Paris Trout (13 page)

Seagraves held up his hands and shrugged. "It's
short notice," he said. "Mr. Trout and I have not had an
opportunity yet to thoroughly review the events that preceded the
shooting."

Trout looked at him again and then back at Townes. "I
did what was right," he said.

The words startled Seagraves. "Mr. Townes,"
he said, "as I mentioned, I have not had an opportunity to
thoroughly review the circumstances, and I wonder if my client and I
might have some time to do that before he issues you a statement."

"
I did what was right as rain," Trout said.

Townes looked up from the desk and said, "Did
you want to review this with your attorney, Mr. Trout?"

Trout shook his head. "No sir," he said. "I
ain't guilty of a thing. I was there to collect for a car. You know
my business, you live here too. I treat everybody the same, just like
they do in New York. If somebody got shot, they shot themself."

Townes consulted the notes in front of him, Seagraves
closed his eyes. "Miss Mary McNutt, in that case, shot herself .
. . let's see, three times in the back?" Townes said.

"
Yessir," Trout said. "If they got
shot, they did it themself just like if she jumped in front of a
train, you don't fix the blame on the engineer. There is a set of
rules that was here before any of us, and there's no man can hold
another to account for the consequences when somebody breaks them. If
it wasn't dangerous to break rules, there wouldn't be no reason to
have them."

Townes put his hands behind his head and leaned back
against the wall. "I have a rule for you, Mr. Trout," he
said. "The State of Georgia wrote it down in the penal code. It
says that you cannot enter a person's house and shoot them dead. And
that's a dangerous rule to break too, sir. An eye for an eye."

Seagraves saw Trout begin to smile. Paris Trout
didn't smile four times every ten years, and today he couldn't stop.
"Those ain't the same kind of eyes," Trout said, "and
they ain't the same kind of rules."

"
The murder statutes of this state do not
differentiate between races," Townes said. "To the law, one
kind of eyes is as good as another. That's the way the rules are
written down, and those are the rules we follow."

Trout moved then, closer to Townes, and bent until
his hands were resting on the front of the desk. "Those ain't
the real rules, and you know it," he said.

Seagraves saw Townes's good nature change then, and
he hadn't moved a muscle. "Mr. Seagraves," he said, keeping
his eyes on Trout, "if I were this man's attorney, I would come
over here and collect him off this desk and instruct him to shut his
mouth for the rest of eternity."

At the sound of the words Trout straightened and
backed away. He was smiling again.

Seagraves said, °'With the informal nature of the
meeting, my client spoke more frankly than he would in a legal
proceeding. It was our understanding that the nature of this meeting
was informational — "

"
See there?" Trout said. "That's what
I mean. You got two sets of rules right here in this office. You got
your lawbook rules and you got your common sense."

Townes stayed against the wall, his hands behind his
head. Trout said, "Now, if you got some goddamn fine I got to
pay, I wisht you'd set it and leave me go back to my store and do
what I'm supposed to do."

Townes brought his chair back to the desk. He looked
at the notes lying on top of it, made a calculation. He picked up the
telephone and dialed a four-digit number. "Hubert?" he
said, "this is Ward Townes. I've got Mr. Paris Trout here in my
office to surrender in the shootings of Rosie Sayers and Miz Mary
McNutt, and I wonder if you would come collect him now .... Yessir,
thank you. We'll be here.

"
Mr. Trout," Townes said, putting down the
phone, "you are now under arrest for the murder of Rosie Sayers
and the attempted murder of Mary McNutt. In view of your position in
the community and my high regard for your sister, I am sure
reasonable bail can be set, under the conditions that you remain in
Ether County and that you and your attorney, Mr. Seagraves here, turn
over any physical evidence relating to this matter. Any firearms,
clothing, or notes of debt."

Trout turned away from Townes and looked at
Seagraves. He had, at least, stopped smiling. Behind him Townes was
saying, "Do we have an understanding, Mr. Seagraves? Mr. Trout?
It is not my desire to send Hubert Norland to disrupt your home and
your wife with a search party."

"
Is tomorrow morning all right?" Seagraves
said. "Mr. Trout surrendered the weapon to me earlier, and we
will pick up the rest after he posts bail."

"You have the weapon now?"

"
At home," Seagraves said.

"
Tomorrow morning would be fine," he said.
`He checked his watch, then stood up and walked back to the window.
"You're welcome to a seat, Mr. Trout," he said, looking
outside. "Chief Norland said he would be by directly, but I
expect he's on the phone right now, trying to reach Mr. Seagraves to
ask him if it's all right to arrest you. He may be awhile."

Trout did not move. "That man's got more common
sense than anybody in this room," he said.

Townes looked back over
his shoulder then, and he was smiling. He said, "That is a
profound observation, Mr. Trout."

** *

CHIEF NORLAND SHOWED UP a few minutes later and was
clearly startled to see Seagraves in the room. He led Trout out
without touching him and took him that way the length of the hall and
down the stairs. They could have been friends out for a walk, except
the chief kept himself half a step in front. He did not want to give
Trout a chance to begin a conversation.

Seagraves shook hands with the prosecutor and
followed the police chief and Trout out of the building. He half
expected Trout to run. It was as bad a day as Seagraves could
remember, and it wasn't through with him yet.

The problem with the day, though, was not Paris
Trout, it was the girl.

When Seagraves got back to the Cadillac, there was a
skinny black dog with eyes the color of sleet inside, licking chicken
blood off the seat.

