Time's Witness (8 page)

There was a second of pure quiet, then Jordan screamed, leaping up and down against Coop, who stood still as a rock, like he couldn’t feel her. The candle slid out of his fist into the mud.

Behind them, Molina raised both arms and silently shook them. Jordan ran to the young protestors, who threw away their signs, cheered, and pounded each other on the arms and backs. Lewis forced a smile, but at least he didn’t wave. I pushed through so I could hear.

Bubba Percy, hopping from foot to foot, jerked out a little spiral pad. “You mean, the governor pardoned Hall?”

Lewis shook his head. “No. Governor Wollston has granted a stay of four weeks in response to petitions regarding the case.”

“Is there new evidence?”

Lewis's assistant, wearing an exact replica of his boss's clothes, leaned over to whisper at him. Lewis nodded at the chauffeur, who opened the back door of the Lincoln. Then he replied, “I’m simply here to convey the governor's decision; that's all.” Coop Hall jammed his hands in his jacket and pushed through the cheering group to Jordan; I was standing next to her, and held out my hand, but he never looked.

His voice was hoarse. “Get to a phone and call Mama.” Jordan hugged his arm as he spoke to the group behind him; he had to yell over their whoops of pleasure. “Okay, everybody. Hey! Come on! Pack up and go get some sleep. Okay? And, listen! Be in Raleigh tomorrow, just as planned.”

They broke off and dutifully collected their placards. Hall moved Jordan toward the cluster of cars. “Go on. If Mama doesn’t answer, you drive on home and wait for her to get back from
Greensboro. I’ll be there soon as I talk to Rosethorn.” He turned away, acknowledging her rub on his back only by a nod.

Bubba was still talking and writing at the same time. “Mr. Lewis, you were state's attorney general when Hall shot Bobby Pym, and that was
seven
years ago. Wasn’t that a fair trial? I mean, how much more ‘study’ of the case do you think—”

“Mr. Percy.” Lewis looked at him, hurt. “I did and do believe the first trial was a fair one. But when a man's life is at stake, naturally the state must take every—”

I didn’t wait around for the speech, but ran back to the Oldsmobile where Isaac was pouring pistachio shells into my ashtray. As soon as I opened the door, yelling, “Hot damn!” he said, “The stay, how long?”

“Four weeks. Hold it, how could you hear him say ‘stay’?”

He sucked on his lip, looking morose. “Too bad. Twelve, eight, I was hoping. Just as easy to say eight as four, the tightwad.” Stuffing all his notes in his pockets, he said, “I remember back, Governor Pat Brown in California, the State Department asked him to give Caryl Chessman a reprieve. Ike was starting that goodwill tour of South America, and there was a lot of sympathy for Chessman down there. Sixty days Pat Brown gave him. Not that it did any good. Later on, I remember, Brown said he was sorry he hadn’t pardoned Chessman. Ahh, I’m tired, I’m going home.”

I caught hold of his coat. “Okay, Isaac, who's going to South America? I get the funny feeling you
knew
there’d be a stay. Hummm? Is that why you hotfooted it over and had me yanked from wassailing with the upper crust when I paid all that money to rent this suit? So, okay, were you tipped off?”

Wrapping his knuckles softly on my head the way he’d done when I was a child, he rumbled his sigh of a laugh. “I use my noggin.”

Bubba was bamming on my window again; the Lincoln limo had left, and the vigilants were crowding into their cars. “Mangum,” he wheezed, thrilled out of breath, “give me a statement and I’ll print it. Wollston granted a stay!”

I said, “There was a report of a threat to disrupt a peaceful assembly. I came to check it out. That's a statement. Now will you
stop trying to crawl into my car? It's crowded enough with Rosethorn spread all over the seat.”

Bubba leaned past me. “Mr. Rosethorn, your client's gotten a reprieve. How do you feel?”

Isaac said, “Better.”

“That's it?”

Rosethorn sighed. “I’ll feel even better when the state supreme court grants my client a new trial.”

Bubba switched back to me. “Look, Mangum, you’ve been involved in this Hall business from the beginning. You were just a patrolman when it started.”

“Sergeant.” I tapped on his spiral pad. “I apprehended the suspect, but I was not assigned to the investigation, nor in any other way ‘involved’ in the case.”

But Bubba had his story line already set. “Here you are trying to put criminals away, and the courts drag it out for seven years. Is that frustrating for the police?”

“The police keep the peace and enforce the law against people who break it; they don’t try people, and they don’t sentence them. Leave me alone.”

“But isn’t it frustrating, when the law said to execute George Hall seven years ago?”

