The End of Always: A Novel

by Randi Davenport

  It took me about twenty minutes to explain everything. I did not look at August. Jared asked me questions about the day August and I got married and what the marriage had been like and had there been any reason before I married to suspect that August Bethke would attack me? Had he struck me during courtship? Had he spoken to me indecently? Had he been known to brawl? He read Bertha’s affidavit aloud and asked if the description she provided regarding the severity of my injuries was true. He asked the judge if he could enter that document into evidence. The judge said, “Duly noted.”

  I had a hard time speaking. The questions were familiar but my answers felt confused. I thought I could not form any words at all, and then it seemed that my own language had run away from me. And when that happened, I felt that I had forgotten the things that were true about my life or else could not lay claim to them. But I had a job to do and I meant to do it. And Jared helped. He nodded after each of my answers. I started to look for that nod. If it did not come, I tried to say more. If it came sooner than I expected, I stopped.

  Before I left the stand, Jared Thompson asked me about the other times that August Bethke had struck me. I recounted them slowly. He asked me to describe the demeaning way that August Bethke had spoken to me. Tears came to my eyes. Jared repeated the question. In the long silence that followed I could hear the mixed sounds of the street outside, where men went about their days unfettered. Jared walked up to the witness chair.

  “Mrs. Bethke,” he said.

  How could I say these things out loud in a place where I was not wanted? In a world where no one believed me? It seemed the only way that August could defend himself was to attack me, to say things that were not true, to disregard the facts until all that was left was a tale he thought worth telling. In his story, I was the guilty one.

  The courtroom was still. I took a deep breath. And then I said that August had called me a bitch. And then I said that he had called me a whore. And then Jared said, “Is that all?” And I looked up at him and my face burned but I found a way to say out loud that August had called me a cunt. The word rolled out over the stillness of the courtroom and Jared did not ask anything else. He waited and I waited and the word hung in the air and even the men in the seats before me kept quiet. And then I realized that underneath everything else he said, cunt was August’s word for me.

  After that Jared asked me about the money I had been given by August Bethke to cover my keep and provide for my creature comforts. He asked me to describe the exact amount of food that I’d had available to eat. When I said that I did not have any food at all, he asked me how I had managed not to starve. And so I explained that I had been forced to go home to my sister and beg her for whatever money she could spare.

  When I was done, I glanced at August. He sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands as if he were reading a newspaper spread out on the table before him. His attorney tapped him on the elbow, and August dropped his hands into his lap and sat up. He crossed one leg over the other and then crossed his leg back.

  When August’s attorney rose and came to me, he smiled. He was shaped like a violin, with a pinched waist and pants that sagged at the crotch and a high voice that would have been silly had he not been so serious. He said his name was Walter Meyer and he was sorry for the court proceedings we were all forced to undergo that day. No one wanted to cause me further harm. That in point of fact he more than anyone in that room wanted to protect me from further harm. He thought that I had probably been injured enough.

  He spoke like a schoolmarm reading the rules to a test, but he was lying. Of course he wanted to cause me harm. August wanted to cause me harm so his attorney would naturally want the same thing.

  He told me that his sole purpose in this was to get to the truth of things and he felt certain that he would. But he wanted to be sure that I understood the depth of the compassion he felt for me. He had seen me himself, walking to and from the woods. He personally knew men who had come to me in the forest. He knew what a fine business I had kept out there, out under the trees, out where I thought no one would ever find out.

  Jared Thompson stood up and objected and the judge said, “Sustained.” Walter Meyer just smiled again. He said that he intended no disrespect, of course, and he was happy to meet me at last, since I was so notorious and he was well acquainted with my exploits, since others had told him all about me. And Jared Thompson stood up again and Walter Meyer just waved at him as if he were waving at a float in a parade or a friend or a swarm of gnats. “All right,” he said. “Withdrawn.”

  He asked me where I had been employed and I told him. He asked me if I had been a regular worker. I said yes. He looked at me. “Always at work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Always? Never missed a day?”

  “I missed one day,” I said. The sound of the wind in the trees rushed through my head.

  “Just one day?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were always on time to work?”

  I studied the railing that ran in front of the witness stand. “No,” I said.

  “No? But you were a regular worker?”

  “Sometimes I was late.” A flush rose to my hairline. I remembered the heat of the laundry and my wet skirt dragging across the floor. August on the river at night.

  “Sometimes you were late. How many times?”

  “I do not know.” I shifted in my seat. I tried to count. I tried to remember. But somehow my mind had become like a land stripped of signposts and roads.

  “You don’t know or you won’t say?”

  “I do not know.” So hard to answer when one is terrified. A simple statement that only begins to tell the tale: not even that will come.

  “Was it five times?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Ten times?”

  Jared Thompson stood up. “Your Honor,” he said. “This has been asked and answered.”

  The judge waved him off. “One or two more questions in this vein will be fine,” he said. He glanced down at me and then gazed off above the crowd of men before him.

