The Scribe (15 page)

“Vernon had no choice. They finally managed to run off the Reconstruction appointees in '77 when the new constitution was ratified. I was lucky to have stayed on that long.”

“Who are
they
, Mister Canby?”

“The Ring.”

“The Ring again! Would that we all had a nebulous Ring on which to pin our misfortunes and moral failures!” Denton dropped the file on the prosecutor's table. “Your Honor, I believe I can indeed expedite this process. Mister Canby, in short, you are a disgrace to the men of Atlanta's police force.”

Denton moved up close to the witness stand, leaning toward Canby. He was close enough that Canby could smell the brilliantine in his slicked-back hair.

“Whatever I am, Greenberg is not your killer.”

“Even further you descend! Based on your highly circumspect expertise and this sullied record of prior employment with the city, you advocate on behalf of this man. You would vouch for a child of the slums of Europe, risen to some prominence of late, yes, but no Atlantan. Hardly even an American.”

Canby looked out over the courtroom, wishing sorely he could steal a sip of whiskey from the flask in his breast pocket. Henry Grady sat in the front row with an open notepad propped on the knee of his crossed legs, pressing the point of a pencil to his damp lower lip. In the back, Billingsley still stood among the others, his eyes hawklike with scrutiny. Canby
looked over to Greenberg, slumped wretched-looking in his chair behind the defendant's table. Canby struggled to swallow before he spoke.

“
Mauther
is not the word the murderer intended.”

“Is it not? By your demonstrably deficient methods of deduction, what word would you have put forward as this madman's message?”

“I do not know.”

Denton nodded curtly, cocking one eyebrow. “No idea?”

“Not
mauther
, certainly. That much I'm certain of.” Canby heard a murmur beginning among the spectators. Again, he swallowed with effort. “Because I carved the
U
. Originally it was an
L.
” With his finger stretched out in front of him, Canby described the gesture in the air.

Later Canby would not be able to recall the exact sequence of events as he registered them from his vantage on the witness stand—whether first he saw Vernon's head drooping toward his chest or noted the declamatory outrage of Denton's turning toward the jury box or Underwood starting from his chair in the colored section and straining to be heard over the burst of noise from the gallery or the nearly athletic fervor with which Grady began to scribble notes on his pad. Or the sad resignation he thought he saw in Billingsley's eyes, or Greenberg's face falling into the palms of his rising hands.

“Your Honor,” Denton cried, with a sigh audible over the tumult and a gesture toward Canby of inexpressible disdain, “the prosecution rests.”

Canby hung his head, thinking how sorely he wished that the rest were indeed silence. No such merciful oblivion for him.
Though he shut his eyes he could not shut out the roar of the spectators' outbursts and the hammering of the judge's gavel on the sounding block, quickening, but sure as the sounding of a knell. The whole of this din filling his ears, the announcement of and accompaniment to his utter and final disgrace.

October 23

C
ANBY SAT ALONE AT A BACK BOOTH OF
L
OVEJOY
'
S
Saloon with the
Constitution
spread out before him and the nearly empty bottle of Jameson at his elbow, his tattered copy of Emerson's
Essays
beside it. Here at Lovejoy's for a second night because the Big Bonanza was now strictly off-limits and the Shamrock, over on Pryor, had proven to be another old haunt too full of ghosts. Killing time. He was reading with half-drunk bemusement the latest installment of a series called “Negro Atlanta” by an ambitious young reporter named M. C. McMillin, who had announced that he planned to tour as much of black Atlanta as he could discover. Canby took a swallow of whiskey as he read.

“Few people in Atlanta ever stop to consider how the colored people of the city live. We see them every day; they are about us and work for us, and at night go to their homes; but what these homes are and where they are, and the little picture that each hearthstone presents, we never think of,” this McMillin reported, indulging in what Angus Canby would
have called a too-pronounced fondness for the semicolon. “But by far the largest proportion of Negroes are never really known to us; they drift off to themselves, and are almost as far from the white people, as if the two races never met.”

The story ended with a list of sites the reporter planned to explore in the following weeks: Pig Alley, the Anthole, Beaver Slide, Hell's Half Acre, Snake Nation. All of them regular stops on the police beat. Places that Canby remembered well as highly inhospitable to the likes of M. C. McMillin. He wondered how the young man's zeal would fare in those most sullen and volatile corners of the city.

He closed the newspaper and looked once more at its front page. This special afternoon edition of the
Constitution
that had run, for the first time in its short history, a double-bill feature of “Atlanta and Her Enemies” at the bottom of page one. Canby studied his likeness sketched in newsprint next to Greenberg's, whose Semitic features had been sharpened and darkened, some shadings of charcoal, perhaps, employed to heighten the shadows of his face, giving it a sinister aspect. Canby himself looked the worse for the portraiture: nose a bit bulbous, bags beneath his eyes.

And above the crease, “GUILTY” spread over all four columns in outsized letters. He scanned the article again. The jury had, at least by appearances, deliberated overnight before reaching its verdict. But it was the
Constitution
's presses that had really delivered the verdict, and would deliver the sentence as well, Canby thought. Greenberg's defense had filed an appeal immediately, the article said. Word of mob justice for Greenberg had been circulating among the lower classes
of whites. For his safety Greenberg was being kept in Fulton Tower instead of the city jail, moved now to the infamous cell for the condemned that the guards called Spot 12, in the front of the tower, near the door and the watch desk. There he would be under the supervision of two guards at all times save the third shift, when the guards retired for the night and the jailer took the wee hours alone, “save for the company of Mary Flanagan's murderer, kept under lock and key but scarce a half-dozen strides away.”

