Time's Witness (52 page)

He walked over to a yellowed philodendron plant in a plastic pot on top of a metal shelf. “Because he figured I’d talked, and that's how I got my reprieve.”

“I don’t think so. I think it had to do with what Cooper was finding out, and the importance of the people he was finding it out about. I think Winston was
told
to get rid of Cooper.”

Gently pulling off dead leaves one by one, he said, “You’re testifying for the prosecutor tomorrow.”

“Not for the prosecutor. As a policeman at the scene. Is that it? You won’t help me because I might pass on information to the D.A. that would affect your defense?”

“I got nothing that’ll help you.”

“I think you have a lot.”

He slowly turned the pot, separating out a dried vine. “Like what?”

I said, “I want to know how much Russell, Pym, and the rest were smuggling not just stuff like cigarettes and videotapes, but guns. How a group like the Carolina Patriots was involved. If Otis Newsome, or anybody else in the Constitution Club, was involved, and how.”

“I don’t know a Constitution Club.…Look, I gave my promise to Isaac I wouldn’t talk to people ’bout anything ’less he was here.”

One thing was certain; if George Hall said he wouldn’t talk, then he wouldn’t. He had already been within twenty-four hours of the gas chamber, already been given the new shirt and trousers to wear to his execution, already been moved to the special last-night
cell with its bare mattress on the stone floor—and he hadn’t talked.

The deputy opened the door, looked disapprovingly at the coffee cups, and asked if we were almost done. I told him I’d let him know when we were. Hall never looked in his direction. After the deputy left, I said, “I’m just sorry, George, you didn’t feel like there was somebody you could trust to tell this whole thing to, way back then. Told me about Pym and Russell. There’re laws to—”

His thick body hardened with anger so fast that I instinctively stood up. He said, “
They
was the law. So was you.”

“No, they weren’t. Neither am I. The law isn’t people.” I held my hands up. “All right, people fuck with it so bad, I agree it's hard to hang on to the difference.”

With long deliberate breaths, he relaxed his body. Then he dropped one handful of dead leaves into the wastebasket by the long scarred table. He nodded. “It's harder for some folks to hang on than others.”

“That's true.”

His other palm tilted, letting the leaves fall. His unhurried voice was quiet again. When he spoke. “Isaac said your daddy worked the line at Cadmean Mills, right?”

“Right.”

“So did mine. One time my daddy got taken on a joyride by some men that worked there. He said something they didn’t like.” George walked without haste around the room. “They took him on this ride, and when they brought him back, he couldn’t get his eyes to open, or get his mouth to swallow food for ’bout a week. My mama got on him bad, said, ‘Go to the law, Tim, go
tell
’em.’ So he went to the law, and he got beat some more. Lost a week off his job. Next time something bad happened, he said to Mama, ‘You asking too much. Let it alone, and just go along.’ He went on along, and along, and along, ’til he died.”

“My father did too. Just went along that way ’til he died.”

George nodded. “I seen a lot of men die fast, didn’t even know it. And I seen men die yelling, crawling in mud. Two years back, I watched them strap a man in a wheelbarrow and take him down the row to the gas chamber, had to strap him, he was carrying on so, crying like a baby. But my daddy, he died the
slowest
, just going
along.” He stopped at the window to watch the rain.

I said, “Now I think my dad was trying hard to do the best he could. I’m sure yours did too.”

George was looking out the window into memory. “Cooper was just a little boy, nine or ten, when Daddy died. The preacher says to him, ‘You grow up a good man like your papa.’ And Cooper says, ‘I don’t want to. I don’t want to grow up scared.’ He told the preacher that, right there at the grave, his face mad and crying both.”

“Yes,” I said. “I never saw Cooper Hall scared of anything. Your brother had great courage. So do you.”

“Naw.” Hall's eyes blinked; taking off his glasses, he rubbed them. He came back to the table and quietly sat down. “Cooper was a teenager, he called me just a worthless nigger headed for jail. Said, ‘You’re too dumb to tell the difference in your kind of fightin’ and my kind.’ Told me my bad-assin’ was just another way of going along.”

I sat down across from him. “You didn’t go along with a guilty plea. To protect your folks, you were willing to take Russell's deal. Why didn’t you take the D.A.'s deal, at least protect yourself from the risk of a death penalty?”

