False Entry (37 page)

Otherwise, except for what could not be helped, everything was encouraged to remain the same; it sometimes seemed to Pierre that his mother was passionately trying to teach them how to live in the present. Never a gossip, always formal, even in private, with the facts of other people’s lives, now she was energized by every account of the daily scene that his uncle could bring her as evidence that the warm, quotidian current of living still lapped their beleaguered household round. Of Pierre’s doings in the years of his absence she never asked, if only because this would have admitted the possibility of his return to them, and the future was the inadmissible danger now. He had no stories that could beguile her in the way she wished to be, that were safe. Meanwhile few people came to the house, few had ever done, and the weight of any fresh, real contact was more than she could sustain. Even the phone, across which one or two correspondents sent what communiqués they could, was literally too heavy for her. Interest, daily more disembodied, was all she had. And the burden of feeding it fell therefore, with heaviest irony, on the one who would be assumed to be the most unsuited to the task—his uncle—a man who all his life long had breasted conversation, tempered judgment, with a cough.

What he did with that task was a marvel, equal, Pierre thought as he was forced to watch it each evening, to the feat of a man with some hidden ear for music perhaps but no performance, who, required by the ogre to sit down night after night at the stiff instrument of his own imagination, finds that for the sake of another, if in this way the castle door can be opened to her, he can. It was the worst of summer heat now, and only his mother throve on it, muffling herself in scarves the color of the dead air and the moths that flitted it, waiting on the porch that Pierre carried her to each dusk at this hour, raising her skeletal head as a blind person might, minutes before he himself heard his uncle’s reviving step.

Each day he came earlier. As he came up the steps, his face, lifted toward them in the peculiar, refulgent light, showed the black-ash daubs under the eyes like a child’s play of spectacles, and although he came quietly, putting down the paper with the air of a man who has done this a thousand times and expects to go on so for a thousand more, he always seemed like a man who had been running. And once Lucine had left them with the tea, his uncle began, opening his day to them like a pedlar’s pack from which he drew one item after the other, watching her face the meanwhile, as if he had done nothing at the mill, the cafe, the street corner, other than buttonhole people for something to add to his stock for home. As perhaps he had, for what he accumulated each day was almost a columnist’s lore. But the lore with which he fitted each item to its saga and kept a dozen such going, the power with which he brought her into places where she had never been or would never be again—from pub to church meeting, to the new golf club at Denoyeville and the shower talk of the red-faced men there—must have been served by a lifetime of behind-the-scenes silence, of that deep, judging flow of comment which his cough must always have forestalled. It was the way a stutterer might have spoken, finding himself suddenly, for a great stake, able to spill. And his reward was to see her face, that had faded so far back, slowly transfuse forward again, as if he had brought it blood.

Tea would decline toward supper; the awnings were drawn up against the dew, and the three of them came inside, his uncle carrying her now. Inside, the three of them sat in their old triangle, but Lucine now moved softly behind them, and the windows had long since opened and closed to the rhythm of a real, not a remembered weather. The years had melded his mother and uncle with the town, and even he, brought here by the gloved hand that arrested all knife-play, had been returned to the trinity. Any envious passer-by, croucher at sills, would have thought them a true family. His mother, if she knew the limits of her triumph, gave no sign of it, as, her face almost a face again, turned toward his uncle, she warmed to the business of interpreting what he had brought her.

“They’ll send the Denny girl to Martindale, you’ll see,” she would say. “Poor thing.”

His uncle would nod, his eyes on the lips that said “poor thing.”

She would go on, briskly. “Mrs. Emerson, the one who used to keep boarders on F Street, she’d have let her stay there. But I expect she’s moved on across the hill.” This was Tuscana’s euphemism for the dam site. “She’d no scruples about getting on in the world, but she was kind.”

