Time's Witness (76 page)

Isaac stepped back, raising his arms in a sweep at the jury. “In the strength of that truth, stand up together. Stand up and break the shackles of prejudice, and lies, that have bound this prisoner to Death for seven long dark years. The key is yours to turn at last. Use it to open the doors. Set George Hall free.”

His wrists crashed together as if they too were manacled, then his arms fell to his sides, motionless. There was no sound but the soaring of his old, hoarsened, beautiful voice. “Set George free. And when you do, I promise you this. You will hear the mighty wings of Truth set free. You will hear the song of justice in this land. And your hearts will be glad and proud that you twelve men and women of North Carolina have once more sent out the word like a dove across this nation: ‘We hold this truth to be self-evident. We are all created equal.’”

No one clapped. No one cheered. No one moved.

Finally Judge Hilliardson asked if the defense had finished, and Isaac nodded that he had. The State's rebuttal was brief. Mitch simply said that the “handicap” under which George Hall had shot Robert Pym made it no less murder, and that Robert Pym, even in death, had equal rights to justice too. After Mitch returned to his chair, the judge folded his hands together and told the jury there remained only his instructions. They lasted half an hour. First, Hilliardson told the jury that they were not the judge.
He
was there to interpret the law, and would take every care to do so justly. Nor were they the police. It was not their function to investigate. It was their function to come to a reasonable conclusion, based on the
facts offered in evidence, as to whether or not the defendant had committed the crime with which he’d been charged.

Taking a sip of water, Hilliardson glanced through the notebook he’d kept during the trial. He would now, he said, instruct them as to the law. And he closed the book. Then he explained murder and manslaughter in all degrees, the perimeters of self-defense and premeditation, the relevance of intent and motive. He told them that the verdict handed down by the first trial should have no bearing on their decision; nor should any suffering the defendant might have endured as a result have any bearing. That circumstantial evidence presented by the State was sufficient to convict if they believed beyond a reasonable doubt that such evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to the defendant, proved instead his guilt. That the credibility of witnesses was for them to decide and that if they believed witnesses unworthy of belief, they should discount their testimony. That the burden of proof rested on the State, and if they
doubted
that proof, then the State had not made its case.

What it came down to was this: if the jury believed George Hall was telling them the truth, then they were free to return a verdict of not guilty by reason of self-defense, and if they didn’t believe him, then they were free to find him guilty. When Hilliardson asked if they had any questions, they looked at each other, already a group, bonded apart from the rest of us. No, they didn’t have any questions. Judge Hilliardson's cold hooded eyes met each of theirs. “Weigh carefully your responsibility,” he said, tightening his hard mouth. “It is not a light one. I expect and require you to act accordingly.” And at 2:25 P.M., he sent them out.

“God, can you believe that Shirley Hilliardson?” groaned Bubba Percy, scraping over a chair to join me in the municipal building basement's “snack bar,” an overlit corridor lined with vending machines. “I bet he sleeps in a freezer. I bet he pees sleet.” Bubba bit into a grayish hot dog, grimacing as he chewed. There were nine or ten other reporters sprawled at tables around us. Like me, they were waiting for word. The jury was still out. They’d only been heard from once—when they’d sent word at 4:30 that they’d like a transcript of Arthur Butler's testimony. Isaac and Nora were upstairs waiting in the bailiff's office with George. Mitch Bazemore was no
doubt in his own office, planning his prosecution of Dyer Fanshaw. My watch said it was two minutes later than it was the last time I looked. Poking at my stale slice of cake, I said, “What's your guess, Bubba?”

He glanced at his own watch, then chugged half a can of root beer. “If they’d come back in fifteen minutes—I’d of said, clear-shot, guilty. Back in forty-five minutes, I’d have said, innocent. Now…,” he burped, “you got me. Even money. He's got the black vote solid. And the whites, well, let's say the Caucasians in this case didn’t come across like the sort you’d want to see marry your sister.” Bubba tore open a bag of peanuts and dropped them one by one into the root beer. “But let's face it, Mangum, nobody
forced
old George to chase the s.o.b. down the block and plug him. And if that's the way he shoots
without
his glasses, I’d hate to have him aiming at me with them
on.
But he had some good bits in his testimony. Faithful to the end. That's how folks like their blacks.” He took a swig from his can.

