The Man Who Loved Birds (8 page)

Two centuries earlier his ancestors had come from one rocky, hilly land to another and made it theirs—they had settled this county earlier than the Catholics, only twenty years earlier but first come, first served, even though the Catholics had multiplied as was their wont and now outnumbered the Presbyterians four to one. The judge was well aware that he lived in a democracy and that his job depended on the Catholic vote, but he had gotten this far by trusting the judgment of the voters to distinguish selfless public service from greed for power, and that was where he placed his faith, which for a fifth-generation Scots Presbyterian in the South meant to administer impartially within the bounds of good judgment and to impose some kind of civilization on the congenitally unruly and to relax into a couple of highballs in the late afternoon to take the edge off all that responsibility.

On this particular morning Ginny Rae had not poured his
second cup of coffee before he started on the antacids, whose chalky taste he associated with turning seventy and, more recently, with the rise of the pot growers. Two days earlier his secretary had conveyed the message that a team of federal attorneys would be pleased to meet with him and appointing—not requesting—a date and time in Harry Vetch’s private offices.

Why the county attorney’s private offices rather than the courthouse? Why not the judge’s private offices? In the end the judge made silk of that particular sow’s ear by arranging to be conveyed the two blocks to Vetch’s office by two state troopers, Officers Smith and Jones, and on their arrival he invited them to accompany him to the meeting. He took pleasure in the unhappiness evident in Vetch’s features when they entered. Without the cops the count was 3–1; with them it was 3–3 and his men were in uniform. The guns stayed.

The federal attorneys had filled the county attorney’s office with placards using pie charts and bar graphs to prove a contention that one phone call to him, the judge, would have established in ten seconds: The marijuana business was big and getting bigger and in this part of the nation it was centered here, among the first hills south of the cities of the Midwest. Years ago the hillbillies made moonshine, one of the attorneys said, and now they were growing pot. The second attorney chimed in, noting that one of the biggest sources of the problem was the leniency of judges, who often looked the other way and sometimes had their hands in the till. “Which is why we chose you to meet with. You have a reputation for probity and we knew we could count on you to back us up.”

“But I have no role in the courts, you know that. I’m only an administrator.”

“And among the most respected and influential.” Vetch was speaking now. “You don’t conduct trials but people look to you for leadership.”

The judge made a little accordion with his fingers, touching their tips and flexing them in and out. “Not so very long ago we
had a case where Miss Lucia Beene, resident poetess and somewhere on the full side of seventy, was convicted of growing pot on her sister’s sun porch and selling it through her Christian bookstore. Now it’s not six months later and you’re telling me you’re going to throw Miss Beene into the federal pen for fifteen years without possibility of parole.”

“Twenty years, and we can confiscate her sister’s property whether or not her sister was aware of the crop.” This from the second attorney. “We put out the message of take-no-prisoners, slash-and-burn, mandatory sentences and people will get the point. This is a new ball game with new rules. We’ve got a federal forfeiture fund now. We confiscate a couple of farms of those guys who don’t know what’s going on, or who claim they don’t know, and we put fear in people’s hearts. And when we confiscate land people will figure out that we mean business. That’s what we want. We want the people down here to understand that this is the law that’s at stake. We flat-out take some property, break a few bones, and we’ll see who’s growing a year from now. Fear is the best means to power and surprise is the attacker’s most powerful weapon. We don’t
want
to give them warning, and we have no legal obligation to give them warning.”

The judge rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “The next step from what you’re proposing is imprisonment without habeas corpus.”

“Oh, please, Judge.” Vetch’s passion brought him forward in his seat. “There’s no point in using that kind of language. You’re an attorney. This is the United States. We don’t hold people in prison without probable cause. Habeas corpus is a constitutional right. If you could only hear yourself. You sound like an old man hanging on to old ways.”

“That’s because I
am
an old man,” the judge said. He took another antacid.

