Chaneysville Incident (29 page)

That made me feel a lot better. I smiled at him. “Not bad, Randall. Not bad at all. For a while there you actually had me worried. Silly me, I forgot it was an election year. But I didn’t know the opposition was that strong.”

“I’m not running for anything,” he snapped.

“Of course you aren’t. You guys never are. But just in case you find yourself giving that little speech to some collection of dumb niggers somewhere, remember it’s ‘black’ this season. Afro-American was so damn cumbersome even Whitney Young couldn’t say it.”

Scott sighed.

“Oh, it’s all right, Randall. Don’t worry. You can buy the funeral. The plaque too. Any nigger who’s fool enough to vote Republican on account of a couple of slabs of rock and a piece of brass probably votes that way anyway on account of he thinks Mr. Lincoln freed the slaves.”

He looked at me, and I found myself feeling uneasy again, because he looked positively
grateful.
“John, I—” he began, but the buzzing of the phone interrupted him. He stopped and gave me an apologetic, man-to-man smile. “I’m sorry, John. This must be important. It had better be. Excuse me, please.” And he actually waited until I had nodded before he picked up the phone. “Betty, I told you…I see.” He glanced at me, then away. “Well, tell him I’m in conference…. He
what
?…How… Never mind.” He looked at me, shook his head. “All right, Betty, thank you. Tell him Dr. Washington and I will be in in a moment.” He hung up and gave me a rueful look. “John, I’m sorry. My father has decided to come in today. There’s really nothing for him to do, but he likes to feel needed, and when he does come in we try to…keep him busy.” He smiled. “Well, it seems that he found out you were here and he’s heard your mother rave about you, and he’d like to see you. If it’s a bother, I’ll make some excuse.”

And I was back to being puzzled. Something was still wrong. But I wasn’t going to find out what it was trading insults with Scott. “Not at all, Randall, not at all. I think it’s wonderful that you let the useless old fart think he’s still worth something. I’ll be glad to humor him. So long as he doesn’t start to drool.”

His eyes were angry again, but he stayed polite. “Thank you, John. You’re very kind. Now, I don’t want you to take up all your time with this; you don’t have to stay more than a minute. This way.”

He led me out the door and on down the corridor, past the entrance to a spacious and crammed library, to a set of double doors. He knocked twice and pulled them open.

The room was large, subdued, solid; rich…deep. There was no way to compare it with Scott’s office; there was simply no comparison. The air itself was different; it seemed thicker, almost as if it were dust-laden. But it was impossible to be sure, for the sunlight was blocked out by heavy drapes; the only light came from an odd ugly Edwardian floor lamp that sat in a far corner and from a simpler green-shaded lamp which sat on the desk. The desk itself was old—not an antique, just an old oak desk that had been made with care and kept with love. There were nicks and scores in the wood, but years of oil and tender rubbing had healed the wounds, until now they were only fading keloid scars. Behind it sat the Judge.

I had seen him before, of course. Many times. Even if he had not been my mother’s employer, I would have known him. It would have been impossible to grow up in that town and not know him. He was a local legend, a regional projection of an American political phenomenon, the local boy who had risen by means both fair and foul to become a minor dictator, loved by some, hated by many, feared—and, if the truth were to be told, needed—by all. He had been born of Scotch-Irish yeomen who had farmed land near Mount Dallas, an area noted for its independent peasant stock, but which was neatly owned and handily dominated by the Hartley family, whose history included having come over on the
Hyder Ali
, the French bottom which had brought to America the final version of the peace treaty between England and the Colonies, and having quartered President Washington when he had come west to supervise the putting down of the Whiskey Rebellion. By the time the Judge was born, the Hartleys were firmly ensconced as local aristocracy, having purchased the farm at Mount Dallas from the original peasant settlers, and were doing a formidable business in freight and iron. There had been, so the tales would have it, a constant friction between the Norman-English Hartleys and the Scotch-Irish peasants; not a feud exactly, but…at one point three of the younger Hartley boys had been found beaten senseless in a ditch, and before the day was done the Judge had left the local schoolhouse, where he seemed to be perpetually assigned to the fourth grade, and had started walking east. In two days he crossed a hundred miles of mountains and made it to the state capital. He was thirteen.

