The Last Juror (25 page)

I went to Harry Rex and asked about the now legendary contract on Sam’s head. He described his client, Sergeant Durant, as a former Marine, an expert marksman with any number of weapons, a career cop, a hothead who was horribly embarrassed by Iris’s indiscretion, and who felt the only honorable way out was to kill her lover. He had thought about killing her, but didn’t want to go to prison. He felt safer killing a black kid. A Ford County jury would be more sympathetic.

“And he wants to do it himself,” Harry Rex explained. “That way he can save the five grand.”

He enjoyed delivering such dire news to me, but he did admit that he hadn’t seen his client in a year and a half, and he wasn’t sure if Mr. Durant hadn’t already remarried.

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T
hursday at noon we settled down at the table on the porch and thanked the Lord for the delicious meal we were about to receive. Esau was at work.

As the garden ripened in late summer, we had enjoyed many vegetarian lunches. Red and yellow tomatoes, cucumbers and onions in vinegar, butter beans, snap beans, peas, okra, squash, boiled potatoes, corn on the cob, and always hot corn bread. Now, as the air was cooler and the leaves were turning, Miss Callie was preparing heartier dishes—duck stew, lamb stew, chili, red beans and rice with pork sausage, and the old standby, pot roast.

The meal that day was chicken and dumplings. I was eating slowly, something she had encouraged me to do. I was half through when I said, “Sam called me, Miss Callie.”

She paused and swallowed, then said, “How is he?”

“He’s fine. He wants to come home this Christmas, said everybody else was coming back, and he wants to be here.”

“Do you know where he is?” she asked.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“He’s in Memphis. We’re supposed to meet tomorrow, up there.”

“Why are you meeting with Sam?” She seemed very suspicious of my involvement.

“He wants me to help him. Max and Bobby told him about our friendship. He said he thinks I’m a white person who can be trusted.”

“It could be dangerous,” she said.

“For who?”

“Both of you.”

Her doctor was concerned about her weight. At times she was too, but not always. With particularly heavy dishes, like stews and dumplings, she took small portions and ate slowly. The news of Sam gave her a reason to stop eating altogether. She folded her napkin and began talking.

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S
am left Clanton in the middle of the night on a Greyhound bus headed for Memphis. He called Callie and Esau when he arrived there. The next day a friend drove up with some money and clothing. As the story about Iris broke fast around town, Callie and Esau were convinced their youngest son was about to be murdered by the cops. Highway patrol cars eased by their house at all hours of the day and night. There were anonymous phone calls with threats and abusive language.

Mr. Kohn filed some papers in court. A hearing date
came and went without Sam’s appearance. Miss Callie never saw an official indictment, but then she wasn’t sure what one looked like.

Memphis seemed too close, so Sam drifted to Milwaukee where he hid with Bobby for a few months. For two years now, he had drifted from one sibling to the next, always traveling at night, always afraid that he was about to be caught. The older Ruffin children called home often and wrote once a week, but they were afraid to mention Sam. Someone might be listening.

“He was wrong to get involved with a woman like that,” Miss Callie said, sipping tea. I had effectively ruined her lunch, but not mine. “But he was so young. He didn’t chase her.”

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T
he next day I became the unofficial go-between for Sam Ruffin and his parents.

We met in a coffee shop in a shopping mall in south Memphis. From somewhere in the distance, he watched me wait for thirty minutes before he popped in from nowhere and sat across from me. Two years on the run had taught him a few tricks.

His youthful face was showing the strain of life on the lam. Out of habit, he continually looked right and left. He tried mightily to hold eye contact, but he could do it only for a few seconds. Not surprisingly, he was soft-spoken, articulate, very polite. And quite thankful that I had been willing to step forward and explore the possibility of helping him.

He thanked me for the courtesies and friendship I’d shown his mother. Bobby in Milwaukee had shown him the
Times
stories. We talked about his siblings, his movements from UCLA to Duke, then to Toledo, then to Grinnell in Iowa. He couldn’t live like that much longer. He was desperate for a resolution to the mess at home so he could get on with a normal life. He finished high school in Milwaukee, and planned eventually to go to law school. But he couldn’t do it living like a fugitive.

