Finally they got him where it hurt. They found the hurt that made him so passionate about being fair and taking care of people, trying to give them the justice they sought and deserved, even when he stood to lose, the hurt of never being able to forgive himself.
It was shame that had driven him out of Alabama all those years before. Despair, too, because he loved something, the law, so much it drove him crazy when he lost faith in it. But shame is a terrible thing. It makes those who are ashamed want to be like those who shame them, to feel upright again and have that power, whatever form it takes. It is instinct, like an animal’s, to be like those who shame us; they have such authority, they must be right. It’s even worse when they say it’s God’s doing, not just theirs, like that’s something a real God would do. We don’t even think about it, we don’t even question the rightness when we’re shamed, because we feel so bad. Questioning it, looking it in the eye, not imitating those who shame us—that’s the hardest thing in the world to do. But that’s what Charlie did.
It was the morning after the Pemberton trial. The kitchen windows were open on a warm autumn day, the sun shining bright through the thinning leaves, all that yellow drifting to the ground. Drusilla was sitting at the table lost in her thoughts, the fresh-poured coffee going cold in her cup. She was angry, angry at the Pembertons of the world, and the trial lawyers and the judges and the fools who listened to them and let their loyalties and perceptions be manipulated. But she knew that was the way things really were, that Charlie had always known it, too, that he and she had never been naive so much as maybe a little too optimistic or idealistic. But how else could one live? She’d never felt so powerless as she did sitting at that table that sunny morning, and probably never loved Charlie more. To her mind, it was that long-ago hurt that had tempered him and made him good.
Charlie always held grief close. When Doc Willis died, the man he trusted the most after his uncle, he’d been real quiet, his eyes reddening a few moments at the supper table when he told her the news. They’d known it was coming, but Charlie said it was the first time the world felt like it would never fill up for him again.
His uncle’s death was something much worse. They were in bed in the cabin in the mountains when he told her. They weren’t married yet. Though they’d talked a lot since they met, the talk had changed since they started sleeping together, gone deeper, like with no clothes on they couldn’t hide from each other. No man had ever taken her there before, as if what they were doing with their bodies was spiritual.
They’d just made love, and he was lying in her arms, his head on her breasts. Suddenly he rolled away and lay looking at the ceiling for a long time. Finally she reached over and stroked his face with her fingers, saying nothing. “I’ve got to tell you about this,” he said finally, his voice different from anything she’d heard, subdued but not gentle at all. But not violent either. She knew he was letting her in on something he was saying to himself. “I never told anyone, I’ve been so ashamed.”
A huge sigh boiled up and out of him like muck from the bottom of his soul into the deathly silence that had settled between them, and suddenly she was afraid. For the first time in her life, she felt all the pain and helplessness of caring. She’d grown bound to this man, and whatever he was about to say, she’d have to live with it.
He told her how he’d stood most of that day in November 1958 looking up at that gash in the earth, hoping his uncle would still be alive. A tightness had gripped him like fear, only worse and more scary because in his heart this hope was battling what he already knew. The men from Montgomery standing nearby had dismissed the yard boss, the one Charlie said was murderous—something inside him caged—and started to talk quietly among themselves. “They live like goddamn animals,” Charlie heard one say. “If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t believe it.”
It might look that way, Charlie had argued to himself, but it isn’t true!
“Independents, they call themselves,” another said. Then they’d laughed, the laughter muted, hardly noticeable, but still laughter. And that was his dead uncle they were laughing at, and the only life Dugan had known until he was seventeen! He’d wanted to kill them.
But just then, one turned to him: “You see a lot of this, Trooper Dugan?” His voice was friendly and easy, and he smiled at Charlie, allowing the paragon of law into his confidence. Men like that always liked the police, Charlie said. If he’d been stationed in Montgomery or Birmingham, they would have invited him to play golf.
“Not of this, no, sir.”
“No, I guess not,” the man had replied, still smiling. “Thank God for that, huh?”
The words had seemed to find their own way out: “Yes, sir.” It was, of course, the sir and what he imagined was the lickspittle tone of his voice, the willingness, he’d said when he could finally speak again, worse, the desire to be included in their confidence, to not be part of that hole up that rainy hillside, to not be a “goddamn animal” but to be like and of those Montgomery men—the repudiation of all that had ever meant anything to him, the essence of who he was—that had made him vomit when he arrived home that night. Hard as he’d tried, he couldn’t towel away the self-loathing. Even all those years later, it was the worst self-loathing she’d ever heard. For to him, the real horror they saw that day, all of them, hadn’t been what his uncle had done—digging a dismal mine in the dirt in order to stay alive and feed a family with some semblance of pride—but why he had to do it, and the willingness of people like those Montgomery men and finally Charlie himself, in his act of submission, to have his uncle do it, when they all knew it was a horror.
Then he’d watched men he’d known all his life carry his uncle through air and daylight once again, on down the hill away from that torn piece of earth. But after hearing the men from Montgomery who construed Charlie as belonging to them, if not as one of their own, he had wondered how the other miners could carry his uncle to his grave, then go back into their own little holes, as though the laws of mortality didn’t apply to them. And as he’d wondered, his face had burned hotter with shame at the words of the men from Montgomery, and his surrender.
Names didn’t matter. Suddenly he’d known those men in suits too well, just like he’d suddenly known himself.
In the following days, unable to escape the shame of feeling any shame at all about his uncle and his life, he’d begun wondering whose laws he was really enforcing, and for what and whom. When he couldn’t answer, not because the answer wasn’t there, he’d turned in his resignation.
From the day his uncle died, he’d known he could never become one of the bureaucrats, could never give in to them and the people who owned them, couldn’t pretend any longer that it didn’t matter. But he didn’t want to become like that yard boss either, who was just the other face on the same coin—not to mention a witness to Charlie’s submission, even if the man hadn’t heard or seen a damn thing. Charlie had witnessed himself in the contrast with the yard boss’s courage.
So was it any surprise Charlie wanted fairness and justice? He didn’t want people to live in shame, repression and violence, because that only brought on more of the same. Those men from Montgomery were, to his mind, just as brutal and far more unforgivable than the yard boss, who at least had stood up to them. Unlike the yard boss, they weren’t accountable. They were cowards who hid behind each other and the law, and whatever rules they were supposed to enforce.
Drusilla found herself looking out the kitchen windows at leaves floating down through a warm, perfect, sunny day, and wiped the moisture from her eyes. Though she might have wished for more, her time for him came when it did. That was the way of things.