They never saw it coming. How could they? At least not the way it happened.
That deputy, Junior Trainor, the one Danny called “Junior Junior,” being assaulted out at Beauford’s Four Corner Market, then old Ned—Danny had known Ned when he used to be a patient out at the V.A.—bashing up Winthrop Reedy’s automobile right in the middle of downtown, terrifying his wife, Lizzie, according to the news. And then just hours later, his wife about blowing that trailer in Little Zion and everyone in it to kingdom come, after catching her husband with some other woman in flagrante delicto, as the paper put it. “Flagrante dee-lickto,” everyone at work was saying the next day, knowing what it ought to mean, even if most of them had never seen the words before, it coming out “flagrant delicious” and a lot worse, everyone having a real good time. That poor woman didn’t deserve to be arrested even, Loretta thought. The humiliation must have been terrible.
And then that woolybooger showed up. “I bet it’s Puma,” Danny said right off with a snort when the very first story came out, when everyone else was crawling under the bed. “I heard those deputies been harassing him something awful. Lord, Loretta,” he added all of a sudden, and turned to her, his face red, about to pop, “this is better than the cartoons!” Then he laughed his old, deep laugh. She hadn’t heard him laugh in so long! They both laughed until it was painful, wiped the tears, then cracked up again.
But about the second or third night, Danny said, “Man, it’s Charlie Dugan’s ass that’s really getting hung out to dry.” And as soon as he said it, she knew it to be true. All of a sudden, that craziness wasn’t so funny anymore, because it all reflected back on the sheriff. It became painful hearing people at work talking and laughing, like those same people might have been talking and laughing back in April, June and July, say, when Danny and Loretta were first in court, only laughing at them instead. By all those other persons’ lights, they made damn fools of themselves fighting what shouldn’t have been fought, and lost more than they won, given their mounting debts. They even made people feel sorry for “poor Doc Pemberton.” So why did they bother in the first place? What did they gain? People hide their cowardice behind false wisdom, she told herself. She’d take on Pemberton again in a minute.
When the girls came home from school the first day all scared because of that monster—their teacher, who was real religious and believed the appearance of the monster might be the onset of the Second Coming and Revelation, having only made it worse—Danny said, “Kids, it’s nothing but some good old boy poking fun at those deputies, you watch.” The two looked up at him and said, “Really?” and believed him right off, she could see. “Ask your mama.” Just the way he said it sounded like her old Danny, and she nodded her head, too, because the girls believed them both in a way they never did before, she would swear. It went so deep it was almost scary to her, and she knew it was on account of what happened on the mountain, and their not sitting down for it, no matter how awful the months since had been. It was the first clear sky she’d seen in all that time. The girls went back to school the next day, and while everyone else was scared and clingy, they were just fine. It was sad to her it had to be learned that way, but they were wonderful, strong girls. Loretta was proud of them.
But she didn’t know what she would have done if Danny hadn’t stood behind her, despite what he believed. He was never a man she thought of as exactly patient, but that’s what he was with her, all in all. He stood behind her, and she loved him dearly for it, though the world would never be the same again, or at least she wouldn’t. Maybe the world is always this way, she thought, and you just wake up to it someday and accept it if you can, bear it if you have someone to share it with.
Charlie Dugan, now, that poor man. He was no saint, but he was truly brave and a good man—a man of real beliefs, she could tell, but how those beliefs must have tortured him! It would have been better, she heard some say, to be shot and killed outright, made a hero forever on Puma’s porch, than shot only in the shoulder by one of your hotheaded deputies. But they were small people who would never have had the courage to fight a battle they knew they’d probably lose, and with it all their comforts. Some people fought because they believed in something, even if that belief was beaten down time and again. Maybe all they were fighting for was the idea. She didn’t know, but she wondered. Stop fighting, it seemed to her, and not even the idea would exist anymore. Then they’d be dead, even if they didn’t know it.
