Unless you found yourself behind a farmer too bitter to let you pass his tractor, or a teenager itchy to ram you into a tree, Old Airport Road was the shortest route from Hillston to Dollard Prison, twenty minutes away, just beyond the city limits of the state capital, and in my county. This late on Friday night, I had nothing to dodge but ice. Needles of sleet were crackling on my windshield hard enough for me to hear them, and the wipers made weak swipes that just smeared the slush around. I listened to a tape with Loretta Lynn on one side and Patsy Cline on the other. That's a lot of love gone wrong.
Out in front of the Hillston Club, I’d used my car radio to call downtown. The night desk sergeant, Hiram Davies, is a Baptist deacon starched clean as his undershirts who almost never goes home because he's past retirement age and he's scared we won’t let him back in if he leaves. After he’d stopped apologizing, he’d given me a message. It was from a man I’ve known for a lot of years, and it upset me enough to make me risk my Oldsmobile to Airport Road in a sleet storm. “Maybe I should have just sent a car, Chief, and I hate to disturb you during your social occasion—”
“Dance, Hiram. I got to this place, and I want you to know these folks are dancing! Drinking, probably even cussing and card-playing in the back rooms. It makes a man want to fall to his knees and pray.”
“I hope so, Chief.” (Jokes slide off Davies like chestnuts off a steep tin roof.) “But since Mr. Rosethorn did say to tell you personally, that's why I decided—”
“Tell me what?”
I could hear Hiram shuffling his notes. “A pickup truck, license AX four one five seven nine, passed Dollard Prison gate twice, slowing near the vigil group; male Caucasians, obscenities and verbal threats shouted.”
“Who told Isaac Rosethorn this? Who and when?”
“He's over there at the prison.”
“Isaac?”
“Isn’t he, he's Hall's lawyer now, isn’t he? At least that's—”
“Jesus Christ, what's a man his age doing marching around with a sign in the middle of the night in this weather?!”
Davies pinched off his words, one at a time. “I couldn’t say, sir. That truck is registered to a Willis Tate, Jr., lives in Raleigh, one previous arrest, vandalism.”
I started my motor. “You’re a hot dog, Hiram, no getting around it. Call Raleigh, ask them to go after that yahoo. I’m heading out there.”
He said he’d send a car for me, and I said never mind it, and he said it wasn’t his place to argue, which had never stopped him before and didn’t this time. Finally he got around to sharing a second part to the message from Isaac. “He said to tell you Lieutenant Governor Lewis had just driven up with another man in a limousine, and gone inside the prison. He said you would want—”
“I’ll be goddamned!” I slapped my hand on my thigh so hard I hurt both of them. “Fuck the ducks, they stopped it.”
“I couldn’t say, sir.” There was a faint snort at my profanity. “And Chief Mangum, what would you like me to do? The holding cell's full and I’ve got a drunk-and-disorderly keeping everybody awake. Four joy riders, two breaking-and-entering. And Norm Brown on wife assault again.” Davies loved a full report, though he usually phrased it in terms of questions he didn’t need the answer to, so I listened while I drove. “Attempted burglary, Maplewood Pawnshop, apprehended on the scene. Three purses snatched in River Rise Mall. Purley Newsome caught one of them.”
“He didn’t kill him, did he?” (Officer Purley Newsome was a leftover from the old regime, with a brother on the city council.)
“—And considerable shoplifting. It's busy tonight.”
“Well, it's only four more shopping days to Christmas. Folks get tense.” I turned the heater higher and turned onto Airport Road.
“—And we had a jumper on the roof at Showtime Cinema; Officer White talked him down, and then Officer White had him admitted to U.H. for observation.” (Davies’ refusal to acknowledge, by name or pronoun, that we had women—like Nancy White—on the force, drove him into a lot of syntactical byroads. He was like an old monk, stunned to find nuns sleeping in his monastery.) “Officer reports his condition satisfactory.”
“Tell Nancy she's a good lady. Aww, humankind, Hiram. Makes you wonder where God went and forgot to turn on His answering machine. Who's the loud drunk?”
Davies squeezed his voice so tight it turned falsetto. “The Lord answers all who call on Him. The drunk's Billy Gilchrist.”