Looking at his hands spread open on the table, he thought awhile. Finally he replied, “Some things you can make yourself say, and some things you can’t. It's just that way.”

When I was growing up in the small dark kitchen of that Mill Street duplex, my daddy said a lot of things for which my mama never “got on him bad” at all, though I knew she didn’t agree with them. He was a scared, unhappy man, but he wasn’t a cruel man— he was gentle to my mother, my sister, and, except when we fought, to me. And he didn’t rant or yell; he just said ugly things that the world he lived in believed were true. He just repeated things he’d been told—about jungle-bunnies, eggheads, long-hairs, bra-burners, draft-dodgers, Pope-worshippers, queers, Jews, Northern agitators, and atheists. He talked a lot about the conspiracies of Cadmean Textiles, landlords, stores, bills, and banks to work, freeze, starve, and cheat him to death. But mostly he talked about all the things that were wrong with black people.

When I was old enough to understand what he was saying, I
talked back. I told my daddy he was a stupid bigot. I told him his facts were wrong and his theories were wrong. He whipped me. When I was fourteen, he said he’d take his belt to me if he ever caught me hanging around that coonloving kike Rosethorn again. I hit him in the face. Mama cried and begged us to stop.

The day I graduated from high school, Daddy and I had another fight because I wouldn’t return those crates of books Isaac had sent me. I told him that Isaac Rosethorn was more of a man and more of a father to me than he would ever be. When he raised his hand, I grabbed his wrist and threw him against the kitchen table. I left before the fear in his eyes made me hit him again. This time Mama followed me back into my room, stood crying by the door, and asked if she could say something. I glared at her. She struggled with her breath, and then she told me, “You got to forgive your daddy. You got to ask him for his forgiveness. Can’t you tell the way it tears him up how we can’t give you fancy books like Mr. Rosethorn, ’cause we don’t know enough and we ain’t got enough?”

I was still shaking as I yanked my graduation robe off its hanger. I said, “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you have to be an
ignorant racist redneck!
” I grabbed my valedictorian speech off my
bureau top, and shook it at her. “
I’m
poor!”

“No, Cuddy. You ain’t cold and you ain’t hungry, and you’ve gone on through school, and nobody ever said to you, you got to stop going. You got so much more than he did. He's worked and worked so you and Vivian could do better than us.” She stood there a long time in tears, squeezing the cheap plastic belt buckle of her new dress. Finally she said, “Cuddy, please. Please, don’t take this day from Malcolm. He's so proud of you. Please, tell him you’re sorry.” I didn’t answer. Her birthmark flushed dark red; she hid it with her hand, and whispered, “If you can’t find it in you to do it for him, son, I’m asking you if you’ll please do it for me. He's out to the garage.” Then she quietly closed the door behind her. It was one of the few hard things she ever asked of me. I walked out to the garage where he sat in his car rubbing at some dirt on the dashboard, and I apologized.

He and I never fought like that again. But from time to time I’d still get angry. Once I asked him if he’d ever been in the Klan. He
denied it, and now I’m sure that when he’d spent evenings with the neighbor who worked the Cadmean line with him, he was doing just what he claimed: “watching the ball game,” or “going out for a beer,” and not plotting black genocide, not burning crosses, or taking Tim Hall on a midnight ride. But my father's unreasonable remarks, his unreasoning prejudices, went on alternately enraging and saddening me until I left home. After I joined the force, when I would go to visit him alone in that duplex, when he would wander from one small dark room to another as if he were looking in them for my dead mother and my dead sister, after that, he just made me sad.

Monday morning I gave my testimony in the Hall trial to the seven women and five men who’d made it to the finals of the jury selection and gotten themselves impaneled. They’d also gotten themselves quarantined at the Ramada Inn. Judge Hilliardson had sequestered the jury there after he denied Isaac's request for a change of venue, snarling, “Mr. Rosethorn, I am prepared to prohibit any local interference with the defendant's right to a fair trial, and I am perfectly competent to do just that, in this court-house, or any other.” Isaac talked and thought about the jury constantly. He was happy that they had chosen the school principal, Mr. Lindquist, as their foreman. On the other hand, he saw no thaw in Mrs. Boren's glowering freeze, and he worried about the sour expressions on several of the other faces.

