A Covenant with Death (24 page)

Parmelee stared into my eyes like a hypnotist in a vaudeville.

“Today is Monday,” I said. Under the circumstances it was a memorable epigram, a brilliant jeu de mots. “Court will rule on these motions Wednesday morning at ten o'clock. Bail will be continued. Court is adjourned,” and I rapped feebly. There was a stir in the audience, and as I rose I saw Dietrich's fretful face.

Oliver Parmelee smiled sympathetically.

14

I wrestled with the angel for two full days.

On the one hand I did not believe that the life of any man should hang upon the word of another, or that facts ever spoke for themselves—never accurately, never fully. I wanted twelve good men and true to make this decision, and my dominant reaction to Parmelee was resentment. These questions should simply not have been posed to a nervous and inadequate young man with problems of his own.

But on the other hand lay my rudimentary sense of fitness, duty, rightness, and even a whisper of pride, the truculent pride of a shavetail in a world of gouty generals. “Judges are best in the beginning,” Tacitus wrote; “they deteriorate as time passes,” and that was some comfort. But Edward Coke answered the more important question; he told me that “judges do not answer questions of fact, juries do not answer questions of law,” and evasion became impossible. Either I was a judge or I was not.

Before I entered court Wednesday morning I had decided that I was.

And then Dietrich made me prove it, and I am still grateful to his shade. He got up and he shook his head and he said, “Your Honor, the state would like to express serious doubts of the propriety of submitting so cruel and complex a decision to a Court so tender in experience. It does so with respect, and I hope Your Honor will understand that this is not a reservation as to your quality as a person.”

I suppose he had more to say, but that was enough. “Mr. Dietrich. You presume.” I spoke with the voice of a lion, and I glowered frankly, and all at once I was not two people, one painfully aware of what the other said and did; I was angry and did not care who knew it. “You've reversed the natural order of relevance, Counselor. What you think of me personally has no bearing. When I preside over this court I represent the people of this state as much as the Governor does, as much as the flag does, as much as the Constitution does. From the first day of my appointment I am entitled to the respect and credit you would grant me if I had been on the bench for half a century; not for what I am but for what I represent. If you have legal or moral arguments for my disqualification, you would be remiss not to state them, and I ask that you do so.”

“It isn't that,” he began.

“Then I must tell you that your personal doubts of my age, experience, or competence are, when here expressed, contempt of court.” He reddened, and I was not above a surge of satisfaction. “I warn you not to repeat them, and I will not warn you again. Do you have anything more to say on this?”

“No.” He sat down. Parmelee sat with his head bowed, but he was not neutral; he was demure. I suppressed a smile.

“Now,” I said briskly. “We'll forget about that. I have considered your motions, Mr. Parmelee, and I think they are well-founded. The issue does seem to be more one of law than one of fact, and therefore more properly the business of a judge than of a jury. Your motion for trial by this Court is granted. I remind you that while you may, by statute, reverse yourself later and move for trial by jury, it is most unlikely that this or any court would respond favorably to such a motion, barring flagrant error on my part.”

“I understand that,” he said.

“Your motion for dismissal is denied, and so is your motion for immediate acquittal. I won't require printed briefs, but I would like them typed up. How much time will you need?”

“A week from Friday all right?”

“Mr. Dietrich?”

He nodded.

“The record will show,” I said dryly, “that the District Attorney assented to Friday, July twentieth, as date of submission of briefs.”

“I apologize,” Dietrich said with a wry smile. “Yes, Friday will do.'”

“Court is adjourned,” I announced, and rapped three times, and returned to my chambers, where I buried my head in my hands and briefly contemplated suicide, or at least exile.

John came in to worship. “Wow,” he said.

“Exactly. Do you understand the issue?”

“Duly authorized agent of society proposes to commit legal but immoral murder. Victim resists, commits illegal but moral murder.”

“There is no moral murder,” I said. “And I am a judge and not a preacher. The question is legal, John, much as we might like it to be moral or emotional. Remember that.”

“Custer,” he said.

“What?”

“George Armstrong Custer.”