And now the feds and their placards were gone back to the city and the officers dismissed. The judge faced Vetch across an expanse of glass-topped desk empty except for a telephone and a computer.
Behind the desk stood a brand-new grandfather clock, its pendulum chamber backed with a mirror. The clock was placed so that a client—sitting in the chair where the judge sat now—saw his own reflection, in a way that was profoundly discomfiting, as the eye invariably sought itself out while Vetch, his back to the mirror, talked on.

The judge stood, shoved the chair a few inches to the right, and sat again. In the mirror the light caught the shine in Harry Vetch’s thinning blond thatch. The judge had thick, waving, silver hair.
Come
, he thought,
let us dance
.

Vetch pulled a sheaf of papers from a drawer and slid them across the desk. “I don’t know if you’re aware of the implications of the new property confiscation regulations.”

The judge ignored the papers. “I was certain that I could depend on you to bring them to my attention.”

“Under these regulations the federal government has the right to confiscate and sell the property of those growing marijuana and their collaborators as well as those who have the crop on their property, regardless of whether they are aware of its presence.”

“I understood Mr. Reagan to have committed himself to the lessening of big government’s intrusions into our small lives. I gather I have been mistaken.”

Vetch indicated the papers. “Our friends neglected to single out two key words which I’m drawing to your attention. Those being
and sell
. What is confiscated is sold. What is sold brings income. At the enforcement agency’s request the government returns most of the income received from the sale of confiscated properties to the enforcement agencies. The idea being that the criminals finance their own arrest and trial and jail time.”

“The idea being, as best I can tell, that the enforcement agency has been provided an almost irresistible incentive to confiscate the property of almost anybody who has the misfortune to come under its surveillance, that is, everyone in its jurisdiction.”

Vetch hunched forward, narrowing his eyes. The judge held up his hand. “I hope you will not take offense, but speaking as
an older attorney to a respected but younger colleague, you must master the art of the blank countenance. I see your point. With not much labor on either of our parts we could have, oh, to offer one example drawn from many, the three hundred acres located adjacent to your golf course development and owned by Johnny Faye—to be more precise, owned by his mother, but this is a technicality that the new regulations are designed to circumvent—we could have this land confiscated and sold to finance two new policemen, or a helicopter for the county sheriff and a pilot to fly it. With the added bonus of Johnny Faye in prison.”

Vetch looked stricken. “Judge. I readily acknowledge that I’m committed to putting Johnny Faye in prison and so far as I’m concerned they can throw away the key. But the future of his land—his mother’s land—had not crossed my mind, not once. I don’t think in those terms and I object to any implication that I do.”

The clock struck eleven. The judge stood. “Well. You are the enforcer of the law, as you know. I’m just the administrator.”

Vetch stood and leaned forward, hands flat on the green baize of his desk blotter. “We can take him down. For the sake of our children—”

“
My
children. Or have you fathered a child while I was looking elsewhere?”

“—we
have
to take him down. The Administration has given us the means to that end and I intend to use those means. And bankrupting and imprisoning a lifelong criminal is a small and necessary price to pay. We can use those funds to hire more policemen—”

“Who can justify their salaries by making more arrests and confiscating more land.”

“With due respect, Judge, I don’t think you grasp the seriousness of what’s happening here. There is a great struggle between good and evil and there’s no room for wafflers. If anyone causes these little ones to sin, it would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the sea.”

“It’s been a long while since I’ve heard Scripture quoted in an office of the law.”

“You’re about to see a lot that you’re not used to. There’s a sea change happening in this country and I’m inviting you to get on board the ship before it leaves.”

“Look. Harry. First philosophy, then politics. Am I concerned about the pot growers? You bet I am. But these guys only know one way to put food on the table and that involves sticking something in the ground and making it grow. You are not going to change human nature by throwing them in jail, you’re just going to get a lot of people in jail and at the considerable expense of the taxpayers, not to mention the Constitution. Meanwhile I don’t have the budget to equip the doctor’s office or to build a softball field where those kids might spend their nights doing something other than smoking pot.”

“You don’t have to convince the people of this county that we’re doing the right thing in throwing the pot growers in jail.” Vetch shook his finger in emphasis. “All you have to do is to sit back and cooperate with
our
government in making it happen. As for the future of his mother’s land—we will cross that bridge if we come to it. Which, I will not deny, I hope we do, because that will mean we have him in the pen.”

