by Pete Dexter
“You don’t need a damn gun to walk up the street Sunday afternoon.”
“How far?”
“As close as you want,” Seagraves said. “The college, officers’ academy, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s private. It won’t help things to be seen walking the streets with a weapon two weeks before they call a jury.…”
Trout looked at his pocket. The mouth of the pistol peeked out of the corner like some pet snake. He took it out, the barrel moving quickly from Seagraves to himself to the door, and then handed it to the boy behind the desk. “Don’t allow nobody to monkey with this,” he said.
The boy took the gun, holding it with two hands, and set it behind the counter. “No sir,” he said.
“Even yourself.”
“No sir.”
Trout stared at the boy a moment longer. “I’ll know if you do,” he said.
“Yessir, I know you would.”
They walked down Main Street, passing Trout’s store, and came to the academy. Seagraves was sick again and went through some bushes to a bench underneath an elm tree. He sat down heavily, Trout stood in front of him.
“Well?” Trout said. “It’s private.”
Seagraves wiped at the sweat on his neck. “I went and talked to your wife today,” he said.
“It’s no one’s concern what’s between her and me.”
“It’s your concern that she comes to your trial,” Seagraves said quietly.
Trout stared down at him, then looked around, as if he were afraid someone were listening. “I pay you for that.” Then he looked at his watch.
“Are you late somewhere? You need to get back to your hotel room?”
“What is it you come by to say?”
“The first thing,” Seagraves said, “you got to talk to your wife, patch up what you can. People know you left the house, but if you could get her to the courtroom, it might help.”
“I mind my own business,” Trout said, “let everybody else mind theirs.”
“It isn’t your business until it’s over,” Seagraves said. “After the trial you got all the privacy you want, one way or the other.”
Trout looked at him. Seagraves could see he was angry, but he held it. “Now,” Seagraves said, “you and Buster Devonne been going over what happened in Indian Heights?”
Trout shrugged. “Ain’t much to go over.”
Trout began to pace.
Seagraves closed his eyes to keep himself from following the movement. “Buster and myself was in it together,” Trout said. “We decided what we said and took a pact to stick to it.”
“A pact?”
Trout nodded. “On the way back to town. That nothing happened in Indian Heights was gone turn two white men against each other.”
Seagraves opened his eyes and stared at him, trying to imagine how it would have looked. He saw Trout stained with the child’s blood, he and Buster Devonne shaking hands on their pact.
“Did Buster shoot the woman, or did you?”
Trout stopped pacing and studied his feet. “He works for me,” he said. “He’ll say what I tell him.” Then, more quietly: “He thinks they’ll invite us in the jury room—my trial and then his—give out party hats to celebrate.”
Seagraves took a deep breath.
“Buster is a popular man in Ether County,” Trout said. “They ain’t going to do nothing to him. It could be their own trouble.”
It was quiet a long minute, and then Seagraves heard his own voice. “If it was you who shot the woman and the girl, and they had a gun of their own, it would explain things better.”
Trout stood dead still.
“If it happened that all the shots came from your weapon …” The words came out of him easier than he thought they would, easier than they should.
Trout still hadn’t moved, but Seagraves began to notice the rise and fall of his chest. “Which one of us you think is paying you?” he said after a moment.
“It was your gun that fired the bullets into the girl,” Seagraves said. “Ward Townes has got the gun and the bullets, that’s the starting point. We all got to agree to it because there it is. But if it happened that the bullets inside the woman were yours too—there is no way to prove that because they’re still inside her—then we’ve got a situation that a jury might see self-defense.”
“I ain’t in this alone,” Trout said a little later.
Seagraves stood up, steadying himself with his hand against the back of the bench. “Either that,” he said, “or you were in it together.” The next time he looked at Trout, he was glad he’d made him leave the gun back at the hotel.
“There isn’t going to be any party in the jury room for either of you,” Seagraves said. “Buster Devonne doesn’t know Cotton Point, he only knows what fits his own way of thinking about it.” He saw Trout didn’t believe that. “It’s a mistake to take a place and say it’s all one way or another, just because that’s the way it’s comfortable,” he said.
THE TRIAL BEGAN SEVENTEEN days later on a Wednesday, at eight o’clock in the morning. Judge John Taylor was a little under five and a half feet tall and weighed 220 pounds, even without his robe, and started early because he was intolerant of late-afternoon heat.
During the summer, in fact, he was sometimes disposed to call a five-minute recess every hour, to retire to his chambers, undress, and cover himself with baby powder. Attorneys who were taken into his chambers for scolding or to argue sensitive issues were accustomed to seeing the judge sitting in his shorts behind his desk, the color of death itself.
He smiled now, at the beginning of the case, and noted the spectators. They had filled every seat and were standing in the back and sitting in the windowsills. “You-all welcome to stay, of course,” he said, “but in the afternoon you ain’t going to want to.”
A few of the ladies looked uncomfortable at the warning.
Seagraves was sitting with Trout. There was a notepad between them on the table, for Trout to write down his thoughts or objections. He was immobile today, staring straight ahead, as he had been the day before during jury selection. He took it as an affront to be judged.
