by Pete Dexter
“During that time Mr. Trout treated me as an employee, without warmth or consideration, and would fly into fits of temper at the least divergence from his instructions. He would not allow me to visit my sisters in Savannah or my friends in Atlanta. He would not allow me to visit with neighbors. So I will take the house in payment for those two years, although given the choice, I would certainly have the two years back.”
“You are forty-five years old now?” He would have thought she was younger, but it was hard to say. With Bonner there was a single stage women passed into when they were no longer young. He could not attach an age to it, but after women had crossed the line, he lost interest in their appearance and could not differentiate the stages beyond it.
“Forty-six,” she said.
“And your husband?”
“Fifty-nine.”
“Have you thought of how you will maintain yourself?”
“I have my savings,” she said, “and I am not incapable of working.” She thought for a minute. “I may return to teaching, I want to do something now to clean myself of this.”
Bonner picked up the pencil and made a few quick notes. She didn’t try to stop him. “There won’t be any problem,” he said, looking at what he had written. “My advice would be to ask for alimony, but if this is what you want, there should be no problem at all.”
“You may want to interview my husband before you say that.”
“There is one law for everyone,” he said.
That remark seemed to brighten her spirits, he could not guess why. “You’ll handle it then?”
“It will be my pleasure,” he said, and smiled at her the way he had smiled to please adults all his life. And once again it cut her own smile in half. He wondered about Hanna Trout and what she saw in him that she did not like.
She stood up, offering him her hand. He took it, noticing the feel of the skin. She was old, but she wasn’t. “How long does something like this take?” she said.
“It depends to a large extent on your husband,” he said. “I’ll file the papers this week, and it could be over in six months.”
“Is that what you expect?”
Bonner was still holding her hand, looking right into her eyes. “I don’t know. It could last a longer time if he wanted it to,” he said. He watched that register and then tried to soften it.
“It shouldn’t be long,” he said. “This is a favorable settlement for him, his lawyer will tell him. If he knows what’s good for him, this will be over in no time at all.”
She said, “I do not think you can count on Mr. Trout’s knowing what is in his own interest.”
AT THE TIME OF this meeting with Hanna Trout, Carl Bonner had been back in Cotton Point two months. She was his first real client.
Bonner had been away eight years. He had left the town when he was sixteen to attend Tufts University in Massachusetts on a scholarship. At eighteen he interrupted his education to enlist in the U.S. Army and spent two years in Korea, operating field artillery and reaching the rank of captain. He was shot in the hand and returned to Tufts University, decorated and honored, and finished his degree in zoology.
It took two more years to complete law school.
But if he was absent in that way eight years, in another way he was never gone at all. He had been one of those children who imprint themselves on an adult society; he was a part of the way people thought about themselves and the place they lived.
Carl Bonner had been the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of the state. He was the youngest person ever known to preach a sermon in Ether County.
From the age of six on, he had played football with murderous intentions, unconcerned for his own safety. In high school he ran three distances at the state track meet. Under the supervision of his father, the Reverend P. P. Bonner of the First Presbyterian Church, he had studied three and four hours every night but Saturday, completing both his elementary and secondary education with the highest marks in his class. He won state contests in mathematics and science. His picture was in the Ether County Plain Talk ten times a year, often with accounts of his study habits.
His father made the Plain Talk too, although it was usually with people he’d just married or a story about vandalism at the church. Religion was removed somehow from the real business of the county, and the boy came to understand that his father was insulted to be left out and drove him for that reason.
And he understood that his one abiding interest—the songbirds he kept in a shelter he built in his backyard—would never be more than a hobby. He was not meant to end up teaching biology.
The boy’s fascination with birds—like his grades and his Scout accomplishments—was common knowledge in town, and some years fifty or sixty mothers, hoping to influence their own children in the same direction, would empty the five-and-dime of its canaries and parakeets at Easter, only to bring them back a month or two later for refunds, feet up in the bottom of the cage.
Carl Bonner lost very few birds.
They were his only childhood friends—the birds and the friends he invented.
CARL BONNER HAD RETURNED to Cotton Point with a wife and opened an office on the second floor of the Jefferson Building, a few hundred yards up the street from Harry Seagraves’s firm.
His wife’s name was Leslie Morgan Bonner, and she was a sincere disappointment to the many townspeople who felt a personal stake in Carl’s life. It had been assumed that he would end up with a Miss Georgia or someone outgoing.
Leslie Bonner was from Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and she kept to herself. While her husband accepted memberships to the Kiwanis Club, the Moose, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce, she eschewed the ladies’ auxiliaries and stayed home. He taught Sunday school at the First Presbyterian Church, she met him in front afterward and attended regular services.
Within a year there would be rumors in town that she could not have children.
Their house sat at the end of Leisurebrook, the first development built in Cotton Point. A small brick house with two bedrooms. He mowed the lawn twice a week, and she spent afternoons under a wide straw hat, working in the flower beds. When people waved or blew a horn, she would sometimes look up from her flowers, but she would not return the wave, and she would not smile.