“Nope, Bubba, that's what the jury and the judge said.”

“Okay, okay. You’re close friends with Savile's wife, Alice, what's her name, MacLeod, the one that keeps trying to bring up that bill in the legislature to throw out capital punishment, that says capital punishment's imposed unfairly against minorities. What do
you
think about that, or, say, about the death penalty in general?”

It was the question I’d worried about getting asked for a long time, worried about asking it of myself. I just shook my head.

No denying Bubba's shrewdness. He grinned at me. “Come on, Cuddy. Should a moral man accept a job to enforce the state's laws if he doesn’t believe those laws are morally right? That's my question.” He kept grinning. “No comment?”

“Bubba, please go on home and write your story before you miss a chance for a headline.”

Rubbing his cheeks with his sheepskin gloves, Percy grimaced.
“Shit, y’all know what the boonie
Star
headline's gonna say, gonna say that old fart Cadmean finally croaked. Black border and big photo. Lewis back there tells me the governor's declared tomorrow a fucking official day of mourning. Half-mast, factory whistles, the whole boo-hoo. Okay. See you assholes back in Deadtown. Basketball tomorrow.” He dodged off on tiptoe to keep his Italian boots out of the puddles.

Isaac Rosethorn and I looked at each other for a while before I said, “Be a little tacky to have executions and racial demonstrations on an official day of mourning, wouldn’t it?” He just fished around in his mouth with his baby finger for nut husks. “My my,” I shook my head. “You must of zipped out of Hillston the minute they smoothed the covers over Cadmean's eyes, and his soul soared off to South America. You didn’t by some chance kill Old Fart yourself, did you, Isaac? Pull the plug, trip over the oxygen line, anything of that nature?”

“I don’t believe in killing, you know that.”

“Well, you must have planted the ‘day of mourning’ notion mighty fast, that's all I can figure. Who with?”

Like in the old days, he waggled his fat finger at me, smug as Churchill. “To predict is not to plant. To conclude is not to cause. And four weeks is only twenty-eight days.” He pulled his gloves back on; one was black, the other one brown. “I need to ride back with Cooper. Come have Chinese with me Sunday, unless, I hope, you did meet a girl at this dance and are otherwise occupied.”

I sighed. “Make it Buddha's Garden at 7:30.”

“Interesting question, Mr. Percy's. The one about moral lawmen and moral laws.” He patted my knee as he pulled himself out of the car, and walked—his right foot dragging a line through the slush— across the empty lot toward his ancient Studebaker where Coop Hall stood waiting for him, staring up at the high brick turrets.

The old prison was settling to sleep. Lights like stars in the chinks of blackened bricks had blinked out, one by one, except for a row on the second floor. Death row is never dark; in darkness a prisoner might contrive to cheat the state, might braid a noose out of his clothes, or, while a guard yawned, fashion a razor from a bit of blade secretly broken off from the supervised shaving tools. It
happened. Or almost happened. Men had been led to the chair with bandaged wrists or throat. But not often, not anymore; there were no sheets, no belts, no shoes, no metal utensils, there were head counts every few hours, there were naked body inspections whenever a guard decided to do one, there were trustees to watch the prisoners eat to make sure they didn’t choke, there was no privacy in the solitary cells, and no darkness, not even on this winter solstice, the longest night of the year.

I thought everybody had left until I saw Jack Molina still standing by the drum can, watching smoke push through the dirt he’d thrown in to smother the fire. I stopped my car beside him. “Come by yourself, Professor?”

“What?” He looked at me as if he were trying to remember my name; then he walked over. Molina had a lean, narrow head, all angles, except for round John Lennon glasses and huge dark eyes like a Byzantine saint. He kept his hair short now and wore a tie. In the sixties, he’d looked a lot like Jesus on a diet. He’d been a sixties star at the university. Shoved through crowds by a phalanx of students, he’d jump up on cafeteria tables or the library steps and give speeches that drove folks crazy—one way or another. After the sixties died, he’d settled for classroom forums and ghost politics; taught courses on “The Rhetoric of Mass Communication,” and wrote speeches for Andy Brookside.

Turns out he’d come over to ask me about tonight's Hillston Club ball, and whether I’d noticed the Brooksides there. I told him I had.

“Did you happen to see my wife, Debbie?” He was glancing around inside my car as if he thought I might have brought her along.

“At the dance? I don’t think I’ve ever met her, so I can’t say. Was she there?” He didn’t bother to answer me, so I asked him a different question. “You knew that Briggs Cadmean died?”

