False Entry (38 page)

Outside, the doctor warned them that her final trip to the hospital ought not to be delayed.

“She wants no change,” said his uncle. “We’ll manage things here.” Feet planted wide, his stance reminded Pierre of the day he had scooped her dead weight from the two men returning her, and arms all at the wrong angle, had for his own moment upheld her.

Young Rollins shook his head, obviously used to the plea. Only in the city where he had received his training, his sad shrug seemed to say, had people learned to go quietly, even to hurry toward the snagless last rites of the hospital; everywhere in this backward place one still met the primitive suspicion that the hospital, ciphering a man to one bed among many, was itself on death’s side, being so used to it—that at home, earthbound to the dirtily personal, clumsily upheld by amateurs, one might still hang on. No, he said, the terminal stage might be long-drawn; her amazing constitution was against her here.

“Against!” His uncle’s eyes stared from their lampblack. “A day is a day!”

But the young man, still so far from his own terminus, could not agree. Morphine. He let the syllable drop gently. Perhaps to be administered in such quantity that only a professional—otherwise he could not be responsible.

“Your father—is responsible.”

Rollins flushed. Third doctor-son of a father who, bred in some raw, homeopathic college of the nineties, had had a tough-tender, midwife competence with birth but should never have blundered near disease, he was also the only son who had been willing to stay on here, to inherit, it was rumored, more than one such of his father’s mistakes.

It was settled that Lucine, with some instruction, would sleep in, the patient to be moved from home only if an oxygen tent, other like impedimenta, were required.

Walking out to the sidewalk, the doctor hesitated, remained leaning on his car door. Not long down from the classroom, perhaps he still dreamed of some discovery made by a young backwater practitioner, some digitalis out of old wives’ foxglove. “Really … her staying power’s remarkable … our man at the clinic says he’s never seen anything like … what do you feed her?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.” The answer was uninflected. His uncle, already dressed in his dark suit at her insistence, stepped back from the curb. Turning, he surveyed his house with the householder’s ratifying glance, appraisal of tasks to be done there come evening. He turned back to the doctor’s car. “You might drop me at the courthouse, you going on downtown.”

And that evening, carried to her chair on the porch, she was waiting as usual. “Foreman!” she said. “Foreman! And who else is on?” He told her. She chuckled, thinking. “That lazy crowd. Not many of them with brains enough for the job—Charlson maybe. How is it they didn’t … ? But I suppose they thought a foreman once might as well be foreman twice.”

He explained that in this case the foreman was appointed by the judge.

“Oh.” Let animation fail her for a second and the skull seamed forward, papier-mâché with its candle removed.

No, said his uncle, gently avoiding the name, not
him
, he was away—a stranger, from another county. And launching quickly into as many details as he could muster, he described their swearing in, the charge by the court, their retirement to a room in the rear, too small for them—but the court was sitting in the other. He did not know why he had been tapped for the job. Accident—or perhaps the older hands had got bored with it; some, he understood, would not turn up regularly; others, like old Frazer, were only there for their six dollars per. A good lot of them were pensioners; old Clarence Whitlock had naturally been chosen clerk. For—he rattled on—once they’d been left to themselves, it had been like a club rather, at least on one side of the room. The jury had spent most of the afternoon fixing the hours of session and adjournment. The first case would be heard tomorrow.

“Quite clear—you make me see everything. I wonder what the case will be.” She was smiling, almost a visible line between their gazes, as if when he respired, she drew in.

He reddened. Perhaps he decried his talent, would otherwise never have revealed it. But this was not the reason now. “Dora … the proceedings are secret … we each of us had to swear.” His voice was weak, asking to be overridden.

At once she helped him, bringing to bear all the advantage she had forsworn. Delicately she rested her hands forward on the tea cloth. “I shan’t be telling.”

Leaving the porch, Pierre at first heard nothing behind him. Then, through the thin door as he closed it, the voice of the petitioner came, still powerful. “George … tell me the oath.”