Martindale was the girls’ reformatory, and Mrs. Emerson, a former client, was a woman in the full-blown tradition of those whose male boarders often went beyond that status, but his mother’s interest ranged wide, and was never scabrous, foraging equally between happiness and its crops, tragedy and its portents, probing restlessly beneath even the mere drama of what happened to people, to the continuity that lay below. It was this continuity, blind as it was, that reassured her. And no one could have understood this better than his uncle, sitting there white-knuckled, spending all his breath to keep her where she was.

“That Mrs. Emerson, you know,” he would be sure to say, putting down his paper the next day, or the next. “She’s taken over the old Davis place in Charlotte. And you were right about the Denny girl—they’ve sent her to Martindale.” Nothing ever foundered in his memory these days; Pierre, listening, reminded of that bedside litany of his the day she was brought home, sometimes wondered now if anything ever had.

Meanwhile for Pierre the town was being repeopled, all the old names and characters coming out of lodging again, not on the scrawny scale of childhood revisited—for staying so close to home, he encountered none of them—but with all their legendary thickness retained. In a way this was better so; the work of the past three years was not to be undone then, only suspended. So things went on for two weeks, three, and he was beginning to believe that, with luck, painful as that luck would be, the two halves of his life would remain unjoined. And so they might have done, had his uncle’s name not been drawn, just at that time, for the grand jury.

All three of them were grave at the prospect. The real history of the world is made by the snailed-in, private lives of millions, a current occasionally muddied by the supposed plenipotentiaries at the top. Historians, biographers tying the world’s way to Alexander’s crupper or Hitler’s, know this and ignore it, for they too must work. But the dullest private citizen knows enough to equate any public action required of him with disaster, rightly measuring it by the immemorial occasions when he has been most forced to it, in time of war, of political storm, of plague. Thus, even the most minor prod from the public weal—a notice to register, a tax bill—can make him uneasy out of all proportion to its weight, if proud.

“I’ll beg off, of course,” said, his uncle, then coughed—not quickly enough to hide that unguarded “of course.”

Pierre was silent, as mostly these days, under the childish superstition that the less he said or did in Tuscana, allowing the Fates the least possible thread with which to reweave him in here, the easier it would be to retain his status as a visitor from elsewhere. But his uncle’s cough had remanded him back to the old, hated evenings of their threesome, a safety for which now, looking at his mother, he found he could even sicken. He got up and turned his back, trying to deny that he was implicated in this scene, unable to deny a twinge of what life held in wait for him—that he had just been dealt one “It is so!” out of a great store of implacables against which the most arrogant “I!” might be powerless.

“That you will not!” said his mother, just as she had done when his uncle had proposed to give up the café. “I shall be wanting to hear!” Her grin, meant to be gleeful, could look only rapacious on that starveling jaw, reminding them that it was she who, lightly as she could, with the least trace of assumed heroine, now held the reins. It was she, most imminently mortal of their three, who would keep them toeing toward health, on their frail, cliff-perched
status quo.
Death was remaking her, at a time which all but a few early Christians—to whom neither Pierre nor the rest of his world now belonged—would deem too late. If we might all remember our own deaths, he thought, then none would be villains, and he idled for a moment—the one that sense allows the young—over a vision of such a world: wars melted, lies cleared, everyone walking abroad in that immediate element, every medley solving under that pure-struck, personal tone. Meanwhile his uncle, doing just as she bade him, was to be the unwitting means of bringing back into her eyrie the final thrust from the world as it unregenerately was.

On July eleventh, then, 1939, at the current term of the supreme court for the trial of criminal actions, a grand jury was empaneled in the county (as known here) of Banks, Alabama. It is presumed that the names of all those summoned had been drawn under the usual procedure—from the annual list of persons qualified to serve as trial jurors, as submitted by the county clerks to their respective county juries, after the removal from the list of any whose records contained convictions either for felony or misdemeanors involving moral turpitude. It is true that, as may well often happen in a small community, several of the names were of those who had reassuringly seen service before. But as afterwards recalled, the judge was not local, the district attorney only half so. Nothing had leaked to the county at large—or rather to those who considered themselves to be this—of any extraordinary matters to be proposed. It was slack midsummer, in a slack place. Like all small places threatened by growth from outside, it could remember this fact only intermittently. And like such places everywhere—where influence has ancestry, authority is always married to somebody’s cousin—it still had its contempt for the laws that are written.

