Time's Witness (47 page)

But listening to him now, I realized it had been a long while since I’d sat in his crammed, messy rooms and “talked.” I’d grown up and gotten too busy for long conversations with Isaac Rosethorn. And thinking about this, I realized that back when I was a boy (when this congestion of law briefs, bird's nests, stamps, pottery shards, chess sets, and mounted insects had all glittered in my eyes like Aladdin's cave), that back then, this man had never once said he didn’t have time for me. He was never too busy to say, “Let's
order in some Chinese food”—when both the notion of “ordering in” and the strange food itself were irresistibly exotic to me—“and you and I’ll sit and have us a discussion, Slim.”

I looked over at him lying on the bed now, fat, rumpled, holes in his socks, his old plaid bathrobe bunched around his worn baggy trousers. His face was
old.
Not just the jowls, the pouches under the sad spaniel eyes, but really
old.
When had it gotten that way? Had he always had those discolored spots on his cheeks and hands? Had his hair been that white when I met him? I couldn’t even remember.

On the day I graduated from Hillston High School, three large crates arrived UPS at our duplex in East Hillston. They were from Isaac, and they were filled with books. Four hundred and thirty-eight books, on all kinds of subjects that he’d picked out himself and that I was sure he’d already read himself. The card that came with them was scrawled in his large, tilted upward script.

Cuddy. Congratulations. Being valedictorian, you already know, I bet, that the word
educate
means “to lead out.” Here in these cartons are a few scouts for the trip. Let it be a long, happy one. Keep going, keep going, beyond the hills. There are no edges where the world ends. Keep going, and you’ll come back home a man who can then lead others out a few steps further from the night.

Your friend, Isaac Rosethorn.

I wonder if he believes I’ve become that man. I know he's proud of the work I’ve gotten so busy at that I never noticed when his hair turned white. I know that had he not been in my life, I might never have traveled into any hills at all, much less beyond them.

Sitting back down in the pockmarked armchair, I said, “Hey, Isaac. I am hungry. How about we call Buddha's Garden? Shrimp with lobster sauce? And some cashew chicken, a quart of won ton, and spareribs?”

“I thought you had to go.”

“What's the point of being chief if you can’t decide you don’t have to show up?”

“And egg rolls,” he smiled. “Call it in. Nine six five, two two one one.”

I called it in. Then I said, “Well, Isaac, look at it the other way. We did get rid of ‘separate but equal.’ We do keep hedging the law in
toward
fairness, don’t we?”

Isaac grinned happily. “
Ah!
Now he lectures
me
with wisdom I had to prize into his calcified skull with the wedge of bribery. An Almond Joy here. An illicit sip of beer there.” He began patting aimlessly around the pillows and on the bedside table. I tossed him the pack of Chesterfields I spotted under the long, littered desk. As he searched for an unbroken cigarette, he said, “Yes. We hedge law in. But the hedges don’t always last. Like the one stopping the death penalty. Because it's people that plant hedges, and people that rip them out.” He squirmed around, patting some more, and I found a matchbook and threw that at him too. Smoke blew to the ceiling, ashes floated onto his chest. “I
know
Bazemore's going to wave that ‘malice aforethought, appreciable time’ flag in the jury's face. If George had to do it, I just wish to hell he’d shot Pym the second he grabbed the gun out of his hand.” Isaac wiggled himself slowly off the bed, and shuffled toward his desk. “Now where's that damn pad!” Watching him riffle through papers on his heaped desk, I noticed a little tremor in his hands I hadn’t seen before. “Shirley Hilliardson on the bench. Interesting. Ah! No, that's not it. All right, here we are.” Holding the legal pad, he started patting his pockets.

