Chaneysville Incident (32 page)

I heard my mother then; she was crying. The Judge reached into the inner pocket of his suit and brought out a handkerchief and, with a grunting effort, extended it across the desk. She did not see it. He looked at me expectantly. I did not move. The handkerchief, soft and white, hung there in the space between us. Our eyes met. The Judge held my gaze for only an instant, and then he looked away, put the handkerchief down, and let it lie on the scarred wood, next to the folio. We both looked at it for a long while. Finally she fumbled in her skirt pocket and pulled up one of her own. The Judge reached out and touched his, toyed with it. Then he looked at me. “I was right to fear you,” he said.

I looked at him, and the surprise must have shown on my face.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s the right word. Fear. I feared you from the day he came in here with that damned gunnysack of his, asking me to do him a…favor.” He paused, smiled ruefully. “When you see what’s in that”—he nodded at the folio—“I expect you will learn that I was one of your father’s oldest and best customers. It was a natural liaison: I have a taste for good whiskey; he made the best there was. But there was more to it than that. Moses was…confidential. When he supplied your private stock it stayed private; nobody even knew you had it. You could be a public teetotaler and a private drunk; nobody knew but you and Moses and God Almighty. That was part of what he charged for. ‘The ability to maintain public illusion and private delusion.’ That’s what he called it. That’s what he sold. And that’s what I bought; what a lot of others bought too. And found out that it was a mighty dear commodity. Because, you see, Moses Washington thought like a white man, when it suited him. That’s the way he put it to me once. I remember the occasion. I had tried to defend a colored man who had shot his wife and her lover. He probably would have gotten away with it, but he shot them when they weren’t within three miles of each other. He got a gun and a horse and went off and shot him, and then he came back and told her he’d done it, and he waited until she had stopped crying and then he shot her too. Then he rode to the sheriff and turned himself in. I tried to help him, but I never understood why he didn’t just divorce the woman, or abandon her, or wait until the two of them were together, anyway, and shoot them in the act. There wasn’t a jury in the state would have convicted him; they were all three colored. I asked Moses what was wrong with that man, why he didn’t think a little bit. And Moses told me I didn’t understand; that I couldn’t understand, because I was white, and thought like white people think. He said a white man will scheme and plot and make plans, and expects his plans to work out, and if they don’t he’ll say it was God’s will. But a colored man, he said, believes that this isn’t the kind of world in which a colored man’s plans have any kind of chance of working, and so he just
does
, and if it works out, then it’s God’s will, and if not, at least he’s saved himself all that planning.

“But Moses had things both ways. He’d plan. We’d have a conversation, and halfway through, it would come to me that Moses had thought it all out ahead of time. We’d argue…there was no way to beat him in an argument. He’d start from a premise and it would be like an avalanche; once he was started there was no way to get out from under. But there was something else about it. Because the places he started from didn’t make any sense at all. And so you’d sit there and listen to what he was saying and he’d make sense every step of the way and you’d have to believe it if you believed in logic, because it was logical, but the end was crazy, because it started out crazy. That’s how he was with the things he’d plan. He was so logical and so cold about anything that anybody who knew how to think and who wasn’t particularly troubled by having a conscience could follow along every step of the way, assuming you knew what he wanted to do. That was the problem. Because even though his plans made sense, the reasons for them didn’t. You’d look back and see exactly what he did, no trouble with that, but you could never figure out why he did it in the first place….” He shook his head.