The following oath must be administered to the foreman and acting foreman of the grand jury:

“
You
,
as foreman and acting foreman of this grand jury
,
shall diligently inquire and true presentment make
,
of all such matters and things as shall be given you in charge; the counsel of the people of this state
,
your fellows’ and your own you shall keep secret; you shall present no person from envy
,
hatred or malice; nor shall you leave any one unpresented through fear
,
favor
,
affection or reward
,
or hope thereof; but you shall present all things truly as they come to your knowledge
,
according to the best of your understanding. So help you God!
”

Code Cr. Proc. Section 238

The scrupulous man, when he breaks a pledge, often makes a wider sweep at it than the careless.

“Oh, come out of there,” said his uncle the next evening, opening the door on Pierre hanging back in the stifling parlor. “You’ve to get your tea somewhere!” And his uncle, who had never been comfortable enough to arrest conversation in Lucine’s presence in the high manner of those born to servants, did not do so now. It is probable, therefore, that among the twenty-three or so families who must surely now and then have heard scraps from the people’s counsel, none could have had such full account of any one matter as was given here on this porch—each cramped summer evening—of all.

An indictment is an accusation in writing presented by a grand jury to a competent court
,
charging a person with a crime.

Section 247

That evening they heard the charges against Mary Jo Denny, accused of infanticide. Evidence connecting the exhumed remains of a newborn infant with the defendant was found to be insufficient, malicious and not corroborated—certainly not by several jurors known to have been acquainted with the defendant, who chose rather to be guided by the minister, Charlson Evans, in his role of merciful doubter, and by the reflection that the girl was already at Martindale. No indictment found.

The grand jury ought to find an indictment when all evidence before them
,
taken together
,
is such as in their judgment would
,
if unexplained or uncontradicted
,
warrant a conviction by the trial jury.

Section 251

So the daily parade went on, trailing minor swindles, obscure rapings, small crimes, single and eternal, unaccompliced except by the nature and history of men.

On this evening, however, they heard the case of the people of the county of Banks, Alabama, against Arthur Bean, of Tuscana in that county, defendant, former member of Inspection Crew Dam Number Three, dismissed, after two warnings for drunkenness while on duty, April fourteenth last. On the night of May tenth, it was alleged, defendant had been seen on the farm of Henderson Presson, Negro, which farm, including tenant house and several outbuildings, had that same evening burned to the ground. Witness to this, including members of the Presson family, could not be found. Defendant, however, it was further alleged, had on two occasions publicly boasted of setting this fire in retaliation for the hiring in his place of Presson’s son Wesley, the first of these occasions being in front of witnesses in a local café that same evening, the second occurring the following morning, in the federal employment office at the dam site. No witnesses of the café incident came forward. Two federal clerks, however, both recent transfers from an out-of-state district, did so testify. In the proceedings, it was also revealed that the farm, of which Presson had been tenant only, had been federal property at the time of the burning, having been acquired from the bank, its actual owner, by the dam authority, some weeks before.

“So there you have it, d’ya see,” said his uncle, almost expansive, in the manner brought home with him, these past evenings, from the professional colloquies of the day.

Gazing at their view and through it, through the clutter of moths batting at the screen, beyond the line of porches semivisible in the late, astral light, his audience of two thought they did see. They saw the room in which the jury sat daily, the rows of seats—five to either side of the aisle, one step up between each of the rows, the flanking tables for the use of district attorneys, the witness’s focal chair. Clearest of all, allotting their own bias in spite of his uncle’s modest disclaimer, they saw the jury—a central cloud of importance, with George Higby, foreman, at its core. Old Clarence Whitlock, retired clerk of the court, sat at his right, once more exercising well-known powers of transcription. On the foreman’s left sat the acting foreman, name unfamiliar, quantity unknown and to remain so, excepting as he belonged with others from across the hill, with—in town parlance—the “new” men from “the other side.” They saw too how the jury had ranged itself, by subtle adhesion, into “old” and “new,” each on its own side of the aisle, and how this separation, having to do neither with the age of a member or the immediate geography of the county, persisted even in the informal hobnobbings at recess, in the obliquity of a glance, the lowering of a voice, in who at times unobtrusively clasped hands with whom.