She’d vote for that man anytime he wanted to run for anything, and told him so. He apologized when he called to tell them Pemberton was going to go on trial now, instead of in the spring, like they all thought. It was like he was saying it was his fault, that somehow it was linked to all that nonsense in the papers. But their lawyer up in Morganton had phoned already, so they knew. They told him, “Fine, let’s just play it out,” Danny’s words really, but it was the sense of things. At least they’d tried, at least Dugan had tried—that’s how Danny and she had come to feel about it. She was still angry, they both were, but somehow they’d begun to feel free in a way they never had before, and stronger, both separate and together, and in a way they’d never have known if they hadn’t been through all that.
The day of court, that Friday, they went to town early and met Sheriff Dugan in his office. They didn’t feel any need to see the solicitor or their lawyer; they both felt it was going to be like it was going to be. Dugan’s arm was still in a sling. The paper said that, according to the doctors, he’d regain full use of the arm, that Deputy Trainor had fired thinking Skinner, the man who buried that boy out at the fairground, was armed when he came out of Puma’s house. Puma shoved in front of him, yelling they weren’t armed, or so some said. Trainor claimed he thought he saw a gun—they were outlaws, after all—and Sheriff Dugan, trying to stop what he saw was about to happen, got himself shot. The paper had a picture of an ambulance and all kinds of deputies and troopers around it, and a picture of Skinner in handcuffs, head bowed, along with Puma, who was looking at the camera like he might eat it. Later Puma was charged with harboring a fugitive, though Elmore Willis got him off, saying, “No way in hell”—his very words, as printed in the paper—“Trainor can prove Puma knew that.” It was Trainor who brought the charges, apparently over the sheriff’s protest, but the sheriff was still in the hospital. Skinner already had a mess of charges against him in the county, as well as up in Virginia and Pennsylvania, so the charge of assault with intent to kill Trainor brought against him was dropped. Anyhow, by the time the shooting happened, everyone knew Puma was “Mr. X,” the woolybooger, who stomped across the road, an old fur over his head, arms in the air, those two deputies fast asleep on their stakeout. Danny just shook his head. “Junior Junior’s aim was off,” he said.
The sheriff had been out of the hospital and back at work in four days. He was “like someone driven,” one of the deputies told them, but he didn’t seem that way to her when they met that morning. He seemed tired, though, and acknowledged it, looking down at the sling like he wanted to apologize for that, too. But he also seemed more gentle somehow, much more than he’d ever been. Sitting around his desk, all three of them seemed real comfortable with each other.
Maybe it was the tension—the courtroom that day was full, out-oftown press in attendance, what with a prominent doctor charged with multiple felonies in a county plagued by outlaws, shootings and woolyboogers—but once in court, she saw how bad it really was. Dugan’s color was terrible, a kind of gray. Now that he was away from his desk, she saw how much weight he’d lost, his clothes hanging on him, when he’d always been dapper, like he had nothing in the world to be ashamed of.
It was the same courtroom, its rows of wooden theater seats stretching up high against the tall windows, only now it was late fall, and a lot more light streamed in the room that morning, a deep golden tinge on it from the trees. They were at the solicitor’s table again. Their lawyer was there, and the solicitor for superior court as well, not that idiot from district court. The solicitor did all the arguing this time; he was fighting for them, they could see, and they trusted him as far as it went, though they still wanted the man from Morganton as backup, even if they had to pay him. Money didn’t matter now. Wherever the case went, they didn’t want to feel like they’d given up at the last moment.
But everything leading up to that day had happened so quickly, Danny first telling her when she came home from work one night, her feet killing her, how the lawyer had called him out at the hospital, how he hadn’t wanted to bother her at the drugstore. Initially she’d felt too weary to hear what the lawyer had to say. But then she headed for the nearest chair and put her feet up on a stool, then looked up at Danny standing in the doorway to the kitchen, him wearing jeans and boots and a T-shirt, no hips, the way she loved him. “Where are the girls?”
“Spending the night at Rexy’s. I called and explained, and she said fine.” Still standing there, looking at her, watching for when she was ready. She could feel it. She put her hand over her eyes and felt a wave of fatigue wash over her, and a moment’s tears, for God only knew what they would have done without Rexy, a neighbor, grandmother and widow who lived three houses down and adored the girls. Rexy hadn’t judged Danny and her the way others had, thinking they were fools or worse, or if she did, she never let on. Loretta was reluctant to lift her head out of her hand and open her eyes back into the reality of Danny’s waiting gaze. God, she was tired! “We’re going to trial a week from Friday,” he said.
