THE MOB CAUSED US no trouble that night. For about an hour they watched us watching them through the windows, then they turned and went away. Every few minutes I peeked out the window, but the streets of Eudora stayed quiet and dark that night.
The next morning the trial began in earnest. I spent a long minute studying the face of Henry Wadsworth North, trying to match the man with what I remembered of the boy on the day Mama took sick. Too many years had intervened. This sallow, blotchy-faced fat man bore only a vague resemblance to the surly kid I remembered from Jenkins’ Mercantile.
Jonah called his first witness: Abraham Cross.
Abraham was wearing his best church suit, of speckled brown wool, and a matching fedora. He rolled in in a rickety wheelchair Moody had borrowed from a crippled neighbor of L.J.’s, a nice woman who sympathized with us.
“Now, Mr. Cross,” Jonah said, “why don’t you take us back to the night of August twenty-fifth. Tell us what you remember.”
Abraham nodded. “Well, sir, I was in the parlor, a-layin’ in my bed, and Moody was tendin’ after me—”
“Excuse me, sir,” Jonah said. “Who is Moody?”
“Moody Cross. My granddaughter. She looks after me.”
“Thank you, sir. Please go on.”
“Like I say, I was a-layin’ in my bed. Not quite sure if I’d been sleeping or not. But then sure enough I come awake. Sound like the cavalry done showed up outside the house. A bunch of horses, I don’t know how many. And men shootin’ off guns, and yellin.’ Like to scared me half to death—and I don’t need to be any closer to dead than I already am.”
Laughter rolled through the courtroom, from whites and Negroes. My father slammed down the gavel to kill it.
Abraham continued telling his story in precise, unwavering detail. Without any prompting from Jonah, he pointed out and positively identified two of the defendants.
“That one there, I saw him through the front window,” he said, pointing at the defense table.
Jonah asked him to be more specific.
“That one on the right,” he said. “Stephens. He shot Jimmie Cooper dead.”
“You’re sure it was Mr. Stephens you saw?”
“No doubt about it,” said Abraham. “And then that one there—Mr. Madden—he come into the parlor where I was, with another one of them Raiders. A man he called Harold.”
“And what did Mr. Madden do?”
“He says to this Harold, ‘You watch this old nigger real good. Keep your gun on his neck.’ Then he went back outside, Madden did.”
“And the one he called Harold—he stayed there with you?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Did he keep a gun on you?”
“Yes, sir. Up against my skull. And he grabbed Moody too. Not in a nice way.”
“And how did you respond to that, Mr. Cross?”
Abraham scratched his old head, closed his eyes for a moment. Then he spoke.
“Well, sir, to tell you the truth I didn’t have to respond.”
“And why is that?”
“Because a minute later, Ben Corbett come into the room, and my granddaughter Moody…”
He stopped.
“Please continue,” Jonah said.
“She pushed a kitchen knife into Harold’s back.”