This, however, they saw almost without knowing in passing that they did so, would have assumed it even if his uncle had not accurately limned it for them. For, in the sudden craters in the farmland, long since forgotten in the sight of the large one, in the steady tinkle of money on small bourses, the silent tribune without flags between state and nation, the change had come to Tuscana, up to now without guns. Under such besiegement man’s life is still daily; power shifts quietly, seen only intermittently even by those with hands at their holsters—of the twenty-three men likely to have been sitting on such a county jury a decade before, almost all would have been born in the county. Now there were but ten, and they felt the need to sit together, on one side.

“So there you have it,” his uncle repeated. “Federal property. Not even the bank’s.” He did not bother to say “Not Presson’s,” his auditors taking for granted that in that event there would have been no case.

And, said his uncle, this was not all. Hesitant at first, he now showed the amateur’s willingness to expound his own growing relish at the discovery that the law, when one had a good look at it, fitted together in all its parts not unlike a machine. The grand jury, he told them, was not bound to hear evidence for the defendant, but under certain circumstances the defendant might appear in his own behalf. And this, as per request filed with him that day, was the intent-of Arthur Bean. Rumor further had it that Bean intended full confession, along with the names of certain persons he claimed as accomplices—members of a confraternity not unknown either to the community or to burning, but never before publicly named. Rumor had it this way at least on the left side of the room. The right side sat mum.

“This is why Neil Dobbin’s been hanging about, chaps say,” said his uncle. His audience, good pupils, nodded. In the absence of the district attorney or assistant, the foreman usually conducts the examination of witnesses, but his uncle, to his mother’s regret, had been required to do so only twice. Dobbin had been in almost constant attendance, to the surprise of some.

“Rum thing,” said his uncle, taking a sip of his tea, now cold. Lucine came around to replenish it, while his mother watched, squinting her eyes away from the sight of a prerogative now taken from her, unable to stop monitoring Lucine’s handling of the pot, too heavy for herself to lift, that she had taken to using only recently—a monster of a pot of some thick Irish ware come down to her from her father, big as a hearth in the orange woolen cozy it wore even in this weather.

“Rum thing …” Arthur Bean’s act, he said, was known to be one of personal vengeance. Because of drunkenness, he had been read out of a certain membership sometime before. Pariah from such, he would have been hard put to it to find any accomplices, least of all those he claimed. But it would be odd if these, never before having had to account for what they had done, were to be brought to reckoning on what they hadn’t. “Rum.”

Justice, however, was not required to be so specious. On the Monday that Arthur Bean, having waived immunity, was scheduled to appear, he did not do so, nor could he be found in any of his haunts on that or any subsequent day. The members of the jury appeared as usual, indeed, as had seldom occurred during their tenure so far, in almost full number—every one being in attendance on the right-hand side. All of these concurring, a true bill was found against Arthur Bean on charges of arson. No one might say either that they had been afraid to appear, or, having done so, had failed to perform their duty to the people’s side.

In towns such as Tuscana had once been, where not only God had marked the sparrow, the disappearance of even a bachelor of low habits like Bean would have left a gap that could not be ignored—lack of gossip alone would have been telltale. Tuscana, snubbed as it had been by the dam, by the preferential rebuilding of the two towns destroyed when the earthworks had given, had kept its character far longer than most. But now, in the daily spillover to and from Denoyeville and Charlotte, strange cars, piloted by strange faces, pullulated in the streets like jack rabbits. There were thirty thousand people now in the three towns. In the matter of cars and people both, it was no longer humanly possible even to keep the bloodlines clear in the mind. Only the Negroes, encysted in the body politic, could still do this, sometimes for others, always at least for themselves. But from the advantage of a fixed position in life, they would know better than anybody how to save their breath, when to hold it.