I picked up his bifocals beside the telephone, handed them to him, and he ran his plump finger down the page. “Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. Okay. This is Hilliardson: ‘From the use of a deadly weapon, the law presumes malice but
not premeditation.
Premeditation and deliberation are questions of
fact
, not law.’ Okay. Blah-blah-blah-blah. ‘It is
the duty not of the judge, but of the jury
alone to determine whether the homicide was of the first or second degree.
’” The old lawyer pushed his glasses down his nose, and
frowned at me. “Say, God help me, I don’t get the acquittal, and we go to the sentencing phase. Well, I’m going to hand Shirley Hilliardson his own instructions, and he's going to tell my jury, they don’t
have
to send George to the gas chamber.”

“They don’t have to. But they can if they want to. Can you stop them from wanting to?”

Isaac looked at the blackboard on which he's already scrawled circles around the names of the twelve chosen jurors. “I just have to make
one
of them not want to, not want to so absolutely that no amount of bullying or pleading by the others can change his mind…or her mind. I think I can.”

I sat forward in the chair. “Isaac, tell me. Was George involved in the smuggling?”

The old man stared at me thoughtfully. “He knew about the smuggling, yes. He knew Pym and Russell, yes.”

“Why didn’t he testify about it? Will you tell me?”

“All right.” His wide spottled hand rubbed across his face. “Now I will. George kept quiet because he believed he was protecting his family. Your former colleague Winston Russell had gotten to George pretty quickly after the shooting and convinced him—I think we can imagine how convincing Mr. Russell could be—that if George let any word get out about what they’d been up to, that it’d just make things worse for him at the trial.” Isaac limped over to his window, and looked down at Hillston. “Maybe it would have. But more important—and, believe me, it was stressed again and again to George at the time of the trial, and by messages given him on death row when Russell was in Dollard—more important was, if George didn’t keep absolutely silent, Russell vowed he’d kill someone in his family. George's mother, his kid brother Cooper, his sister. That's why.”

I stood up. “Awh, Jesus Christ. And George went along with that?!”

Isaac's long sigh lifted his hands across the old bathrobe. “As we discovered, George was quite right to believe it wasn’t an idle threat. God help us.” He turned back to me. “The point is that he believed the threat, and he faithfully, I’d say, frankly, he
nobly
kept his part of the bargain. And even after Cooper involved himself actively in the case and brought me into it, George refused to talk to me, or to Cooper, about anything to do with the Pym shooting. The night before he was scheduled to die, he didn’t talk! I didn’t find this out until I got back from Delaware. George started asking to see me after Cooper was killed.”

“You believe all this?”

“I believe he was willing to die to protect his family. I believe he shot Pym to protect himself.” He looked at the names on the black-board. “All I need is for the jury to believe it too.”

It was midnight before I left the Piedmont Hotel. Isaac didn’t spend the whole evening discussing the trial, just most of the evening. But he also talked about Captain John Smith's changing views on Powatan Indians, about the current situation in the Middle East, about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the life span of the male silk moth (six days, all of which time it spends looking for mates—doesn’t ever even stop to eat a single meal).

Maybe it was the
carpe diem
determination of the silk moth that led him suddenly to ask, as we poked with chopsticks for the last bits of shrimp and pea pods clinging to the sides of the white cartons, if he could “ask a personal question.” I said, “Sure.”

Leaning back in his old leather reading chair, he rubbed his paper napkin around his mouth. “When are you going to get married, Cuddy?”

“When are
you
? I’ve already been married once. I’ve already tried to get married a second time; the engagement ring's still in the drawer with my socks. It's your turn.”

“I’m in the grave to my knees, whom should I marry? But you, you’ve got the bulk of your life left, God willing. You want to spend it with an empty bed, a lonely breakfast, and a wall of books? You want to end up like me?” He waved his arms around the musty room. It was a good argument.

I gave him a chance at the last sparerib, but he passed on it. “Whom should
I
marry, Isaac? There's Miss Bee, but I know for a fact she's been in love with you for forty years. Got any other candidates?”

He brushed egg roll crumbs off his robe as he leaned over to me, his deep brown eyes warm and bright as dark candles. “Yes. I do.” “Who?”

“Nora Howard”

“Aww, Lord.” I stood up, broad-stepped a stack of law journals and headed for the kitchen. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

“You had a feeling for a reason,” he shouted after me.

