Clock Without Hands (23 page)

The Judge pulled up a blanket on his bed as the night was very cold. And how did his fair-born, darling son get mixed up with Nigra murderers, shiftless preachers, child-brides? How? Oh how? And in what a mangled maw it was to lose his son!

Self-defense or no, the Nigra was doomed to die and Johnny knew it as well as anybody else. Why then did he persist in taking the case, which was a lost cause from the beginning? The Judge had argued to dissuade him. What would it fetch him? Nothing but failure. Yet, little had the Judge known that it would lead to more than a young man's hurt pride, more than a fledgling lawyer's failure—but that it would lead to obscure heartbreak and death. But how, oh how? The Judge groaned aloud.

Except for having to impose sentence, he had kept out of the case as much as possible. He knew that Johnny was all too deeply involved with the case, burned the midnight oil till daylight, and boned up on law as though in defending Jones he was defending his own blood brother. During the six months Johnny was working on the case, the Judge reproached himself, he should have known. But how could he have known, not being a mind reader? In the courtroom Johnny was as nervous as any other fledgling lawyer at his first murder trial. The Judge had been distressed when Johnny agreed to take the case, was amazed at first at the way he handled it—hot potato that it was. Johnny was eloquent, just speaking the truth as he believed it. But how could you sway twelve good men and true like that? His voice did not rise and fall like most trial lawyers. He did not shout, then sink to a whisper at the incriminating point. Johnny just talked quietly as though he was not in court at all—how could that sway twelve good men and true? He was talking about justice with a voice that broke. He was also singing his swan song.

The Judge wanted to think of something else—to daydream of Miss Missy and to go to sleep, but most of all he wanted to see Jester. In old age or invalidism, stories once remembered cast a spell on the mind. Useless to think about the time he had a box at the Opera; it was the first time the Atlanta Opera opened. He had invited his brother and sister-in-law as well as Miss Missy and her father for the gala occasion. The Judge had invited a whole box of friends. The first performance was
The Goose Girl,
and well did he remember Geraldine Farrar coming across the stage with two live geese on a kind of harness. The live geese said "Quack, quack," and old Mr. Brown, Miss Missy's father, had said, "First damned thing I've understood this evening." How embarrassed Miss Missy was, and how pleased he had been. He had listened to the Germans squalling their heads off in German—the geese quacking—while he just sat there looking musical and learned. Useless to think of all these things. His mind came back to Ossie Little, the woman, and Jones—it would not let him rest. He struggled against it.

When was Jester ever coming home? He had never been hard on the boy. True, there was a peach switch in a vase on the diningroom mantelpiece, but he had never used it on Jester. Once when Johnny had been cutting up and throwing bread at the servant and his parents, he had lost his temper, taken down the peach switch, and dragged his young son to the library where, amid the wails of the entire household, he had cut him two or three times on his bare and jumping legs. After that, the switch remained stark in the vase on the mantelpiece as a threat but never once used from that day to this. Yet the Scripture itself said: "Spare the rod and spoil the child." If the peach switch had been used more often, would Johnny still be alive? He doubted it, but still he wondered. Johnny was too passionate; although it was not the passion he could readily recognize—the passion of the posse, the passion of the Southerner who defends his womankind against the black and alien invader—it was passion nonetheless, as strange as it had seemed to him and other Milan citizens.

Like a tedious tune that pounds in a fevered brain, the story insisted. The Judge turned mountainlike in his huge bed. When was Jester coming home? It was so late. Yet when he turned on the light he saw that it was still not nine o'clock. So Jester was not out so late after all. On the mantel to the left of the clock there was Johnny's photograph. The vigor of the young lost face seemed to blossom in the lamp light. On Johnny's left chin there was a small birthmark. This imperfection served only to sum up the beauty of Johnny's face, and when he noticed it the Judge felt closer to heartbreak.

