by Bev Marshall
Jehu let go and came around the table; he pulled me up to his chest and wrapped his arms around me. “I’ve already guessed a lot of it, and it doesn’t matter. None of it was your fault. Or your mother’s either.”
“I wish everybody felt the way you do.” And then I knew I had to tell him everything. I couldn’t bear to spend these sweet mornings with him with the hope of his love and then have it taken away when the truth came out. I couldn’t afford to hope for something I might not get. I led him to the couch. “I want you to know everything,” I said.
I began with the night Mama told me she and Wallace were getting married. As I warmed up to my story, I realized that this was good practice for my testifying if it came to that. And it felt good to pour out my fears and my feelings about Mama and Wallace and even Papaw and Miss Louise. As I talked, I watched his face for a reaction, but Jehu sat silently, the muscles in his face as immobile as Mervin’s cement figures.When I came to June’s role in our drama, I left out the part about blackmailing her into testifying, and I never mentioned Roland. I longed to unburden myself of those worries, too, but I wasn’t going to test Jehu’s forgiveness that far. “So now you know why I’m so scared. I’m not what you thought I was,” I said with my heart rising into my throat.
I had been talking for a long time, and Jehu hadn’t said one word. Still silent, he stood up and paced around the exercise bike and then stood looking out the window into our side yard.When he turned back to me, I saw a look on his face I’d never imagined he was capable of. His eyes were narrowed, his jaw so tight, it seemed he would never be able to unlock his mouth to speak. His fists were clenched, and in his eyes, I saw what I’d seen in Mama’s when she swung the 7-Up bottle at Wallace’s head. Panic rose up so fast inside me, I could barely breathe. I’d said too much, and now he saw that our little blue house was filled with ugliness and he was disgusted and enraged that I’d tried to trick him into thinking we were nice people like him and his family. I felt physically sick.Why hadn’t I killed myself and never lived to this day? “I’m sorry,” I tried to say, but I choked, and it came out “I’m sor.”
“Son of a bitch, bastard,” he yelled across the room. “I wish I’d had a chance to beat the crap out of him before your mother killed him.”
I tried to stifle the hope that was reemerging inside. Wait, Layla Jay, I cautioned. Make sure of what he means. I kept my eyes on him, as wary as a cornered animal.
“For God’s sake, why didn’t you tell somebody before all this happened?”
“I ... I ... couldn’t.”
He talked over my reply. “I mean if you’d told your mother, or your grandfather.Well, anybody.You should’ve ...”
I bowed my head unable to look at his accusing eyes. I wanted him to go home now. I needed to cry and I wasn’t going to release one tear until I could be alone with my misery. I heard his steps across the floor and then felt the weight of him on the plastic-covered couch. His palm was on my chin and he lifted my face. “I wish I could have helped you somehow. If you’d told me, I would have done something. I’m sorry for you, and I’m sorry for your mother.”
“I don’t want your sympathy,” I said. “You don’t have to pretend with me.You can go home. I’m fine.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” he said.“I care about you, Layla Jay. Really care. I mean maybe I love you.”
Maybe he loved me! Maybe. “You don’t know?”
He kissed me, a long kiss that seemed to draw out all of my love and hope and maybe even part of my soul. He slid his mouth across my cheek to my ear.“I know I think about you every morning when I wake up. I want to be with you all the time, and I want to kiss you again.”And he kissed me again and again until we were both breathing hard and my face felt as warm as it did with a fever.
I pulled away first, scared of where all of my feelings were headed. Never had I felt such emotion bubbling like furiously boiling water inside me. Something had to spill out or I’d explode. “Oh, Jehu. I wish I could tell you how I feel. I’ve loved you for a long time,” I said. “You can’t imagine how much I hoped for you to love me.” I touched my fingertips to his lips. “But I thought you were in love with Lyn.”
Jehu’s face was as flushed as mine felt. He kissed my fingers and held them against his cheek. “No, I was never in love with her. I guess I thought maybe I was, but I didn’t really know what being in love is supposed to be like. Lyn just wanted me to say it all the time. I love you, over and over, and every time I said it, I wondered if I really did.” He leaned closer and kissed the tip of my nose. “I’m not wondering with you. You’re different.”