“Oh, come on. And the Sioux weren't a part of the society that commissioned him. It was a just war, if you like, but not—”

“They were so,” he said. “They'd signed treaties and acknowledged the government's authority and kept their word. That Custer was after gold and he got what he deserved.”

“All right, all right.” I surrendered. Digby on Indian affairs was Calvin in a Montmartre boîte. “But I don't think we'll get very far with it. Will you see if you can find something more relevant?”

“I will,” he said, and marched out immediately. My faithful scout.

It was the loneliest week I can remember. I was hedged about with taboos, and walked in a golden glow of divinity, like a primitive chief with a bagful of enemy eyes or big toes hanging from his belt. The experts deferred; more, they avoided me. I had a quick chat with Geronimo and when I asked, “What do you think?” his glance darted here and there and he mumbled, “How would I know?” Colonel Oates's reticence was almost pathetic, and his humility almost human, but at the last moment he was a prancing stallion again: “Ah, yes. Yes. The most difficult of human decisions. I remember sending men to their death. A dreadful decision,” and you could see that there was nothing he had ever enjoyed more than that power. “Mind you, I had fought well myself, and been wounded. I knew what I was sending them into. Good boys, they were,” and so on and so forth. We parted amicably. My isolation had softened the critical sense; these people were not so bad after all, just people, and I would have enjoyed a drink with Hochstadter. In the street my fellow citizens nodded respectfully, and made way for me. I wandered alone, or conferred with John, or sat on the veranda thinking. I had no faintest notion of an answer. John was not much help because there was little in the books that applied. Which meant that the briefs would be more interested than interesting, more partial than informative. My burst of confidence died quickly, and I was left with a void, infiltrated now by worry, now by frustration, now by dread, now by helplessness or the fear that whatever I did would be wrong. An outsider might have said that I was well prepared, but an outsider would have seen no more of me than my mirror saw: a tall dark stranger with a strong nose that might someday be bulbous and a middling chin that might someday recede and good teeth that might someday be replaced. Inside me were a heart and a brain and various efficient systems, at least one of which had been neglected for too long; and on such frail elements, subject to unexpected malfunction and inevitable decomposition, rested my burden.

I thought of my father often, because I had been linked to all this forty years earlier by what I can only call an accident of love. My father had saved the life of the man who was now governor of our state. Not in a great blaze of heroism, villains dying by the score, but with the patience and persistence of a nurse. “You'd be surprised how seldom a man has to shoot,” he had once told me. “In the first place these pistols”—the old .44s, like Donnelley's—“couldn't hit a wagon full of hay at more than about fifty yards, much less a moving target, and much,
much
less when you're moving yourself. You're hot stuff with tin cans on a fence, but try it sometime at a gallop. You do better than one in ten and I'll make you a deputy on the spot. In the second place a marshal or a sheriff or a ranger generally goes into trouble with his gun in his hand, where it'll do him some good, and if you come up on your man that way it looks like a cannon and he conies along quietly. If he's holed up somewhere, then you shoot and shoot and shoot and he shoots and shoots and pretty soon he gets thirsty and comes out, or he knows he will sooner or later so he does it now. And in the third place there was nothing worse in my time than killing a marshal or a ranger. If you did that you knew they'd come after you for the rest of your life and your only chance was to go down to Mexico and settle there for good. That old story about the one ranger—‘Ain't but one riot, is there?'—was true, but not because he was so powerful or a dead shot or anything like that. It was because he stood for hundreds more, for
years
more, of rangers, and people didn't want to fight that. Of course, some of them did. But most of the shooting was right on the spot, if you happened to come along when a crime was being committed. Then they'd shoot and try to get away, and you'd shoot back and try to stop them.” It was when they were sent out after a man that he had saved the Governor. Fifty miles from men, at the edge of a desert, the one had poisoned himself with bad water and the other had wiped off the vomit, improvised a shelter, medicines, and bedpans, sponged away sweat and urine, poured precious water—taking none himself—cupful by cupful into the gibbering mouth to flush out the agonizing body, and, when the fever broke, tied the half-conscious patient on his horse and led him thirty miles to a river. It is easy enough to say that in those days that was how men behaved, but that was not how men behaved in those days or any days unless they were very good men. That was the cardinal act of my father's life and it was not Davy Crockett or Sam Houston; it was Walt Whitman. And because of it—half in thanks, half in the confidence that virtue was heritable—I was a judge.