In any event, no juror, before being sworn, had been challenged on the grounds either that he was insane or that he could not act impartially and without prejudice to either party. None of the persons currently held on various charges in the county jail, for instance, would have been ignorant enough to wish to challenge a roster of such good names as Charlson Evans (minister of the First Baptist), Ian Frazer (railroad watchman, retired), Miles Blankenship (Rhine’s—retired), E. V. Semple (factor of same), Treacher Nellis (formerly of same, now member inspection crew Dam Number Three and federal employee), the Jack Lemons, father and son (horses, and allied arts), Robert Rollins (youngest son, already called “Doc,” though still a student), Hannibal Fourchette, Jr. (also of course the son and associate of justice), and others of the like—all names ringing like the alphabet on any local ear. Whether or not from the same kind of ignorance, the district attorney also acceded to all names without challenge. Perhaps he was counting on, or at least encouraged by, the presence on the panel of some dozen foreigners. These were citizens, resident within the last ten years or so, who had been brought in by the dam in various capacities, members of a group now too prominent and too pushing to be overlooked without trouble. Citizens they were of course, of the nation if not of the region, some from the East, more from the West and Far West—all, in local eyes, from the “North.” All twenty-three of the jurors were male, for although women possessed the right to be called, in this neighborhood they were both unlikely to be called and disinclined to it—often a matter for comfortable courthouse laughter. Of those special foreigners of the place who would never be called there was never any mention—this being a matter buried too deep for laughter. From this group of twenty-three, George Higby (born in Birmingham, England, grandnephew of Luddite rioter, now naturalized and presumably neutralized citizen, foreman at Rhine’s) was—by lazy analogy, compromise, or accident—appointed foreman by the court.

A grand juror performs an important duty to the public. He is selected with care, and is a member of a body of men who stand between the people of the State and one accused of crime. No person can be put on trial for a crime of any magnitude until after a grand jury has found a bill of indictment. Its deliberations are secret. It usually hears but one side of a case, and that the people’s side. The accused, who is called the defendant, has no opportunity to appear by counsel, nor ordinarily, even in person.

Bender’s
Grand Juror’s Manual

Early on the morning of George Higby’s first day of service as juror, the doctor was called to attend his wife, who sometime before dawn had had what appeared to be a slight hemorrhage of the bowel. Even then, still dictator, she had refused to let the doctor be summoned until a more reasonable hour, with the remark that young Lee Rollins, since taking over the practice after his father’s retirement, often looked tired enough himself to stumble into the nearest grave. Besides, what more could he do than “make her comfortable,” which, due to her “leeching”—she called it this—she now was? Lucine, however, must be called at once to make her tidy; she had had some nurse’s training with the Sisters, and being a woman was used to the sight of blood.

“Eh, isn’t that so?” she said, as the doctor was leaving. “We women are blooded early.” She caught sight of Pierre through the half-open door. “Mind you remember that!” she called. “Any young priss says she can’t stand it, she’s the bloody liar!” She was sitting up, elated, consciously heroic now for the benefit of the doctor, who must be made to see her as still strong. Until her illness, her language had always minced away from the bodily, in the limbs-for-legs euphemisms of her class, but recently she had seemed to be returning to an earlier speech, perhaps her father’s, before she had been genteelly instructed away from it, and sometimes now she even relished the simpler “functional” jokes that sweet old ladies take glee in at their dotage—as if her sickness must replace her aging. “Only a lady could afford to say ‘bloody,’” Pierre as a child had often heard her decree. Now death, along with its other purifications, had at least given her leave to be one.

“Mind you tell George there’s to be no change,” she said, pushing her chin out, monkey-sharp, at the doctor. “You go on, George, it’s nothing new,” she called out before the doctor could speak. “I’ll be waiting to hear; you go on downtown!”