Jorgensen spent a couple of days getting ready for winter. That meant mending the shrimp nets, folding them up, and putting them into barrels; carrying in a week’s worth of firewood, in order to keep it dry; shutting off the water to the outside hose, draining the pipe to it, and pouring in a little antifreeze to keep anything he might have missed from bursting the fittings; and doing some caulking around the portholes - at least those he could reach from the ground, or with a stepladder.

That left the biggest job of all, dragging the catboat out of the water. But he wasn’t quite ready to do that yet - not only because it was backbreaking work that would take him half a day, but because, even though it was already November, he was determined to get in one last sail before mothballing her.

His chance came one morning at the end of the week when, even before he’d stepped outside, he knew from the spray on the windward portholes that there was a crisp offshore breeze blowing. With the wind coming directly out of the east, it would be something of a struggle to get out past the breakers. But there’d be a payoff: Once he was beyond them, he’d be able to pick his course at will, without having to worry about getting back in; the same breeze he’d have to fight going out would carry him home safely.

He found Jake nosing around at a crab hole in the sand. “You up for a sail, mate?”

If the old dog didn’t really understand, he sure did a good job of pretending. Tail wagging, entire body wagging (if, indeed, a body can wag), he all but knocked the old man over, rushing past him on the narrow pathway that led through the spartina grass and down to the dinghy.

It took them a series of tacks to get out. The one-sail design of the catboat made for poor pointing upwind, and they were forced to zigzag - first to port, then to starboard, then back to port - over and over again. Each time they came about, they’d lose a little headway: The sail would luff for a moment, and the waves would slap against the hull, stopping their momentum and occasionally even pushing them back toward shore. But the cat had a fixed keel, with a leaded core for ballast. It was shallow enough to let them glide over the shoals and sandbars without running aground, but long and heavy enough to minimize drifting. Bit by bit, tack by tack, they made headway, and gradually Jorgensen was able to see that the shoreline was receding behind them, and the lighthouse was getting smaller.

Once safely over the breakers, Jorgensen swung the tiller one last time and set a north-northwesterly course, or at least a pretty good approximation of one. He carried no compass, other than the internal one he’d inherited from his Scandinavian ancestors, and that had always proved pretty accurate. In fact, he had nothing on board more sophisticated than a folding knife, a screwdriver, and a bailing can. Marge had been after him for years to buy a little outboard motor, but doing so would have meant registering the boat, and registering it in turn would have meant insuring it. So instead he paid attention to the wind and the weather and the tides, and they hadn’t let him down yet. And if they ever did, if some monster squall suddenly appeared from out of nowhere and knocked them over, or some rogue wave decided to crash over their bow and swamp them? Well, to August Jorgensen’s way of thinking, there were worse ways to die.

But today there would be no monster squalls to knock them over, no rogue waves to swamp them. Only a long starboard reach in the morning sun, followed by a good run back to shore - a satisfying end to the season.

And that afternoon, while there were still a couple of hours of daylight left, he rigged a bowline to the winch he’d welded to the front of his truck, and let Thomas Edison do the work dragging the old catboat out of the water and up onto her winter cradle.

He spent the following morning chocking the hull so she wouldn’t slip. He removed, cleaned, folded, and stored the sail. He scraped a season’s worth of barnacles and algae from the keel and the underside. He thought about putting on a coat of anti-fouling paint, but decided he’d be better off waiting until spring, when the surface would be good and dry and take the paint better. Finally, he draped her with plastic tarps and secured them with nylon cord, leaving only the mast uncovered. With the boat no longer swinging free at her mooring to show him the direction and strength of the wind, her landlocked mast would serve as his winter flagpole, its red pennant the only telltale he’d need.

His work done, he whistled for Jake and took a drive to the post office. His electric bill was a month or so past due, and even though the folks over at Santee Cooper had learned to put up with his irregular payments, he didn’t like to abuse their kindness.