For the next five years he ran “errands” for the state legislators, making himself indispensable and acquiring the reputation of performing delicate tasks with great success, total discretion, and no comeback. He could have stayed there forever, a sort of backwoods Bobby Baker, but he was also a restless young man, and he left Harrisburg in 1914, took passage for France, and was a veteran of the trenches long before Pershing and the AEF came into the Line. He was decorated several times and probably would have risen rapidly through the ranks had it not been for his propensity towards brawling; he was demoted twice and he was scheduled for court-martial on charges of striking an officer—of beating him bloody, in fact—when a wisp of gas weakened his lungs and left him open and vulnerable to the influenza that killed more soldiers than the gas and bombs and bullets combined. He spent a year on his back in hospitals. That was where—so he claimed in his frequent speeches—he changed. Saw the same light that had blinded Saul of Tarsus. Lost his fascination with flesh and the Devil, and the terrible anger that had made him hate instead of love. It was there, he said, that he read his first book, the New Testament, of course, and read it in French too, thereby acquiring a skill, a language, and a faith, all at one time. When he was discharged he thought to enter the ministry, but, he admitted candidly, while he was no longer preoccupied by the pleasures of the flesh, he was much too fond of them to be an effective pastor. And so he returned to the state capital and spoke to his old cronies, and somehow, without benefit of high school diploma or money for tuition, managed to be admitted to Dickinson College. That, he always claimed, was the only favor he ever took from his old friends and employers, the politicians. For the next five years he turned his back on pleasure, living on study and scraps, graduating at the end of it with a Phi Beta Kappa key, a bachelor’s in Latin, and a degree in law. And then he came home, walking in order to keep the few dollars he had saved to rent a decrepit office at the east end of town.

There he hung up a shingle that he whittled himself, and set about getting a meager living and a prodigious reputation by successfully defending the poorest, orneriest, and guiltiest-looking defendants he could find, North County poachers and South County chicken stealers and renegades from every point of the compass, and by bringing suit against the powers-that-were on behalf of any small farmer of businessman who could make him believe in the rightness of the case. At the same time he was winning the love of the local church groups by telling the story of his miraculous conversion and by staunchly and publicly embracing the cause of temperance and Prohibition. By 1926 he had forged a political coalition composed of conservative church congregations, yeoman farmers, and small businessmen, and backed by the muscles of some of the most violent rascals in the Alleghenies. He threatened to upset the reigning Republican order at the ballot box, and to make it stick, if it came to that, in the street. The powers-that-be were worried. Not just about farmers and chicken stealers and a scrawny Irishman who quoted Blackstone, Shakespeare, and Moses with equal facility; news had reached them of goings on in the backwoods of Louisiana, of a man named Huey Pierce Long. Popular revolt seemed to be all the rage.

But the local powers had never desired to be fashionable, and so, long before the elections, they went to the Judge and sat down to haggle. According to Old Jack—who had been privy to much of the informal chawing over of policy—they hadn’t expected the negotiations to take long. The Judge held all the cards, they knew that. All they wanted to know was, what did he want?

In the end, the Judge surprised everybody. He could have taken
de facto
control of the Town and most of the County, and gotten God knows how much financial leverage, and, if he had wanted that, been well on his way to the governor’s chair. But he settled for a few insignificant-seeming reforms in the local tax structure, and some minor adjustments in the zoning ordinances, and a few actual zoning changes in remote regions, including Mount Dallas, and the right to appoint a few unimportant men to a few unimportant patronage jobs. The price was so cheap the powers-that-were fell all over themselves giving in. They went away talking about what a fool he was, and once the word of the bargain got out, the general opinion was that he was worse than that. Then, a few months later, it was announced that the Judge was engaged to a cousin of the Hartley family, one noted more for her crazy liberal notions and her literary pretensions than for her congeniality, and the wiser heads nodded sagely. Probably, so the speculation ran, the betrothal was part of the political agreement; it was hard to imagine that the Hartleys would have permitted such a
mésalliance
otherwise. (The opinion was confirmed when the Hartleys gave the Scotts a fairly substantial plot of land east of the Narrows as a wedding present, and defused the explosion that was almost triggered by the Scotts’ purchase of a house on the Heights.)