Canby folded the paper and looked out over the saloon. Nearly all of the patrons had gone. Even Joel Chandler Harris had left at some point without Canby's noticing. There'd been an awkward moment between them when Canby came in: Harris looking up from his notebook to give Canby a short nod, then back to his work. No reporting at this hour, in Lovejoy's, Canby figured. Most likely more Remus tales of Brer Rabbit or Brer Fox. Harris mixing his pleasure and business these days, with seven mouths to feed at home, maybe eight now. It had not been Harris's byline under the stories about Canby and Greenberg. Canby pushed the paper across the tabletop, away from him.

A black boy of grammar school age was wiping down the empty tables and booths. Lovejoy was behind the bar rinsing glasses in the zinc.

“What time have you got, E.B.?” Canby asked.

“Closing time, Thomas.”

“That's not a proper time, E.B.”

“Proper time is ‘late.'”

Canby refilled his glass and pressed the cork into the bottle
with the heel of his hand. He sipped the whiskey and watched the black boy as he worked his way toward this last booth.

“You can take those,” Canby said when the boy finally got to him. He nodded at the newspaper and the bottle of Jameson. The boy rolled the paper and stuck it in his back pocket. He put the bottle on the bench across from Canby and began cleaning the table. Canby set his glass on the book of Emerson and moved both out of the reach of the boy's dishcloth, pressed against the pine beadboard that lined Lovejoy's walls.

“It's a weeknight.”

“Yessir,” the boy said, dragging the wet cloth in circles over the table.

“That means school tomorrow.”

The boy looked up, a trace of a smile in his eyes. Canby imagined he was used to the drunks funning him and that he wanted to let him know he was in on the joke.

“I'm not kidding. School. Tomorrow.”

“Yessir.” The eyes dropped back to the table and the cloth resumed its circuit.

Canby reached into his jacket for his wallet, fat now with what Vernon had diplomatically called his ‘muster pay,' and took out a dollar.

“Make you a deal. I give you this, you go to school in the morning.”

After a moment's consideration the boy nodded and Canby gave him the bill.

“How far is home for you?”

“Nine blocks out to Shermantown, sir.”

“Be careful getting there. You shouldn't stop to talk to anyone.”

“Yessir.”

“I'm serious, now.”

“Yessir.” The boy folded the dollar up. He took off his left shoe and stuffed the bill into its toe, then put the shoe back on and carried the bottle behind the bar.

Canby picked up his glass and the battered
Essays
and rose. He took a pull from the glass, then another, longer one, and set it on the bar as he said good night to E.B. Lovejoy.

Outside he stood under Lovejoy's shingle and weighed his options for a moment before he admitted to himself that he had none, other than to spend another night sheltering at Vernon's. He set out down Peachtree Street toward Butler. The hour was nearing midnight now but the streetlights were still lit, gaslight glowing for the safety of those travelers who continued to arrive in the city at all hours for the Cotton Exposition. He looked up in the night sky for some constellation but the city's light was too bright to see past it. He supposed that boded well for Lovejoy's boy on his way home, though he knew the gas grid had never extended out as far as Shermantown, likely never would.

He marveled at the rarity of being the only pedestrian on Peachtree. Late indeed, he thought. The wee hours. The late wee hours. He knew he'd had too much to drink. Was that the word the
Constitution
reporter had used,
wee
?

He stopped and looked around him at the stores shuttered for the night on the other side of Peachtree, the three-storied white mass of First Methodist South behind him, its slate
steeple reaching up past the light of the lamps. Wee hours, the story had said. And the reporter had pointed out that the jailer took the last shift alone.

Then he was moving again, heading southward now to Porter Street, his footfalls sounding off the macadam of Peachtree as he stepped up his pace toward Butler and then Fair Street, toward the tower.

Midway there he heard the clatter of wagon wheels on the pavement and then he was running, cutting across a short block of Butler Street toward the lighted hansom racing up Hunter, shouting to hail it.

T
HERE HAD BEEN
no torchlight to herald their coming. No snorting of horses; no creaking of wagon wheels. Not even the sound of the jail door's lock being jimmied. As the jailer told it, there was only the settling of a noose around his neck by hands unseen, the swift draping of a pillowcase over his head by figures behind him and out of sight. He was lashed to the bars of Spot 12 himself while Greenberg groaned inside the cage and they worked their way through the jailer's pilfered key chain. They talked of Buckhead, the jailer said, where most of Mary Flanagan's kin still were. And of the big oak out front of Henry Irby's store, there at the crossroads.

So Vernon told it after nearly running Canby down in the middle of Fair Street with the police hansom. Vernon had been whipping the reins across the horses' necks, speeding them northward to the rail yard and the Western & Atlantic depot, when a dark figure had stepped into the middle of
the street waving his arms. Vernon said he'd had half a mind to mow down the fool, another drunk peckerwood the likes of which he was trying to intercept. But he had recognized Canby at the last moment and slowed the hansom just enough for Canby to jump into it. And now, pulling into the rail yard, he said that their likeliest chance of beating the mob to the tree in Buckhead was the W&A's Number Nine Line. How much time had elapsed before the jailer had worked loose the knots and sent for Vernon was anyone's guess. Right now their best hope was speed.

“Likely the bastard was asleep,” Canby said, climbing up behind Vernon into the smoking locomotive.

“Likely. But he also was scared. He'd soiled himself. That was quite evident.” Vernon leaned from the locomotive cab, half his body out of the engine and in the night air, hanging by the handrail, adroit as a yard hand himself. “Ho, there! Got those cars uncoupled?”