Clock Without Hands (24 page)

The Judge's concern had not yet changed to worry until, after no more than a year of practice, Johnny had chosen to take the case of Jones
versus
the People. To what avail had Johnny graduated
magna cum laude
at the University, if he did not have a grain of common sense? To what avail had been Johnny's legal knowledge and education when he stepped on the bunions, corns, and calluses of every one of that jury of twelve good men and true?

Refraining from discussing the case with his son, he had cautioned him about a lawyer's sensitivity to jurors. He said, "Talk on their own level and for God's sake don't try to lift them above it." But would Johnny do that? He argued as if those Georgia crackers, millhands, and tenant farmers were trained jurors of the Supreme Court itself. Such talent. But not a grain of common sense.

It was nine-thirty when Jester came into the Judge's room. He was eating a double-decker sandwich which, after those hours of remembered anxiety and grief, the old man eyed hungrily.

"I counted on you for supper."

"I took in a show and made myself a sandwich when I got home."

The Judge put on his spectacles and peered at the thick sandwich. "What's in it?"

"Peanut butter, tomatoes, and bacon and onions."

Jester took a gaping bite of the sandwich and a chunk of onion fell to the carpet. To quell his appetite, the Judge shifted his eager gaze from the delicious sandwich to the onion which was stuck to the carpet with mayonnaise. His appetite still remained, and so he said: "Peanut butter is loaded with calories." Opening the liquor chest he poured some whiskey. "Just eighty calories an ounce. And more what I wanted anyhow."

"Where is my father's picture?"

"In the drawer over there."

Jester, who knew well his grandfather's habit of hiding the photograph when he was upset, asked, "What's the matter?"

"Mad. Sad. Cheated. When I think of my son I often feel so."

A certain stillness fell on Jester's heart, as it always did when his father was mentioned. The Christmas chimes were silvery in the frosty air. He stopped eating and silently placed the scallop-bitten sandwich on the end table beside the bed. "You never talk about my father to me," he said.

"We were more like brothers than father and son. Blood twin brothers."

"I doubt it. Only introverts commit suicide. And you're no introvert."

"My son was not an introvert I'll have you know, sir," the Judge said with a voice that was shrill with rage. "Same sense of fun, same mental caliber. Your father would have been a genius if he'd lived, and that's not a word I bandy about lightly." (This was truer than anyone could have imagined, as the Judge used the word only when it applied to Fox Clane and William Shakespeare.) "Like blood twin brothers we were until he got involved with the Jones case."

"Is that the case where you always said my father was trying to break an axiom?"

"Laws, blood customs, axioms indeed!" Glaring at the bitten sandwich, he seized and ate it hungrily; but because his emptiness was not a hunger of the belly he remained uncomforted.

Since the Judge seldom talked about his son to Jester or satisfied his grandson's natural curiosity, Jester was used to asking angled questions, and so he asked: "What was that case about?"

The Judge responded at so wide an angle that the answer and question did not directly meet. "Johnny's adolescence was passed when communism was blaring wide and handsome in the grandstand. High muckety-mucks squatting in the very White House itself; the time of TVA, FHA, and FDR, all those muckety-muck letters. And one thing leading to another, a Negress singing at the Lincoln Memorial and my son...!" The Judge's voice soared with rage, "and my son defending a Nigra in a murder case. Johnny tried to..." Hysteria overcame the old man, the hysteria of the fantastic incongruity which strikes upon the heart's chagrin. He could not finish for the painful cackles and flying spittle.

"Don't," Jester said.

The rasping cackles and spittle continued while Jester watched soberly, his face white. "I'm not," the Judge managed to articulate until hysteria mounted again, "not laughing."