“What he did with the whiskey was like that. He did what every white businessman would do with his business: he kept records. And yet there wasn’t a white man who expected him to. Because it didn’t make any sense to treat the bootleg whiskey business just like it was a dry goods business. But he did. And you should have heard them howl when they first found out about it. He had us all by then, back in the days when it was a dry county, and there wasn’t a one of us could have stood up to the scandal. We had a sheriff then, an old fat fool they said was part of the Klan. Well, Moses paid him, just like he was supposed to, but that idiot decided to stage a raid and get some glory to go along with his money. I suspect he thought that nobody was going to take the word of a colored moonshiner against that of a duly elected sheriff, if Moses did talk about the bribe. Well, Moses got away, although he lost the whiskey he was hauling. But he let it be known in a day or two that one more little episode like that and there was going to be a whole lot of…discomfort. And so we all got together and let it be known that nobody was to interfere with him. And the funny thing was, he kept on paying bribes. I think what it was, he liked to own people personally, not secondhand. Or maybe he just liked to bribe. And I’ll tell you another funny thing about him: he never blackmailed anybody. All he would do was to do what any good and respected citizen is supposed to be able to do in this fine democratic republic of ours: express his opinions. He would write letters to the people that made policy, or go see them in the dead of night. He knew who held the power around here as well as anybody, but he never came to anybody that wasn’t duly elected. Oh, the word got back, and there was never much of a question that his…preferences would be strongly considered. But he never did a thing out of line. He used his power, but not like a whip. More like a leash. He kept people in check. He was fond of delaying things.

“He never came to me directly. I didn’t have any legal authority. I was just a country lawyer with lots of friends. Until the day he came in asking for his favor. And God knows I was vulnerable then. I wanted to be judge. Judge of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Wanted that so bad I used to go in the washroom and lock the door and look in the mirror and say it over a few times. I liked the sound of it.” He paused again, and shook his head. “So there I was, the weakest man in the world—a certifiable hypocrite with high-toned ambition—and Moses Washington came to the door. I told them to show him in. He came in, carrying that old gunnysack of his. I told him to sit, and he sat. ‘Lucian,’ he said, but I cut him off. I said to him, ‘Moses,’ I said, ‘now, we’ve known each other for a long time. We both know you can ruin me. And we both know there’s not a damned thing I can do to stop you. But the one thing that neither of us knows is just exactly how much I want to win that election. But I’ll tell you this: I don’t propose to be threatened, not by you or anybody. You tell me what you want, and I’ll say yea or nay, and then you do what you will.’ That’s what I said. I thought at the time it was a pretty good little speech; I still think it was. But you know what he did? He laughed at me. Said he had been meaning to vote my way, but now he wasn’t sure, seeing as I had such a guilty conscience that I was ready to start running before the hounds even got wind. And then he said all he wanted was for me to draw up his Will.”

He stopped, looked at me. “I am rambling, John,” he said. “I am not senile; I know what I’m doing. I am rambling. Do you mind an old man’s rambling?”

“No,” I said.

He took a deep breath, and leaned back in his chair. “We drank together,” he said. “Not often. Perhaps three dozen times over the years, he came and knocked at my door and we’d go into the study and pull the shades and drink together. He always came to the front door. He always came after dark, but that doesn’t make any difference in this town—somebody always sees everything. I was nervous at first, knowing people were seeing him, but I often wonder if he didn’t reason that out. I wonder how much of the success I had, especially in those early years, was due to the fact that people had seen him come and go and, since they didn’t think I drank whiskey, wondered what kind of…secrets we might be sharing. But we shared no secrets. Moses never shared secrets. We just shared whiskey.

“And we talked. We talked history. We talked law. We talked land. Moses Washington knew more about the land in this County than any man alive. And he knew more about economics. I sometimes thought he could see into the future. He made no money that I know of, but he could have—I did, following what he said. We drank all night sometimes, back in the thirties.

“And we drank when he came for his ‘favor.’ But not until late at night. Moses’ Will was a complicated thing. We worked at it all day. We got it all drafted by about sundown. He sat there while I typed it; he didn’t want anybody else seeing the provisions, and I wasn’t sure I did, either. We finished the last copy about midnight, and he signed them all, and I witnessed the signature. He gave me a whole stack of checks—cashier’s checks, drawn on out-of-town banks, mostly Philadelphia banks, but one or two in Pittsburgh and one in New Orleans—to set up the endowments with, and he gave me the deeds to the land. Then he reached down into that gunnysack and brought up a jug, and we drank, and then I thought we were finished. But then he reached down again and brought up”—he nodded at the folio—“that.

