The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (29 page)

One of the older boys laughed. “Naw, Alf ain’t sick. He’s done gone bear huntin’ with his brothers over the mountain.”

That was true enough. They found out about it later. Alfred had indeed headed out from the Feists’ farm that morning, tramping through the carpet of leaves alongside his father and brothers, happy to be spending a crisp fall day in the woods instead of trapped in the stuffy old classroom. He was carrying an old Springfield .30-06, sold off cheap by the army after World War I, and handed down to him by one of the older boys, who had got it mail order. That morning, Alfred had been a-ways back from the others. He had spotted a buck running for the safety of a laurel thicket, and, still overjoyed to be out hunting, he stopped to take a shot at it and missed by a mile. Then, hurrying to catch up with the others, he lowered the weapon and broke into a trot, forgetting to put the safety back on.

He was almost within sight of the hunting party, climbing over a rail fence, when somehow he dropped the rifle, and in his haste to catch it before it hit the ground, he got a gloved finger caught against the trigger, and the gun went off, catching him full in the chest. He lived long enough for his brothers to reach him, but by the time they carried him down off the mountain, Alfred Feist was dead.

Miss Parsons heard all this from her grieving former pupils, Ray and Marlin Feist, when she went to the viewing at the church the night before the funeral. Thinking back over what they told her, she realized that Alfred must have died just about the time Nora Bonesteel had announced in the classroom that he wasn’t coming back. Miss Parsons never spoke of it, and neither did Nora, but she never quite succeeded in dismissing it as a coincidence.

Nora’s desk was next to the window, and, if you asked Miss Parsons,
the girl spent far too much time staring out at the folds of hills and entirely too little time on her sums and her spelling exercises, but one could hardly complain about the behavior of a straight A student, although she did suspect that the girl’s excellent grades came not from any particular interest in the subjects, nor even in a desire to please her teacher, but simply because it came easily to her.

Sometimes she had strange views on the lessons, though. Especially in American history. Miss Parsons thought of the time she was describing an Indian village for the class, depicting it as she had seen one pictured in a book once. As she warmed to her theme, describing buffalo hide teepees and stern warriors with braided hair, Nora looked up from her notes and said quietly, “It wasn’t like that.”

Miss Parsons stared. Nora seldom spoke in class unless she was called on. “I beg your pardon?”

“They didn’t live in teepees around here. They used river cane mixed with something that looked like plaster. And their huts had thatched roofs like you see in those pictures of English cottages. And the men didn’t wear braids. Their heads were shaved, except for a topknot piece—looks to me like a rooster’s comb.”

She proceeded to describe a Cherokee village as clearly as anyone else might talk about their own community. She talked about the women making vine baskets or cooking dinner of soup and cornbread on stone hearths. The children were nearby, playing with a pet dog. After a couple of minutes, Nora stopped abruptly. She blushed and stammered, and looked down at her desk.

The other children had been staring at her in bewilderment. Now a few of them started to snicker.

“Well, Nora, you certainly have a lively imagination,” Miss Parsons had said.

And Nora nodded, still not looking up. But in later lessons when she had urged Nora to use her imagination to talk about Versailles or the Pilgrims
at Plymouth Rock, Nora didn’t seem to know any more about them than the other students. Decidedly, she was a strange girl.

Now, here she was, looking as primly unobtrusive as ever in her gray plaid dress with the crisp white collar, standing awkwardly in front of the desk, waiting to speak her piece.

“Well, what is it, Nora?” Miss Parsons’s own lunch was waiting in the bottom drawer of her desk, and the noon recess was ticking away.

“I wondered, ma’am, if you could give me the lessons for the rest of the week so that I could do them away from school.” She put a sheet of paper down on the desk. “If you could just write them down.”

Miss Parsons looked up at her, expecting to see measles spots or perhaps the beginning of a case of mumps, but the girl looked the same as always. “Why, Nora? Are you ill?”

“No. I have to go away.”

For one stricken moment, Miss Parsons found herself thinking of little Alfred Feist, pale and shiny in his little wooden casket, but then she realized that Nora would hardly be asking for her school assignments if she were approaching death. She pushed at a wisp of red hair straying down over her forehead, and said, “Well, where are you going, Nora?”

The girl gave her a faint, faraway smile. “On a train ride, I think. Over into Virginia.”

“Is it a family emergency?”

Nora considered the point. “Yes’m, I would say that it is.”

“And you want to take your lessons with you?”

“Yes’m. Just this week’s. I can work on the train, and of an evening. I should be back to class next Monday.”

“Back from what? ”

Nora shook her head. “Best we talk about it next week,” she said. “The letter hasn’t come yet.”

Miss Parsons managed to keep her voice steady, as if it were the
most natural thing in the world to give out arithmetic problems and theme topics to someone who knew about emergencies in advance of their occurrence, but all the while her mind kept straying to thoughts of the thatched huts of a Cherokee village, where long-dead children played with a brown spotted dog.

Come out from hiding / Under the silkworm room / Little demon toad.

—
MATSUO BASH

During the lunch recess Carl Jennings followed the crowd out of the courthouse, figuring that the locals would lead him to a cheap café that served a quick lunch. They did, but the place was so packed with people that he figured he’d be lucky to get to the counter to order before the break was over. He thought about buying an apple at the grocery instead, but then he decided that, even if he went hungry, the café would be a good place to eavesdrop on the public opinion about the case.

