Preacher's Boy (17 page)

"Right here," I said. "Thank you for the ride."

He stopped smack in front of the courthouse. I could see people beginning to gather from all directions, coming to stare at the motorcar. I was briefly tempted to wait, so that it would be
me
sitting in the back seat that they would see and envy, but I put old Satan behind me. "C'mon, Elliot," I said, climbing down carefully so as not to jar my head. "Thank the nice lady and man."

"Sank you," he said sweetly.

"You live at the
courthouse
?" The man was about to get riled at me again, but he saw all the people come crowding near, reaching out to touch his treasured vehicle. He was anxious then to be rid of me and Elliot and move out of danger.

The lady waved at us. "Take care of yourselves, boys," she called as they pulled away from the curb. We waved back. Then I grabbed Elliot's hand, and we started up the long flight of granite steps to the courthouse door where my duty lay in wait.

Elliot opened the door for me, looking anxiously at my face for signs of fainting. I was dizzy as a top, but I managed to smile. "Now, we go in there," I said, pointing at the heavy double doors that I fig
ured must open into the courtroom itself. "I think Pa's in there."

I knew at once who was the judge and who were the jury. I could see the back of poor Zeb's head bent over a table at the front. There were maybe thirty or so people sitting in what looked like church pews. Before I could locate Pa, he spotted us standing at the back of the big room. He came hurrying from where he had been sitting. "Robbie, Elliot, what on earth...?"

"Shh," warned a large man standing near the door. "No talking in here."

Pa guided us back into the vestibule. "What are you boys doing here?" He looked at me closely. "You've no business being out of bed, Robbie."

"We ride da motorcar," Elliot said, but Pa wasn't listening.

"Here," he said, taking me by the elbow. "At least sit down." He led me over to a long wooden bench. I was glad to sink down on it.

"Robbie, what in the name of Heaven—?"

"Pa." How could I explain everything? "I got to testify."

He didn't interrupt me, just waited patiently for me to figure out how to put the words together. "First. I was never kidnapped. So if they hang him, it would be—it would be just like I'd murdered him."

"Then the note...?"

"It—it was kind of a ... joke." My head was hanging nearly to my boots. "No one was meant to see it. It—it was sort of a mistake that it got into Zeb's pocket at all."

He could tell there was more to the story, but he put
his hand on my shoulder to indicate I didn't have to
go
into
all
the gory details just then. "We'll talk about that later," he said. "The pressing matter is what will happen to Mr. Finch today. I don't think they plan to hang him, Robbie, but no matter. If there was no kidnapping, the judge must be told."

I looked up into his kind, honest face. I bet Abraham Lincoln didn't have as good and honest a face as my pa. The problem with such a face is it makes the other feller have to search his own false soul, so I bared mine. "Truth is," I said, "I run away. After I dunked Ned Weston, I was afraid ... Pa, the truth is I nearly drowned Ned Weston. I was scared—and shamed." I could feel tears starting behind my eyes. I didn't want to cry like a weakling just when I was trying so hard to be strong and do what was good and proper.

He sat down on the bench beside me and put his arm around my shoulder. "Thank you for telling me, Robbie. You're right, we need to talk to the judge straightaway."

Standing with Pa before the judge in his little back room, I wanted to confess everything. I started with Mabel Cramm's bloomers and how I turned into an apeist, wanting nothing but the pleasures of life before the end come. How I stole vegetables from my own parents and how I had succumbed to anger and nearly drowned Ned Weston.

About then the judge interrupted me. "I don't need to know everything that's on your conscience, son. That's between you and your Maker. I just need to know if you were kidnapped by Zebulon Finch."

"No, sir, I was not."

"Then the note they found on him was something of a hoax?"

It seemed wise to agree.

"But he did attack you?"

"Yessir, he hit me, but that was partly my fault. Me and Vile—Violet Finch, that's his daughter—we stole his booze. He had gone down to get some more."

"From the drugstore?"

"He favors Willerton's Digestive Remedy. You may not know, sir, but Willerton's is mighty near pure alcohol."

"I see," he said, something like a smile playing around his mouth.

"The booze just makes him crazy, and really, I attacked him first."