“Yeah? Listen, I don’t even know Nora, and she doesn’t know me.”

“After all these months how can you—”

“Furthermore, she doesn’t even much
like
me.”

“Not true!”

I came back with a trash can and began dumping the food cartons in it. “Oh really? She tell you otherwise?…Listen, just because I don’t blab out my private life to you, doesn’t mean I don’t have one.”

“Wait! Don’t throw away that egg roll.”

“Right, let's drop it here under the chair to rot.”

“What are you getting so angry about, Slim?…Tell me about this private life. Are you marrying somebody else?”

“Jesus, Isaac. No, I’m not marrying ‘somebody else.’” I shoved the unused little packages of cookies and tea bags down on top of the cartons.

“Why not?”

I don’t know what made me blurt out the truth, but I did. “Because she's already married, okay? Okay?!”

“Ahh.” He relit a half-smoked cigarette, and stared at me awhile. “I’m sorry.”

“Right.” Grabbing the bottle of ale, I flung myself back in the old chair.

Isaac shifted his glance to the window behind me. “And I imagine she feels it would not be…possible for her to leave her husband…under the circumstances.”

I glared at him. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, I’m very sorry, Slim. I wish you were happy.”

Had he seen me with Lee? Yes, okay, a couple of times, but only at things like the reception after Coop's memorial service. Had somebody been talking about us? Maybe he knew Edwina Sunderland. Maybe Nora had seen Lee on one of the (very infrequent) occasions she’d come to my apartment. Or, maybe he hadn’t meant anything at all by “under the circumstances.” We both sat with our thoughts awhile, but he could always outlast me. Finally I said, “It's a very complicated—and delicate—situation. If someone's said something to you, I wish you’d let me know.”

His sigh sounded like an old lion's. “I’ve known you since you were nine. It was this very room you sat in, eighteen years old, biting your mouth raw so you wouldn’t cry, the first time you let your heart get broken.
Over the same damn thing.
”

“Okay, okay.”

“So don’t you ask me ‘if someone's said something to you.’ Do I need to be
told
who you are, after all these years? Because, God help you, you apparently have not altered one iota
.
She won’t leave Brookside, don’t you know that?”

“It's none of your business!”

“Well, well, you’re right. Ah, who knows. Certainly not an old shriveled celibate like me. So I’ll trust Juvenal: ‘Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.’ If that's how you feel, Slim, that's how you feel.” He pulled himself out of his chair, limped over, and patted me on the knee. “Now ask
me
a personal question. Come on.”

I smiled up at him. “How old are you?”

“That's it? That's not an interesting question. I’m sixty-eight, or -six, or something. That's not personal.”

And it wasn’t the question I’d planned to ask. I was finally going to ask Isaac what had ever happened between him and Edith Keene. But I decided I didn’t have the heart to hear the answer.

On my way out of the municipal building the next afternoon, I cracked open the court doors to check on the trial. Mitchell Bazemore was sermonizing his way through his opening statement. Stroking his Phi Beta Kappa talisman, he paced the jury box like a preacher too fervent to stand still behind his pulpit. “The burden of proof is on the
State
, ladies and gentlemen, and in the name of our good state, I am
proud
to accept that burden. I honor that burden, because our Forefathers placed it upon me to
protect the innocent.
Unless the State establishes by an unbreakable chain of hard factual links,
every
charge we’ve brought against the defendant George Hall, we have not
proven
him guilty, and you are required to find him innocent. And that is one of the precious glories of the American system, and I cherish it as much as I’m sure you all do.

“But if we
do
establish the charges beyond a
reasonable
doubt— and, now, that doesn’t mean beyond
any
doubt, or a
possible
doubt, but a
reasonable
doubt—then we
have
proved George Hall guilty. And
then
your duty—your duty to the victim, to the victim's family, your duty to the great society in which we all live; your duty to the
State
…” (Mitch pointed at the flag and the seal now, just like he
always did.) “Because, members of the jury, you
are
the State—your duty is to find George Hall guilty as charged of murder in the first degree.”