Yet in spite of the spasm of grief that always came when he looked at the little birthmark, the Judge could not cry for his son. For underneath his emotions there was always resentment—a resentment that had been lulled at Jester's birth, softened a little by the passage of time, but always and forever there. It was as though his son had cheated him by depriving him of his beloved presence, the sweet and treacherous thief had plundered his heart. If Johnny had died in any other way, cancer or leukemia—the Judge knew more of Malone's illness than he let on—he could have grieved with a clear heart, cried also. But suicide seemed a deliberate act of spite which the Judge resented. In the photograph Johnny was faintly smiling and the little birthmark summed up the radiant face. The Judge folded back his twisted sheet and lumbered out of bed, steadying himself with his right hand as he crossed the room. He took down Johnny's photograph and put it in a bureau drawer. Then he steered himself into bed again.

There was the sound of Christmas chimes. For him, Christmas was the saddest season. The chimes, the Joy to the Worlds ... so sad, so left, so lonesome. A flash of lightning lit up the dark sky. Was there a storm coming? If only Johnny had been struck by lightning. Yet one cannot choose. Either at birth or death one cannot choose. Only suicides could choose, disdaining the living quick of life for the nothing nothing of the grave. Another flash of lightning was followed by thunder.

True, he had almost never used the peach switch, but he had counseled Johnny as a lad. He had been concerned about Johnny's admiration of Bolshevism, Samuel Liebowitz, and radicalism in general. He had always consoled himself by the fact that Johnny was young, was a quarterback on the University of Georgia football team, and that the fads and fancies of the young pass quickly when reality must be faced. True, Johnny's youth was so different from his father's waltzing, singing-and-dancing days when he was the beau of Flowering Branch and courted and won Miss Missy. He could only say to himself that "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous"—but he did not dwell on it, because in his wildest dreams he could not associate Johnny with danger.

Once he had said aloud that first year Johnny was in the firm, "I have often noticed, Johnny, that when one is too much involved with the underdog, one is apt to go under oneself."

Johnny had only shrugged his shoulders.

"When I first began to practice, I was a poor boy. Not a rich man's son like you." Although he had noticed the embarrassment that flickered over Johnny's face, he had gone right on: "I eschewed court charity cases which fall to the lot of a poor lawyer at first. My practice increased and soon I was able to defend the cases that brought in considerable financial returns. Financial returns or political prestige was, and always has been, a prime consideration."

"I'm not that kind of lawyer," Johnny said.

"I'm not trying to persuade you to emulate me," the Judge said untruthfully. "One thing—I have never taken a crooked case. I know when a client is lying and wouldn't touch the case with a ten-foot pole. I have a sixth sense in such matters. Remember the man who murdered his wife with a mashie on the golf course at the country club? The fee would have been princely, but I refused it."

"As I remember it, there were witnesses."

"Johnny, a lawyer of genius can bamboozle witnesses, convince the jury they were not where they swore they were, and could not possibly have seen the things they saw. However, I refused the case and many another like it. I have never committed myself to unsavory cases, no matter how princely the fee."

Johnny's smile was as ironical as the one in the photograph. "Well, isn't that handsome of you!"

"Of course, when lucrative cases combine with a just cause, it is just sheer heaven for Fox Clane. Remember how I defended the Milan Power Company? Sheer heaven and a whopping fee."

"The rates went way up."

"You cannot sell your birthright for electricity and gas. I never had them as a child. Had to trim lamps and stoke stoves. But I was free."

Johnny said nothing.

Often the Judge had taken down the photograph when paroxysms of emotion were caused by the little birthmark or when the smile seemed to mock him like a sneer. The photograph would be kept in the drawer until his mood changed or until he could no longer bear the absence of the likeness of his son. Then it would appear in the silver frame and he would gaze at the little blemish and even tolerate the remote and lovely smile.

"Don't misunderstand me," he had counseled those years ago, "I take lucrative cases but not out of self-interest." The mature lawyer and ex-congressman had yearned for some word of appreciation from his young son. Had his honesty in saying home truths seemed like cynicism to Johnny?

After some time Johnny had said: "Often this past year I have wondered how responsible you are."

"Responsible!" The Judge flushed quickly, violently. "I am the most responsible citizen in Milan, in Georgia, in all the South."

To the tune of "God Save The King," Johnny chanted, "God help the South."

"If it weren't for me, where do you think you would be?"

"A little scrap hanging out on the washline of heaven." Johnny's voice changed. "I never wanted to be your son."