“Of course, I knew what he kept in there. Everybody knew that. I expect they still tell the story about the time somebody tried to take it from him, down Clearville way. It was down in old man Minnich’s store, and the gentleman who tried it was drunk on whiskey, probably Moses’, and he reached over and opened up Moses’ sack and took the folio out. Moses watched him do it. Then he said, ‘Put that back,’ That was all. The man stopped and thought about it, and then he put it back. Nobody said anything. Moses said, ‘You know, you’re lucky. The last man who touched something of mine died. I was going to kill him. First I was going to gut-shoot him, and then I was going to tie him up to a tree and dress him out like a deer, at least until the screaming got real bad. Then I was going to roast him over a slow fire.’ And, as the story goes, that gentleman jumped up and ran out of Minnich’s and headed down the road towards Chapmans Run, going about as fast as a man can on foot. Moses didn’t move. He just sipped his whiskey. Then he said, ‘Of course, I never got to do all that; he ran himself into collapse before I could catch him.’ Well, they had a good laugh out of it. Until later that day when they brought that man in, draped over somebody’s plow horse, dead from a heart attack.” He stopped again. “I’m sorry, John,” he said. “That was digression. Or perhaps not. Because I thought I was going to have a heart attack when Moses brought the folio out. Because I not only knew what it was, I realized that it was part of the Will: ‘miscellaneous documents of no financial value but great personal import.’ It was dirt, pure and simple. Otherwise known as power, enough of it to hold on to this County for another twenty years. It was slipping from me then, but I could have held it. All I needed was what was in that folio. And he wanted me to keep it, and he expected me not to use it.”

He looked down at the folio, put his hand on it, stroked it. “And I didn’t use it. Never.” He raised his eyes and met mine. “You can see that the seal is unbroken, John. I didn’t use it. I was tempted enough times. But mostly I wanted to destroy it. Because I feared you.” He smiled at me, a little sadly.

“That’s the word. Feared. If terrified isn’t a better one. I don’t imagine there’s too much power in here anymore, in terms of politics. But there’s a lot of pain in here. A lot of people could be hurt. Maybe they should be; there’s truth in here, and there’s a hell of a lot of hypocrites out there. And I rather imagined you would…enjoy exposing them. That’s why I wondered why you didn’t come. I thought surely he must have had your mother tell you that there was something powerful waiting for you, even if he didn’t say precisely what, even to her. I watched carefully, expecting you to come. I know some of the things that went on when you were young. How you must have felt about them. When the cities burned, I thought to myself, thank God he doesn’t have this; if he did, it would be just like that here—burning, looting. Oh, you couldn’t have seen it, there wouldn’t have been real fires—but it would have been the same. But you were too young—even if you had come, I would not have had to give it to you then. I was glad for that. But when you turned eighteen I expected you to come charging in hero, ready to…to make us pay. I sat here until midnight the day before you turned eighteen, thinking about that. I almost burned it. I don’t know why I didn’t. And then I sat here until midnight the next day, waiting.

“But you never came. And I couldn’t imagine why. It seemed to me I would have, if I had been you. But when you didn’t come, I thought, well, maybe he isn’t interested in all that old mess. Maybe he wants to put all that behind him. And when you won your scholarship and went away, I thought that was the end of it. But then your brother’s name came up. I knew you would come then. But I didn’t worry then, you see, because I knew that when you came you would want something tangible. There would be a basis for negotiation. I was afraid of righteous destruction, you see, but I knew we could survive a little blackmail. This County has been run by blackmail for years. But you didn’t come then, and I started to worry again. When your brother ran away, I didn’t know what to think. When he came back…I made sure he wouldn’t go to jail. I knew if we did that to him you would surely come down upon us. But keeping him out of jail was the best I could do. I prayed that when you came I could make you understand that. And when you didn’t come, I thought perhaps you did understand…. And then he…died. I
knew
you’d come then, full of…wrath. Fury. God, I feared that. But I sat here. The day of his funeral I sat and waited until the bus would have left, and then I called the Alliquippa to see if you had gone. They said you had. And then I felt safe. For the first time in ten years I felt safe. I knew you hated us, but I thought perhaps you hated us so much you were going to leave us alone to burn in our own hell. That you couldn’t be bothered banking fires. I felt safe. I’ve felt safe for almost ten more years, thinking you didn’t come because you didn’t want to.”