But while the wags called it politics and the romantics called it love, the people whose cause the Judge had championed—the farmers and the poachers and the two-bit rednecks from Helixville and Chaneysville and Artemis and Yellow Creek—called it a betrayal, and they turned away from him. One story had it that an old farmer had passed the Judge on the street and spat at his feet.

But the Judge did not seem to mind. On the contrary, he seemed to thrive on the sudden isolation. He devoted his time to supervising the planting of his land and making other land deals here and there, always for property that nobody much could see the use of. He accepted and diligently pursued the cases of those who were humble enough to come to him. He made more speeches to church groups. He supervised the restoration of his house. He doted on his wife and dandled his newborn son on his knee. His opponents called it acknowledging defeat. His former supporters called it quitting. Those few who still supported him said he was only resting before pursuing the fight. None of them understood that he had won.

The victory became apparent when the WPA began to bring sewerage and water and roads and bridges to areas that had been previously known only to the most desperate of farmers and the most enterprising of hunters—and perhaps a moonshiner or two. “Useless” lands became prime building sites, and the Judge’s insignificant-seeming concessions gave him the power to zone and control. He even had some say as to setting the priorities of the WPA. In a few short years more than one farmer had discovered that his back woodlot or worst cornfield had virtually turned into gold—or would have, if anybody had had any money. A few speculators did, and the land was bought at prices then thought to be outrageous.

By 1936 the Judge had regained all the power and prestige that he had ever had, and the powers-that-were suddenly realized that what they had thought was a cheap victory was in fact a very expensive defeat. There were talks of a new compromise, and it was desperate talk, for now the Judge not only had power, he had money. There would be no compromise. And if anybody thought there might have been, the publication of Mrs. Scott’s novel, a thinly disguised
roman à clef
which aired the dirty linen of half the County’s aristocracy and made only slightly vague reference to the dinginess of the long johns of the other half, corrected the impression. In the 1938 elections the Judge backed two candidates. Both won. After that his hand was never seen; he endorsed nobody, contributed to no campaign, gave no speeches except the perennial ones to church groups, attended no dinners. He simply ran the County. The aristocracy had to be content with still owning most of it.

By 1946 even that was slipping away from them. The G’s were coming home, the ambitious young sons of farmers armed with the confidence that comes from years of war and ultimate survival. They had educational opportunities and financial leverage courtesy of the GI Bill, and the potential gold in all those woodlots and cornfields became real. The farmers who had had the foresight and the liquidity not to sell out early made money. The speculators made money. Anybody in the County who had clear title to an acre made money.

The Judge, it seemed, owned three parcels that just accidentally lay to the south, west, and east of town. Exactly where the money to buy two of them had come from, no one knew. It was certain that the cash had not come from his in-laws (although the third parcel, the one to the east, had been his wife’s dowry). Perhaps the money came from the sales of Mrs. Scott’s novel. At any rate, the Judge went into the housing business, providing land and capital to erect three large “editions.” He invested the profits outside the County. By 1955 he owned nothing but common shares of GM, Ford, and AT&T, and preferred shares in two little-known companies, Sperry Gyroscope and Xerox.

But the population boom that had made him rich had eroded his base of power; the newcomers owed their allegiance to new industries—trucking companies, a shoe factory, a metalworking plant. Now it was the old power structure that bided its time, forging an alliance with the new industrial middle class just as the Judge had once forged his with an agrarian one. They waited for the Judge’s inevitable decline, waited to drag him down and chew him up and spit him out and nail what was left of his hide to the barn door. But they had underestimated him. After delivering a record number of votes to the gubernatorial campaign of David Lawrence, votes that no Democrat had any right to expect from that county, the Judge went to work and parlayed the rest of his power into state jobs for his most loyal supporters and a seat on the State Superior Court for himself, thereby achieving immunity to the local vicissitudes.