Then she surprised herself. “We needed to send the girls to Rexy’s for this?”
“I thought we might need some time to get used to the idea, talk if we have to.” But what is there left to say? she wondered. That’s when she really saw for the first time how much he’d changed, how quiet inside he’d become, like he’d finally made some kind of peace with it, and it was all so close up she hadn’t seen it until then. It might have scared her once, wondering what it might mean for her if he got someplace first, or she couldn’t even get there. He’d always tried to be good for her, calm and strong, but she never doubted he disbelieved. She remembered when Sheriff Dugan came over and talked to her in the back of that deputy’s car the night it happened, and she felt everything was going to be okay again. “We’ll wait and see, Loretta, honey,” was what Danny had said. How long ago all that seemed, now that it was about to be over, for she knew somehow it was going to be over.
Then, all at once, she also knew how much she’d changed. She was still angry—people should not have their lives be at the mercy of other people who don’t care because they are unhappy or drunk. They should not be able to visit their miseries on you. But she wasn’t afraid of what Danny felt anymore, and wasn’t afraid of the anger in herself either. She could feel the tension running off. Maybe now I’ll sleep again, she’d thought, sitting there with her feet up, looking at him. No matter what happens now, though I may still be angry, I won’t be ashamed.
The judge was different, too—more businesslike, it seemed—a thin, smallish man with white hair and glasses who looked serious about everything, even mean, she decided. But the biggest difference was the jury—its existence. The lawyers had spent almost two hours impaneling it, seven men and five women. She’d tried to guess about each one, what they might think. Most looked like working people, a little awkward in their dress clothes.
By the time the first witness for the prosecution was called, the courtroom had filled all the way to the top seats, where she and Danny had sat the first time and hardly anyone else had been there. She could feel an excitement in the room and in herself. But she felt seasoned, too, like an old hand, which seemed strange. What had changed? Danny looked almost bored, and she grinned to herself and was proud of him. But these feelings made her feel confused, too, because she knew that even if it was going to be all over that day, it was about something ugly and always would be—not an entertainment, or the circus. Or theater.
She looked over at the defense table. The doctor, dressed again in a nice suit, this one dark, was sitting with his hands folded on the table, just like the last time, only looking relaxed. Something had become settled in him, too; she could feel it and was suddenly afraid, as though there would never be any end to the lessons and surprises and hell that had begun up on that mountain. She was deluding herself if she thought otherwise. But she took hold and forced her fear down. I’ve been through too damn much now, she told herself.
Once again, the solicitor called Danny first, and Danny said pretty much what he had the last time, the defense asking one or two questions but not being very aggressive, unlike before. Then the solicitor called Sheriff Dugan to describe what he’d found when he arrived at the scene. There was scarcely a sound in the room when Dugan took the stand, his arm in that clean, white sling, his uniform obviously too big, for all the weight he’d lost, and him looking old beyond his years. It was fatigue, she knew, fatigue that had become greater since he’d left the office earlier that morning. And pain, for every now and then he might move a special way, and she barely detected a wince and knew he was fighting to hide it, to not make excuses for himself or, worse, to be seen doing so. But Lord, to get up before the public and press, who were sitting there just waiting to see what he looked like!
When the sheriff took the stand, she looked over at the defense table again and found Pemberton watching the witness closely. He has to see Sheriff Dugan’s discomfort, she thought, but his face seemed pitiless to her, and self-absorbed. It divulged no emotion, nothing despite the smile that she knew was only in the shape of his lips—fixed and accidental, like his birthright. At that moment, he was so unattractive to her with his coddled look, she felt actual revulsion.
The defense attorney, all smiles and sweetness, said he had one question: “Sheriff Dugan, during testimony at Dr. Pemberton’s preliminary hearing, the name Ronnie Patton was mentioned as the person who, and I read from the transcript, ‘had the gun and pointed it out the window.’ Do you recall that?”
“Yes, sir,” Dugan said, looking unflinchingly at the attorney, but not, it seemed to Loretta, with hostility or unfriendliness. He seemed to be making an effort to rally himself to do a good job.