“Lock him in the interrogation room, he can sleep on the table.”
“I already did.”
Sergeant Davies signed off in a huff. I put on Patsy Cline. I still hate to think of that woman's plane crashing. “Why can’t I forget the past, and love somebody new…” Her voice was so sweet with sadness, I slid down into a memory of Lee Haver as if other heart-breaks—as if my wife, as if Briggs—hadn’t worn the first loss away years and years ago.
Twenty minutes later, the black brick turrets of the old penitentiary rose up at me, caught by big searchlights. The place sat there in miles of flat meadow and rows of broken tobacco stalks, like a backwater castle built by some paranoid, third-rate baron that the king never came to visit. In summer, you could watch convicts slouch through the yellow grass swinging their thick wooden scythes. Families picnicking in the public park across the highway would point at them, maybe hoping they’d be lucky enough to see one of the blue-shirted reapers slice a guard in half, then race off without much hope toward wherever he figured freedom was. Or maybe the picnickers pointed to show their children what could happen to them if they didn’t stop talking back. In summer, the convicts played baseball in the meadow and grew tomatoes against the fence. In winter, unless herded off to fill some highway potholes, they stayed indoors like everybody else in the South. The sixty-three men on death row never went outside at all.
Now the prison looked wide-awake, so many lights on, you could tell that the coils of barbed wire on top of the turrets were shiny with ice. Out front, I saw some huddled cars and a dozen or so figures, most in plastic ponchos, crowded together under the house ledge. Inside his steamy cubicle a guard was eating doughnuts and reading a magazine. Four more people hunched beneath umbrellas around a forty-gallon drum where burning sticks hissed at the sleet. Nothing was going on and nobody looked injured, just miserable. Obviously the pickup truck hadn’t come back. There was a stretch limo, a black Lincoln, parked near the gate.
As I slowed, a Mustang behind me passed in a hurry, then cut left into the prison drive, skidding sideways next to the high iron gates. I pulled in fast, and jumped out the same time the driver did. We had both run, spraying slush, halfway across the wide lot toward the vigil group before I recognized Bubba Percy, reporter for the Hillston Star—star reporter according to him—a handsome good-ole-boy gone to pudge in his thirties, with a nose for news like a jackal's after maggoty meat. Clamping me on the shoulder, he yelled, “Mangum! That pickup come back? I miss anything?”
I snapped open the umbrella I keep in my raincoat pocket. “I bet you heard that on the scanner, didn’t you, Bubba? Breaks my heart you got nothing else to do on Friday nights. And lashes pretty as a girl's, except if this ice hardens on them, it's gonna freeze your weasel eyes shut.” I kept walking toward the foursome at the fire watching us.
“Oh shut up, Mangum.” He ran, zigzagging puddles. “You know a few years back, there was a W.Y. Tate arrested in Raleigh for tossing a stink bomb in that synagogue window on Yancy Street? You know that? Do you?” His hair snagged on one of my umbrella spokes, and I hauled him under it with me.
“Bubba, you just hang on, one of these days The New York Times is bound to call.”
I didn’t recognize anybody in the crowd scrunched under the gate ledge—most were black, some were female, all were bedraggled as cats. Slush had blanked out half the letters on the big signs propped up beside them: FREE GEORGE HALL. STOP THE KILLING. JUSTICE FOR ALL. I did know the four people under umbrellas around the fire drum. The tallest, slender and
long-muscled, wearing an old army jacket that had probably belonged to George, was Cooper Hall, the condemned man's younger brother who’d just started college when George went to prison and now worked for a civil rights organization that ran a legal-aid society, engineered legislative lobbies, and published a journal called With Liberty and Justice which Coop pretty much ran. He was better-looking than George, with a fine-boned arrogant face.
The woman in a yellow slicker beside him was his fiancée, Jordan West, a caseworker at the Department of Human Services; time to time I’d see her in the municipal building when she’d come to testify about a welfare violation or child custody trouble. In her early twenties, she had the kind of remarkable good looks that will turn your head on the sidewalk, women and children's too. Bubba Percy put it differently, stopping to whisper, “Shit, now that's fucking brown sugar! That's the best excuse for miscegenation I ever saw. Hey! Cut it out!” I gave his wrist another sharp twist before I dropped it. “That was a compliment, Mangum!”