The Judge, still flushed with emotion, wanted to blurt, "But I always wanted you to be my son." Instead he asked, "What kind of son do you think would be about right for the old man?"

"How about..." Johnny's mind turned over imaginary sons. "Why, how about Alec Sisroe?" Johnny's light laugh blended with his father's bass guffaws. "Motheromine, oh Motheromine," the Judge quoted through his spittle and wild laughter. For Alex Sisroe quoted that poem every Mother's Day at the First Baptist Church. He was a prissy, weedy mother's boy, and Johnny would take off the performance to the delight of his father and disapproval of his mother.

The sudden, off-beat hilarity ended as quickly as it had begun. Often the father and son who responded to the ridiculous in the same manner were caught by such laughter. This side of their relationship had prompted the Judge to a further assumption, to a fallacy often common in fathers. "Johnny and I are more like two brothers than father and son. The same love of fishing and hunting, same sterling sense of values—I have never known my son to tell a lie—same interests, same fun." So the Judge would harp on such fraternal similarities to his audiences in Malone's pharmacy, in the courthouse, in the back room of the New York Café and in the barbershop. His listeners, seeing little relation between the shy young Johnny Clane and his town-character father, made no comment. When the Judge himself realized the widening difference between his son and himself, he harped on the father-son theme even more than ever, as though words could turn the wish into reality.

That last laugh about the "Motheromine Boy" had been perhaps the last joke shared between them. And hacked about Johnny's reference to responsibility, the Judge had cut the laughter short and said: "You seemed to criticize me for taking the case for the Milan Electric and Power Company. Am I right, Son?"

"Yes sir. The rates went up."

"Sometimes it is the painful choice of the mature mind to have to choose the lesser of two evils. And this was a case where politics were involved. Not that I had any brief for Harry Breeze or the Milan Electric and Power, but the Federal Government was rearing its ugly head. Imagine when TVA and such like power plants control the entire nation. I could smell the stink of creeping paralysis."

"Creeping paralysis doesn't stink," Johnny had said.

"No, but socialism does to my nostrils. And when socialism takes away self-initiative and..." the Judge's voice meandered until he found a sudden image, "puts people into cookie cutters, standardization," the Judge said wildly. "It might interest you to know, Son, that I once had a scientific interest in socialism and even communism. Purely scientific, mind you, and for a very brief time. Then one day I saw a photograph of dozens of young Bolshevik women in identical gymnastic costumes, all doing the same exercise, all squatting. Dozens and dozens of them doing the same gymnastics, breasts the same, the hams the same, every posture, every rib, every behind the same, the same. And although I have no aversion to healthy womanflesh, whether Bolshevik or American, squatting or upright, the longer I studied the photograph the more I was revolted. Mind you, I might well have loved a single one among all those dozens of exuberant womanflesh—but seeing one after another, identical, I was revolted. And all my interest, however scientific, quite left me. Don't talk to me of standardization."

"The last track I followed was that of the Milan Electric and Power raising the rates on utilities," Johnny had said.

"What's a few pence to preserve our freedom and escape the creeping paralysis of socialism and the Federal Government? Should we sell our birthright for a mess of pottage?"

Old age and loneliness had not yet fixed the Judge's hostilities upon the Federal Government. He had spread his huffs of passing anger to his family, as he still had a family, or among his colleagues, as he was still an able, hard-working jurist who was not above correcting young trial lawyers when they misquoted Bartlett, Shakespeare, or the Bible, and his words were still weighed and heeded whether on the bench or not. It was the time when his chief concern had been the widening rift between Johnny and himself, but the concern had not yet changed to worry, and indeed he had mistaken it for youthful folly on the boy's part. He had not worried when Johnny had upped and got married after a dance, not worried that her father was a well-known rum runner—preferring in his secret heart a well-known rum runner to a preacher who might spoil the family feasting or try to crimp his style. Miss Missy had been brave about the matter, giving Mirabelle her second best string of pearls and a garnet brooch. Miss Missy had made much of the fact that Mirabelle had gone two years to Hollins College where she was a music major. Indeed, the two practiced duets together, and memorized the "Turkish March."