“Given the seriousness of this allegation, has your department taken any steps to apprehend him?”
“Yes, sir. Following that testimony, and as we informed your office when you inquired, we learned that the subject had left North Carolina with several outstanding warrants against him, including our own alleging assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. He left two weeks before the hearing in which he was implicated.”
“And that’s where your investigation ended, with a warrant?”
“Tough keeping law and order out here, is it, Sheriff Dugan?” Laughter rippled through the room.
Loretta suffered for the sheriff because she knew he wasn’t himself and didn’t even look it, shrunken as he was in those clothes, trying to hold back the pain. It seemed to her that the defense attorney in his fancy suit with his good health deliberately puffed himself up every time he went near the stand. Oh, he’s good, she thought.
“We received word just yesterday,” Dugan persevered, but in a lower voice that brought a hush back to the courtroom, “from Phoenix, Arizona, that a man answering Ronnie Patton’s description is being held there on a charge of manslaughter. We haven’t been able to confirm whether this is in fact the same Ronnie Patton, though we are in the process of doing just that. However, even if it proves to be the same man, extradition may be difficult, given the gravity of the charge in Arizona.”
“You couldn’t have found all this out sooner, Sheriff Dugan?”
“We found out as fast as we could, sir. We were right on it.” But the way that attorney had worked it, she saw, the sheriff couldn’t be right on anything.
“You didn’t ask for a continuance when you received this information?”
“Yes, sir, we did, and as I believe you know, it wasn’t granted.”
“Of course it wasn’t! Finally a glimmer of compassion and justice! Here a man’s considerable reputation, not to mention career and livelihood, have been on the line for months, his name has been bandied about and dragged around in the mud like he’s a common criminal, and you just wanted to suddenly continue this case a little longer because you were ‘right on it’ and finally were able to locate a man identified as the actual shooter in this incident, a man whose name you’ve had for months. Now, just what is criminal here? Come now, sheriff.” The attorney walked back to the defense table and sat down, dropping his forehead into his hand and riffling idly through some papers, things so quiet everyone could hear the sound the papers made.
“This is awful,” she whispered to Danny.
“It’s court, baby,” Danny whispered back. “Sheriff knew what he was in for.”
At last, the defense attorney looked up like he was so disheartened by the ugliness and injustice of all that had happened to his client he’d forgotten he had a witness in the stand. “No more questions, Your Honor,” he said, and the dismissive way he said it was so full of contempt that muttering swelled in the crowd behind her, a few people even breaking into laughter. But that attorney knew all along about Patton, Loretta told herself, surprised that she could still be amazed by anything here. It was simple, deliberate humiliation.
The judge was banging his gavel when she became aware that the solicitor had been calling another witness. Soon there was virtually no other sound in the room. “Mrs. Mary Stacy,” he repeated in the silence. Turning slightly in her chair, Loretta found herself looking in the same direction as all the other people. Reggie, the bailiff, was looking, too. Then, from the far corner, from one of the high seats that looked down on the east door, a woman rose and started making her way carefully down the steep steps, the unsteady click of her shoes on the wood floor punctuating the hush. She was wearing a pretty, knee-length navy suit with white collar and cuffs, and a small white hat such as you might wear to church. She wore short heels, also dark blue. Stunned, it took Loretta a moment. She didn’t buy that suit! was her first thought, and with it came an electric jolt of anger, like some sort of betrayal was coming clear.
She looked again to make certain it was who she thought it was. By that time, the woman was at the gate to the bar, and Reggie was holding it open for her, his smile all oily, the pig.
Loretta recalled the dress she first saw Mary Stacy wearing, the pink dress with white polka dots all over it, the low-cut bodice, the hem reaching only halfway down the woman’s thighs, the flimsy material, the high spike heels, the beautiful legs going to fat above the knees. She remembered the inescapable truth not only of what her eyes had beheld at that preliminary hearing, but finally the truth of the woman herself, something utterly foreign to her until then, something slatternly but attractive somehow, like a scent.