“Bubba, it's a real moral uplift being around a guy like you.”

“Any time.” He grinned. “One thing I am sure of, the pressure's on in there. Get it over with. It's five-to-five on
Friday
, man. That jury doesn’t want
another
weekend fucked. Supposed to be great weather too. We could have shot some baskets if you hadn’t fed yourself through the paper shredder. You look as bad as this food, Mangum. Is that cake edible?”

I said it wasn’t. I added that the cake was merely there as a symbol anyhow. I was, in fact (although I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, and no one had mentioned it to me), celebrating my birthday today.

“No shit,” Bubba said, fairly congenially. “Well, have a good one. Man, I wish they’d hurry up. I got a dinner date.”

“Who with, Edwina Sunderland?” “Nah. Cindy…something or other.”

A professional colleague of Percy's, a youngster in running shoes, clanked down the pay phone on the wall next to our table. Already trotting backwards, he announced that Andrew Brookside had been taken off the critical list. He was in his own room at U.H., and in half an hour he’d be making a statement. Bubba and the rest of the men in the room took off after the youngster as if he’d made
a clean sweep of their wallets.

Alone, I went back to the courtroom and walked quietly down the sloped aisle toward the bar rail. Here and there throughout the large silent room, a few people were still waiting, but not many. In the first row, behind the defense table, Nomi Hall sat with her sister and her minister. A deputy chatted with Mr. Walkington, the court recorder. I climbed the steps to the bench, where Miss Bee Turner stood briskly tapping the judge's papers into neat stacks.

“What do you think, Miss Bee? Are we on hold ’til Monday?”

Her small, wrinkled face pursed up at me as she crossed her arms tightly under her breasts. “No,” she decided. “I asked the foreman if they wanted to order dinner and he declined. I suspect they’re close.”

Miss Bee, as usual, was right about the goings-on in “her” Superior Court. And at 5:42, she ordered those of us who were in there to rise, as “the Honorable Shirley W. Hilliardson presiding” stalked to his high leather chair and perched motionless while the jury filed back in. Behind her son, Nomi Hall's hands locked together against her mouth. Mitch sat at the far end of his table, away from his assistant, Neil Sadler. Across the room, Isaac had one hand on George's arm, the other on Nora's hand. But his eyes stayed on the jury. I looked at them too, but I couldn’t tell. Their faces were carefully frozen, their heads turned toward their foreman, the school principal. Mrs. Boren still squeezed her purse the way she always had.

“Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

Gerd Lindquist, the foreman, stood up, an ordinary-looking man in his late fifties, a little overweight, a little out of shape, a little bald. He coughed, then said loudly, “Yes, Your Honor, we have.” He held out the folded piece of paper to Miss Bee, who scuddled over, took it from him, and after an expressionless glance at the contents, stretched up on her toes to hand it to Hilliardson.

“The defendant will rise.”

Together George, Isaac, and Nora stood behind their table.

The judge swiveled his chair toward the foreman. “What say you, members of the jury? Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?”

The foreman glanced back at his fellow jurors. Some nodded at him. Then he turned toward George Hall and looked at him. Isaac knew. His hand was already raised to hug the black man's shoulder, as the words “Not guilty, Your Honor” rang out like the clang of bells.

When he said the words, Lindquist smiled, and in an odd gesture, as if they’d just met, he lifted his hand slightly and waved at George.

All the voices sounded together. Martin Hall's shout of “Yes!” Nomi Hall's sister's sobbing “Praise God!” Other cheers and words and claps, while Hilliardson waited patiently above the noise. George was still standing. Then I saw his head nod twice toward the jury box. At the accountant, the farmer's widow, the housewives, the bus driver, the flower-shop clerk. The twelve men and women were already beginning to rustle, look at the room, at the weather outside the windows, at their watches; going back to their ordinary lives, shedding their solemnity as if they were a little embarrassed by the sacredness they’d felt themselves. George Hall turned from them, shook Nora's hand, shook Isaac's hand. And only after that did I see him move for the first time as if he weren’t twenty years older than he was. Whirling round, he reached over the wooden bar and pulled his mother up into his arms.

