The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (23 page)

Kenji explained that the temple itself was not so ancient as the site of the shrine. Eight hundred years ago, a statue of a guardian spirit had been placed in a cave within the mountain. Centuries later the temple had been constructed around it. Kenji added that nearby there was a small but celebrated waterfall, where a famous samurai had once bathed in the aftermath of a battle.

They were the only visitors that afternoon, and the pleasant old man who tended the shrine had offered them tea, and seemed glad for their company. He spoke no English, but with the aid of Kenji’s interpreting skills, they passed a pleasant hour, and the priest attempted to answer Henry’s questions, most of which centered on the traditions concerning death.

After a few general comparisons between the beliefs of Christianity versus those of the traditional oriental faiths, Henry found himself telling the old priest about the death of his parents in the influenza epidemic. The old man nodded sympathetically. Many had died in Japan of this illness, as well. There had been great sorrow.

When, through the interpreter, the priest suggested that Henry leave prayers for his parents, Henry shook his head. “I cannot seem to mourn them. They are so far away that the news of their death is not real to me. It is only words. I can’t feel it.”

The old man nodded, “Perhaps then they are not entirely gone from you.”

“I know that you do not regard the dead as we do,” said Henry. “I have seen the little shrines people make for the ancestors in their homes.”

Kenji translated this observation, and the priest spoke at length about the custom of
bon odori
, the summer festival when the dead are welcomed
back into the world with fireworks and festivals and offerings of food at the family altar. After a few days, though, they must be sent away again, and to effect this, on the last night of the celebration the people put little paper boats bearing candles adrift on the streams or in the sea.

“You must see it, Ohenro,” Kenji added. “It is sad and beautiful to see the procession of hundreds of shining boats sailing along in the darkness, carrying the souls of the dead away again.”

The priest had heard Kenji say
Bommatsuri,
and he nodded and smiled, seeming to know what they were discussing. He spoke a few words to the interpreter, who said, “The festival is in a few weeks’ time. He says that perhaps you could make a boat for your parents.”

“I would like to see it,” said Henry, “But, no, I cannot send my parents away—even if it is only symbolic.”

When this was relayed in hasty Japanese, the old man looked up at Kenji and said,
“Shugorei?”

The priest drank his tea in placid silence, while the interpreter tried to explain this concept with gestures and a torrent of heavily accented English. “
Shugorei
is someone who is dead . . . You have the word ghost. It is something like this. Perhaps an ancestor, or a wise person from ancient times . . . This spirit stands always behind you, and keeps you from harm.”

Henry searched his mind for a western counterpart to this idea. “A guardian angel?”

The interpreter shook his head. “Not quite. Angels were always angels.
Shugorei
was once a person. They stay in this world to look after you.”

“Why?” said Henry. “Who tells them to?”

The interpreter relayed the question to the
kannushi
, but the old man simply smiled and shrugged.

“Well, do you suppose I have one?” asked Henry.

He had not needed the translator to understand the reply. The priest had stared at him for a few seconds, or rather at a spot just over Henry’s
left shoulder. Then he said in Japanese, but slowly, so that Henry could understand his words: “I do not see one.”

AT THE LITTLE OAK TABLE
before the dark fireplace, Henry was tired but not sleepy. Tomorrow morning the trial would begin, so he must be sure to wake up before the hour of the dragon. It would be a long day, and probably a tedious one. In his experience, trials usually were. They were as ritualistic as tea ceremonies, but considerably lacking in elegance.

Wrapped in his black
juban
of
tsumugi
silk, Henry sat hunched over his notepad, staring at a half full tumbler of the clear mountain whiskey he had brought with him from Abingdon, in case this remote hamlet should turn out to be a “dry” county. Henry could endure much in the way of bad food, but he drew the line at abstaining from tea and alcohol. The taste of the Abingdon brew made his stomach burn—or perhaps it had been the salty ham that unsettled his digestion. Perhaps he should have had tea instead.

The case.

It was no use putting it off any longer, and, thanks to that mountain child in Pound, his reverie about his youth in Japan had ceased for now to be a comforting memory.