I was different all right. “But, Jehu, now you know it all, about me, I mean. I’m not, not . . . pure.” I hated that word, but I couldn’t think of another one to use to describe my nonvirginal self.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jehu said. “It wasn’t your fault.You didn’t allow it. He forced you.” He held both of my hands in his.“When we do it, it’ll be because we’re in love, because you want to.You’ll be the first and only one I’ll ever make love to.”
When we do it, he had said. Not if, but when. He still wanted me. Used goods were good enough for him. I’d be his first, but he wouldn’t be mine. I tried to push thoughts of Roland away. Could I have an honest relationship with Jehu if the night with Roland was always going to be between us? I looked at the sweet smile on his lips, saw his love for me in his eyes. He didn’t deserve the pain my confession about Roland would cause him. I’d have to live with my deceit, and then when he kissed me again, I thought that keeping one secret wouldn’t be that hard to do.
Chapter 27
WHEN MERVIN CAME OVER THAT NIGHT, HE BROUGHT A handful of travel brochures with him. “After Key West, we might get bitten by the travel bug and want to go some other places,” he said, spreading the colorful brochures across our kitchen table. The first pamphlet he opened was about Gatlinburg,Tennessee, where you could ride in a chairlift up to the top of a mountain.There was another depicting the colors of Ruby Falls, and the third one he unfolded showed a glossy photograph of a family playing in the sand on Panama City, Florida. I wanted to see all of those places. The most interesting trip I’d ever been on was to the state capitol in Jackson when our sixth-grade class went there on a school bus tour. I knew he was trying to keep Mama’s mind away from the upcoming hearing and on something pleasant, but Mama barely glanced at the brightly colored pictures. In the last day or so her former confidence had begun to wane for no reason we could discern.Tonight she flip-flopped into total pessimism. Now she was sure the charges against her weren’t going to be dismissed.“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.“All I’m going to see are three cement walls and some bars with a big lock on them.”
“Frieda, you’ve got to think positive,” Mervin said. “If you expect defeat, that’s what you’ll get. When I talk to a customer, I don’t think they won’t buy anything. I think they’ll want everything I’ve made and have trouble choosing between an angel, a squirrel, or a gnome. And usually that’s just what happens. Good thoughts bring big rewards.”
I thought about this philosophy. Maybe it worked for some people, but Mervin’s life hadn’t been anything like ours, and I suspected that people like Mama and me could burn up our brains with good thoughts and the reward would just be more bad news.
Praying was our only hope, and Mama wasn’t even doing any of that. I prayed everywhere.When I took walks around the neighborhood, I prayed beneath Miss Westheimer’s maple tree, over a bed of red salvia, beside the corner mailbox.“Please God, please God, please.” I prayed on my knees in my bedroom, while I sat watching Ed Sullivan, while I stood in the kitchen in front of the open refrigerator door as if God was the lightbulb that illuminated our leftovers. If I’d had a megaphone like the ones the cheerleaders put to their mouths to scream “Go Cougars go,” I would have lifted it toward heaven and shouted into it, asking Go
d to save Mama and me.
On the morning of the hearing, I began praying at nine when it was scheduled to begin, and I kept on praying until I saw Mama drive up in Wallace’s Galaxie at eleven o’clock. She didn’t have to tell me. As soon as I ran out and saw her sitting behind the steering wheel with her hands wrapped around it and her eyes staring straight ahead at the back of the carport wall, I knew. God hadn’t answered my prayers. Grady Abadella, the Lexie County district attorney, had won the day. We were going to trial.
Mama got fired from her job the next day. I couldn’t blame Mrs. Salloum for sending her home. She was a zombie, walking around so stiffly with glazed eyes, no one would want to be around her, much less trust her to sell anybody face powder. After Mama was sent home, she spent the days reading paperback novels with covers of wild-haired women and men entwined in front of castles. Mervin tried to get her to go out to dinner ; Papaw begged her to visit him and Miss Louise; even her old friend Cybil, who hadn’t called in a couple of months, asked her if she’d like to go to the movies with her some night. Mama just kept reading, turning page after page, lost in the world of fictional romance where maidens got rescued by handsome men with muscular thighs.
