him, but he wrote back more than once telling her not to worry—that he was innocent, had the best lawyers in the state, and that he was confident of a successful outcome. But here his father is standing up for his son on the final day of testimony. He is sparer even than three weeks ago, as though he’d been drained, his beard a scrap of Spanish moss. His suit hangs on him like a scarecrow’s—he looks like a good wind could blow him all the way back to King and Queen. Yet his face seems as unlined as on that first trip to Richmond.

  Meredith wants to know about the marks on the prisoner’s hand. “We have witnesses we can bring in here who’ll swear you said he got them on a fence rail. Do you stand by that story?”

  “I do,” Cluverius says, looking straight at Aylett. Tommie almost wishes his father had stayed home. Detective Wren dug up this confabulation of his father’s and the prosecution now claims they have witnesses to verify that he went around telling it. Tommie has no idea how his father came up with it, nor why, unless he felt his son guilty. Crump and Evans have offered no alternative to the prosecution’s witness, a medical examiner, who maintained the scratches on his hand were from some curved object like a curette—or a fingernail. When Crump asked Tommie about the scratches, all Tommie could say was, “I don’t remember what happened or what I said. They didn’t seem important.” Both Crump and Evans thought it all right, then, if Mr. Cluverius came out with his story.

  “When did that happen?” Aylett asks, stretching his mouth so that his teeth flash beneath his waxed and curled mustache.

  “The day he got back from Richmond.”

  “The day he got back from Richmond? And how exactly did it happen?”

  “Well sir, I met with him at the store that afternoon, and we went a little ways off to talk. Tommie leaned against a fence. He slipped and scratched his hand on a knothole.”

  “What kind of fence was it?”

  “A stake-and-rail fence.”

  “And how was he standing?”

  “With his back to the fence, arms stretched out along it.”