“Yeah. Here's another one. Your mama must be the first woman in history to give birth after getting fucked up the ass by a hyena.”
He was unfazed by the vilest insult I could come up with.
“Something bugging you? Something happen out here tonight?
Come on, what's the story!” “Jesus!” I kept walking.
The thin white man by the fire was Brookside's assistant campaign manager, Jack Molina, a communications professor at Haver University and a founding editor of With Liberty and Justice. The considerably older and broader white man next to him, smoking in the rain, his nubbly Russian hat on sideways, his dirty camel-hair overcoat gaping at the buttons, was the one who had sent me the message: Isaac Rosethorn—for just a month now, George Hall's lawyer; for a whole lot of years, a friend of mine. He was maybe Hillston's only native-born Jew, probably its only native-born legal genius, and undoubtedly one of its most perverse citizens. He said, “Thirty-five minutes?”
I said, “Road's icy. Hi, Isaac. Evening, folks, how y’all doing? Coop, Dr. Molina. Jordan, nice to see you.” Jordan made a place for me.
Rosethorn gave up on his wet cigarette and asked, “Could you trace that truck? There was a second one. Both pickups, big Confederate flags flapping out the windows. We only got the plates on the last one.”
I said, “Raleigh's already traced it. A Willis Tate.” “Ahhh? Tate? The synagogue?”
Bubba Percy grabbed me. “Didn’t I tell you!”
“Bubba, damnit, will you stop stomping on my toes? Y’all know Bubba Percy of the Star, clubfooted hound of the free press?” While I talked, Coop Hall and I kept our eyes on each other; if looks could freeze, you could have snapped my arms off like icicles on a drain sprout. Behind us, the dozen young vigilants pressed nervously in a semicircle near him. I nodded at them. “Any word from Warden Carpenter?”
A few of them shook their heads and a young man said, “No. Nothing.”
I said, “I’m sorry.”
Coop Hall stepped around Percy; his face was a lot younger than his eyes. Hatless, he seemed indifferent to the weather; his close-cropped beard and hair glistened with rain. He shook his head at me slowly, scanned his eyes down the ruffled tuxedo shirt. “You don’t belong here.”
Jordan said, “Coop, please.”
He pulled away from her with a twitch of his arm. “What are you supposed to be, Mangum, fuckin’ police protection? We don’t need it. Why don’t you go do something for my brother? Why don’t you go figure out how—”
Rosethorn said, “Cooper!”
I said, “Isaac called me, okay? Listen, I know how you feel—”
Coop said, “Ha.” It wasn’t a laugh.
I nodded at him. “I meant, how you feel about me. Okay? I’m just trying to do my job…about these pickup trucks, didn’t the county sheriff send somebody over here with y’all?”
Isaac dismissed the sheriff with a swipe at the air. “He had two bozos drive by every now and again, but naturally they haven’t been back since before our visitors showed up.”
“Did these guys stop? Anybody see any weapons?”
Jack Molina wanted to take charge, but Coop cut him off, his breath steaming out in the cold. “Okay. They came twice, they didn’t stop, they threw a glass bottle—”
“Did you recognize anybody, anybody from that bunch that tangled with you back at the Trinity Church meeting?”
Molina pushed forward. “They were going too fast. They yelled out stuff like ‘Gas the nigger’—”
“And ‘Fuck the nigger lovers,’” Jordan added, her eyes bright and hard.
Coop winced with impatience. “So what? You think my mind's on filing some more complaints about what a few more chickenshit rednecks spew out of a truck window?!” He pointed at the prison looming over us. “Julian Lewis is in there with the warden right now! And I can’t find out if it's even about my brother or not. So, do you know, Mr. Police Chief?”
“No. I don’t know any more about it than you do.” I looked at Isaac Rosethorn. Hall walked away from us back toward the gate. The other vigilants followed him immediately, and Bubba Percy grabbed Molina, tugging him aside.
