Time's Witness (77 page)

“I wasn’t expecting this much company.”

Alice waddled in from the bathroom, her sun dress floating out in front of her. She said, “I’m glad you were born,” and tried to kiss me, but couldn’t reach until I bent from the waist. She rolled her eyes, “And when somebody
else
I know gets born, I can’t
tell
you how glad I’ll be.”

“Hey, grits, come and get your grease,” Justin called. “Hold these buns smack in the middle, or the hamburgers will slide right out.”

By 10:30, everyone but Alice and Justin had gone home, or back to work. John Emory was driving to the hospital, to see how Nancy was doing, and to sit awhile with Zeke, who never left the place. Justin and Alice, who’d ridden over with Etham, stayed to clean up.

A little after eleven, Nora Howard knocked on the door, carrying a package and a platter of Italian pastries with candles stuck in them. Alice whistled at her. “God, you look beautiful! And you’re so tan!” Running her hands over her own stomach, she added, “I have to hold on to that thought.
You
had children.
You
looked like this. And now you look like
that.
Where’d you guys and the Halls celebrate?”

“The Pine Hills Inn. And I don’t think any of us will go back. Their attitude, like their food, was…don’t take this personally, Justin…a little waspy.” Nora handed him the pastries, then pulled the thin white strap back up on her bare shoulder. “Isaac went over to the Halls’ house. He sent you this.” In the package was a thousand-page anthology of love poetry.

“That's an odd present from him,” Alice said.

Nora said, “My God, look at that TV! They said it’d be
big
, but—”

Rolling the console toward the wall, Justin called over his shoulder, “Quick, plug it in.
Casablanca
's on Channel Seven at 11:30. Or are you feeling tired, Cuddy?”

“No, actually I feel a lot better.”

“
Casablanca
's what we were going to say we came over to watch.”

I said, “Fine, but I’ve seen it.”

Justin started yanking jacks out of my old TV set. “Oh, you love
Casablanca.
You always cry at the noble stuff. ‘Here's mud in your
eye, kid.’”

“Oh, Jesus!” I plugged the VCR unit into the new model. “‘Here's looking at you, kid.
Here's looking at you, kid!
’”

“See!” Justin grinned. “He loves that movie.”

A thought occurred to me, and on consideration, I decided I liked it. I said, “Okay, you’re right. In fact, I’m going to make a tape of it, if I can find a blank one.” So I opened my drawer of videotapes, reached behind them and found the one I’d hidden there after Etham Foster had brought it to me, the one labeled “Jane Fonda's Workout,” the one Bubba had joked that I could trade for the Biltmore Mansion. I shook the cassette from its case, then I closed the drawer.

Alice was hauling over my leather sling chair, and Nora was tossing my couch cushions onto the floor. I ate one of the pastries, and watched them. Alice and Nora grinned at each other, like they had a secret.

After a dozen commercials, the black-and-white globe of the wartime world filled the huge bright screen. The earnest narrator's voice said, “But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly….”

I slid the “Workout” cassette into the VCR and punched record.

After I took Justin and Alice home, I drove across town, up Cadmean Street to the municipal building. Hiram Davies was there at the desk, reading his Bible. “I hope you had a nice party. Everything's fine here,” he told me quietly. “Everything's under control. You should go to bed, Cuddy.”

I said, “All right.” I patted his hand on the Bible. “Remember me in your prayers, Hiram, okay?”

The old sergeant pulled his glasses down on his nose to look at me. He shook his head. “I always do,” he said. “Go home.”

But first I drove into East Hillston. On Maplewood, there were Andrew Brookside posters in some of the store windows. I stopped at a curb to look at one of them. “
Your
Candidate.
Your
State.
Your
Choice.”

Cardboard covered the front of the duplex I’d grown up in. There were cracks and holes in the driveway where my father had bent scrubbing for hours at his car, trying to make at least one thing perfect in his life. Farther east, most of Canaan was sleeping, but on Mill Street, lights shone from every window of Nomi Hall's house. Nearby, music still bounced out of Smoke's into the night.

At the top of the hill across the street from Smoke's, the mural painted to honor Cooper Hall was lit from below so that everyone in Canaan could see it. Cooper's hand reached up, right under the painted sun, as if he’d just lifted it into place. And all along the mural's base, small blood-red brambled roses grew out of the bright grass, climbing up the broken wall, into the colors of the painting.

