A Covenant with Death (18 page)

PART TWO

8

In all my life I cannot recall another month as oppressive as June of 1923. The last spring rains had dried on the first of May and by June first Bryan Talbot's cell was the coolest chamber in Soledad City. My mother's house was large and usually airy, with tall, wide windows and overhanging eaves for shade; but that June it was an oven. The heat seemed to roll down like a bland, transparent, indifferent solar lava; it flowed into corners, filled basements, rose through parlors and kitchens and bedrooms and attics. Most of the year the town smelled good, even if it looked terrible. Exhaust fumes encroached slowly, but the desert supplied a regional perfume, cactus and cholla and prickly pear, Spanish bayonet and sage, nothing overpowering but a good clean dry sandy smell. That June we smelled of whatever was in the street. The air just hung, and the horse apples and dead cats decomposed fitfully; so, it seemed, did grass and shrubs and even people. Hochstadter was played out, as though he had been drained by the trial and now
this
, no breeze, no cloud, only a stinking town with pigs on the dirt roads and cars on the paved roads and oily streetcars on their tracks and the tracks embedded in ribbons of black tar that bubbled like bean soup. Drinking was no help. Geronimo drank hot tea. He said that was what the Chinese did. He and I went to Alonzo's for dinner one night—a Chinese restaurant, and Alonzo's real name was Charlie Quong—and asked him about it, and he said yes yes, red tea. The British drank black tea and the Chinese drank green tea, but in very hot weather, red tea. Yes, he had some. I bought a couple of ounces and brewed it at noon the next day. After two cups I was hotter than before but I had learned a valuable thing: bad as a hot day is, it will be worse if you drink red tea. Geronimo said it cooled him off right away.

Even my mother groaned and complained. She was alert and curious for a few days, waiting for my account of the visit to Albuquerque, which was not forthcoming. She admired the Packard, which hung around until the following Wednesday, when I got Phil Moens to take it back; he was an electrician and his wife's folks were in Albuquerque and I imagine he was delighted to pile the kids into the car and come tootling up to the in-laws' like John D. himself. And the Packard sharpened her appetite for news. “Must have been a fine fight,” she said. “What time did you leave Albuquerque?”

“Poincaré has resigned,” I said, “and Stanley Baldwin has replaced Bonar Law.”

“All right, don't tell me. I'll just imagine it.”

“We talked about William Jennings Bryan,” I said. “He wants to ban Darwinism in Presbyterian schools and their general assembly won't let him. Rosemary was furious.”

“I read that.” She smiled. “And the Sunday paper had a funny thing. Two headlines. Page … four, here it is.” She adjusted her reading glasses and sat there like Benjamin Franklin. “Two headlines side by side: Presbyterians ban views of Fosdick; and Baptists in uproar silence Doctor Straton. How's that?” She looked up. “Can't take it, those Protestants.”

“Unlike you folks,” I said, “who have free and open debate on all matters.”

“Touché,” she said. “But the Protestants are
supposed
to. That's what they turned Protestant for.”

“You are an ignorant old Dago lady,” I said. “In their best days the Catholics never dotted the i's the way Calvin did. In writing, too. He gave Servetus a safe-conduct and then burned him alive. For whistling in the street, or something. I guess for taking the Reformation seriously.”

“Who was Servetus? What happened with Rosemary?”

“She just didn't feel like screwing. Hand me that newspaper, will you?”

“Ben!” Real anger; I looked up. “Don't be rude to me. Obscenity has to be redeemed by a high elegance, and you don't always have it. I don't like that kind of language. In certain essential respects I'm a lady. Here.” She passed me the newspaper.

“Sorry.” I smiled half a smile. “Very sorry, really. I'm tired, and we had a dust-up, and it's hot, and Bryan Talbot has to hang, and I just don't feel like talking about that particular virgin goddess. All right?”