He was dressed in a pale gray suit and a yellow tie. He had been to the barber and shined his shoes.
Hanna Trout, however, was missing from the room. Seagraves had saved a place for her in the seats just behind the defense table, and it was the only empty seat in the room. He took it as a setback and as an omen.
And he was disappointed in some way that was unconnected to the trial.
Buster Devonne, whose own trial was scheduled to follow Trout’s, sat behind the gate, on the aisle of the third row. Seagraves noticed he bore a certain resemblance to some of the members of the jury, a resemblance of attitude and manner which Trout, under any sort of scrutiny, did not share.
As the trial date closed in, Seagraves had spent long afternoons with Trout and Devonne, together and then one at a time. Devonne, who was an imbecile, understood immediately; Trout held some unspoken resistance. Hours went into the preparation of the statement Trout would read at the trial, and more hours into trying to coach him into some sort of ordinary civility. But each time they met, Trout was more remote than the last. It was almost as if he had removed himself from what was coming. On the last afternoon Seagraves gave up and left the instructions at this: “If you need to say something, write it down. Write slowly, so it looks thoughtful.”
Trout had said, “I don’t need to write things down. That’s what I paid you for.”
THE FIRST WITNESS WAS Henry Ray Boxer. He wore a long-sleeve shirt with cuff links at the wrists, Sunday pants, work shoes. His hand on the Bible was as narrow as a woman’s. He slouched in the witness chair, afraid to look left or right, and spoke so softly he could barely be heard.
Seagraves noticed that Ward Townes’s voice was lacking capacity too. It was Townes’s courtroom manner to take a jury out of the reference of a courtroom, to make them comfortable, let them know it was all right to smile like
ordinary people. This morning, though, there was none of that, and the thought came to Seagraves that Ward Townes didn’t want to be here any more than he did.
Townes asked Henry Ray Boxer where he lived, who all lived with him. Henry Ray used his fingers, giving each one a name of a brother or sister. He didn’t know ages.
Townes asked when he had bought the car, how much he paid. Henry Ray went over the arrangement, mentioning the $227 for insurance. He told about the accident at the gas station and bringing the car back to Paris Trout after it happened.
His testimony went on for most of an hour, with Seagraves objecting only once, at the end, when Henry Ray called the truck driver who had run into him a “damn nigger.”
“Your Honor,” Seagraves said, standing up, “we are as understanding as anyone of the great divergence of people this matter has brought together, but out of respect for the ladies I would ask the court to instruct the witness to refrain from gratuitous profanity.”
“Mr. Boxer,” the judge said, “do you understand the meaning of the word ‘profanity’?”
“Yessir.”
“Then I instruct you not to use it.”
“I didn’t said it, he did.”
“Not the word itself,” the judge said, “but the examples thereof.” And Henry Ray Boxer sat still, looking at the judge as if he’d just said there was a twenty-dollar fee to be a witness.
“Thank you,” Seagraves said, and sat down.
Townes smiled, the first time that morning. “That’s all I have for now,” he said, and turned the witness over for cross-examination.
Harry Seagraves walked toward Henry Ray Boxer slowly, scratching his head. He felt the jury watching him. He would have made them wait—he liked to build a feeling—but then he noticed Trout was staring at the witness in a way he did not want the jury to see, as if the boy had just walked in and told him all over again that he wasn’t going to pay.
“Henry Ray Boxer,” he said. The boy did not reply. “That is your name?”
“Yessir.”
“Henry Ray, where was the last car you bought before the one from Mr. Trout?”
“Didn’t have none before this.”
“Didn’t you buy a car from Mr. William Sutter in Eatonton?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t bought no car from Mr. Sutter.”
“Weren’t you driving Mr. Sutter’s car the time you ran into Mr. Louie Veal?”
“No sir.”
“That was a different car?”
Henry Ray moved in his chair. “No sir, that was a truck.”
“You weren’t driving the car in question.…”
“What question is that?”
There was some laughter in back, Seagraves smiled and shook his head. “The car you agreed to purchase from Mr. Trout.”
“No sir, a lumber truck hit that.”
Ward Townes stood up then, looking tired, and objected to everything about Mr. Louie Veal, saying it was included only to prejudice the jury. Judge Taylor sustained.
Seagraves walked back to his table and picked up his notes. “Now, how much did you tell Mr. Townes there that you paid?”
“Eight hundred.”
“Could it have been more?”
“Could have, I don’t know.”
“Don’t you know what you paid for it?”
“I didn’t pay for it,” he said. “I was gone pay on it.”
“But it was eighty-five dollars, even money, every month?”
“I don’t know even money or not.”
Seagraves tossed the papers back across his desk. “It looks to me, if you wanted to tell the truth about this thing, that you could tell us. You ought to remember how much you paid.”
“Eight hundred,” the boy said. “Assurance ran it up to thousand twenty-seven.”
Seagraves sighed and then looked at the jury. Half of them came from Homewood and worked at the asylum. They had sewage and city drinking water because of him. “You bought the car from Mr. Trout,” he said, without looking at the witness, “tore it up, and then refused to pay on it because Mr. Trout wouldn’t fix it?”