Thank you, old man.

Thursday, the nineteenth, I did what my father might have done, thinking of him as I changed to jeans and an old denim shirt and dragged out my boots that I hadn't worn for half a year, blew the dust off them and put them on and stuffed some canned goods and bread and cheese and a pillow into an old potato sack and jammed a blanket in after them. The pillow was from my father, too: he did not believe in unnecessary discomfort. I filled a canteen and snapped it on my belt, and finally turned up an old jackknife. I left a note for my mother and walked down to Santiago's, a mile and a half and none too comfortable in the boots, and picked out a horse. “His name is Rickets,” Santiago said.

“What kind of name is that for a horse?”

“What's the matter with it?”

“Do you know what it means?”

“Don't mean nothing. Just a name. He's strong and gentle.”

He was, a chestnut gelding about eight years old. We followed the river south for seven or eight miles and then hooked west for ten more. It was longer that way but we were near water, and as the crow flew we would have had to cross a bone-dry, sandy, twelve-mile flat. This time of year there would be none of the red and yellow cactus blossoms, and who wanted twelve miles of nothing? Along the river we had grasses and alders, and flushed some scaled quail; killdeer hopped and swooped and woodpeckers fell silent. After we swung west the trees were mostly desert willows, and there were patches of mesquite and cholla, and once we saw a badger. In a couple of hours we reached the first slopes and climbed into a modest range of hills humped around Toussaint's Lake like buffalo around a waterhole. We came down on the lake shore and I made for a small grove of Gambel oaks. I emptied out the saddlebags and scavenged enough wood for a fire while Rickets browsed. Then I watered him and tethered him. Hobbles are all right if you know the horse but not otherwise. A good horse can go miles overnight in hobbles, and I was no tracker. I could have followed a mule deer through a mud flat but not if I was more than ten minutes behind him.

The sun was low but not setting. I stripped and walked out into the lake. Cold. When it was thigh-high I flopped forward and wallowed like a stranded whale. It was shockingly cold but the shock passed quickly, and a pleasurable tingling set in.

I was alone. I was probably ten miles from a human being. The world was water and hills and trees and a dark blue sky, and it was world enough. It was peace. Rickets had grass and I had beans, and it was peace. I amost fell asleep floating, like a man in a snowdrift. I lay on my back and thought that I would have liked to take Rosemary there. Rosemary. But she would have brought a bathing suit. Rafaela, then. Peace. Gli occhi di venere. Et la tête. Et la bouche. Et le cou. Et toutes ces choses-là. Y pues? El galanteo. Y pues? La paz.

It was a lovely thought but I was cold again, and waded ashore peering about like the first amphibian. I rubbed myself warm with the blanket and stretched out on the sunny bank. Peace. Within a mile of me skunks were eating turtle eggs, and foxes were eating silky pocket mice, and coyotes were eating desert squirrels. Not to mention birds eating insects and fishes eating fishes. Peace.

I too had to eat. I dressed and built a fire and opened two cans of pork and beans. When the beans were ready I ate them and the sun was setting. I heaped more wood on the fire and lay back in the cool dusk and thought.

Which means not that I wrote myself an essay, but that for a couple of hours, while the fire snapped and Rickets shuffled lightly in the darkness, ideas and images thronged my mind. Words and pictures and a little music. But I will not subject you to impressionism and palimpsest. I thought about love, and the law, and the world I lived in and the world it was likely to become, and shortly I sat up to give that world my full attention. I thought about privacy and tolerance, and about their deadly cousin, indifference. The early moon rippled silver off the lake and washed the spurs and boulders in ghostly white; before me as I sat Indian fashion burning oak glowed orange and crackled gently; wood smoke perfumed the night; outside my little circle of light it was dark, dark. I thought of my own future, and of the little use this world had for the weak; and I was weak, and realized that night that I preferred weakness to strength. And that not only Bryan Talbot's life but my own depended on the next few days, and I could not flee, because certain questions require answer and my moment had come.