He listened for a few moments to the chatter of those closest to him, but they confined their remarks to the weather. Then he saw why. Harley Morton, in his expensive city topcoat and red silk scarf, was standing only a few feet away, staring up at the menu scratched on the blackboard behind the counter. He stood there, his brown fedora pushed back behind his ears at a jaunty angle, seemingly oblivious to everyone else around.

As crowded as it was in the diner, Harley Morton had elbow room, because no one seemed inclined to get too close to him. Carl couldn’t tell whether their hesitance was out of diffidence or distaste. Presuming upon their brief acquaintance of the day before, he decided to find out.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Morton,” he said, edging up beside the man. “Carl Jennings. We met yesterday at the lawyer’s home. How do you think it’s going?”

Harley Morton glanced at him without interest. “Seems routine to me,” he said. “But I’m no expert in legal matters.”

Carl nodded. “Early days yet. Can I buy you lunch?”

His eyes flickered and he ran his tongue over his thin lower lip. Money would always get Harley Morton’s attention, and Carl didn’t think that much else ever would. He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “I reckon that’d be all right.”

They stepped up to the counter, and two minutes later they came away with the diner’s Blue Plate Special (gravy-covered ground meat and two vegetable sides) and coffee, just as a couple of patrons were leaving the back booth. Their meals set Carl back a dollar that he could ill afford, but he figured it was the best way to try to get his story. They slid into the booth, and Harley began to attack his food as if he hadn’t eaten in days. Carl picked at the mashed potatoes, trying to think of a subtle way to begin the conversation.

“This must be quite an ordeal for your family,” he said.

Harley shrugged. “We never had it easy. Daddy didn’t do much for us while he was alive. I reckon he can make it up to us now.”

“Don’t you want justice for him?”

“Maybe he already got it. But it’s an ill wind that blows no good.”

Carl puzzled over that for a few more bites. “Well, I know you’re hoping for your sister’s acquittal, but I don’t see what more good can come of all this.”

“That’s cause you’re a hick, buddy-roe. You don’t know how the world works. But I’ve been on my own since I was fifteen, and I know all the angles. Didn’t I get those big uptown papers to pay us for interviews? They can’t even talk to my sister without forking over the cash.”

Carl blinked. “Yeah, but where does that get you? It all goes to the lawyers.”

Harley Morton’s smirk said otherwise, but he did not reply. He
kept spearing fried apple slices with his fork and shoveling them into his mouth.

“Doesn’t it?”

Still chewing, Morton tilted his head left, then right. He seemed to be weighing his answers, either calculating how much he could safely disclose to a hick reporter, or perhaps loath to give anything away for nothing. Still, the hick had purchased his lunch. What the hell. “There’s always an angle,” he said. “All of a sudden, we’re getting free meals and getting slipped cash for interviews. The old family pictures are worth good money. And you know there’s talk now about folks paying me to go out and give lectures talking about how the courts wronged my sister.”

But what if she’s acquitted?
“Lectures?”

“Ladies clubs want to use this case to overturn Virginia’s law about having all-male juries, and they can afford to pay a speaker. And justice groups or just nosey parkers who want to hear a hillbilly tale of death and quare country ways. I can tell them whatever they want to hear. Feuds? Incest? People who worship trees or think the South won the War?”

Carl stared. “But none of that is true!”

“Oh, they don’t care about that. They just want a rousing yarn. They wouldn’t believe the truth if I told ’em, and they wouldn’t like it if they did. Where’s the percentage in saying we’re not much different from the folks in their own town?”

“You’re going to go on the lecture circuit?”

Harley Morton seemed to take the question as an affront to his skills. “Oh, I can talk, buddy-roe. It’s in the blood, you know, spinning yarns. And I’d never have made it as a salesman if I didn’t have the gift of gab. Yes, sir, I reckon I could preach hellfire and damnation about as good as any revival preacher. Maybe take up a collection, too.” He grinned. “You know—for legal fees.”

“Well, maybe you won’t have to,” said Carl.

“What’s that?”

“The jury might find your sister not guilty. Then everything can go back to the way it was.”

Harley Morton set his jaw and stared out at the milling crowd. “I don’t believe it will ever do that.”

“Well, nothing will bring your father back, of course, but maybe if people really understood what happened. Those national reporters are being hard on the community in their articles, you know. There ought to be a way to tell her story without making everybody else mad. Maybe if I could talk to her . . . I’m local. Well, Tennessee mountain, anyhow. I believe I could understand your sister better than any of these city people.”

Harley Morton shook his head. “That’s as may be, but they have all got one thing that you ain’t got. A checkbook.”

“Well . . . but this is a news story.”

“Do you think that paper of yours back in Tennessee would front you some money to get you a personal interview with Erma?”

Carl took a swallow of coffee in order to keep from saying that even if his editors would come up with the money—which they wouldn’t—he wouldn’t ask them to. He decided to temporize. “How much are we talking about?”

Harley Morton seemed suddenly to lose interest. “It don’t make no never mind, anyhow. You couldn’t afford to go up against those syndicate boys in a month of Sundays. And anyhow, I already sold them the exclusive rights. I told you that yesterday, didn’t I ?”