A Stranger in the Kingdom (60 page)

“Of course we know that this isn't a perfect place. But as a close relative of mine likes to say, it's an eminently improvable place, and the fact that it can be improved and that we're in a position to do that may yet be its greatest strength and ours. Now I'm nearly finished.”

Charlie turned back to the defense table. He took a long drink of water, emptying the entire glass. With his profile to the courtroom, he pointed a long arm at the jury, looking for all the world now like a preacher himself. I could feel my father go tense beside me, no doubt waiting for the torrent to come, for Charlie to roar like an evangelist about the girl whose blood had drenched our town and the innocent man who had been crucified for her death. I know Charlie was tempted to do just that because he told us so afterwards. But when he spoke again he didn't say anything about murder or martyrdom or racism. Instead, he dropped his arm, shook his head sadly, and as much to himself as anyone else said:

“Folks, you're left with a hard decision. Who do you believe? A pillar of the church or a young man who by his own admission is an outcast—an outcast with a reputation for always telling the truth? I remind you of the courage it required for Frenchy LaMott to come forward. I remind you of all the facts that we've reviewed together. I remind you too that by finding Reverend Andrews innocent, you're in no way pre-judging any other individual, only affirming that you have been unable, beyond a reasonable doubt, to find him guilty because in fact, as Sigurd Moulton himself said, we have drastically broadened the field of candidates during these past two days. That is what all this now comes down to, ladies and gentlemen. Reasonable doubt. If in your minds there is a reasonable doubt that Reverend Andrews murdered Claire LaRiviere, my client must go free.

“An innocent verdict won't atone to this good man for what we've done to him. It won't expiate us or our town from the guilt we all have to share, the guilt of knowing we stood by and allowed this to happen, if nothing else. But it will be a small redressing of some of the injustice that's taken place. I'm not as religious as many people. No doubt I'm not the best one to say this. But I hope the Lord can forgive us for what we have done here in this town this summer, because I don't see how on earth any mere human being could be expected to.”

As my brother sat down, my father wrote something in the ensuing silence. I looked at his notebook, and my eyes filled with tears to see scrawled there the single word:

“AMEN.”

 

“So what, precisely, constitutes a reasonable doubt?” Judge Allen was saying. “The best way I can put it, ladies and gentlemen, is that if your collective common sense tells you that for whatever reason or reasons you can't be sure who killed Claire LaRiviere, then you must find the defendant not guilty. Now understand that if you come to that conclusion, you aren't in any way incriminating anyone else. If you can't be sure the defendant is guilty, that doesn't mean that you're pointing your finger at another person and saying you think he or she did it.

“If, on the other hand, after considering all of the evidence, including admitted circumstantial evidence, common sense tells you that the defendant very probably committed this crime, then you must find him guilty. And as I've said, the fact that he's a Negro or the fact that he is a good father or the fact that he's a good minister mustn't enter into your decision at all. In other words, you can't be swayed by sympathy, any more than you can be swayed by prejudice That's what the blindfold on the figure of justice means.

“Now, it's getting late, and you people must be getting tired. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I want you to begin your deliberations now, while everything you've heard over the past two days is still fresh in your mind. If you don't come to a clear decision tonight, you can sleep on it. As soon as you do go into deliberation, I'm going to send Mr. Blake to the hotel and have him bring you back some hot food and coffee, and I'm going to have him reserve rooms there for you. When and if you get tired, just let him know, and I'll recess court until tomorrow morning. Above all, I want you to take all the time you need because this is an extremely important decision, not just for this defendant, but for the town as well. Like it or not, the eyes of the county are on us tonight, but once you begin deliberating I want you to forget that, too, to forget the reporters and the tape recorders and the newsreel cameras outside the courtroom and, as both Attorney Kinneson and Attorney Moulton said, just pay attention to the facts of this case.