Mitch Bazemore didn’t want me on the witness stand long, just long enough to confirm that when I’d arrived at what he continually referred to as “the scene of the murder,” I’d observed Bobby Pym bleeding to death thirty feet from where I’d observed George Hall with what Mitch continually referred to as “a smoking gun.” I think Mitch got a smug pleasure out of the fact that I was the first eyewitness for the prosecution. Meanwhile, Nora Howard glared at me from the defense table the whole time, George looked at the state seal above Judge Hilliardson's gray tufted hair, Isaac made a teepee out of three pencils and a rubber band.

After about ten minutes of establishing my credentials and bringing me into the “scene of the crime,” the D.A. (with the brisk, manly collegiality that marked his “we’re both professionals on the side of law-and-order” style) asked me: “Captain Mangum, as you
assessed the scene before you, what did you assume?”

Rosethorn (blandly): “Objection.”

Hilliardson (uninterested): “Rephrase.”

Bazemore, who now fell into a trap that I suspect Isaac had set up, said, “Captain Mangum, you are a professional police officer. As it were, an expert on the assessment of crime?”

“I’m a professional police officer. From what I’ve been hearing on the news lately, some folks aren’t so sure I’m an expert at it.”

Bazemore joined in the little laugh I got on this. Then forcefully he slapped his fist into his palm. “Captain, on the basis of what you directly observed, what was your professional appraisal of the situation outside Smoke's Bar when you arrived?”

Mangum: “A man had been shot. I ran over to him, and identified him as Robert Pym. He was alive, but unable to speak or move. The wound was critical. He’d been shot in the head.”

Bazemore: “He’d been shot through the right eye, hadn’t he?”

Mangum: “Yes.”

Bazemore: “Did you make an immediate assumption as to who had shot Officer Pym?”

Mangum: “Well, I’m not sure about immediate, but…yes.”

Bazemore: “Who?”

Mangum: “George Hall.”

Bazemore: “Is that man in this room? If so, please point him out.”

I pointed at George. Turning around, Bazemore pointed at George. “You are pointing at the defendant, George Hall?” I said yes, and he asked me what George was doing to make me think he’d been the assailant.

Mangum: “He was sitting on the sidewalk beside a gun.”

Bazemore: “A still-smoking gun.…Did you then speak to George Hall?” “Yes.”

“Did you then
ask
George Hall if he had shot Officer Pym?”

Isaac objected that the State was leading its witness, the Court sustained it, and the State rephrased: “When you spoke to Hall, what did you say to him?”

Mangum: “I went over and warned him fully of his rights under
the Miranda ruling, then I asked, ‘Did you shoot him?’”

Bazemore: “And how did the defendant answer, if possible, in his exact words?”

Mangum: “He didn’t say anything. He nodded.”

Bazemore: “He nodded, signifying yes, he had shot Pym?”

“Yes.”

“Did his answer surprise you? Or did it confirm what you’d already assumed?”

“The latter. Then he asked me if Pym was alive, and I told him he was. He asked me if an ambulance had been called. At that moment, another patrol car arrived, and—”

“Thank you, Captain Mangum. That's all for now. We appreciate your help, and apologize for taking time from your pressing duties. Your witness, Mr. Rosethorn.”

Isaac shambled toward me, fingering a collar point on his fresh white shirt. He looked as if he’d never seen me before in his life, and didn’t much think I’d improve on acquaintance. Since he wasn’t acknowledging me, I focused my eyes about an inch to the side of his head. “Captain Mangum, the defense too apologizes for taking up your valuable time, particularly when I know from the newspapers that your department has been working very hard—though lamentably without success—to catch the two police officers with whom Bobby Pym had been stealing, smuggling, extorting—”

Bazemore, on his feet fast: “Objection!”

Rosethorn, fast: “—And who are also now wanted for the murder of the defendant's brother Cooper Hall, and of—”

Bazemore: “Objection! Objection! Irrelevant, immaterial, and—”

Hilliardson: “Sustained.”

Rosethorn: “—William Slidell, their partner in crime.”

Judge Hilliardson, angry: “
Mr. Rosethorn!
The prosecution's objection is sustained! Sustained! You are seriously out of order!
Had
you been asking a question, I might request that you rephrase
it. As I heard, however, nothing at all interrogatory in your bizarre remarks, I order them struck from the record. The jury will disregard them.” The jury looked sheepish.