And I still have two reports from that newspaper; I ripped them out and slipped them into a ledger where they yellowed until I grew old and began reminiscing. They were not dramatic. One simply stated that Larry Semon, a comedy star of the films, had signed a three-year contract for three million dollars. Remember what three million dollars stood for in 1923. Obviously Larry Semon would never be forgotten. A true immortal. Who? What was that name? The other report also concerned the films. The British censor had unburdened himself of a few rules to be applied to American movies. Sixty-seven of them, “Any one of which will cause a film to be banned. The board will not permit materialization of the figure of Christ, cruelty to children and to animals, disparagement of public characters or officials, prolonged death bed scenes, too much revolver shooting, or a picture which holds up as laudable the sacrifice of a woman's virtue.

“The censor will not allow little boys to tie cans to dogs' tails, and he will not let trained ‘movie' dogs pretend that they have been hurt. He allows the bad man in the film to say ‘Go to Hades!' but not ‘Go to Hell!' Girls taking part in crime, women drunk, and women being branded are not allowed to be shown on films, and no one may say ‘What the Devil!' on the screen.”

What the Devil! The man had left us nothing! I wished him in Hades! I think I kept those reports because they summarized human foolishness; and that week, that month, the human race seemed to have little to recommend it. Thwarted in her busybodying, my mother fanned herself and took to drinking with the Colonel; and the Colonel annoyed me beyond measure because he was devoid of honest lechery. Altogether. He could monger rumors with the fellows, and he was avid of transgressions; but other people's, and not his own. He was a nosy, rigid, disciplined, bloodless officer in the army of permanent righteouness. He was, God save him, pleased that Talbot would hang. “The sins of the flesh always, always, always demand retribution. I have never known it to fail.” Well, I had known it to fail, but you could never be sure; you never knew what remorses, what frustrations, what bladder troubles might be the wages of sin. Death was everybody's wages and so did not count. Though payday was coming a trifle early for Bryan Talbot. The Colonel liked that, and he sat on our porch swilling my bourbon and chattering, instructing, preaching; his horsy nostrils flared and contracted, his glossy skin dulled in the heat, his slightly yellowed eyes rolled and flashed. That my mother tolerated it was a measure of her own disarray.

He drove me out of the house, and there was little judging to do, and I would have felt only moderate surprise if the world had come to an end. The town was torpid. We squinted against the sunlight, gaped sleepily, nodded like robots. Business fell off everywhere. Henry Dugan worked overtime and ran out of ice. The river was low. Judge Hochstadter was troubled by indigestion and John Digby at last renounced his jacket and tie. We tried one card game and quit because the cards were slippery with sweat and limp in twenty minutes. Oliver Parmelee composed his appeal and Edgar Musgrave printed it and off it went to the superior court. Geronimo had a fight with Bosko because they were both selling Za-Rex fruit juice concentrate, which Bosko thought unfair. But Bosko was selling sanitary napkins. At Peter Justin's Billiard Parlor a customer played “Bambalina” twenty-two times and was knocked unconscious with a pool cue while winding the machine for the twenty-third; when he woke up he ripped the baize off a table and Peter had him arrested. I dismissed the charge when he paid up, including seventy-five cents for a new record.

Ebb tide. Soon, the summer session, Judge Lewis presiding. Hochstadter was planning a trip to Montana for most of July, to a place where Mrs. Hochstadter could sit with refined ladies while the Judge disappeared with a guide and lived on trout, bourbon, and cigars. “There is a glacier,” he lusted. “A small glacier but a glacier. And the water of the lakes and streams is cold, and rushes. And sometimes it actually rains.”

“Take me with you. John can handle the court calendar.”

“I'd like to.” He cocked his head, amused. We had been spending more time together; meeting as if by habit at the Territorial, sitting in quiet communion while the afternoon burned out. Juano joined us now and then; he had drawn up a chronological list of the states ratifying the Eighteenth Amendment, and had declared a thirty-six-day period of mourning, each state to be honored in turn. Ordinarily Hochstadter would have spurned such juvenile recreations, and it was in surrender to the heat that he fell in with the ceremonies. We were a bit hazy one afternoon when he said, “You know, I wasn't expecting you back, the morning the jury came in.”

“It was the least I could do.”

“But I didn't think you'd do it. I didn't know you were out of town until about eight-thirty and I was pretty sore. How do you feel about it now?”

“About the verdict?”

“No. About being a judge.”