The day George Hall walked out of Superior Court and into whatever life he could find, Andy Brookside walked into a lounge at University Hospital and into the embrace of a mass of new supporters whom all the earlier polls had said would vote against him. These were Lana Pym's “just regular people,” people jealous of privilege and suspicious of brains. But they turned out also to be people who couldn’t resist a man with enough guts to get shot in the heart, and enough magic to stand up and walk away from it.

I was a year older today, and nobody but Bubba Percy seemed to know it. I was home, alone. Drinking a beer, sorting with my good hand through a box of old papers and letters to throw out (a few from my ex-wife, Cheryl, who’d dotted her “
i
”s with hearts; a few from Lee, whose stationery had the faint scent of her perfume), I sat on my living room carpet and watched Andrew Brookside's impromptu press conference on the evening news. Pale and hand-some, he stood behind the jumble of microphones, his arm around Lee, and said very appealing, witty things about the fact that he’d almost died. He said that all along he’d been telling the voters he was the candidate with a heart, and now he had pictures to prove it. He told funny little jokes Lee had supposedly made as he was being wheeled from the recovery room. Lee laughed at them, and kissed him for the cameras.

Martha Mitchell stayed away from me; she’d seen me in this
kind of mood before, and maybe figured I was going to have her put to sleep for running up the vet bills in her old age. When I flung the beer can in the trash with the letters, she barked angrily, then hobbled in a hurry all the way upstairs.

I couldn’t stand the way I felt either. Not just the itch of my sutures and the pinch of my cast; I couldn’t stand any of the objects in the room. Couldn’t stand my apartment, my job, or Hillston, or Brookside's arm around Lee, or myself. So I left a note on my door, went out to my car, got in it, and drove. I drove Airport Road twice as fast as anybody ought to. I put on a tape of Jerry Lee Lewis, put it on loud, and I listened mile after mile to the pounding of his hard high white-trash speed, gritty as the country and mean as a knife. I listened to him until I got tired of his noise and his anger, until I wore out my own. I outdrove Jerry Lee—“the Killer”—and that's hard driving.

Then I turned down the road to Dollard Prison. Parked in the gravel lot, I sat a long while, looking up at the dark brick turrets. George Hall wasn’t in there. That was something. Zack Carpenter was still in there, doing the best he could. That was something. Finally, I turned the Olds around and headed back to Hillston. The lights of the small skyline twinkled, indistinguishable from the lights of the stars. I knew all the buildings by heart. The people in them were reasonably safe. That was something too.

I put on Aretha Franklin and told her, “Let's go home.”

The note had been for Justin and Alice. She’d called and asked would it be all right if they came over to watch television. It was a first step we all needed to take, for Justin and I had been avoiding each other since he’d returned to work after his suspension. So in the note I’d told them to look for the key where I always left it for them. But from the hall now, I heard rock-’n’-roll music. And when I opened my door, I walked under a canopy of blue and gold balloons, into the chatter of at least twenty people, all of whom worked at HPD, and all of whom spun around and yelled, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” at me. The same message was spray-painted with shaving cream on my balcony sliders. In the middle of the carpet, with a blue bow on top, was a television screen as big as my wall mural, an ultra-modern thin style, a black square with Dolby
speakers. Brenda Moore and Wes Pendergraph ran forward with a life-sized cardboard cutout, taken from a news photo, of me in my raincoat on the steps of the municipal building. There was a card taped to my hand: “The Force Is With You,” it read, and it was signed by the one hundred thirty-eight members of the Hillston Police Department.

“Isn’t it disgusting?” shouted Ralph Fisher from my kitchen. “That's a
fifty-eight
-inch screen! DiMallo and Baker brought it over in the wagon.”

Shouting through the music, I asked the circle of faces, “Y’all didn’t put this on my Visa, did you?”

Etham Foster stood by a plastic tub floating with bottles and cans; overhand he threw John Emory a beer to give me. Then Etham tapped his watch. “Two hours, thirty-one minutes late, man, to your own party.”

I toasted the force and thanked them.

In the kitchen, bacon-fat spat bubbling as Justin dumped a huge bowl of home-fries into my cast-iron frying pan. On my counter, boxes from Hot Hat Barbecue were heaped with greasy bones. Justin looked over at me and raised his hand. He nodded at me. I nodded back. And then he smiled. “Well, the party's almost over,” he said. “You leave a note? ‘Make yourselves at home.’ What's that supposed to mean? It's usually considered a little nicer to hang around when you’re expecting company—”