The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (2 page)

The elephant.

Surely, Carl reasoned, he couldn’t recall that day, not even a year into his life. But although the photos had been in black and white,
he remembered the day in a swirl of colors: the sharp blue of the late summer sky, shaggy Buffalo Mountain looming over the railroad yard.

But you’ve seen that all your life, Carl. You’ve been there a thousand times. It’s where your daddy works.

But he also remembered the eyes.

Those sad black eyes in a shapeless gray face, seeming to look directly at him.

All this he remembered, or thought he did. It was only later, when he went to work for the newspaper, that he found out the most important part of the story:
why it happened.

IN 1916 CHARLIE SPARKS’S
little ragtag circus, five railroad cars of tents and costumes, show people and wild animals, toured the small towns of the Bible Belt, outclassed in the major markets by the Ring-ling Brothers outfit, which was itself almost a city, an eighty-four-railroad-car megalopolis that dazzled even the sophisticates in New York and Chicago, who had damn near seen it all. But if you lived in a jerkwater railroad town in central Kentucky, or southwest Virginia, or east Tennessee, then Charlie Sparks’s shabby little circus was all the magic you were ever likely to get.

The wagons would roll into town a day or two after the posters went up, drumming up local interest with a noon parade down Main Street, and then they’d head off to the fairgrounds to set up the tents, water the livestock, and lay out the midway for the coming performance.

Besides the well-trained dogs, the performing sea lions, the clowns, the pretty girl bareback riders, and the acrobats, Charlie Sparks’s show had five elephants, including a big Indian pachyderm named Mary, who, according to Sparks, was a few inches taller than
P. T. Barnum’s Jumbo. Well, who in the hinterlands would know any different? Big Mary was thirty years old, and a real crowd-pleaser. They said she could play tunes on a row of musical horns, and she could hit a baseball by swinging a bat with her trunk.

The ragtag little circus worked its way along the Clinchfield railroad towns, from Jenkins in eastern Kentucky, over the mountain to the village of St. Paul, Virginia. Their next stop would be Kingsport, just past the Tennessee line. First, though, they had to hire a new “under keeper” for the elephants. The last fellow had up and quit in Kentucky, so on Monday, September 11, at the stopover in St. Paul, they took on Red Eldridge, a drifter who had turned up in coal country, looking for work wherever he could find it. The thought of being nursemaid to an elephant must have struck him as a likely job for a drifter: endless travel, and a fair chance of excitement.

On Tuesday, September 12, the circus arrived in Kingsport, and there was Red Eldridge, bigger’n life, making his debut in show biz: riding on the neck of Big Mary. After the parade, they took the elephants to a watering hole, and from there they were plodding along on to the circus grounds for the afternoon show, with a crowd of townfolk lined up to watch the procession. Mary spotted a discarded hunk of watermelon on the ground, and when she went for it her brand-new handler prodded her sharply in her sore ear, to keep her in line.

An instant later, Red Eldridge was flying through the air, on his way to an abrupt exit from show business and from life. He went headfirst into a lemonade stand and slumped to the ground—maybe unconscious, but certainly in no state to jump right up and get moving again. Perhaps some of the spectators thought to go and help him, but Mary got there first. Before he could stir, she put her massive front foot on his head and pushed down with all her weight.
People screamed, and some of them ran, but nobody went near Red Eldridge, because everybody could see that he was well past help.

EVERYBODY IN EAST TENNESSEE
knew what happened next, but Carl only learned
why
it happened by chance, after he grew up and became a journalist. At lunch in the Dixie Grill on Roan Street a veteran reporter was reminiscing about his early days on the job at the
Johnson City Staff.
Carl had just gone to work for the paper, and the old man remarked that he hadn’t been much older than Carl when he first became a journalist, back at the turn of the century. In his rumpled gray suit with baggy trousers, fraying shirt cuffs, and a skinny tie, the old man reminded Carl of a mournful elephant, which is probably what prompted him to ask the question.

“Did you cover the hanging of the elephant?” he asked.

“Cover it?”
The old reporter smiled. For several moments he continued to tap bits of tobacco out of the little cotton drawstring pouch and into a little square of rolling paper. When he had packed the tobacco fragments into a tight line and rolled up the paper, he licked the edge to seal it, and stuck the cigarette between his lips. “Cover it? Son, I
caused
it.”

He offered the matchbook and the little bag of tobacco to Carl, who waved it away, pointing to his plate to indicate that he wasn’t finished eating. He was embarrassed to admit that he didn’t smoke, and that he could ill afford to start. “I was there,” said Carl. “At the hanging. I was a baby, though. I don’t remember it. They tell me I don’t, anyhow.”

The reporter shrugged. “Well, I’ll never forget it. That crazy rogue elephant just stomped her trainer flat over in Kingsport. The sheriff—George Barger, it was—pulled out his pistol and fired the whole cylinder into that beast, but she didn’t even flinch. There was a blacksmith in the crowd who shot at her, too, but pretty soon
everybody realized that you couldn’t kill that thing with bullets. The crowd was calling for blood, of course, seeing as how they’d just seen the creature kill a man, but they would have calmed down in an hour or two, and that would have been the end of it.”