Isaac finally budged; he’d just been watching me and Coop. “Here's the bottle they threw. That makes it assault. Ron Rico rum, a pint. Disgusting.” He pulled a bent McDonald's milkshake cup out of his fat coat pocket and handed it to me; it was full of chunks of glass.
“I tell you what's disgusting, Isaac. The thought of you out in this weather drinking a milkshake.” I walked him back to my car and he pulled himself in, lifting his bad right leg with his hand.
Isaac Rosethorn's a fat old bachelor who's never done a thing to deserve still being alive. Living in the South, his family had totally tossed away all the healthy habits of their race. When Isaac wasn’t eating spareribs or fried chicken wings, he was drinking bourbon; when he wasn’t napping on his worn-out couch, he was sucking on unfiltered Chesterfields, holding the smoke down until it puffed out of his wide mouth like steam from a train. I never could decide if his eccentricities were natural, or if he’d put them together out of all the books he must have read to get away from being a poor, fat, brainy Jewish boy in the South, when none of that was popular. But he’d eat lasagna for breakfast and cereal for supper; he’d wear a ratty wool tweed suit in July and sleep with his windows open in February. His career was built on his brilliance and ostentatious peculiarity, not to mention a spectacular head of white wavy hair, a voice dark as molasses, and eyes like a cocker spaniel's—all very effective in the courtroom. When I was younger, I’d tell him, “Get off your fat butt. You could be rich and famous!” He’d say, “Probably,” and go back to identifying weeds or birdcalls, or reading Rumanian poetry, or whatever weird fancy he’d dodged off into at the time.
“Ahhh, God.” A sigh rumbled down Rosethorn like an old elevator as he settled into the seat. “Poor Cooper hates you, still hates you.”
“No kidding. It's not exactly the way to get folks behind you.”
“So who are you, Dale Carnegie? What's this ‘Auto-Reverse’ mean?” he said, then he sneezed on my dashboard.
“Tapes, they play one side, then they play the other. Isaac, you’re too old, not to mention fat, to try dodging shotguns in the slush. Why are you out here?”
“Who said shotguns?” He checked his watch, then started through his soggy pockets, dropping crumpled papers and file cards on the seat, looking for his cigarettes. “Our lieutenant governor's now been in there forty-two minutes. That's his chauffeur over there in the stretch limo.”
“I figured. You know why?”
His round shoulders shrugged inside his overcoat. Then straightening a cigarette, he pointed it at the prison gate. “You know who carved those letters over the gate?” I glanced across at the deep Gothic incisions in the stone ledge: EUSTACHE P. DOLLARD STATE PRISON.
He smiled, “W. O. Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe's father, that's who. Interesting, huh.”
“Yes, interesting
.” Back by the fire, I saw Bubba was still cornering Jack Molina, or vice versa. I said, “Okay, Isaac, besides nobility and architectural tidbits, what are you up to? Yesterday you said you had to rewrite a petition for some District Court judge.”
“Mrs. Hall just drove it to Greensboro.”
“In this weather? She's too old to go to Greensboro in an ice storm. Why couldn’t Coop go himself? What's the matter with him, sending his mother!”
“God almighty, Cuddy, what's the matter with you? The main business here is not you and Cooper. The main business here is George.” He yanked off his hat and jerked his hands through the shaggy white hair. “Anyhow, that priest at St. Stephen's took her. I thought if maybe she drove all that way herself, personally, especially on a night like this. Judge Roscoe's an ignorant dotard, but he's sentimental.” Now he was looking for his box of kitchen matches. “Slim, I’ve got some bad news.”
“The governor already said no. Why didn’t you say so!”
But he shook his head. “No, nothing to do with that. Old Briggs Cadmean died a few hours ago.”
“Cadmean died?” I guess it surprised me, not just because I’d enjoyed tangling with the old bastard about his daughter, but because Cadmean was Hillston. Growing up in the east part of town, his smokestacks and sawtoothed mills were my skyline. The mills were where grown-ups’ paychecks came from, and Cadmean was the man who owned the mills. I wondered how Cadmean's daughter had felt when they called her, high on some western starry mountain, to tell her the news; or maybe all the while she’d been by his bed right here in Hillston, the past forgiven.
Time's Witness Page 5