Sugar eye,
the child had said.

She would probably never hear another word of Japanese as long as she lived, but she had done a creditable job of pronouncing that one. Perhaps the old priest at the
jinja
had not seen a
shugorei
behind him all those years ago, but the little Virginia mountain girl had seen it, describing the vision so well that he recognized it.
Ishi.
He did not want to remember Ishi, because then the dreams would come, and they always ended the same way: with the world in flames.

To the job at hand, then.

His editor would expect a telegram tomorrow, sent in time to run
a story in the next day’s morning edition. Henry needed to think about ways to frame this trial into the classic Jernigan style of high tragedy. He had learned nothing today, though. He saw the little town, and met that strange reticent child who saw too much, but he had found no fresh way of looking at the sordid little story of a dead father and his beautiful prison-pent daughter. Seeing the town had provided him with the background imagery, but he could have spun that out of whole cloth without ever having set foot in the place.

He uncapped his gold-nibbed fountain pen, and read over his notes in the leather-bound journal in which he roughed out the preliminaries of his stories. Consider the beautiful defendant, Erma Morton. Who was Erma, what was she?

He searched for a literary parallel. Not Juliet. Not Desdemona. There was no lover in the offing. Not a victim. A murderer, or at least accused of being one. But not Medea, not Clytemnestra, killers of children and spouse respectively. Lady Macbeth? No, this was no political assassination, nor was it done for gain.

Erma Morton did not kill the deceased—at least, not the way Henry intended to fashion the tale—and strict accuracy meant as little to Henry Jernigan as it had to Shakespeare and Homer. The story was all, and mere facts must not be allowed to mar its literary symmetry.

For a moment, his thoughts flickered back to his beloved Japanese folk tales, but it was no use thinking up some oriental parallel of imprisoned innocence. He must find a similar story in Western literature, something his newspaper’s readers would recognize without having to be given the entire story.
An innocent wrongly accused
. . . He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate through the beginnings of a headache. He could not think of any woman in classical antiquity who had been mistakenly charged with a crime.

Saints? Certainly there were Christian martyrs aplenty to choose from—blameless women who had perished because of unjust laws. For
inspiration Henry pictured medieval paintings—St. Catherine on her wheel . . . poor sightless St. Lucy, with her torn-out eyes resting on a platter . . . the martyred St. Cecilia . . . But they had been accused of nothing worse than piety. Even for a pen as skillful as his, it would be a stretch to liken a possible murderess to a blameless saint.

The Salem witch trials? He took another swallow of whiskey. He had mentioned them in his dispatch from Abingdon, hadn’t he? Now, that might be just the image he was after. Ignorant and superstitious villagers ascribing deviltry to their innocent neighbors, and executing them for it.
A witch hunt.
Yes, that might serve very well, because everybody knew about the Salem witch trials, and everybody knew that the poor wretches accused of sorcery had been innocent. He could make his point in a well-chosen simile, rather than having to analyze the evidence and belabor the subtle points of the legal argument. Yes, he would continue with the theme that this trial was a witch hunt, and from that moment on, the presumption of innocence was assured.

CARL JENNINGS,
whose expense account did not allow him to be a guest of the Inn at Wise, was now ensconced on a cot in Cousin Araby’s stillroom, just off the kitchen. Although he had met her at various family gatherings, this was his first visit to her large Edwardian home in Wise. She was a tall, sharp-featured woman, the age of his parents, and when he first arrived he made the mistake of calling her “Aunt Araby.”

“I am your first cousin once removed,” she informed him. “Your father and I are first cousins. If I had a child, you would be its second cousin. You may called me Cousin Araby, if you like. I hope your journey was pleasant.”

“It was tolerable,” said Carl. “I’m happy for the chance to cover this trial, though. And I thank you for making that possible.”

“Well, you’re family. I wish I could give you better lodging, but they’re packed to the rafters this week. You’ll have to make do with a cot in the stillroom, but it’s warm enough, and you’ll get full board with the paying guests, so I reckon you’ll survive the ordeal.”