The birdhouse was in back. It was a circular shape, built mostly of wire, with the northern side enclosed. Canaries and lovebirds and parakeets. The birds were advertised in the American Ornithological Society’s monthly publication, and from time to time a pet store in Atlanta or Macon would order a hundred at a time. More often the orders were for two or three birds.
Carl Bonner kept meticulous records and sent Christmas cards to even the smallest customers.
He was as obsessive in business as he had been in school, and as isolated. And even though he had very little, he watched the community of lawyers on Madison Street, thinking they would try to take it away—this in spite of the fact that his only work was what they sent him.
He made collections, he handled their pleas when they were out of town. He would do their research and accept indigent clients they did not want to handle themselves.
ON THE DAY HANNA Trout hired him, Carl Bonner went home early. There was a Kiwanis Club meeting at seven, things to do at home.
He found the front door of his house locked. Leslie was sitting at the window, reading. She saw him, but she didn’t move. The birds began to chatter in back, knowing he was there. He let himself in, wondering if his neighbors had noticed yet how often he needed a key to get into his own house.
People in Cotton Point did not lock their homes, they went off all day without closing the front door.
She was sitting cross-legged on the couch in shorts and one of his undershirts. It hung by narrow straps from her shoulders, sleeveless, the drop of cloth under her arm showing the crease of skin at the bottom of her breast.
He wondered if she had been in the yard without her brassiere again. He walked down the hall to their bedroom and changed i
nto dungarees and an old shirt. She followed him in, still holding the magazine, the New Yorker. He buttoned the shirt and tucked it carefully into his pants, checking himself in the mirror.
“You look fine,” she said, “the birds will be dazzled.”
He noticed she had not brushed her hair. She lit a cigarette and sat down on the bed with her knees spread wide apart. He saw that she had shaved her legs. The smell of the smoke—a different thing from the smoke itself—filled the room. “Was there any mail,” he said, “besides the magazine?”
“Word from the outside world?” she said. He didn’t answer, and in a moment she said, “Bird things. They’re on the kitchen table.”
He went down the hall into the kitchen. Last night’s dishes were still in the sink. He found the monthly newsletter from the American Ornithological Society and checked to make sure it had included his advertisement. She came in behind him, bringing the smell of her cigarette, a faint odor of soap. She dropped her magazine on the table and took the newsletter out of his hand.
“I have Kiwanis tonight,” he said.
She held his hand against her mouth a moment, then guided it underneath her shirt until he felt the weight of one of her breasts resting on his knuckles. She was always doing something he did not expect. The first night he asked her out, she had come back from the ladies’ room and put her panties into the pocket of his coat.
Until that moment he had thought she was shy because she didn’t talk much.
He did not move now. She stood in front of him, watching his face. Another moment passed, and then she pulled away. “It’s not the same here, is it?” she said.
“Everybody’s different when they go back where they come from.”
“Everybody hates tits in their hometown?”
He saw the windows were open and hushed her.
“I’m quiet,” she said. “You couldn’t hear a damn shotgun over the birds anyway.”
He moved away from her to shut the window. “I wish you’d make a few friends,” he said.
“It isn’t that easy for me,” she said. “Besides, look at you. You don’t trust anyone. All this Kiwanis Club, Junior Boy Scouts of Commerce is a pose.”
He got the window down just before she finished that. “You can’t make everything a choice,” he said. “It isn’t you on one side and how I make a living on the other. That’s not the way things are after you’re married.”
“We’re not married like other people,” she said.
“You do what you have to do first,” he said, “and then what you like. And right now I have to take care of the birds and then go to Kiwanis.”
It was quiet a little while, and then she went back into the living room and opened the magazine.
“I need to see Harry Seagraves tonight and thank him,” he said. He waited, but she did not ask for what. “He sent me a client. Hanna Trout.” He saw she did not recognize the name. “Married to the man that shot that Negro child this summer.”
“Shot a child?” she said.
He nodded. “She’s divorcing him. If you would push yourself out the front door once in a while, you’d know what he did.”
“Why in the world would I want to know that?”
“It’s where you live,” he said. “It isn’t Philadelphia, but we get a killing once in a while. If it’s the noise you miss, there’s some to be had.”
Outside, a squall of bird sounds rose and fell. “It isn’t the noise,” she said.
He mixed seeds and vitamins into a bucket and started out the back door and then was suddenly filled with feelings for her.
He said, “You want to help me feed the birds?”
EARLIER THAT SAME DAY Paris Trout had come to see Harry Seagraves.
In the four and a half months following his conviction on second-degree murder, it was the third time Paris Trout had come to Seagraves’s office. The first time was after Seagraves had prepared the appeal to Superior Court, the second time was the day Buster Devonne was convicted of assault and sentenced to six months, and the third visit—today’s—was to ask why the appeal had been rejected.
None of those meetings lasted fifteen minutes.