“I'm going to say one more thing, then I'll pipe down and you folks can take over. I want to say that despite everything that's happened here in this county this summer, I have faith in two things. First, I have faith in our legal system, however unwieldy it may seem at times. And just as important, I have faith in you twelve folks and in your ability to sort out everything that you've heard over the past two days and to bring back the right and just verdict. That's why I never for a single minute considered transferring this trial out of Kingdom County. Discuss the case until you come to a decision or get tired; then let me know. Take your time. A year from now, nobody's going to remember whether you reached your decision tonight or tomorrow or, the next day. All they'll remember is that decision itself. Good luck, ladies and gentlemen—good luck!”

“They're going to need it, editor,” Plug Johnson said a minute later as we jostled our way out of the courtroom. “That luck the judge wished them. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes tonight, no sir. Jim here, though, he's probably come to a decision already. What is it, Jim, heh? Guilty or innocent? Use your common sense now, boy, like the old judge said. Don't be swayed by sympathy or nothing, else.”

“They won't come back with a verdict tonight. I'm positive of it,” Farlow Blake half-whispered to us as he headed down the stairs on his way to the hotel for provisions. “Don't breathe a word of this to anyone, boys, but on his way into the jury room I heard Yves St. Pierre say they should have brought their nightcaps.”

Instead of going over to the shop, Mom and Dad and Athena and I went upstairs to Charlie's office. (There were only two chairs in Charlie's office, so Mom and Athena sat down, I perched on the edge of Charlie's desk, and Dad stood by the window looking out over the dark common below.) And there we were, waiting again, right in the same room where all of this had first begun last spring, on my thirteenth birthday, when I had come back from Burlington to find Charlie just finishing Resolvèd's letter to
Young Love, True Love.

Charlie appeared a few minutes later with Nat, looking tired and tense. He squeezed Nat's shoulder. “Thanks, buddy. Thanks for coming back and for testifying. It had to help.”

“So what will they decide?” Nat said

My brother shook his head. “I'd like to say they'll be back in ten minutes with an innocent verdict, Nat. But you never, never know. It's almost impossible to predict. One thing I'm pretty sure of, though. The longer they take to make their decision, the better our chances are. That means that at least somebody in that deliberation room, probably more than one somebody, is seeing something our way.

“Where's Elijah, by the way?” Charlie asked.

“The last I saw of him, he was still downstairs in the courtroom,” Athena said “I'm surprised that somebody isn't keeping a closer eye on him.”

“Why should you be surprised? He hasn't been charged with anything yet.”

“It's going to snow pretty soon,” Athena said, winking at me. “There'll be some big snowbanks, right, Jim?”

“Right!” I said, but my heart wasn't in it.

“I loved it when you got up and delivered your unsolicited testimonial for old Frenchy,” Charlie said.

“My father didn't,” Athena said. “You can bet that the minute this trial is over, he'll be on his way up to the big lake for a week or two.”

“Duck hunting's coming, and that's a fact,” Charlie said. “I'd like to go with him. But I doubt he'll invite me. He was pretty mad over that hundred-dollar mistake I made.”

“I'm going over to the shop,” Dad said. “James, keep an eye peeled for Farlow Blake. If it looks as though the jury's going to come back in with the verdict tonight, which I very much doubt, come right over to get me.”

Nat and I went back downstairs and peered into the courtroom only to find Elijah carving away on his chain, intent as old Dr. Manette at his cobbler's bench in
A Tale of Two Cities.
It made my flesh creep to watch him. Even then I did not believe that the old sexton was capable of murder, but if ever pure evil seemed compressed into a single form or being, it seemed compressed into Elijah Kinneson and that dizzying chain, as he carved on and on under the courtroom lights, oblivious to everything around him, with the thin curly shavings flaking off and accumulating around his pitted shoes.

We wandered back out to the second-floor landing, where Farlow Blake had buttonholed me last spring to tell me about the Most Peculiar lawyer. Nat went downstairs to the jail to wait with his father, and I drifted aimlessly here and there, from the second-floor landing to the first floor of the courthouse, back up to Charlie's office, down onto the street. The straw Harvest Figures around the common looked spooky in the dim streetlamps, and wherever people were gathered I heard bits and snatches of opinions about the outcome of the trial, but the only opinion that counted that night was the opinion of the twelve men and women sequestered in the jury room of the Kingdom County Courthouse.

