As it turned out, Sister Eleanor had been going down to Austin to take care of my mother, her sister. So, all that time I’d been too afraid to tell her who I was, imagining that waiting was all that Mother needed, was not wasted. Eleanor Rose had been taking care of things without me. That was the oddest feeling, having someone like her in charge.
The first morning we went down to see Mother, Eleanor got real bossy about my clothes. “Put on the khaki skort, please.” She crossed her arms over her chest and blocked my exit at the base of the stairs.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because, how you dress matters,” said the same woman who was standing there covered from head to toe in fabric. “Go!” She pointed one long arm up toward my bedroom and waited. I turned slowly and plop plop plopped back up the stairs, the very same stairs I had practically skipped down because I was so excited about going to see my mother.
Aunt Eleanor followed me, saying to hurry up, it was an hour drive to town. So I scrambled into the khaki skort, stretched into a fresh blue blouse with stupid buttons, then stepped back into my cowboy boots. I thought she was going to protest, but I stuck out my chin and defied her. She shrugged.
“The hair is not negotiable,” she said, and snatched up a brush and ran it through my hair.
“Ouch!” I pulled away. But she kept at it until every hair was stuck to my head.
She reached to clip a bow in my hair but I said no, no, no. “Bows are not negotiable. I’m a cowboy hat kind of girl.”
“Fine,” she said. “Wear the hat if you must, but the guns stay here.”
“I need my—” I began, but she cut me off with that hand chop she used to shut me up fast.
“They have no sense of humor about guns in the courthouse, toys or not.”
During the drive I asked her about her cancer. It was blunt, I know, but since we were all about shedding secrets I needed to know. And I worried about who would take care of me if something happened to her. After all, feeling safe and secure at Paradise Ranch was a brand-new feeling and I didn’t want to lose it.
“Are you going to die?” I asked.
“Sure I am,” she said. “We all are.”
“No, I mean…”
“I know what you mean, Ruby Clyde. And the answer is—I do not know. I’ve had surgery and chemotherapy and radiation. I’ve responded well but I’m not cancer free yet. These things take time.”
More of that time thing, I thought.
I was about worn out with everything taking time, but I wasn’t on the committee that set up this crazy world. Sometimes you just have to believe what you need to believe. Right then, she was well enough to take care of me and my mother, and that was that.
When we got to town, Aunt Eleanor knew where to go. She drove her blue van into a parking lot downtown. We entered through a gate that lifted all by itself. After taking a ticket she drove around and around to about the third floor before she found an empty place large enough for her van. Some of the spots we passed were marked COMPACT but those weren’t for us.
As she turned off the ignition, I imagined seeing Mother in a few short minutes.
“Is Mother okay?” I asked.
“Well, she’s in jail…” she said, and I felt foolish.
We walked out of the parking lot, across the street, and into a tall shiny building with at least ten floors.
“This is a jail?” I thought jails were big castles with armed guards in watch towers. Not a big swanky building in town with people coming and going wearing suits and high-heel shoes.
“The jail is over there.” She pointed to another building, which wasn’t as fancy, but it didn’t look like a jail either.
“Why aren’t we going there? I want to see Mother.” I skidded back on the heels of my boots.
“Ruby Clyde,” she said. “We don’t have time for this. Joe Brewer is your mother’s lawyer. He is waiting for us. He is taking us to see your mother. It’s the only way both of us can see Barbara. He has gotten special permission from the sheriff for us to have a face-to-face visit.”
She dragged me a little bit until I heeled along beside her.
“And mind your manners,” she said. “Joe Brewer is a court-appointed defender and he is doing everything humanly possible to help us.”
I’d never heard of a court-appointed defender before. It sounded like a comic book hero. I later found out that in Austin, the court-appointed defenders are regular attorneys who are paid by the court to represent people who can’t afford an attorney. A court-appointed defender fights for the criminals, or in Mother’s case, the innocent people accused of crimes. Then the lawyers trying to put them in jail for breaking the law are called prosecutor, district attorney, or assistant district attorney.
Aunt Eleanor rushed me into an elevator just as the doors were closing. “Eight please,” she said to a perfect stranger just because he was standing closer to the buttons. Once we were off the elevator the big wooden doors were right there. I thought we should knock but Aunt Eleanor walked right in. That seemed rude to me, but she did it.
The front room of the lawyer’s office was fancy, with artwork on the walls, three chairs, a sofa, a hundred magazines, and a large desk with a lady on the telephone, if you can call it that. It was a wire thing that wrapped around her head and hovered in front of her mouth. She punched a few buttons to send the call along and said into her microphone, “Sister Eleanor is here.”
I perched on the edge of a chair and said, “Hey, she knows you. You didn’t tell her your name but she called you Sister Eleanor.”