I thought it over, and then shook my head. “I just don't know. It was an honor, and all that, and I couldn't have said no to the Governor. And then my mother was proud, the little old lady with the boy who makes good. I even had a girl I wanted to impress, just met her the day the Governor asked me. And the Colonel—you know the Colonel? a damn fool—honored me with the formal approval of the War Department, law and order et cetera. Even old Goldman got owlish about it. You know what he said? Pour me another, will you? He said, ‘In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.' And he slapped me on the back. So I said, what the hell was that? And he said, It's from the Book of Judges. Don't forget it. Then he said if I could find out why Ehud had to be left-handed he'd appreciate it. Who was Ehud? He spelled it for me and I had to go home and look it up. I still don't know why he was left-handed. But I found the verse, and I noticed that it was the children of Benjamin who lived that way. So even that seemed to fit. If I was superstitious I'd have said it was a sign. You know? But even so, have you noticed that nobody calls me Judge? Only John.” I raised my glass to him and drank.

“And then?”

“And then … well, I had to decide important things. Whether a man spent ten days in jail or thirty. Whether he had a right to beat his wife. To kill his neighbor's chickens. To break a contract. Do you know what I liked best in the war?” He waited. “I mean in the fighting. What I really liked best was a few days in Paris. But at the front what I liked best was patrols. Because on a patrol there were four or five of us, and every man did pretty well what was right in his own eyes; but when the whole company moved up I had to give orders. To my thirty men. I had to say, Let's go. And thirty men would go and ten come back, and I was the one who had said, Let's go.”

“Responsibility,” he said. “You can't duck it forever. You can't always be a lone hand.”

“Maybe.” I rubbed my eyes. “I don't mind responsibility up to a point. But I don't like power. I don't trust it. And a judge has a hell of a lot of it. My God, what a good man a judge ought to be. And I'm not a good man. I'm an upright, downright, foursquare, kind-hearted, easygoing, red-blooded American boy.”

“You've got real trouble,” he said, serious and sympathetic. “If it helps any, a judge has got to be human, too. I mean he's got to be pretty much like everybody else or he won't see through the shams and evasions and such. I think you underestimate yourself. A judge can't be a saint, you know. He has to be above it all, but if he's never felt temptation he can't judge the fallen. And god damn it, boy, better a man who knows his own stupidities than a man who's too sure of everything.”

“‘I wish I were as sure of anything as my opponent is of everything.'”

“What?”

“Something like that. Melbourne. Or Macaulay. I can never keep them straight. Well”—I grinned at him—“you've made me feel a little better. Let me buy you a drink.”

“A pleasure,” he said. I poured. He raised his glass. “Here's to an easy summer term.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'd like that fine.”

You agree that I was querulous and petulant, a boy-man. I have been trying to set down the story of a trial and it twists and writhes like an unruly sunflower glaring always at me. Autobiography, after all. Facts are hard and understanding is harder and wisdom is hardest. So we read a book or a magazine and look in the mirror and then, complacently, describe the world. We say that Dostoievski was epileptic or Carlyle impotent and listeners say oh ah really, but we never tell them about our own seizures or limpnesses. I have not been honest. Not said that Bryan Talbot's fate was of no real concern to me; that I observed him, did my duty as a young judge, and did not care. Not said that as I strutted and sulked before Rosemary other haunches, other bosoms, other fair faces caught my eye, my mind, my loins. Or that the heat of day was as nothing beside the heat of night; lying alone, frenzies upon me, the corrupting odors of desert and river roiling my blood like coriander in a lusty soup. Or that I was lonely, not unloved but unloving. Despising, deep within me, the cast of cardboard characters I called friends, understanding them no more than I did Congreve's: M
ADAM
D
OTING
, a mother; C
OLONEL
S
EBASTIAN
E
NTRENCHING
-T
OOL
, a prurient and gossipaceous officer; M
R
. S
EIDLITZ
P
ERUNA
, a sentimental pharmacist; S
IR
S
USPENSUS
P. C
OLLUM
, a gouty judge; L
OINCLOTH
G
AITERS
, a reformed savage; M
ISS
M
ESSALINA
R
ONDEUR
, a laetificant and temulating temptress; and S
ENORITA
N
INA DE LA
T
IERRA
, a wall-eyed princess.