The Watchman (30 page)

By the corner of Seventh and April streets he moved past the courthouse, under the shadow-tattered canopy of low-boughed maples and sycamores, beneath which, set back in the mists some twelve feet from the curb and flanked by twin, outmoded cannons whose deep, rifled throats, through sixty years of civic insensibility to the splendors of some old war with Spain, were stuffed nearly to the muzzles with pop bottles, newspapers and cigar wrappers, rose a massive square of polished granite, chiseled with names. Atop this stone extravaganza stood a ten-foot high bronze effigy of a bareheaded doughboy of the First World War. Slung from one shoulder hung the warrior's Springfield rifle whose fixed bayonet thrust upward with careless belligerence among the neutral boughs of high, old courtyard trees. The weathered, sculpted metal of the childishly youthful face was tossed back in a bared grimace which its artist may have meant to express victory's joy, spiritual sorrow, physical pain or combat-induced insanity. In the young soldier's forearms lay the draped, dead figure of a young girl. Through forty years some Mound Countians had found this feature of the monument even more cryptic than the expression on the soldier's face. Some thought the figure of the dead girl represented Edith Cavell, nurse, shot as a spy by the Hun firing squad in Belgium; others called it symbol of all the young American war-dead, one Adena minister of radical-leaning and shortlived rectorate likened it to the intimidated, betrayed and finally extinguished mind of Woodrow Wilson. In the final sermon of his brief tenure this minister revised his interpretation to an even more shocking one. He had said the bronze warrior on the quiet courtyard corner marched homeward everlastingly bearing in his arms the mutilated and self-slain soul of himself. And he had said the smile on the bronze face was not a smile at all but the guUt-maddened rictus of

total human cruelty. This minister left Adena on the earliest Monday train. For he was, of course—as were all the other guessers—entirely mistaken.

The figure of the doughboy was posed for by the recently and gloriously returned Private Will Hunnicutt and the girl in his arms, draped in the veils of her neo-classic dance fad was his sweetheart, young Jo Clay. Five hundred dollars of the memorial's cost were pennies donated from the lunch-moneys and twenty-five-cent weekly allowances of Mound County schoolchildren while the balance of the expense of ten thousand dollars was made up from the pocket of Will Hunnicutt himself who had made his fortune in Pittsburgh steel. The monument was universally referred to as the Memorial to Mound County's War Dead. Those old enough to remember who its models had been were respectful enough to forget that there had been models at all. The solitary exception to this public mood of patriotic amnesia was Colonel Bruce who frequently and publicly addressed the statue as "The Tomb of the Weil-Known Soldier."

Luther passes beyond it now. The Ughts of the courthouse, its windows all ablaze from the riot of the night, caused the figure of the bronze boy and his girl to cast a long shadow of accurate, echoic definition across the ghstening bricks. But now the crowd moves across it, obliterating these momentary simiUtudes of shadow and substance.

Where's he a-taking her? whispers a voice.

Dog if I know, answers a tree's shadow softly.

Up to Peace's Parlors? asks the dark.

Not hardly, says a mouth in the mists. He's sure takin' the long way round if he is. Peace would be thataway. He's walking thisaway. On up Seventh.

Toward the Mound? asks the shuffling whisper of two shoes.

Toward the Mound, says the dark.

And each of them raised his eyes, troubled and edgy now, toward the looming shape of that vast, dark preeminence: the mists which now veiled it were luminous with a grayish-yellow radiance from the lamp posts round the base of the great and prehistoric grave. Some in the procession whispered disparaging excuses and fell away from the crowd, waiting behind to watch, while letting the others go on to a gamble with menaces which none would admit. Perhaps none before that night had ever clearly seen their Mound before: surely no light of day had ever shown it to them so plain as

now it loomed against that night sky's huge and hazy frieze. Luther moved on, without pause. And yet, it seemed that, beneath the Mound's great shadow, those behind him slowed, flinched, an instant of scarcely perceptible hesitation, before they quickened and hurried it behind their vision. But Luther was not carrying his dead ones to that Mound. Their common sigh: a vast and relieved expiration might have been only the wind. But there was no wind. The naked lights of the state prison blazed ahead.