The judge pushed Vetch’s pointed finger to the side. “And now we get to politics. As you know, I am judge by honorific only—I have no power to do what you ask, except in the matter of placing a bid on confiscated lands. And I am relieved to hear you’re not thinking about that, since it absolves me of the need to lecture on the inappropriateness and potential illegality of such thinking.”

“I beg your pardon, Judge,” Vetch said in a low intense voice, “but I love these people. I love them more than they love themselves. It drives me crazy to see them put themselves down. I want to give them a chance at a real job, making real money.” Here Vetch pushed himself up from the baize and turned his back. The clock ticked off the seconds. In the mirror of the pendulum compartment
the judge could see him clenching and unclenching his jaw. Finally Vetch turned around. “There’s power and there’s power,” he said evenly. “I have the power of the law. You have the power of . . .”

Another long pause. “Funny,” the judge said, “how that clock seems to tick louder at some times than at others. I’m sure it’s all in my head. I imagine that if I could somehow keep track of that, I’d have some clue to my own thinking.” He stood and replaced his chair in its original location. “On second thought, I’d rather not have a clue to my own thinking. Everybody is better off that way, especially me. I will take my leave, and I will be interested, very interested, in the proceedings from here, but I am especially interested in how you complete that last sentence. Oh, and a parting bit of unsolicited advice which I offer from my commitment to the political party that I have loyally served, one of whose rising stars, or so I am led to believe, is you. Marry that Shaklett girl, what’s her first name, sounds like a pizza parlor. Maria Goretti.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.
You
don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The judge sighed. “You think everybody in this county isn’t following every detail of your colorful personal life?”

“You can leap to conclusions but that doesn’t make them right.”

The judge made a great show of pulling down one corner of his mouth, rolling his eyes upward and studying the ceiling.

“For God’s sake, Judge, she’s a lab tech.”

“And what is wrong with marrying a lab tech? I’ll save that question for the next time you need a blood test in short order.”

“Look, Judge, I’ll be honest. I’m looking for a wife who’s prominent. Visible. Somebody who shares my vision. Somebody—”

“—as ambitious as you are. Sounds like a recipe for disaster but whatever, marry some girl, any girl sooner rather than later and preferably shorter or at least no taller than you—this will look better when you’re together on stage. If I may presume on your ambitions, as a bachelor you have no political future in this state.
You may philander all you want, but you have got to have a wife so that when you’re caught, and you will be, she can extricate you from the mess of your making. Now try to enjoy spring before it turns hot.”

The judge lived in a sprawling old home near the county attorney’s office, and on these spring afternoons he enjoyed seeing the town—his town—leaf out. Anything seemed possible, even prosperity, for a place that had steadfastly resisted it for so long. Leadership, which he had once so eagerly sought, seemed a struggle and a burden, as young men did what they must do and snapped at his heels, and as the manners that had once governed the process vanished. “Sir,” “ma’am,” grace before meals, dances on Saturday evenings with Paul and His Privates on the bandstand, every band member a decorated veteran and the music with a syncopated beat to steps you had to learn and practice; Benediction for the Catholics on Sunday afternoons, and though his Presbyterian soul had nothing but disdain for all that smoke and mirrors, it kept their idle hands occupied—better smoking incense than smoking pot.

The day was somber and gray to match his thoughts. On the two-block walk to his house he found himself reconsidering the notion of a new home. Maybe he
should
buy a lot in Ridgeview Pointe as a peace offering to Harry Vetch. And who knew, maybe in a couple of years he’d build a nice little low-maintenance one-level ranchette with a guest room for the kids when they came to visit. He would miss their old house but the time had come—was past, really—to leave. The water pressure was lousy, the bathroom was downstairs and the bedrooms were upstairs, Ginny Rae’s knees were going, and sometimes—he’d never told her this—he had to pause on the landing to catch his breath. A nice new house all on one level and with a golf course at hand—yes, that was the thing, and he would have the pleasure of knowing that he had left his mark on the place—left the town more civilized than when he’d been born.