“There’s a fair amount of pressure on me, you know,” he said. “Seven brothers and sisters, seven PhD’s.”

I described my fruitless search for an indictment, my inquiries to Sheriff Coley, and my conversation with Harry Rex about Mr. Durant’s current mood. Sam thanked me profusely for this information, and for my willingness to get involved.

“There’s no threat of being arrested,” I assured him. “There is, however, the threat of catching a bullet.”

“I’d rather be arrested,” he said.

“Me too.”

“He’s a very scary man,” Sam said of Mr. Durant. A story followed, one in which I did not get all the details. Seems as though Iris was now living in Memphis. Sam kept in touch. She had told him some horrible things about her ex-husband and her two teenaged boys and the threats they’d made against her. She was not welcome anywhere in Ford County. Her life might be in
danger too. The boys repeatedly said they hated her and never wanted to see her again.

She was a broken woman who was racked with guilt and suffering a nervous breakdown.

“And it’s my fault,” Sam said. “I was raised better.”

Our meeting lasted an hour, and we promised to get together in a couple of weeks. He handed me two thick letters he’d written to his parents, and we said good-bye. He disappeared in a crowd of shoppers and I couldn’t help but ask myself where an eighteen-year-old kid hides? How does he travel, move around? How does he survive day to day? And Sam was not some street kid who’d learned to live by his wits and fists.

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I
told Harry Rex about our meeting in Memphis. My lofty goal was to somehow convince Mr. Durant to leave Sam alone.

Since I was living under the assumption that my name was on a not-so-favored list somewhere on Padgitt Island, I had no desire to have it added to another list. I swore Harry Rex to secrecy, and had no trouble believing he would protect my role as the intermediary.

Sam would agree to leave Ford County, to finish high school up North, then stay there for college and probably for the rest of his life. The kid simply wanted to be able to see his parents, to have short visits in Clanton, and to be able to live without looking over his shoulder.

Harry Rex didn’t care, nor did he want to get involved. He promised to relay the message to Mr. Durant, but he wasn’t optimistic it would get a sympathetic ear. “He’s a nasty sumbitch,” he said more than once.

CHAPTER 24

I
n early December, I returned to Tishomingo County for a follow-up with Sheriff Spinner. I was not surprised to learn that the investigation of the murder of Malcolm Vince had produced nothing new. More than once, Spinner described it as a “clean hit,” with nothing left behind but a dead body and two bullets that were virtually untraceable. His men had talked to every possible friend, acquaintance, and coworker, and found no one who knew of any reason why Malcolm would meet such a violent end.

Spinner had also talked to Sheriff Mackey Don Coley, and not surprisingly, our Sheriff had expressed doubt that the murder had anything to do with the Padgitt trial over in Ford County. It appeared as though the two sheriffs had some history, and I was relieved to hear Spinner say, “Ol’ Coley couldn’t catch a jaywalker on Main Street.”

I laughed real loud and added, helpfully, “Yeah, he and the Padgitts go way back.”

“I told him you’d been over, snoopin’ around. He said, ‘That boy’s gonna get hurt.’ Just thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Me and Coley see things differently.”

“Election’s a few months away.”

“Yes it is. I hear Coley’s got two or three opponents.”

“Just takes one.”

Again, he promised to call if something new developed, but both of us knew that was not going to happen. I left Iuka and drove to Memphis.

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T
rooper Durant had been quite pleased to learn that his threats were still hanging over the head of Sam Ruffin. Harry Rex had eventually delivered the word that the boy was still on the run but desperately wanted to come home and see his momma.

Durant had not remarried. He was very much alone and extremely bitter and embarrassed about his wife’s affair. He ranted at Harry Rex about how his life had been destroyed, and worse, how his two sons were subject to ridicule and abuse because of what their mother did. The white kids at school taunted them daily. The black kids, their new classmates at Clanton High, were smug and made wisecracks about it.