He looked at me thoughtfully. "
You
were the aggressor? Are you saying that Mr. Finch hit you in self-defense?" It was clear he didn't believe me.

"See," I said, "I thought he was fixing to hurt Vile—Violet—so I jumped him. He was just striking back. He didn't mean to really hurt me. I know he didn't. It was more or less an accident."

"I see." The judge exchanged glances with Pa, who nodded his head. His Honor called one of the constables and told him to take Elliot and me out to the bench in the vestibule and then go buy us each a bottle of Moxie, which we couldn't drink in the courtroom but we could out on the bench where we'd sat before.

"Ed?"

I nearly dropped my Moxie. "Vile! Where you been?"

"Around," she said. She stared at my drink.

"Here," I said. "Have some. It's right tasty."

She took a long drag from my bottle. I could see she was reluctant to hand it back.

"Nah, you keep it. I had plenty."

"You wan' mine?" Elliot held out his bottle.

She nodded. Vile finished off both bottles of Moxie without hardly taking a breath. "Thanks for coming," she said, giving me and Elliot the empty bottles. "I was just listening in there before I came out here." She jerked her head at the courtroom door. "I think they're going to let him go."

"Good," I said. "That's good."

"Who's your pal?" she asked, nodding at Elliot.

"It's my brother," I said. "Say hello to Violet, Elliot."

"Hey, Bilet," Elliot said. "How you?"

"I'm doing great," Vile said. "Just great, thanks." It was the first time I'd seen her really smile.

My head was throbbing fierce, and all I wanted to do was stretch out on the bench and go to sleep, but I was determined not to go puny in front of Vile. It seemed years before the doors finally opened and people begun to filter out of the courtroom. The ones from Leonardstown smiled at me and Elliot, gave Vile a stare, and hurried on out. Pa and Zeb were about the last ones out the double doors. Zeb was kind of shuffling from one foot to the other, not daring to raise his head.

"It's all right, Paw," Vile said. "Ed don't hold nothing against you."

"Ed?" Pa looked puzzled.

"It—it was kind of a game," I said. "Vile—Violet knows good and well that my real name is
Robbie,
don't you, Violet?"

"Huh?" She gave me one of her sharpest looks. "Oh, yeah. Sure,
Robbie?
"

"Violet," Pa said, "you and your father will be coming back to Leonardstown with us." He pulled his watch out of his pocket. "But we're going to have to step on it if we're going to make the last train."

"Robbie cain' walk too good," Elliot said.

"Want a piggyback, son?"

As embarrassing as it was to climb on Pa's back like I was a five-year-old, I was grateful to Elliot. Vile or no Vile, I'd done all the walking I could manage for one day.

T
HE COURT PUT
P
A IN CHARGE OF
Z
EB FOR THE NEXT
three months. Pa got him a job working at the Leonardstown Hotel, where they could have a room and three meals a day. The judge had said Zeb could remain in Pa's custody as long as he went to work every day and didn't touch alcohol. The damage to Wolcott's Drugstore was considerable, but Mr. Wolcott agreed that Zeb could pay him a bit out of his salary every week to help make restitution.

If there was a sheriff on Zeb's tail, the officer never appeared. By September Vile had stopped snatching every handbill in sight. Seems she couldn't read well enough on the run to see if they pertained to Zeb or not, so she stole them all, just in case.

I thought at that point that everything was going to end happily ever after, but it didn't quite work out that way, and since I am back on the Ten Commandments,
I have to tell you the truth of things. First of all, school opened like always. For me it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. I sat right behind Rachel Martin again. Miss Bigelow, despite the business about the snake, decided to come back another year. She'd gotten prettier over the summer. I wasn't the only one who thought so. Willie even remarked on it out loud. She was nice, too. Miss Bigelow, I mean. Rachel Martin continued to ignore me.

Miss Bigelow was especially good to Vile, who she never failed to address as Violet and made everyone else do the same. It didn't make a bit of difference, though. Vile cordially hated going to school. She was so far behind every other eleven-year-old that she claimed it was like drinking pure bile to recite her lessons. She used to say that school was worse than jail. "And here I was so worried about poor old Paw getting caged up, and I'm the one who's lost their freedom."