Edna Coombs, the postmistress who’d been retiring for at least eleven years, kept lollipops for the kids and treats for the dogs behind her window, so Jake was always the first one through the door. Jorgensen waited while he and Edna got reacquainted, then handed over his envelope.

“Thirty-four cents,” said Edna.

“Thirty-four? What happened to thirty-three?”

Edna reminded him that it had gone up a penny, way back in January. Jorgensen nodded absently. It seemed only yesterday that stamps were purple, and it cost three cents to mail a letter. Or you use a one-cent green one and stick it on a postcard. Penny postcards, they used to call them. A nickel would get you a whole Coke, one that came in a bottle made out of real glass, not that plastic stuff they used today. And a dime? A dime would get you into the picture show, where you could hunker down and spend half a day watching a newsreel, a couple of Tom and Jerry cartoons, a Bill and Coo short, and a double-feature.

“Thirty-four cents,” Edna was saying again.

He fished around in his pockets until he came up with two quarters. “Put the change in my account for next time,” he told her, “and make sure you keep track of the interest. Got anything for me?” They both understood that his anything meant any mail worth opening. Edna had long ago taken it upon herself to weed out the catalogs, credit card offerings, sweepstakes announcements, and other junk mail Jorgensen had no patience for.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” said Edna. She pretended to search around for it, but Jorgensen knew that was just for show, to impress him with how busy she was, and how much stuff she had back there. “Ahh,” she said after a minute, “here it is.” And handed him a package.

But this was no ordinary package, Jorgensen could see; this was how packages used to be. The size of a shoebox, wrapped in well-used brown paper, and all tied up in white cotton string with lots of knots. Instead of bearing one of those postage meter stickers, it had real stamps, a whole row of them. And his name and address hadn’t been typed or printed on a label by one of those machines. No, it had been written by hand, and - if he was any judge - slowly and meticulously, the work of someone to whom writing was definitely not second nature.

“You been expectin’ it?” Edna asked him. She was a bit of a busybody, as they used to say, who liked to know whatever there was to know about her customers.

“No,” said Jorgensen, “can’t say that I have been.” He tucked it under his arm.

“Well, don’tcha want to see what’s in it?”

“I probably will,” allowed Jorgensen, “I probably will.” And opened the door for Jake.

Back home, he placed the package on his kitchen table and studied it. There was no return address, and the postmarks (there were several, to cover all the stamps) were all too smudged to read.

Back when he’d been on the bench, a federal agent had come around, from Postal Inspection or Secret Service, or maybe ATF, warning Jorgensen and his colleagues to be on the lookout for suspicious-looking packages. It seemed some district judge over in the Fifth Circuit had had three fingers blown off when he’d opened up a box mailed by a defendant who hadn’t been too pleased with his sentence.

Well, if ever anything looked suspicious, thought Jorgensen, this certainly fit the bill. But then again, who on earth would want to blow him up? Just about everyone he’d ever sentenced had finished doing their time long ago, or died trying to. He found a pair of scissors, snipped the string, and slit open the paper.

Inside, just as he’d guessed, was a shoebox, an old beat-up one with the name THOM MCCAN printed on the lid. He remembered Thom McCans well. No-nonsense shoes, folks used to call them. He tried to remember if they were the same as Buster Browns, or different.

Hi, my name’s Buster Brown,

And I live in a shoe.

This is my dog, Ty-

He lives here, too.

Or something like that.

He lifted the lid off the box. No flash of light blinded him; no deafening explosion shattered his eardrums. Instead, he found himself looking down at a letter, a single-paged letter written in the same hand that had addressed the package. Using the tips of his fingers (all ten of which had somehow managed to survive the opening of the package), he lifted it up, noticing as he did that underneath it lay a stack of more letters, older ones from the look of them, tied together with faded blue ribbon.

Dear Mr Judge,

They tell me you are the new lawer for Boy. I am his sister. My name is Nell. First of all I want to thank you for help my brother. Even if he did what they say and I gues he must of he is not a bad person. He never lern to read or rite. He try but his brane is no good at lest it is not the same as other fokes.