  “Was it more than ten times?” said Walter Meyer.

  “No,” I said.

  “So you do know.”

  I looked at him. Behind him the men in the courtroom like a tableau. Unmoving faces as if they even failed to breathe. August at his table with his gaze on me like a man with an intention known only to him. He leaned forward.

  “You didn’t worry about your employer on such occasions?” said Walter Meyer. He widened his eyes as if I had just said something very shocking.

  “I did what I was supposed to do,” I said. I tried to keep the hurt out of my voice and I told myself not to cry.

  “So you did worry about your employer. But still you came late.” He looked around the courtroom with an aggrieved expression on his face. “That doesn’t seem right to me. Just not right at all.” He walked up to me. “Who was your employer?”

  “William Oliver,” I said.

  “And would Mr. William Oliver agree with your assessment of the way things stood between you?”

  “I do not know,” I said softly. I thought of all the ways that William Oliver and I had not agreed, and of the one thing on which we had not agreed most of all. I tried to picture him standing before us, admitting the thing he had asked of me, the thing I would not do, the thing he had done. I could not see how this would ever happen.

  “What was that?” Walter Meyer had been walking up and down in front of the men in the benches with his hands crossed behind his back, playing to them as if they were the jury. Now he cupped his palm around his ear and leaned toward me.

  “I do not know,” I repeated.

  Jared Thompson stood up. “Your Honor,” he said. “Relevance.”

  Walter Meyer turned to the judge. “I’m merely trying to establish whether or not we have before us a credible witness. Whether or not her word can be trusted. She comes to this court and asks for relief and claims her husband,
whom I know to be a kind and loving man, tried to kill her. That’s a big statement. A very big statement. This is not a common occurrence, as you well understand. Men don’t kill women. The very idea is preposterous. And it’s even more preposterous to imagine that this man, who has a gentle spirit, would kill this woman, who does not. So we need to find out how she ticks.” He looked earnest and sincere. “Right now, it’s her word against his. We don’t really know what went on behind closed doors. So I need to come at this thing any way I can. I need to do this part of my job.”

  “Your Honor,” said Jared, but the judge held up his hand. “Go on,” he said to August’s lawyer.

  “Mr. William Oliver,” said Walter Meyer. “You worked for him for how long?”

  “Five months.”

  “Five months.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was the nature of your relationship with Mr. William Oliver?”

  I thought of his hands in my hair as he bucked against me in the alley, the smell of his breath. The bulk of his body crushed on mine. “I worked for him,” I said quietly.

  “And that’s all?”

  “Yes.” My very breathing nearly ceased with the thought of him.

  “Nothing else you want to say about that?”

  “No.” I looked at my hands. The anger I felt at just that moment was provoked even more by impotence than by Walter Meyer. I could not bear the things he said about me. I could not bear that he said them in this courtroom. But there was nothing I could do about it. When we were preparing, Jared Thompson had told me the other side would get mean. But he had not told me how they would get mean or what they would say or how they would come after me. Perhaps he knew all of these things and therefore assumed that I knew them, too. But I did not and now I had to learn in front of a room full of men.

  “In those five months you never left your place of work to seek him out in his private rooms?”

  “No.” I clenched my hands. Walter Meyer glanced quickly at my lap. Jared Thompson had told me, above all, to remain calm. To answer the questions with as few words as possible, and not to give my emotions away. I forced myself to let my fingers go limp, as if I could take back the clenching and therefore take back my rage.

  Walter Meyer walked toward me. “No?” he said. “You didn’t go upstairs and stay there for many hours on end?”

  “I went where he told me to go,” I said. I looked at the floor, at the way two boards in the floor held themselves together with black nails, at the nails themselves.

  “He told you to go upstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you did go with him to his private rooms.”

  “To his office,” I said, and hung my head. Shame was a nail that could have staked me to the very floor, and yet Walter Meyer did not seem to mind.

  “His private office?”

  “I guess,” I said slowly.

  “And what did you do there?”

  “He talked to me.”

  August frowned.

  “About what?” said Walter Meyer.

  “I do not know.” I wanted to bolt from the chair, bolt from that room, bolt from the stares of the men who no longer read their newspapers or talked quietly to their friends but merely gaped at me as if I were some kind of marionette on a string, a carnival act, a freak in the middle of a dance only she could do.

  “Mrs. Bethke. You have to try to remember.”

  “But I do not,” I said. I straightened in my chair.

  “You don’t.”

  “No.”

  Walter Meyer sighed deeply. He acted as if he was very much put out by my incompetence. He gave me a hard look and then he turned back to the courtroom and opened his hands before him, as if pleading for understanding.

  “Mrs. Bethke,” he said, walking back to me. “What if I told you that I have witnesses who will testify that you went to William’s Oliver’s office and stayed there for very long periods of time and enjoyed a special relationship with him? That would all be true, would it not?”