The dog froze when it saw him. For two seconds the
only movement was the rise and fall of his ribs, and then he bolted
and ran.
 

HANNA
Part Three

The story of the shootings in Indian Heights appeared
Thursday morning in the lower left-hand corner of the front page of
the Ether County Plain Talk — "The Conscience of the South"
— beneath a short announcement of the birth of Estes Singletary"s
first grandchild. Estes Singletary owned the paper.

The Plain Talk account of the shooting fixed no
blame. It was not until the last line, in fact — "Miss Sayers
was taken to Thomas Cornell Clinic and later died of her wounds"
— that a reader understood someone had been wounded at all.

Until the last line it might have been something
innocent.

That was Hanna Nile Trout's thought, anyway, sitting
on a counter stool at Dickey's Drug, reading the story again and
again, until she could have closed the paper and recited it. There
was a cup of coffee in front of her, and beside that a plate of bacon
and grits, untouched. It might have been something innocent.

She couldn't think what and began the story again.
Paris and Buster Devonne were in it, but neither of them were
identified beyond their names. Mary McNutt, it said, was a maid. And
Rosie Sayers, fourteen, had died of her wounds.

She closed her eyes and imagined her husband inside a
house, shooting colored women. It came to her right away and
frightened her. She knew it was true.

She folded the paper and laid it on the counter next
to her plate. She stared at the plate and finally tasted the grits.
They were cold and heavy in her mouth, and she was sorry to have
ordered them. She ate anyway — she believed it was sinful to waste
— trying to remember if she had heard of any Negroes named Sayers,.

Hanna Nile had taught public school in Ether County
for almost fifteen years before she'd gone with the state. She had
substituted in the Negro schools, she had been appointed by Mayor Bob
Horn to head a committee on truancy. She had taken her duties
seriously and wondered now if she'd had this dead girl in class or if
she had gone into her house one day and asked her mother to send her
to school. She wondered if she had been inside the same house where
Paris had gone with Buster Devonne.

The phrase came to her again, almost like a song. It
could have been something innocent. She finished the grits and ate
the bacon with her fingers, looking at the story's place in the paper
and wondering if it was somehow connected to the weight of the event.
The name Sayers was familiar, but detached from her professional
life.

Something she had heard, it didn't seem to matter
where. She saw it clearer now, the size of her mistake, marrying
Paris. It was the same mistake she'd made when she left Cotton Point
for the job with the state: wanting what she did not have.

A principal's position had come open, but the Ether
County school board had turned her application down — there were no
women principals in Ether County — and she had gone to work in
Atlanta. In five years she was the highest-placed woman in the state
department of schools, making more money than some of the men, but
what she gave up for that was the teaching itself. That was an empty
place inside her now.

She accepted it as a punishment for her ambitions.

There were other empty places: her mother and father,
both gone; her only brother, who had died in the Philippines,
fighting the war. She had been alone so long, and she had seen so
many other women alone. Her profession was where they went.

And then she'd come across Paris — she'd known him
before, but only to nod to on the street — and he appealed to her
after the bureaucracy in Atlanta. There was a shape to his life, she
was sure of that. He was direct and willful and honest, and there was
a sureness about him that was missing in her own life. He did not
lie.

And yes, at the bottom of it she sensed a darker
side, and it had excited her. She never loved him, she knew that, but
she gave up her job in the department of schools to spend her life
with him, not to end up alone, without a life at all.

But there was less love in Paris Trout than the state
government. He had never said he loved her, of course, she had never
expected it. She'd thought the distance between them would narrow,
though. She'd thought he needed her beyond the violent jerking inside
her — in a way as urgent, but on another level.

But she had mistaken his nature, and her own. And the
spasms would shake her as hard as he shook himself but the empty
place only grew.

He'd put her to work in the store, twelve and
thirteen hours a day; he would not hire a maid to clean the house.

He was hard-boiled and cold-blooded and had not
brought her a present since the engagement. He had fornicated with
her almost nightly for two years, pulling her legs up over his
shoulders to push himself deeper or bending her over a table or the
arm of the couch. He had never spent a night in her bed, though, or
her room. And she stayed, because that is what you did.

Weeks would go by with hardly a word, and then he
would suddenly emerge from his office in back of the store and abuse
her with the worst language, sometimes in front of people she knew
from her days as a schoolteacher.

The marriage cut off her friendships.

A month into it she lent him half her money — more
than four thousand dol1ars — for a lumber transaction, and he never
repaid it. The other half was in a bank in Atlanta, and she kept it
secret. She had been careful all her life until she met Paris Trout,
and marrying him — she saw it now — was reckless, and she was
punished for that, too.

The countergirl appeared in front of her, freshening
her coffee. Hanna did not know the girl — there was a whole
generation of Ether County children she did not recognize, it was
part of the punishment — and the girl did not know her. The child
wore a perfume Hanna could taste in her grits and a beauty parlor
hairdo that did not move even when the fan turned and blew the collar
of her uniform into her earrings. Hanna guessed she was sixteen years
old.

"Did you see this here?" the girl said. She
Put a pink fingernail dead in the middle of the story from Indian
Heights.

"
I was just on it."

"
It's worst than the Civil War," she said.

Hanna looked at the child, trying to decipher what
she meant.

"
It's what my daddy said, that it's worst than
the Civil War."

"
I don't understand."

"All I know," she said, "it's got
something to do with politics."

There were three other people sitting at the counter,
and two of them turned to see who had spoken. The girl blushed under
the attention and began to speak louder. She said, "They ought
make him governor of Georgia."

"Who?"