I was nearly as depressed as she was, and I was scared, scared of not only the outcome but of the road that was going to lead to it all. Night after night I lay in bed seeing myself sitting on the chair in the witness stand. Grady Abadella pointed his finger at me and shouted “Liar liar” over and over until I would leap out of bed pressing my palms against my ears to shut out the accusing tones. And worst of all, I had learned that there would be many nights of dread because the trial wouldn’t begin until months from now. I would be back in school by then, and from Monday through Friday each week, I would suffer the curious looks, the whispers, the thrill of horror the kids would feel sitting in a desk next to the daughter of a murderer on trial. I had thought that having Jehu’s adoration would change everything in my life. God had granted my request for his love, but now I wished I hadn’t prayed for him. I considered that maybe God only answered a limited number of prayer requests, and I had used up too many of mine asking for trivial things like breasts and madras skirts, and a great tan that wouldn’t peel. I thought again of suicide, of running away, but I couldn’t abandon Mama. She needed me more than ever.
Late on Wednesday afternoon I was setting the table for dinner for three as usual now that Mervin ate with us every night.“Layla Jay, come here a minute,” Mama called from her room. “I want to talk to you before Mervin gets here.” She wanted to tell me that Mr. Albright had phoned and wanted her to come to his office the next morning.“I want you to go with me,” she said. Mama held out her hand without looking at me.When I reached forward and took it, her fingers were as cold as an ice cube. “I’m scared, honey. I need you with me.”
Fear struck like a lance in my chest. “Why?”
“The reason Mr. Albright wants to see me is the district attorney sent him the reports for the discovery.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s any evidence that he’s got to use against me.”
“What’s he got?”
“That’s what we’ll find out tomorrow. All Mr. Albright said was that I had an enemy I didn’t know about.” She pressed her cheeks with her palms. “Somebody wants me to get convicted, and I don’t know who or why.”
That night I left Mama and Mervin cuddled up on the couch and went to my room, saying I was exhausted. I was, but I couldn’t sleep, worrying and wondering what the DA had up his sleeve. Who would want Mama to go to jail? Every man in Zebulon adored her. A lot of women were jealous of her, but none of them would know anything about what had happened that afternoon. On our first visit to his office, Mr. Albright had explained that, according to the legal definition for voluntary manslaughter, Mama had killed Wallace in a heat of passion caused by adequate provocation.When I had asked what that meant, he said,“Heat of passion may be provoked by fear, rage, anger, or terror.Your mother lost self-control and acted on impulse, without reflection, to protect you. When a person witnesses a crime against a close relative, that’s justifiable cause for adequate provocation.”
But now someone was saying that Mama didn’t have justifiable cause. How could anyone know if she did or not? I was never going to figure it out, and I was never going to get to sleep. I remembered Papaw saying that worrying about something never kept him awake.“You can’t do anything about your problem when you’re in bed, so why worry about it until you get up the next morning?” Good advice, but hard to follow, I thought. I turned to God.“Dear Lord, smite Mama’s enemy like you did the Philistines. Forgive Mama her past sins and me mine. Be on our side.”
WHEN WE ARRIVED at Mr. Albright’s office the next morning, the receptionist, Miss Kathleen, who reminded me of Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke, ushered us down the hall to the library, where a large conference table took up most of the room. Mama and I sat side by side in two of the eight burgundy leather chairs placed around the dark polished table. In minutes Mr. Albright came in. He walked over to me first and offered his hand. “Good morning, Layla Jay. How are you doing?”
I watched his eyes for any sign that he knew I’d kissed his son the day before. Nothing there that I could discern. “Fine,” I said.
He pressed Mama’s hand in both of his and then pulled out a chair directly across from her. Mama didn’t look like herself. Despite wearing a bright red-and-white polka-dot dress with fake pearls, she looked awful. Fear had aged her, and I imagined that this was a preview of how she would look when she turned into an old lady with loose papery skin and liver spots. Even her voice sounded years older. “So what’s up?” she asked, crossing her arms over her breasts.“What’s in that discovery report that I should be worried about?”