“I’d sleep in the woodshed to get this assignment.”

“Well, it won’t come to that, but you may wait a long time for a bath or hot water of a morning. But I’ll see that there’s enough to eat, even if I have to get up in the middle of the night to start breakfast. I had a hired girl, but she fell pregnant and left me to do it all by myself, not that she was ever much use. I wish I could find a dependable girl to help out with the extra work for a couple of weeks, just until the extra guests leave town.”

“I know just the girl,” said Carl.

COUSIN ARABY HAD DASHED
off a note of invitation at once, addressed to the Bonesteels on Ashe Mountain, and Carl had written a letter to Nora herself to accompany it. Then he walked to the post office to mail both missives so that they would go out first thing Monday morning. When he returned, Araby had supper on the big dining room table, and he ate bowls of beef stew and hunks of buttered cornbread, elbow to elbow with the other boarders. The regulars consisted of half a dozen local men, most of whom worked in the mines over the mountain in Kentucky, but there were also three other reporters, too—not so grand as the New York bunch, but still more exalted than he was.

After supper, the journalists had commandeered the little parlor in order to talk shop, and Carl had joined them, resolving to contribute very little to the discussion, because he soon learned that he was the only reporter present who had been given an audience with both the defense attorney and the prosecutor. The others had been allowed in to see Erma Morton, but she wouldn’t talk to them, either,
because of her deal with the newspaper syndicate. They had to manufacture what copy they could out of descriptions of the interior of the jail, and fulsome verbal portraits of the defendant herself.

The reporters, one from Richmond and the others from Washington, didn’t seem to have any inside information, but they wanted to second-guess the lawyers and rehash the crime, perhaps in hope of finding fresh inspiration. Carl settled in the cordovan leather chair next to the coal fireplace, and tried to look more inexperienced and uninformed than he actually was. It never did any harm to let people underestimate you.

Later he would finish writing up his own notes of the afternoon interviews with the attorneys. He now realized how important they were, because they might contain material that the national reporters did not have.

THAT AFTERNOON AT THE DOOR
of the courthouse, Carl and the ladies from Knoxville had stopped to ask a uniformed officer for directions to the home of the commonwealth’s attorney. The man looked doubtfully at the resolute expressions of the crusading dowagers, as if momentarily debating whose wrath he would rather face.

“Well, ladies,” he said, “if you’re looking to have a talk with him, I believe I can save you a trip. I just saw him heading up to his office a couple of minutes ago.”

Armed with directions to the prosecutor’s office, the ladies from Knoxville had marched straight to his door, demanding to hear his side of the story, and, such is the power of the upper-class Southern dowager, the lawyer actually let them in and did his best to make them understand.

Frank Schutz was a soft-spoken, earnest fellow in his mid-thirties, with a modest manner and a deferential attitude toward his visitors. Although he was working alone in his office on a Sunday afternoon,
he wore a brown suit and a silk necktie. Carl wondered if he had come to the courthouse straight from church.

After a round of introductions, he ushered them into his cramped and crowded office, tidied away his pipe, ashtray, and a pile of papers, and helped the ladies to chairs facing his desk. When he learned that Carl was a journalist, his smile faded, and his manner remained cordial, but a shade more restrained. The weeks leading up to this notorious trial had taught him to be wary of reporters. He had obviously been preparing for tomorrow’s session in court, and he looked as if he had eaten little and slept less for days, but he listened attentively to their explanation of a fact-finding mission from Knoxville, waving away their apologies for disturbing him, and declaring himself only too happy to help.

Carl leaned against the wall, next to the framed University of Virginia law degree, and tried to make himself unobtrusive.

“It’s not like they’ve been telling it in those city newspapers, ma’am,” he said to Mrs. Coeburn—for, no matter who else was present, people always instinctively addressed Mrs. Coeburn.

She inclined her head in a regal acknowledgment of the statement. “We shall be only too happy to hear the other side of the story, Mr. Schutz. Please go on.”