“A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that's all one….”

—Twelfth Night

Over thirty thousand people appeared at Cadmean Stadium on the last evening in October to attend the “Night of Stars” Brookside rally. Maybe some of the spectators had really come to see the rock singer or the Hollywood celebrities, or had come just because they’d heard everybody else was coming. But they all cheered when Andy Brookside stood in the swirling spotlights, and told them that the old power brokers didn’t own the state of North Carolina, that
they
owned it. And they all stood up and cheered when he told them that maybe the old power brokers had begun to realize that they couldn’t vote Andy Brookside out of the race, or buy him out of the race, or
shoot
him out of the race either!

Then he talked about a lot of things that Governor Wollston had done wrong. He didn’t include as one of them the fact that the governor had no plans to stop the execution of Joe Bonder, who was scheduled to die at Dollard Prison in two more days. In a speech interrupted thirty times by applause, Brookside did not say one word about the fact that a twenty-year-old black man—who’d claimed it was his partner who’d shot the liquor store owner, and who didn’t
seem to be able to grasp the idea of his own imminent death—was going to the gas chamber.

There were only a dozen protestors outside the gates of the prison the night Joe Bonder died; among them, George Hall stood in silent vigil with his mother, Nomi, and his cousin, Martin. Holding a candle, Paul Madison read aloud from the prayer book. Myself, I was there because I was waiting for Isaac and Nora. They were inside now, seated on benches arranged so that witnesses could look through the glass to see the man strapped into the metal chair. The old lawyer had told Nora he had a single requirement of any partner who might ever be asked to defend someone against a capital charge: the requirement was that she should witness with her own eyes what would happen to her client if she lost.

Near me by the guardhouse, Jordan West kept watch quietly, arm in arm with the young psychiatrist she’d just married. And I recognized faces from the old Hall vigil group moving in a slow circle with their candles and their signs that said, STOP THE KILLING. But there weren’t as many as there had been for George, or the time before George, or the time before that. As Jack Molina told the solitary reporter who drove by to interview them, “We know we’re not in the majority. But then neither were those other irritating little groups of cranks who made pests of themselves, being the first to say, ‘Stop! Look at what we’re doing. Stop this slavery. Stop this genocide. Stop this war.’”

The young woman reporter didn’t think it was at all fair to compare an execution to genocide; and besides, the condemned man had been given a fair trial.

The candle flame burned in Molina's old wire-rimmed glasses. “This nation's whole social system is on trial here tonight.” Then resting his hand on the top of his sign, he gave her some figures about the race, income level, education, and I.Q.s of those scheduled for execution across this country, and where in this country, and why. But the reporter didn’t write it down, and she left a few minutes later.

“It's not even news anymore,” he said to me, as we watched her drive off. And raising the handle of the picket sign, he walked back to take his place in the circle.

Zackery Carpenter told me later that Joe Bonder “went in quietly.”

The doctor's execution log said that at 9:02:45, the chamber was locked. At 9:04:33, sodium cyanide eggs entered the vat of sulfuric acid, releasing gas vapors; 9:05:51, prisoner inhaled gas; 9:09, prisoner in distress. At 9:21:10, heart stopped. At 9:35, exhaust valve opened and drained; at 9:58—prisoner removed, declared dead.

When I looked at Nora's eyes as I helped her into the car, she didn’t need to tell me anything.

Sluggish and blowsy, Indian summer hung on as long into autumn as it could, ’til maple leaves dropped big and limp as dusty rags from the sagging boughs. Downtown, hot empty streets were sticky with melted tar. Lives changed, if they did change, behind air-conditioned doors. The news changed, of course. It quickly forgot George Hall, and ran to Dyer Fanshaw. During summer's long dull days, questions had hummed like a lazy fly through the North Hillston homes of the inner circle: would a man of Fanshaw's stature ever really have to go to jail, or would his fancy quartet of lawyers get him off? Atwater Randolph thought they would; the bank and the towel company weren’t so sure. Or so I heard from Peggy Savile. After Fanshaw's arrest, Atwater and his friends had apparently decided I wasn’t one of them, and I didn’t get invited to the Club's Harvest dance.