Both boys were expert marksmen and avid hunters, and the three Durants had vowed to put a bullet into
Sam Ruffin’s head if given the chance. They knew exactly where the Ruffins lived in Lowtown. Durant commented on the annual pilgrimage many blacks from the North made at Christmastime. “If that boy sneaks home, we’ll be waitin’,” he promised Harry Rex.

He also had some venom for me, and for my heartwarming stories about Miss Callie and her older children. He guessed correctly that I was the family’s contact with Sam.

“You’d better get your nose outta this mess,” Harry Rex warned me after his meeting with Durant. “This is a nasty character.”

I wasn’t anxious to have someone else dreaming of my painful death.

I met Sam at a truck stop near the state line, about a mile into Tennessee. Miss Callie had sent cakes and pies and letters and some cash, an entire cardboard box that filled the other seat in my little Spitfire. It was the first time in two years she had been able to touch him in any way. He tried to read one of her letters, but became emotional and put it back in the envelope. “I’m so homesick,” he said, wiping huge tears while at the same time trying to hide them from the truckers eating nearby. He was a lost, scared little boy.

With brutal honesty, I recounted the conversation with Harry Rex. Sam had naively thought his offer to stay away from Ford County but visit occasionally would be acceptable to Mr. Durant. He had little grasp of the hatred he had inspired. He did, however, seem to appreciate the danger.

“He’ll kill you, Sam,” I said gravely.

“And he’ll get by with it, won’t he?”

“What difference will that make to you? You’ll be just as dead. Miss Callie would rather have you alive up North than dead in the Clanton cemetery.”

We agreed to meet again in two weeks. He was doing his Christmas shopping, and he would have gifts for his parents and family.

We said good-bye and left the dining area. I was almost to my car when I decided to step back inside and use the men’s room. It was in the rear of a tacky gift shop next to the café. I glanced out a window and saw Sam, very suspiciously, jump into a car driven by a white woman. She looked to be older, early forties. Iris, I presumed. Some people never learn.

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T
he Ruffin clan began arriving three days before Christmas. Miss Callie had been cooking for a week. She sent me to the grocery store twice for emergency supplies. I was quickly adopted into the family and given full privileges, the highest of which was to eat whenever and whatever I wanted.

Growing up in that house, the children’s lives had been centered around their parents, each other, the Bible, and the kitchen table. And for the holidays there was always a fresh dish of something on the table, and another two or three on the stove or in the oven. The announcement “Pecan pies are ready!” sent shockwaves through the small house, across the porch, and even into
the street. The family gathered at the table where Esau rather quickly thanked the Lord yet again for his family and their health and for the food they were about to “partake;” then the pies would be cut into thick wedges, laid on saucers, and carried off in all directions.

The same ritual was followed for pumpkin pies, coconut pies, strawberry cakes, the list went on and on. And those were just the light little snacks that carried them from one major meal to the next.

Unlike their mother, the Ruffin children were not the slightest bit heavy. And I soon learned why. They complained that they were unable to eat like this anymore. The food where they lived was bland and much of it was frozen and mass-produced. There were a lot of ethnic foods they simply could not digest. And the people ate in a hurry. The list of complaints grew.

My hunch was that they had been so spoiled by Miss Callie’s cooking that nothing would ever measure up.

Carlota, who was single and taught urban studies at UCLA, was especially entertaining when telling stories of the latest wacky food trends sweeping California. Raw foods were the current rage—lunch was a plate of raw carrots and raw celery, all to be choked down with a small cup of hot herbal tea.

Gloria, who taught Italian at Duke, was considered the luckiest of the seven because she was still in the South. She and Miss Callie compared notes on the different recipes for things such as corn bread, Brunswick stew, and even collard greens. These discussions often
turned serious, with the men offering opinions and observations, and more than one argument erupted.

After a three hour lunch, Leon (Leonardo), who taught biology at Purdue, asked me to go for a ride. He was the second oldest, and carried a slight academic air that the others had managed to avoid. He had a beard, smoked a pipe, wore a tweed blazer with worn arm patches, and used a vocabulary that he must’ve spent hours practicing.