Jester sat upright in the chair, and his face was white. Alarmed, he began to wonder if his grandfather was having an apoplectic fit. Jester knew that apoplectic fits were queer and sudden. He wondered if people turned red as fire and laughed like that in an apoplectic fit. He knew, also, that people died from apoplectic fits. Was his grandfather, red as fire and choking, laughing himself to death? Jester tried to raise the old man so he could slap him on the back, but the weight was too heavy for him, and at last the laughter weakened and finally stopped.

Bewildered, Jester considered his grandfather. He knew that schizophrenia was a split personality. Was he acting crisscrossed in his old age, laughing fit to kill when he ought to be crying? He knew well that his grandfather loved his own son. A whole section of the attic was kept for his dead father: ten knives and an Indian dagger, a clown costume, the Rover Boy series, Tom Swift series, and stacks of child's books, a cow skull, roller skates, fishing tackle, football suits, catchers' mitts, trunks and trunks of fine things and junk. But Jester had learned that he must not play with the things in the trunks, fine things or junk, for once when he tacked the cow's skull to the wall of his own bedroom, his grandfather had been furious and threatened to switch him with the peach switch. His grandfather had loved his own and only son, so why did he laugh with hysterics?

The Judge, seeing the question in Jester's eyes, said quietly: "Hysterics is not laughter, Son. It's a panic reaction of confusion when you cannot grieve. I was hysterical for four days and nights after my son's death. Doc Tatum helped Paul haul me into the bathtub for warm water baths and gave me sedatives and I kept on laughing—not laughing, that is—hysterical. Doc tried cold showers and more sedation. And there I was hysterical and the corpse of my son laid out in the parlor. The funeral had to be held over a day and I was so weak it took two big, strong men to hold me up when we went down the church aisle. Tight fit we must have been," he added soberly.

Jester asked in the same quiet voice: "But why do you get hysterical now? It's over seventeen years since my father died."

"And in all those years not a day has passed that I didn't think about my son. Sometimes for a glancing time, others for a brooding spell. I seldom ever trusted myself to speak of my son, but today most of the afternoon and the long evening I have been remembering—not only the skylarking times when we were young but the grown-up gravities that split and vanquished us. I was seeing my son at that last trial as plainly as I see you right now—plainer, in fact. And hearing his voice."

Jester was holding the chair arms so tightly his knuckles whitened.

"His defense was masterly except for one fatal flaw. The fatal flaw was that the jurors never got the gist at all. My son argued the case as though he was talking to a panel of New York Jew lawyers instead of the panel of twelve men good and true of the Circuit Court in Peach County, Georgia. Illiterate, one and all. Under the circumstances my son's opening move was a stroke of genius."

Jester opened his mouth and breathed through it, so tense was his silence.

"My son's first motion was to request the jurors to rise and pledge allegiance to the American flag. The jurors shambled to their feet and Johnny read them through the rigamarole, the pledge. Both Nat Webber and I were caught flatfooted. When Nat objected, I rapped the gavel and ordered the words struck from the record. But that didn't matter. My son had already made his point."

"What point?"

"At one stroke my son had joined those twelve men and prompted them to function at their highest level. They had been taught in school the pledge of allegiance and in speaking it, they were participating in some kind of holy exercise. I rapped the gavel!" The Judge grunted.

"Why did you strike it from the record?"

"Irrelevance. But my son, as defense lawyer, had made his point and lifted a sordid, cut-and-dried murder case to the level of constitutional law. My son went right on. 'Fellow jurors and your honor...' My son looked hard at each juror as he spoke, and at me. 'Each one of you twelve jurors has been lifted to an immense responsibility. Nothing takes precedence over you and your work at this hour.'" Jester listened with his hand and forefinger propping up his chin, his wine-brown eyes wide and asking in his listening face.

"From the beginning, Rice Little maintained that Mrs. Little had been raped by Jones, and his brother had every right to attempt to kill him. Rice Little just stood there like a little dirty feist dog guarding his brother's property line and nothing could shake him. When Johnny asked Mrs. Little, she swore it wasn't so and that her husband had tried to kill Jones out of deliberate malice ... and in the struggle for the gun her husband was killed ... a strange thing for a wife to swear. Johnny asked if Jones had ever treated her in any way that was not right and proper and she said, 'Never,' that he had treated her always like a lady."