Farlow popped outside two or three times, looking solemn, but he wouldn't say a word. Charlie came back downstairs to sit with the minister and Nat in the jail cell. In the adjacent cell, an uncharacteristically morose Resolvèd was working on a bottle of Old Duke someone had passed in to him through the bars of the tiny basement window. On the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, Welcome shared glimpses of the full October moon through my great-great-great-grandfather's telescope.

Plug Johnson nudged me with his elbow. “Can you see them green fellas up on Mars with that spy glass, Welcome?”

“Aye, and more besides,” Welcome said, “for with this wondrous device, a man may peer deep into the far reaches of creation and view the comings and goings of many a distant civilization. In fact, I was just about to take it up into the church steeple with me, to get a closer look at Old Mother Moon. You come, too, Jimmy.

“You like local history, don't you?” Welcome asked me as we toiled up the steep winding steps of the church steeple. “Do you know that, except for Sundays and funerals and weddings, this bell's been rung just two times in the past hundred and fifty years? Both times in 1918. Once when the Red Stockings won the World Series and then again a month later on Armistice Day.

“Now here's my idea, Jimmy. I shall ring this bell myself, tonight, when the reverend's innocent verdict comes in, as I have no doubt it will. And it's very possible we'll have others on hand to celebrate along with us.”

Welcome pointed significantly up at the sky.

Step by step, one hundred and twelve steps in all, my cousin and I labored up into the four diminishing coffins of the United Church's steeple to the little rope-pull belfry overlooking the town and the lighted courthouse. There Welcome spoke to me earnestly for a short time, making me repeat my instructions twice, to make sure I had them right.

I left my cousin humming a tuneless little song and gazing from time to time at Mother Moon through his telescope, and hurried back down to the common. On the courthouse steps, I met Frenchy LaMott.

“Well, Kinneson, what you think? They going to send me back down to Vergennes, or what?”

“Hell, no, Frenchy. Nobody's going to send
you
anywhere.”

“They never frigging believe me, though. Old Andrews going to get the chair, Kinneson. Him or his boy. I never should have come out of Christly woodwork.”

“Tell me something, Frenchy,” I said in a low, confidential voice. “Why
did
you come out of the woodwork? I mean, really? Was it because Nat saved your life, or did your mom make you, or what?”

Frenchy laughed. “'Member that time I tell you 'bout, when old E-li hire me dig up them coffin over at graveyard? That mother and baby, hair all turn to dust when he open it? Well, he say he pay me two dollar, but old bastard never gave me a frigging cent. 'Member I tell you I do for him some day? Like old Bumper always say, it a goddamn long road that don't have no bend. That why I tes'fy. Fix E-li good, me!”

Frenchy let fly a great jet of tobacco juice. “Every word I say in there true, too. I don't give a frig you believe me or not.”

With that, he slunk off toward the common, satisfied that, at last, he had “done for” Elijah Kinneson for welching on the two dollars that day in the cemetery more than a year ago!

On the common, kids raced here and there setting off lady fingers left over from the Old Home Day celebration, but no one seemed to care. Normal order did not quite pertain tonight. I wandered over to the hotel, where Mason and Zack and Sigurd Moulton were eating a late supper. When I went by their table, Zack handed me a small campaign button that said,
BARROWS AND WHITE IN
'52. The sheriff reached out and slapped me on the back, glad-handing it as though the jury's verdict had already come in in their favor and he'd just been reelected by a landslide.

Disgusted, I drifted outside again.

Just as I started back across the common toward the courthouse, I noticed a commotion on the knoll on the east side of town. A crowd was milling around in the street in front of the empty parsonage and talking excitedly.

As I approached, I spotted something unusual on the porch. At first it looked like a man, standing on the railing and clinging to the thick bittersweet vines, dimly illuminated by the porch light.