  I shook my head. I glanced at August, who sat back hard in his chair as if surprised. He stared at me.

  Mr. Meyer leaned toward me. “What did he say to you, Mrs. Bethke?” he said in a slippery voice. “What was it that you were given to understand?”

  Someone in the back of the room coughed and I could have sworn the smell of his breath came to me.

  “Mrs. Bethke,” Walter Meyer repeated.

  “You will answer the question,” the judge said. He sounded bored.

  “He wanted me to have a relationship with him,” I said. I looked at August.

  “A relationship.”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. And did you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. Jared Thompson left his seat and came up to me where I sat. He handed me his handkerchief and nodded encouragingly.

  “What kind of relationship are we talking about?” Walter Meyer said. “Did he have work he needed you to do?”

  “No.” Please stop, I thought.

  “Was it a romantic relationship?”

  “That was what he wanted,” I said, Jared’s handkerchief balled wetly in my hand. I wiped my eyes again.

  “He wanted a romantic relationship and you said no and that was the end of it?”

  “Yes.”

  August coughed and coughed, as if he wanted to get my attention. When I glanced at him, he picked up the glass of water that had stood untouched before him. He raised it in my direction.

  Walter Meyer nodded briskly. “Very good,” he said. “Your Honor, I have an affidavit here signed by Mr. William Oliver, who has sworn that he conducted a consensual romantic relationship with the plaintiff, for which he supplied her sums of money. He is sorry to have to say these things in public but that is the way it is. I also have a sworn statement from Mrs. Inge Braun, a coworker in the laundry with Mrs. Bethke, describing Mrs. Bethke’s business in the woods, her constant tardiness at work, and her outright absences on many occasions. I would like to enter both of these documents into evidence.”

  I felt the turning of the world, all the stars spinning away, the ground gone beneath me, the great tides pulling me, and the room but a space for the pulsing of blood in my head.

  “Your Honor,” said Jared Thompson. “If he has witnesses, let him bring them to court so they can testify. Let these individuals be available for cross-examination.”

  The judge leaned back in his chair. He was a tall man with yellowing white hair. Behind him, the flag of the land, run up on its pole, an eagle clutching the golden ball that rested at the top, wings outspread and beak parted and askew, just like the eagle I had seen in the justice of the peace’s chambers the day that August and I got married.

  He tipped forward. “Mr. Meyer,” he said. “Are these witnesses available to come to court?”

  “Mr. William Oliver is a prominent local businessman. Mrs. Braun is his employee. They prepared sworn affidavits because they prefer not to come to court themselves. They prefer not to be associated with such a sordid set of events as we have before us. They are good and decent people with fine names. They do not wish to be dragged into this.”

  “Once you sign an affidavit, you cannot claim that your sensibilities are too fine to get involved,” the judge said. “Do they know that?”

  “I believe they do,” said Walter Meyer. “I believe that fact is well known to them.”

  “Can you produce them?” the judge said. His chair squeaked as it turned, a sound like a shrieking wheel on a rail, and the judge glanced down and then looked up again. “Can you get them into court today?”

  Jared Thompson gave me a tortured look, as if he had known all along that this was what they would do to me and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  I looked at Walter Meyer. He stood before the bench. He had composed his face so it would seem neutral and frank. “I do not believe the
y will come,” he said.

  “The court can compel them,” the judge said. “You know that.”

  “I do not believe they will come.”

  The men in the court shifted in their seats. A door banged as one of them left the courtroom. For a moment I could hear voices in the hallway.

  “Let me get this straight,” the judge said. “I just want to be sure I’m hearing all of this correctly. You want me to enter into evidence affidavits from witnesses you claim are central to your case but who will not come to court and who will not respond to a subpoena? Who would stand in contempt? Is this what you are telling me?”

  “Your Honor,” Walter Meyer said. “This is a painful case. Surely you can understand my impulse to protect these fine citizens from someone like Mrs. Bethke. I promised them that they could swear to the facts as they knew them but would not have to come to court. I gave them my word. My word is my bond.”

  “Your word is your bond,” said the judge. He eyed the attorney.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not the right currency here,” the judge said. He cleared his throat. “I can tell you that I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Thompson. These are grave charges and cannot be entered into the record without thorough examination. So I am going to deny your request unless and until you produce these witnesses for cross-examination. If you have anything else, I’d like to hear it. If not, I’m going to disregard this testimony and move on.”

  “Your Honor.”

  “That’s my final word on the subject,” said the judge. “What’s next?”

  Walter Meyer stared out across the courtroom, as if he wanted to give the impression that he was a reasonable man, a man who must be given a minute or two to think things over, who must be allowed to organize his thoughts, who only wanted to follow the correct course of action. But when he turned back to me, he came at me with a broad smile. “Mrs. Bethke,” he said. “You said that your husband tried to kill you. I’d like you to explain this to the court. What was his reason?”