The appeal was written to almost a hundred pages but centered on only two points: that the pictures of the dead child should not have been admitted as evidence and that allowing Mary McNutt to show the scars of her wounds was prejudicial and beyond the scope of the complaint against Trout.
Trout never asked to read the appeal or the opinion rejecting it. He sat in Seagraves’s office both times, arms crossed, and listened. And on this morning, when Seagraves finished, he’d said, “What court next?”
Seagraves took a long breath. The papers were lying on top of his desk in an open folder, corners of the pictures showing underneath. He kept them hidden beneath the papers and would have kept them in another folder altogether except he was afraid they would be lost.
“I don’t know,” Seagraves said. “We ought to think about this, if it’s worth your money.”
Trout had not changed expression. “Is the State Supreme Court the next court?” he said.
“You know the courts as well as anybody,” Seagraves said.
“Then that’s where we’re going.”
“We need to reconsider our case,” Seagraves said. “There’s no hurry now, we got time.”
Trout did not seem to hear him. He stood up and walked to the door. “If the court made mistakes—if it wasn’t your mistakes—then you got to write it in a way that it’s clear,” he said. Then he left.
Seagraves pulled the pictures out then.
He was looking at the child again, the reflections of light from the flashbulbs shone on her shoulders and forehead, the places her skin lay against her bones. He knew the pictures by heart, they came back to him sometimes early in the morning—looking at Lucy asleep in her blindfold would in some way remind him of the other darkness that had fallen across Rosie Sayers’s eyes—and sometimes sitting in a courtroom or when he was out to dinner or making a speech.
He spent the day in his office, avoiding calls and appointments, thinking of the child and Paris Trout.
At four o’clock Lucy called, wanting to know if he would be home for supper. He could not place her voice at first, and then, even as it became familiar, there was a long minute when he could not remember how she looked.
“I’ve got Kiwanis,” he said.
“Oh, I had Betty get us some sirloins,” she said.
“They’ll keep a day.”
“Then I don’t know what to have tonight …”
It occurred to him that this same conversation, with variations for chicken or roast beef, had been going on for close to twenty years. And then, as they spoke, he noticed that the low December sun had stretched across the floor and halfway up the bookcase on the far wall, glaring off the titles, and somewhere in that moment the fact of the child’s death was fresh again.
“Harry?” It was Lucy, but even the shape of her was gone now. It was as if she were lost somewhere in the dark parts of the bookcase. “Harry, are you there?”
“I’ve got to go,” he said.
“What am I going to do about supper?”
“I’ve got to go,” he said again, and then he hung up.
When the phone rang again, he didn’t answer.
IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK before he left the office. It was beginning to rain, and the air felt cold. He walked across the street to his car, started the engine, and waited for it to warm up enough to put on the heater. In the dark he began to shake.
He put the car into reverse, backed out into Madison Street, and drove, without thinking of what he was doing, to the corner of Draft and Samuel. The lights were on inside, he saw her once, moving toward the back of the house. He found himself walking toward the door, then he was knocking.
A sudden wind almost took the hat off his head, and he held it in place and waited for her to answer. The porch light went on, the door opened. He did not move.
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br /> “Mr. Seagraves,” she said, not surprised at all.
She stepped out of the doorway and he filled the empty space, dripping rain. “I was on the way to a meeting,” he said, “and I saw your light.”
She did not answer him.
“Did you contact Mr. Bonner?”
“Yes,” she said. “He said he would accept my case.”
Seagraves was still holding on to his hat, unsure if he should remove it or not. “He’s a fine young man,” he said. “I’m sure he can handle it.”
“He seemed confident,” she said.
He smiled in spite of himself. “Young lawyers are always confident. It’s a failure of our law schools.”
“Let me have your coat.”
He let her have his coat and his hat. “Have you eaten?” she said. “I was just fixing myself a bite.”
He shook his head. “I have to sit through a Kiwanis dinner in a little bit, and you cannot face that on a full stomach.”
“A drink?”
And he smiled and rubbed the rain off his cheeks. “I’m surprised you would take a chance.”
She offered him a seat on the couch and fixed him a drink. She made one for herself too. “Well, Mr. Seagraves,” she said, “what is on your mind?”
He sipped at the drink. The room, he noticed, had been painted since his last visit. The windows had been washed, the furniture moved to new spots on the floor.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I happened to think of you on the way somewhere else, then I saw your lights.” She watched him and waited. “I don’t know why I stopped,” he said.
She said, “Perhaps I reminded you of something when I called this morning.”
He took another sip, and with the taste of it still in his mouth he began to tell her. “I am bothered by the case I tried for your husband,” he said. “Aspects of it have transcended the courtroom and have not left me alone since.”
“Which aspects?” she said.
“The girl herself.” It was quiet in the room, and he drank again. “Somehow I’ve obligated myself to her. The meaning of what has happened will not settle one place or another. It moves, again and again, so I never know where to expect her or when she will intrude on my thoughts.”