Carl had just taken a bite of his hamburger, and while he chewed it, he was thinking things he might not have said aloud:
Well, wouldn’t it have been a good thing if they’d let the matter drop? It was just a poor animal, maybe even mistreated by that trainer she killed, and what would be the point of destroying a creature who doesn’t know right from wrong, anyhow?
Perhaps his expression revealed his thoughts, because the old reporter shook his head, as if contradicting the unspoken opinion.

“I can see you’re not thinking like a newspaper man, son,” he said, tapping a column of cigarette ash into his congealing French fries. “You’re probably thinking up flowery editorials that would counsel mercy for this poor dumb beast. Well, that’s short-sighted thinking. What you need to do is make sure the story doesn’t end there. Nudge it along to the next level.”

Carl took a swig of soda pop through the paper straw. “How?”

“Why, you push the story along for further developments. Write pieces geared toward keeping people stirred up. I was mortally afraid that those circus people were going to grab the first train across the state line after the show in Kingsport that night, but I guess they couldn’t change their schedule without losing a deal of money, so sure enough, they kept right on planning to head to Johnson City for the next performance. And there I had ’em!”

“Had them?”

The old reporter helped himself to one of Carl’s ketchup-soaked French fries and waved it for emphasis. “The circus management. Because the circus was going to try to play
Johnson City.
And Johnson City had just passed an ordinance to restrict the operation of traveling shows within the city limits. The city fathers weren’t happy
with all the fly-by-night con games and girlie shows floating around on the carny circuit at the time, and they were just looking for a likely excuse to keep carnivals out of the city altogether. A murdering elephant was all the excuse they needed. ‘In the interest of public safety,’ the performance would be banned, not only that week, but permanently thereafter. I didn’t think that shoestring circus outfit could stand the loss of revenue. Oh, I had that circus boss, all right. They couldn’t run and they couldn’t hide.”

Carl thought about it. “So the circus owner decided to sacrifice the elephant to prove to the Johnson City officials that the show was safe for the local citizens?”

The reporter shrugged, and stubbed out his cigarette on his plate. “Well, he didn’t want to, of course. That thing must have been worth ten thousand dollars, maybe twice that, even. But I let him know that I was writing a story, and that the paper would come out Wednesday morning—the day they would be arriving in Johnson City. Oh, it was a hell of a story. I had eyewitnesses, saying that the elephant had squashed her trainer’s head like an overripe watermelon. I waxed eloquent over the lawman pumping bullets into the beast, and her just standing there as calm as if those lead slugs were raindrops . . . How could you control a beast as strong as that? A killer? Why, he would have been lucky if nobody had showed up for his circus in Johnson City. More likely, folks would have come with pitchforks and torches, ready to take another crack at executing that rogue elephant. When I made all that clear to him, what choice did he have?”

“Well, I would have gotten out of Tennessee,” said Carl.

“Too late. That story of mine would have dogged them everywhere they went. Scandal travels by railroad from one whistle-stop to another, same as the circus did. So they decided to make a virtue of necessity, and turn that elephant’s destruction into a public spectacle.”

Carl nodded. “They took her over to the railroad yards in Erwin, where my daddy works.”

“Yep. Announced it at the parade in Johnson City. Come one, come all. Free admission. ‘See the killer elephant pay for her crime.’ They knew by then that bullets and electricity were useless, so they commandeered one of those big cranes the railroad uses to lift locomotives off the track, and they fitted the strongest chain they could find to the hook on that crane. They figured to string her up. Must have been five hundred people there in the railroad yard to watch it happen.”

Carl stopped listening then. He stared down at the pool of congealing ketchup on his plate, as the stream of gleeful spite rolled over him. He hardly drew a breath, willing himself not to betray his feelings by so much as a word. He did remember that day. He had seen those sad, dark eyes, comprehending more than his infant self had done. And now he was sitting across a table from the man who had made it happen.

The old reporter set a couple of nickels next to his coffee cup, and blew his nose on a paper napkin. “This job may not make you rich, boy,” he gasped out between coughs, “but there’s not much more power to be had in this world than that of a newspaperman, if you know how to use it.” He began to roll another cigarette. “When the Lord cast Adam and Eve out of Eden, he posted an angel with a flaming sword there to guard the gates. Well, sometimes I feel like that angel. I wield that flaming sword against all mankind at my discretion. Hell, son, the pen isn’t mightier than the sword. It
is
the sword.”

The front door opened bringing in a blast of cold air, and, with a few more valedictory wheezes, the reporter passed through it and was gone. For a long time after that, Carl sat at the table staring at nothing, and thinking about pens, and angels, and the sad dark eyes of Mary.

Each day is a journey, and the journey itself home.

—
MATSUO BASH

Two hours west of Washington, Henry Jernigan finally gave up on his book. This Mr. John Fox, Jr., might have been a brilliant author—although personally he doubted it—but the clattering of the train shook the page so much that he found himself reading the same tiresome line over and over until his head began to ache. The November chill seemed to seep through the sides of the railroad car, and even in his leather gloves and overcoat, he did not feel warm.

He thought of taking a fortifying nip of brandy from the silver flask secreted in his coat pocket, but he was afraid of depleting his supply, when he was by no means sure that he could obtain another bottle in the benighted place that was his destination. Prohibition had been repealed eighteen months ago, but he had heard that some of these backwoods places still banned liquor by local ordinance. He repressed a shudder. Imagine trying to live in such a place, sober.