“Yessir.”
“Was it running when you brought it back?”
“Yessir, it was running, but it was tore up so.”
“And you won’t drive a car like that—”
“No sir, I don’t drive no ragged car.”
He turned away and asked the next question. “Have you got a license, Henry Ray?”
“Yessir.”
“Is that the same license Chief Norland looked at the day when he arrested you for running over Mr. Veal?”
“That is the same one.”
Townes stood up, making the same objection. Judge Taylor sustained.
Seagraves put his hands deep in his pants pockets and bent as if he were looking for something on the floor. “Had you done business with Mr. Trout before you bought this car?”
Henry Ray nodded.
Seagraves looked directly into the jury again. “These folks can’t hear you unless you talk, Henry Ray. They come here to try and find out what really happened out to your house, and they need to hear all your answers, not just the ones you feel like giving.”
Judge Taylor said, “The witness will answer the question.”
“What question was it?” Henry Ray said.
Seagraves turned back slowly. “The question was, had you ever done business with Mr. Trout before you bought this car?”
“I borrowed money away from him.”
“Good. Now can you tell us how much you owed?”
The boy shrugged. “ ’Bout twenty-five, I expect.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a hundred?”
“No, sir, it wasn’t no hundred dollars.”
“But you owed him something.”
“Yessir, I paid him along on that too.”
Seagraves went back to the table and consulted his notes again. “Now, that pistol your brother Tommy has out there, whose pistol is it?”
“Mr. Lyle’s.”
“Your stepfather.”
“Yessir.”
“So in other words, on the day of the shooting Tommy had Lyle McNutt’s pistol out there?”
“I don’t know, sir. I wasn’t home.”
“Did Tommy have your pistol out there that day too?”
“No sir, I don’t have one.”
Seagraves froze, as if something had reached out and touched him in the night. Then, moving only his head, he looked up at the witness. “What did you do with it?”
“I never had it to do nothing with it.”
“Am I mistaken,” he said, “or weren’t you convicted for carrying a pistol in 1954, right in this courthouse?”
“That was Mr. Lyle’s pistol, I was bringing it from Eatonton.”
“But you were convicted here.”
“Yessir.”
“You were found guilty.”
“I don’t know, sir, if I was found or not.”
“Didn’t they give you two months’ sentence?”
“No sir, not that they said.”
“Didn’t they fine you twenty-five dollars? You remember that, don’t you?”
Ward Townes finally stood up again, Seagraves was surprised he’d allowed it to go as far as he had. “Your Honor,” he said, “the attorney for Mr. Trout has exceeded the limits of fairness. This line of questioning has been employed only for prejudice, and you and I and everyone in this courtroom knows there is enough of that here already.”
“Overruled,” the judge said.
But as Townes spoke, Seagraves watched the jury. There were three of them he could read clearly, a couple of others that he was beginning to. He did not like what he saw.
“I’m through with this witness,” he said.
TOWNES CALLED THOMAS BOXER. He was smaller than his brother, and more delicate-looking. In some ways, Seagraves thought, he resembled the pictures of Rosie Sayers. He settled into the witness chair after he was sworn and then ju
mped at the sound of his name.
“Thomas,” Townes said, “you were at the house the day Mr. Trout and Mr. Devonne came to see your brother?”
Thomas Boxer told the story, what he had seen and heard. It took him a long time, but it came out true. Trout and Devonne on the porch with their guns, the things that were said and done.
Trout following Rosie into the house, Mary McNutt following him, and then Buster Devonne coming in behind. Thomas Boxer looked at his hands when he said he had run into the other side of the house.
“Why did you go in there, Thomas?” Townes asked.
“Went in there to get out the way.”
“Do you know what else happened?”
“Shooting,” he said. “Shooting started before I got to the door.”
“How many shots?”
He shook his head. “You couldn’t say. Seem like firecrackers. They was almost all together, all of it didn’t take but four or five seconds.”
“What happened after the shooting stopped?”
“After the shooting I went out to the back, there was Momma and Rosie both coming out the house. Momma holding herself here on her breast, Rosie holding her ’tomach.”
“Did you see Mr. Trout or Mr. Buster back there?”
“No sir, they gone by then.”
“Was there a pistol in the house at the time all this happened?”
“Yessir, on my side. Right under my mattress.”
“Did you ever get that pistol?”
“No sir, I never bothered it till the next morning when they come out after it. I give it to a police.”
“Did you fight Mr. Trout any? Did you put your hand on him?”
“No sir.”
“Did he put his hand on you?”
“Yessir, but he didn’t have his hand on me but a little while. He didn’t touch nothing long, but when he left his hands off us, we was changed for good.”
Townes stood quietly a moment, giving that time to sink in. Then he looked at Trout and said, “Your witness.”
∗
SEAGRAVES STOOD UP, UNDECIDED as to how that last remark had affected the jury. He looked at them again, trying to remember which ones were indebted to him for their city water, but in some way that would not quite come clear, they were not as familiar as they had been an hour before. He smiled, glancing down at the pad in front of Trout. He was drawing cartoons—ducks shooting guns at each other.