The Judge added, "I should have seen something. But then eyes had I, but saw not.

"Plainer than yesterday I hear their words and see their faces. The accused had that peculiar color of a Nigra who is deathly scared. Rice Little in his tight, Sunday suit and his face as hard and yellow as a cheese paring. Mrs. Little just sat there, her eyes blue, blue and brazen, brazen. My son was trembling. After an hour my son shifted from the particular to the general. 'If two white people or two Negro people were being tried for this same accident, there would have been no case at all, for it was an accident that the gun went off when Ossie Little was trying to kill the defendant.'

"Johnny went on: 'The fact is that the case involves a white man and a Negro man and the inequality that lies between the handling of such a situation. In fact, fellow jurors, in cases like this, the Constitution itself is on trial.' Johnny quoted the preamble and the amendments freeing the slaves and giving them citizenship and equal rights. 'These words I quote now were written a century and a half ago and spoken by a million voices. These words are the law of our country. I, as a citizen and lawyer, can neither add to nor subtract from them. My function in this court is to underscore and try to implement them.' Then carried away, Johnny quoted 'Four score and seven years ago...' I rapped."

"What for?"

"These were just private words that Lincoln spoke, words that every law student memorizes, but I was not bound to hear them quoted in my courtroom."

Jester said, "My father wanted to quote them. Let me hear it now." Jester did not know clearly what the quote would be, but he felt nearer to his father than he had ever been, and the riddling skeleton of suicide and the old glory hole trunks were being fleshed by a living image. In his excitement Jester rose and stood with one hand on the bedpost, one leg drawn up against the other, waiting. Since the Judge never needed a second invitation to sing or recite or otherwise exercise his voice for an audience, he gravely quoted the Gettysburg Address while Jester listened with tears of glory in his eyes, his foot drawn up and his mouth open.

At the end, the Judge seemed to be wondering why he was quoting that. He said, "One of the greatest pieces of oratory ever spoken, but a vicious rabble-rouser. Shut your mouth, boy."

"I think it was terrible that you struck that from the record," Jester said. "What else did my father say?"

"His closing words, which should have been his most eloquent, petered out sadly after the high-flown impractical words of the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. His own words drooped like a flag on a windless day. He pointed out that the amendments that followed the Civil War had not been implemented. But when he spoke of civil rights, he was so wrought up he pronounced it 'thivil' which made a bad impression and naturally undercut his own confidence. He pointed out that the population of Peach County was almost equally balanced between the Nigra and white races. He said he noticed that there was no Nigra represented on the jury and the jurors looked quickly at each other, suspicious and puzzled.

"Johnny asked, 'Is the defense being accused of murder, or of rape? The prosecution has tried to smear the defendant's honor and the honor of Mrs. Little with sly and evil insinuations. But I am defending him against the accusation of murder.'

"Johnny was trying to get to a climax. His right hand grabbed as though to conjure some word. 'For more than a century these words of the Constitution have been the law of our land, but words are powerless unless they are enforced by law, and after this long century our courts are stately halls of prejudice and legalized persecution as far as the Negro is concerned. The words have been spoken. The ideas have been shaped. And how long will be the lag between the words and the idea and justice?'

"Johnny sat down," the Judge added bitterly, "and I unscrooched my behind."

"You what?" Jester asked.

"My behind, which had been scrooched up ever since that mistake about 'thivil' instead of civil. I relaxed when Johnny's speech was finished."

"I think it was a brilliant defense," Jester said.

"It didn't work. I retired to my chambers to await the verdict. They were out just twenty minutes. Just time enough to troop down to the courthouse basement and to check their decisions. I knew what the verdict would be."