Willie and me tried to make life easier for her. We really did. Even Pa helped. He offered to give her extra tutoring, but Vile claimed she had something that made her break into hives if she got too close to a preacher. I told her that was nonsense, but she showed me these red spots on her arms and said, "See!" I suspect they were bedbug bites, but I decided to leave it be. Next thing she'd claim she couldn't sleep in a regular bed.

Elliot was crazy about her, but Elliot likes everybody. The interesting thing is that Vile liked him back. Sometimes she would come up to the house not to see me but just to play paper dolls with Elliot and Letty. It was the only time I ever saw her acting like a regular little girl.

Anyhow, the first snow fell in October soon after Zeb's three-month parole was up. They disappeared the night after it snowed, heading, I guess, for warmer territory. They were originally from somewhere farther south. Anyhow, I got a postal card from Vile at Christmastime written in smudged pencil. They had made their way as far as Massachusetts, hopping trains. Zeb was mostly behaving himself, she said. She herself was working in a mill, which she didn't mind at all since no one made her recite lessons in a mill. I mustn't worry. She had taken the primer that Pa had given her and was teaching herself. Couldn't I tell how much her writing had improved even without her having to go to school? She spelled
writing
as
ritin.
And that was about the best spelling on the card. I spent more than an hour puzzling out what she was trying to say. It made me furious that she didn't know what was good for her. She could have had a swell life here in Leonardstown with us, but she threw it away.

It made me sad, too. Even if she was happier in Massachusetts, she was like a buddy to Willie and Elliot and me. We all miss her. Now that I'm back to being a Christian, I pray she'll come back. She hasn't so far.

The whole town was planning to stay up on December the thirty-first and watch the new century dawn. Deacon Slaughter and Mr. Weston had already determined that our celebration would be simple and in the good taste befitting a God-fearing town in Vermont. Unlike those festivities being advertised in the larger cities, Leonardstown would tolerate no raucous behavior, drunkenness, or dancing in the street.
(Not that anyone would be tempted to dance on a street of packed snow in their winter boots.) There was to be a band concert in the town hall at seven
P.M.,
followed by prayer meetings in the individual churches. The plan was that everyone would assemble on the green afterward and say a proper farewell to the nine-teenth century and welcome the twentieth. Willie and I had stuffed our pockets with strings of firecrackers and matches in honor of the occasion. But when the concert and prayer meetings were over, it was still not ten-fifteen and the temperature was plunging faster than a wild goose full of buckshot.

People stood around, shuffling their freezing toes and mumbling. After a while Mrs. Weston remarked rather loud that anybody with any sense would go home and welcome in the new century in the comfort of their own homes. The crowd began to drift away after that. We young ones complained, but we were not listened to. Maybe someone had gotten wind of those firecrackers and was scared one of us fellers would burn our britches or worse.

If anyone but me was thinking about it being almost the End of the Age, they didn't say so. It wasn't even mentioned during the prayer meeting. I wondered if people had forgotten so quickly all the excitement over the potential apocalypse when Reverend Pelham was here in June, or if they just didn't want to dwell on the possibility.

We sat in the kitchen. Ma made us hot sassafras tea and Pa popped corn. We had a good time for a while until Letty fell asleep in her chair. Then everyone started to yawn. As it turned out, only Pa and me could keep our eyes open past eleven-thirty.

"Come on, Robbie," he said, consulting his watch, "why don't we greet the new age outside among the stars."

We put on our coats and caps and high boots. Pa grabbed the lantern from the kitchen table. The two of us tromped through the snow across the back yard to the edge of Webster's pasture. It was bitter cold, as it tends to be when the sky is perfectly clear. The stars were sparkling and winking like they were dancing for joy. We craned our necks back to stare. A shooting star sped across the dome of the sky and disappeared behind the mountains.

"Pa," I said, "do you think—do you think it will all be over soon?"

"What will be over, Robbie?"

"The world. Do you think it's coming to an end?"

He didn't laugh. "We can't know that sort of thing for sure, son. But my hunch is that this old earth will be here a long time after we are." He was quiet for a minute. Then he added, "I think the world's at a sort of beginning, myself."