Not dressed for court or church, she remembered thinking, then suppressing the thought and where it inevitably was leading, because she didn’t want to judge anyone by their poverty. She remembered, too, her struggle with the woman’s immodesty and insolence, and the innocence or stupidity and whatever else had been there—remembered her struggle to keep an open mind because she knew she would be stronger for it if she could.
She recalled all that as she found herself clutching the wooden arms of her chair, a new fury suddenly raging through her, another kind of outrage. She’s supposed to be Sheriff Dugan’s witness, our witness! But it was too apparent that Mary Stacy wasn’t anymore. She had been coached, dressed, made demure even, was answering questions politely, “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” acting like she could have been in church, her eyes not playing for the solicitor this time, or the audience or the judge, but looking modestly down at her lap sometimes. Look at me! Mary Stacy was saying again, but so differently. And people were, Loretta felt, just as she had felt their response to the defense attorney’s handling of Dugan. And worse, she was looking herself and feeling the confusion between memory and the present moment. She detected no poverty of body or mind in front of her, both of which she knew embarrassed people and made them do unfair things just to get that poverty out of sight. All she saw was a mildly pretty woman with a modest haircut holding her hands on her lap—holding a pair of white gloves, too, good Lord!—trying her best to answer the questions well for the solicitor.
The same questions, the same story, but now it all sounded rehearsed, divorced, disconnected from the person relating it with a look of simple, honest well-being. But if you didn’t know otherwise, how could you tell the difference? How could you ever know? It seemed part of something else, something scripted, but what was the script? Yes, it was the doctor’s car, but she had been drunk, too drunk to be sure where the doctor was, if he was there at all. Three men were in the car, yes, she was certain of that—one driving, and Ronnie Patton another one, the one with the gun, just like she had testified, and another man beside her in the backseat….
No questions from the defense. Nothing. Tears stung Loretta’s eyes. There was a trap here, she just knew. It was all a trap.
Even the solicitor seemed agitated at the quietness of things now, his attempts at oratory and drama falling flat. His sense of futility, or suspicion, or perhaps the wariness one might feel approaching an ambush, sensing it without knowing it for sure, slapped up against the bench like a wave from a fast boat. I will not be shamed by this again! she thought, feeling an old panic. I tried, we tried. She took Danny’s hand.
“Dr. Martin Pemberton.”
Startled—she had forgotten for a moment this was a trial and not just a repeat of the preliminary hearing, that the doctor would testify—she watched him press down on the table, slowly push himself to his feet, then walk to the stand, looking as relaxed and unconcerned as when she first saw him that day. Again the silence in the room was palpable, and she found herself holding her breath, waiting for even the answer to the first question: his name and occupation. The reply was quiet and smooth, not insolent nor impolite nor haughty either, like the look of the man suggested—his birthright, she thought again, without knowing why. She still felt a trap as the solicitor marched on with renewed vigor through that too-deep hush where not even the sound of the birds in the surrounding oak trees intruded: Did he own a car matching the description of the vehicle used that night in April?
“Yes.”
“Really! Was it the same car?”
“Yes.”
The room was stunned. The solicitor had started to ask another question and had to stop himself as the doctor’s answer registered; he couldn’t hide his surprise. My God, it all seems so easy. Why does this feel terrible and false?
“Dr. Pemberton, were you in the car at the time the shooting into the Carvers’ car occurred?”
“I believe so.”
Again the room held its breath with Loretta.
“You believe so? Yes or no?” She saw that the solicitor’s astonishment was not only that of a man not in charge, but that of a man with no illusion he was.
“Yes.”
“You were driving?”
“No.”
“Where in your Cadillac Eldorado automobile were you?”
“In the backseat next to Mrs. Stacy, I believe. I was too drunk to drive, you see. I was too drunk to do much of anything that night, I’m ashamed to say, especially not the right thing. Just as I’m ashamed I didn’t come forward sooner, too, and so have cost people much more pain. But it was shame that kept me from coming forward, realizing that I, especially as a man who holds a public trust—”
“Wait a minute! You’re saying you are guilty?”
“Guilty of being in the car. I couldn’t tell you who else was in there for sure, not who was driving, not even Mrs. Stacy there—I have to take her word for it.”