The pen, ran the whisper through the streets. The pen. The pen.

And at the sight of that giant, black Gothic shape before them each was warmed by senses of safety and comfort. The blackened granite of walls stretched for five town blocks: almost as far as a man could see into the mists on either side. The prison: the shape of childhood's castle: turreted and, to those outside it, grim and frightening only in the make-believe of scalp-prickling, nursery legend; the cardboard castle of evil-ogres resting on the playroom floor and always hovering below whatever frightening fancies it might make, the strong authority of parents just downstairs. No, nothing ever quite believable about the place when seen out there, outside. Fortress of phantoms and mound of fantasy: castle of ogres. But no sane man out there is scared by tales. No Christian man out there will ever be shut up in those quite unbelievable interiors. As well imagine being closed up in a toy. Even now in close perspective nothing uneasy in that prospect; something, quite the contrary, of warming safety, comfort, solace, even of a pleasurable detachment. And all of that great, spreading bleakness: the turreted castle in which a child snaps shut the drawbridge and locks in tight his faceless toy legions of scuffed and villainous men of lead: the box to latch up all the yeamed-to-do and undone deeds of punishable naughtiness. And as Luther Alt bears his soft and broken package to the wheel-gate the footfalls shuffle whispering in his wake and in the shifting, shifty hiss of shoes behind him an echo of the old and great forgotten child in each heart speaks.

By God, they're openin' the wheel-gate for him, cries a voice soft as a breaking leaf in the darkness.

He's a-takin' her into the pen, comes another voice wisping. He's gone. Yes, gone. Clean out of his mind, I reckon.

It's a justice, still, says another in the mists. Yes, a jus-

tice. He's carrying her dead to the place where we'd have carried her alive to die!

The guards at the wheel-gate stare, falter, stiffen; they lift the oiled, long barrels of pump-guns toward Luther and the mob.

What's this? What the hell is all this? one growls.

Let him in, says a voice from the faces behind the big, quiet man with the faded gaiety of the rug wrapped round his lightly rounded burden.

The pump-guns steady, yet something unsteadies them: faces of prominence, of law, of eminence, of wealth in all that sprawling sea of masks; it was not a mob to open fire on with impunity.

What's he want inside for? What the hell's he got in that bag there? drones the voice, not certain now, not pump-gun cocky now.

It don't matter, let him in.

The pump-guns falter. A man may not fire magnum slugs into the bodies of preachers, lawyers, deputies, doctors: for an instant, each guard dreadfully envisions himself in aftermath of such brute rashness: the guarded now and not the guard: the man in the chair and not the man who puts him there. Yes, step aside: ask afterwards, says the guard. And something of a strange, primordial mood drifts in upon him from the mob, the fog, the mound. Some dark and ancient rite is being done. And who of them who once has seen the green room and the galleried faces of its pews upon those gala nights of executions does not sense and grasp, with creature-quickness, the spell and gallantry of dark and ancient rite?

The long guns fall away. Above the high stone portico, visible even now in those mists, the chiseled motto of the state bitten into the smoky stone of the arch: Mountaineers Are Always Free. Some men have laughed at that: even manacled men who have moved beneath its leering irony, never to glimpse it again except in quaking, fitful, simpering death-row dreams. Like an enormous iron carousel of chilled-steel bars the cogged, cage turnstile of the wheel-gate groans and goes slowly turning on its huge, oiled drum. The guards look at Luther's face; some turn away, disturbed: they have known him, some have respected him. Now something in the news of him tonight, something at this moment in his face awes and frightens them. Deputy Tzchak and Prison Chaplain Godd are permitted inside with him. The wheel-gate

begins its slow orbit again, barring off the crowds. Now the guards move down the steps into their midst, pump-guns raised, angrier now than before at the mob for something they have remembered in the face of Luther Alt. The crowd falls back. It waits. It will stay there till fresh news comes whispering out. Crowds have always waited outside prisons for the grass-fire news of things inside to come whispering out.