Mr. Albright looked down at the typed pages and yellow legal pad he had laid on the table in front of him. “I’ll get to that, but first let’s summarize the process and the facts from the beginning.”
I looked up at the twin brass chandeliers that hung over the table. There were no windows in the room and the lights that illuminated the table and chairs didn’t extend to the dark corners. In the shadows an artificial ficus sat in a terra-cotta pot, and across from it a pedestal table held a bronze bust of some ancient Greek or Roman man. Mr. Albright shuffled the papers, and with his pen pointing to the top line, he began his summary. “Now, after your arrest, at the arraignment, you were formally charged with voluntary manslaughter.” He looked over at me. “You remember the definition?” When I nodded, he went on. “You pled not guilty to the charge, so now the burden of proof is on the prosecution. Grady Abadella, the DA who’s got the case, has to present evidence that the state is going to use against you. They must prove that, although you lost self-control, you committed an unlawful act without proper caution or requisite skill, and this constitutes a reckless disregard for human life, amounting to criminal negligence.”
“Can you just say all this in plain English? Sounds like legal gobbledygook to me,” Mama said.
“I thought I was,” Mr. Albright said with a smile. “Okay, let’s go at this from another angle. If asked . . . which he was by me . . . the DA is required to disclose the evidence that he intends to use at the trial.This discovery material includes the police report, medical records for the autopsy and for Layla Jay, and all witness statements.”
“I gave a statement about what happened,” I said. “He wrote it all down.”
“Right. And your mother gave hers, which she didn’t have to do without counsel, but volunteered.” He frowned a little at Mama then. “So the DA looks at all of these things and decides how he’s going to prove his case. Now, there are several ways to prove your culpability. For example, Frieda, if you had come into your bedroom, seen what was happening, and done nothing at the time, but later broken a bottle over Wallace’s head and stuck the glass in his throat, then you’d have had time to control your
actions, to calm down, and we’d have a difficult time proving you acted in the heat of passion after a time elapse.”
“But it didn’t happen that way,” Mama said. “It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes before I slammed the bottle across that bastard’s head.”
“Right, and Layla Jay corroborates your time line, which, unfortunately, included a lot of hours before you reported what happened. And it’s mother’s and daughter’s word only.There were no other witnesses.”
“We wouldn’t commit perjury. Put me on the stand,” I said, thinking that I most definitely would be committing perjury if I told my rape story in court.
“Okay, there aren’t any other witnesses,” Mama said,“except Wallace, but he’s busy pleading with the big judge in heaven to save his soul.”
Mr. Albright ignored Mama’s attempt at humor. I knew she was trying to overcome her nerves with a little levity, but Mr. Albright was more concerned with the facts than our emotions.“Another avenue the DA can take is to prove you acted with excessive force. This is the road we don’t want him taking, the one we’ve got to worry about. We can’t claim diminished capacity as you’re intelligent, weren’t drunk or taking drugs, so we want to prove you didn’t realize that you were using excessive force.”
“And the DA will say that I did? That I meant to kill Wallace and knew what I was doing?”
Mr. Albright hesitated, as though he was about to lower the boom on Mama, and I squeezed my fingers together so tightly my knuckles turned as white as the paper on the table. “Here’s what he’s going to say to the judge and jury.” He smiled across the table at Mama. “The little judge on earth. He’s going to go through the physical evidence first.”
Mr. Albright went on delivering the bad news in a quiet tone without a flicker of emotion on his face, and I marveled at his composure and wondered if one of the courses they taught in law school was on how to mask your feelings in front of clients who were scared shitless. All of the physical evidence was damning. Mama had no self-defense wounds, and neither did I, there was no semen inside me,Wallace had multiple bruises on his legs from where I’d kicked him, and the blow to his head had caused a deep gash two and a quarter inches long, which meant that he couldn’t have fought back when Mama grabbed the piece of glass (with her thumbprint on it) and stuck him in the external jugular vein. At some point Mama said she didn’t see how she was supposed to know that he wasn’t able to fight back.“I’m not a doctor; did he expect me to check his pulse and take his temperature?”