The Club's other favorite subject of gossip turned out to be Briggs Mary Cadmean, who’d apparently at some point forked over millions of dollars to Haver University for the construction of a planetarium; the scaffolding for it was now, ironically, rising right across the greensward from her papa's new textiles laboratory. So, despite old Cadmean's codicil, “Baby” had figured out a way to have her stars, and her inheritance too. I suspect he might have admired her chicanery. On Jordan West's advice, Briggs had long ago turned over to the journal
With Liberty and Justice
her father's $25,000 bequest to Cooper Hall. Last I heard, G.G. Walker, who was running the office between classes at Haver, had talked her into matching the old man's donation.

Speaking of thousands in donated dollars, Paul Madison called
me one day with “great news.” Billy Gilchrist had lied to us. He had not put nearly as much as he’d claimed of the stolen thousands into the collection plates at Trinity Church. “You know, Cuddy,” confessed the rector, “I
thought
, even in little dribbles and drabbles, I would have
noticed
that sort of rise in our cash take.” Instead of contributing the money to God as he’d told us, Billy had hidden a good two-thirds inside the crypt of a Mr. T.C.W. Polk, the church founder, an act which seemed, even to Paul, “a little much.” Still, Billy's pastor was thoroughly delighted to learn that his lost sheep was alive. For Paul had received a letter from Miami, where Billy had fled with the money—despite his professed eagerness to testify for Jesus, not to mention for Isaac Rosethorn. He’d gone there to escape what he described as “the heat”—by which I assume he meant that Winston Russell was looking to kill him in a pretty unpleasant way. All things considered, as Paul said, we could hardly blame Billy for taking that plane south.

As for not getting in touch all these months, well, he’d read in the papers that “things worked out okay for John [
sic
] Hall anyhow,” and that “some cop took out Rusel [
sic
], which to tell you the truth, Father Paul, after comming across the inclosed [a newspaper clipping describing Paul's knife wounds], I say good riddence.” Honesty compelled Billy also to acknowledge that his old nemesis, a pint a day, had snagged him in February, and hustled him off the straight-and-narrow, down a detour. A detour that wound around Florida's dog tracks and horse tracks. A detour where, as Billy bluntly put it, he’d “blown his wad to zip.” Which was why (in addition to once again having the ears to hear the call of salvation) he was writing this letter. Could Father Paul mail him, c/o General Delivery, a hundred bucks so that he might take a bus home to Trinity? Paul could. And did. And still expects Billy Gilchrist to appear one day at mass to hoist the banner of St. Michael. I said, “That's nuts.” He said, “That's faith.”

Perhaps on its time-tested guideline of “To those who have, more shall be given,” Fortune awarded first prize in Paul's Trinity Church Porsche Raffle to Mrs. Marion Sunderland. I was surprised Edwina didn’t keep the car herself; it was about her speed. Bubba, on the other hand, was crushed that she didn’t slap a ribbon on the
hood and leave it outside the
Hillston Star
for him. But, of course, family blood is thicker than even the pulse of geriatric infatuation, and Eddie gave the Porsche to her grandnephew, whose new wife, the voluptuous Blue Randolph Sunderland, totaled it a few months later while driving under the influence and over the speed limit. “The bitch didn’t get a scratch on her,” exclaimed Bubba, presumably outraged that Fortune was as cavalier as he was. He didn’t win the Pulitzer either.

I don’t see Bubba much anymore. He had quit the
Star
right after the Hall trial to become Andrew Brookside's press secretary. “Give us ten years,” he predicted. “We’ll be rolling Easter eggs on the White House lawn. D.C., here I come! Now
that
town is swimming in loose pussy! Catch you later, Mangum. Keep the peace in Boonieville.”

Alice MacLeod, a woman of strong will as well as political fervor, gave birth during a legislature's recess at the beginning of December. The birth was a quick one. The baby was so fast that Justin never had a chance to use all the Lamaze techniques he’d memorized.

“That's the way we do it in the mountains,” Alice whispered with a dopey grin that wasn’t like her at all. The next morning she told the features editor from the
Star
that she planned to finish her term in the state legislature, where she’d be chairing two new committees. After that, she was thinking of running for Congress. Justin's mother and I shared a thermos of what tasted like pure gin, under the portrait of Justin's father, J.B.S. IV, and we toasted all seven pounds, two ounces, of Cuthbert MacLeod Savile the First.