Slowly Luther walks up the echoing corridor, his boots ringing now as steady as ever they rang in the still, safe nights when men and women of Adena in their beds, hstening, felt the comfort of that sentried pace along the mist-swathed bricks of lonely streets' vigilance. Tzchak and the minister hurry along behind. And in the darkened hallways between cell blocks men lift their anonymous and faceless faces to the bars and watch the three in silence. Reverend Doctor Godd goes sobbing now, almost falling, reaching out to grab Luther's sleeve, still gasping at him in those begging whispers.

Listen to me, Sheriff. Oh, my brother, if only you'd let me help you in this hour of travail. If only you'd talk to me, cried the minister softly.

Tell you such as what? smirked Tzchak. Well, did I ever reckon I'd live to see the night when a preacher of the gospel would ask for answers to anything from a broken-down lawman?

The minister reached Luther's sleeve, seized it weakly, tried to pull him round. It was as if he were obsessed with the certainty that Luther, in this moment of that terrible night, possessed, perhaps only for an instant, the clue to both and all aspects of man's Janus face; perhaps that, in a blinding flash of sight-bestowing revelation Luther had leaned over the brink of tragedy and seen cruelty's face plain and now, in wonder, his tongue was suddenly gifted to the simple phrase which would be key to crime, to punishment, to atonement. And yet in every falter and rickety gesture of the minister's graceless, palsied pursuit it seemed, as well, that he dreaded to possess the very truth he chased, and would faint and wither in the knowing of its knowledge. The faces without faces clutched in their cages, witnessing; the guards looked at Luther, lowered their eyes, let down their guns, moved aside. They had known him, respected him, had felt his strength on nights when other men must die. Now tonight they felt him, troublingly, stronger in the very moment of his weakness.

Sheriff, in Christ's name wait, sobbed Doctor Robert Godd. I've got to talk to you.

But Luther seemed to know of the existence of nothing beyond the bloodstained blanket-bundle in his arms. Behind his steady, ringing boots came cocky Tzchak and the stumbling minister. Far ahead of them at the end of the corridor, in the faint illumination of a single light bulb, two guards stood on either side of the small green door. In the deadfall of that light the little door stood out bright as spring against the chalk-white concrete. At the sight of it the minister, who had gone that route and seen that door so many times before, stumbled and fell to his hands and knees. It was the deputy who helped the Reverend Doctor Godd back to his tottering legs again, crutching him under the armpits, easing him along.

Courage, my son, courage, Tzchak whispered softly, smiling, into the chaplain's ear. You must be brave in these last moments, my son.

Luther blinked up at the light, then looked down to first one and then the other of the guards' faces.

Let me by, he mumbled.

The men looked away from his face, the tough leathered passivity of their masks was troubled and unsteadied.

Sheriff, you don't want in there, said one of them softly. Luther, you're all upset tonight. Go on home now.

Let me by, he said again.

Sheriff, what's the sense? said the other. Ain't nobody scheduled to go down tonight.

Let me by, Luther sighed, bowing his head, closing his eyes, holding the bundle a little closer as if it were something preciously alive that he felt stir in fright and which now he must reassure and comfort with awkward pats of his giant fingers.

Unlock it, Jonse, whispered the first man. Can't do no harm. Keep him in there, if you can, whilst I go fetch Snedeker.

The other man looked at Luther a moment, then fetched up his big ring of heavy keys, fumbled among them for the large, bright brass one to the green door's lock, unshot the massive bolt, pressed the door open, stepped aside.

No, not you two, he said to Tzchak and the preacher.

Tzchak shrugged and turned away but, when the minister tried to push past, the guard thrust out his arm and held him back.

But I've got to be with him! implored the preacher. There's something I've got to tell him.

Preacher, let Luther Alt alone, said the guard.

But there's something I've got to tell him! cried the Preacher.

Preacher, tell it to me, smiled the guard, blocking the way and pulling the green door closed behind him. There's no man alive in Mound County can tell Luther Alt much he don't know in there already. So tell it to me, Preacher. Can't never tell I might need to hear it now so's I can remember it someday. Maybe a night sometime when I might be alone in there like him.

Let me by, guard! cried the Reverend Doctor G. Robert Godd. I'm chaplain of this penitentiary. You've got no right to keep me away from a desperate man who needs me.

He don't need you. Preacher, said the guard softly. Jonse, run fetch Snedeker. This poor parson needs a doctor worse than Luther Alt.