“I told you, Ruby Clyde, that how you dress matters. When I walk around in this habit people remember me. It’s all they see. They see this outfit and they call me Sister Eleanor. It could be Sister Joan bringing you in here but they wouldn’t know it. They would call her Sister Eleanor. I’ll tell you a secret. If you ever want to rob a bank, wear a big red wig, the wig will be all they will remember when they try to describe you.”
I believed she was right about everything, but not about getting mixed up with Sister Joan. Nobody would forget Sister Joan’s big caterpillar eyebrows.
Just then a man walked out. “Sister Eleanor,” he said, sticking out his hand. He wore a stiff white shirt collar and a necktie so tight I couldn’t stop staring at it. His face was wide and friendly, wise—like a tall version of that little Yoda thing from Star Wars. He turned to me and said, “Hello, young lady,” and shook my hand too. I liked that already. “I am Joe Brewer. You must be Ruby Clyde Henderson.”
Joe Brewer led us down a hall, past a library and a room where people were screaming at each other. He took us into an office with a glass door, which he closed. I sat down right next to his desk and leaned in to talk quietly. “Is it true you are going to take me to see my mother, right now in a minute?”
He smiled. “Yes, right now in a minute, but first I thought you might have some questions.” He tilted his head and waited.
Questions, I thought. I had so many questions they were leaking out my ears.
My questions spilled out. “What’s a lawyer? How did you get to be one? And what do you do that we can’t do ourselves?”
He didn’t smile. But I could tell he wanted to. The corners of his lips tipped up, then he made them stop. “I’ll answer those important questions one at a time.”
He proceeded to tell me that a lawyer was a person who studied the law. He had graduated from college, gone to three years of law school, and practiced law for ten years.
I wondered about a man who practiced anything for ten years. Had he never gotten good enough to just do it?
It was like he read my mind because he let himself smile and said, “Practice is working at the job of law. Which brings me to what I can do that you cannot. I am licensed to go into court to represent your mother. You cannot do that. I am trained to handle all of the paperwork and procedures before trial. I also know the law, which is vast and confusing to untrained people. And I know exactly how to behave in court. Court is a formal and solemn place. It is a place where we try to determine the truth. Justice and truth.”
“That’s all fine and good,” I said. “But why does Mother even need to go to court? What is her crime?”
“Armed robbery,” he said simply, and let that settle.
“But, she didn’t—” I started.
“Let him finish, Ruby Clyde,” Aunt Eleanor said sharply and I settled down.
“Your mother has been arraigned where she entered a plea of not guilty, and was indicted by the grand jury who heard from the owner of the Okay Corral Gas and Food Mart. She has a right to go to trial sometime within the next 180 days. At trial, the district attorney will try to prove to a jury that your mother committed armed robbery with her boyfriend. After that I will present her side of the story. I will attempt to show that she is innocent of the charges. Then the jury will render their verdict. Guilty or not guilty.”
“Will you win?” I asked.
“I can’t make any promises but I am very good at my job. I can promise to do my best.”
I didn’t want his best. I wanted truth and justice for my mother. But he seemed the only path to get there.
I said, “But it was all the Catfish, what’s happening to him?”
“The Catfish?” He tilted his head again.
“Carl,” I spat. “The no-count boyfriend who dragged me out of bed while I was asleep and tried to take us to Hollywood.”
Mr. Joe Brewer listened and nodded slowly, thinking. I didn’t ever remember being listened to so completely, so when he asked me to tell him my story, I told him how I went to sleep at home and woke up at the campsite, how we rode the Duck boats in Hot Springs. I must say he looked right amazed when I told him about freeing Bunny the Pig from the IQ Zoo. I meant to tell him the whole entire story, every bit of it, but I choked on Gus Luna and his gun. I felt complicit—Wordly Wizard!—by not protesting, and I had even encouraged the Catfish to use that gun in the rescue operation. I skipped some of that part and went on to the robbery at the Okay Corral. His eyes softened when I told him about being in the middle of all that shooting and thinking they were going to catch me and put me in the orphanage. But then like an angel from God, Angie had appeared.
“You’re very brave,” he said.
“It’s all the Catfish’s fault.” My chest was tight with fury. “He’s the one and only criminal.”
“And that is what I will try to prove in court. The Cat … Carl—you’ve got me calling him the Catfish—will have a separate trial. The evidence against him is strong. I don’t think any attorney could get him off. He’s going to stand trial alone. And for what it’s worth, your mother wants nothing further to do with him.”
“That’s the best news I’ve ever heard,” I said.
Finally, Joe Brewer looked at his watch and said, “Okay, are you ready to go see your mother?”
“Am I?” I yelled.
“I take that as a yes.” He stood up and straightened his tie. Aunt Eleanor smoothed her habit, and out we went.