“Rosethorn mentioned it when he drove out to bring us some coffee.” His eyes weren’t paying any attention to what he was saying. “Rosethorn's quite a character.”

“No argument.”

Molina poured more dirt into the smoking trash can, and stuck
his bare hand in to spread it around; I don’t know why it didn’t burn a hole in his palm. “Yeah,” he nodded, “Rosethorn defended Piedmont Chemicals in that big negligence suit in 'seventy-three. I was in the line picketing his clients at the trial. He got them off. You know the one thing all Utopias share? No lawyers.”

“That and failure.” I asked him again, “You come alone?”

“Yeah.” He pointed at a midsized motorcycle leaning under the shadow of the gate; it surprised me—he didn’t seem the type; plus he was wearing chinos and loafers.

“Whooee, Professor, your balls must be charged with anti-freeze.” I meant it friendly, but he took offense and walked away, stiff-backed, without a kiss-my for a tired police chief on his night off, driving twenty miles through sleet to stop some rednecks from maybe chucking a brick at his head. I bet back in the sixties Hillston cops must have just loved Jack Molina.

Before I rolled my window up, I heard a strange sudden howl, so sharp in the dark quiet that Molina jumped back a step, his heel striking the drum can like a gunshot. It was a sound like a mountain lion might make that had somehow managed to walk out of the Smokies down to the Piedmont, and was claiming the territory. I called to Molina, “Keep in touch if you see any more of those trucks.” He turned around, nodded, and raised his hand in good-bye.

It wasn’t until I was halfway home that I wondered if the yell had been George Hall, finding out they weren’t going to kill him in nine more hours. When they told him, twenty-eight days probably sounded like a long time.

Clouds had quit and hurled themselves out of the way of the moon and a few stars; the slush had washed off, so the drive back to Hillston was fast. On both sides of the highway, winter trees twisted up like coral reefs, and the road was so lonesome I might just as well have been under the sea. Patsy Cline sang “Crazy” and Loretta Lynn sang “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man.” Some folks fight, some folks cry.

Airport Road comes into town from the north, so I figured I’d go back by the Hillston Club to tell Justin and Alice what I’d heard at Dollard Prison. It was 1:00 A.M. when I drove down the poplar-lined entrance. The Mercedeses and Cadillacs had thinned out in the parking lot, but there were still plenty of Saabs and BMWs left; Justin's old Austin wasn’t among them, but maybe they’d come with somebody else, or maybe Alice had left early with the car. Out on the pitch-black fairways, I could hear some golf carts tearing around, girls shrieking “Faster!” and guys hollering “Fore!” The whole white-columned wood front was still lit up with twinkling Christmas lights, and the Jimmy Douglas Orchestra appeared to have shucked off the past, at least as far as early Motown, because even outside I could hear them chopping up the Supremes’ “Baby Love” in the worst way.

It was clear that the older half of “the number” (as well as most of the staff) had abandoned the ball, or been locked in the basement
by the younger set. On the couch where I’d seen A.R. Randolph's granddaughter passed out in her red satin gown, I now saw a young disheveled couple kissing like they never expected to get another chance; they’d pull apart, gasp for air, and plunge back in like they were trying to save somebody from drowning. Two young men in their ruffled shirts were fencing with brass pokers beside the giant Christmas tree. Somebody smart had blown out all its little candles just when there’d been nothing left but wax nubs between that tree and a flaming inferno; Hillston's whole high society could’ve burnt up like Confederate Atlanta. On the parquet floor, two young bare-foot women sat, their dresses spread like bright parachutes, each chugging a bottle of champagne while watching the fencers. “Aren’t they silly?” said one. “I think men are the silliest things I ever saw in my whole life, I really do, I mean, you know, don’t you? Don’t you think, Steffie, men are just, well, I don’t know, silly? Or something.”

Steffie opened her mouth, but then slowly shook her head as if her thoughts on the subject were too complex.

In the ballroom, the guests still on their feet (there were some stretched out on chairs and tables) were gyrating like they’d stuck their hands into a fuse box. I gave a halfhearted look for Justin, but knew I wouldn’t find him; he's not a modernist and was probably already home one-fingering Cole Porter tunes on his upright. And I didn’t see the mayor and Mrs. Yarborough, or Paul Madison, or the Brooksides, or anybody I much knew. Maybe the older crowd had gotten word of Cadmean's death, and all gone home to mourn the passing of an era. If this group here had heard, they hadn’t let it get them down. Three very good-looking drunk girls (one, I realized, was Randolph's granddaughter) stood on the band dais, imitating the Supremes. They’d giggle when they’d turn wrong and crash into each other.