Ever since our mama got sick and cant travel no more I am the onliest one to visit Boy at Brushy Mt. I use to go ever month so I can rite a letter and tell Mama how her one sun is. After mama pass I dont go ever month but I still go when I cans.

When Mama pass and my sisters and I clean out her things from her closit we find all the letters I ever rite her about Boy in a shoe box all tie up just like this. I dont no if they help you but may be so. I hope so.

Please do not contack me as I have a new husban and he do not no about Boy and I am a fraid he will leave me and my babys if he find out and I can not a ford that.

Ever nite I pray to Jesus to bless Boy and now I will pray for Him to bless you to for helping Boy.

Nell McDaniel Ashworth

He read the letter twice through before replacing it in the shoebox. What kind of a man, he wondered, would leave his wife because of sins committed by her afflicted brother? Plenty, he decided. And what good would a stack of old letters do him? None that he could think of. The fact was, they were all hearsay, the words not of Boyd Davies himself, but of one of his sisters. Boyd Davies had no words. And August Jorgensen had no appetite for reading a bunch of old letters assuring an ailing mother that her autistic son was doing just fine on death row. He laid Nell’s “Dear Mr. Judge” letter on top of the rest of them and replaced the lid on the box. “Save them for a rainy day,” his mother used to tell him.

Well, there’d be plenty of those.

And this business about Nell’s praying for Jorgensen to be blessed? He had to chuckle at the thought of that. A lifelong atheist in a state full of Southern Baptists, he’d been forced to answer a lot of pointed questions at his confirmation hearing, when subjects like abortion, creationism, and separation between church and state had come up. And now Jesus himself was being asked to bless Jorgensen’s appearance before the Supreme Court.

Hell, he figured. Why not? Or as folks liked to say nowadays, What’s the down side to it?

There was none, of course.

Then again, if Jorgensen’s memory served him, that Jesus fellow hadn’t fared too well in his own battle against the death penalty, had he? If you wanted to look at it that way.

Three days before Thanksgiving, Jessica Woodruff received a telephone call from Linda Greenhouse. Like Jessica, Linda was a lawyer who’d managed to find employment on the other side of the bar: Linda made her living covering the United States Supreme Court for The New York Times. But “covered” hardly did justice to Linda’s reporting. Her analyses and commentaries - which often began at the top of Page One - were so informative and insightful that she’d long ago become required reading for most of the nation’s constitutional scholars.

On top of that, Linda had been a friend of Jessica’s since law school days.

“I just thought you might like to know,” she said now, “the Court’s scheduling order came out today.”

“Oh?” said Jessica.

“And oral argument on the Davies case has been set down for April tenth.”

“How much are they giving us?” Jessica asked.

“Each side gets forty-five minutes.”

“Not exactly Bush versus Gore, huh?”

“No,” Linda agreed. “But it could have been worse. A lot of them get only half an hour.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Are you going to argue it?”

“Me? No way.”

“Larry Tribe?”

“No,” said Jessica. “And you have exactly one more guess.”

“David Boise.”

Jessica did her best impersonation of a buzzer, signifying a final wrong answer.

“How about telling me off the record?” Linda asked.

One thing about Linda: When she said off the record, it was off the record. Still, Jessica said, “Promise?” It was her way of letting Linda know she really didn’t want this to get out.

“Honest Native American,” said Linda.

“Okay,” said Jessica. “We’ve reached deep into the retired judges’ geriatric ward.”

A silence on the other end told her Linda was stumped. Supreme Court justices tended to die, rather than retire. “I give up,” Linda said.

“August Jorgensen.”

“August Jorgensen? Is he still alive?”

“I think so,” Jessica said. “Though every once in a while, I’m tempted to check for a pulse.”

“Where’d you dig him-, I mean, where’d you find him?”

“I’ve got to tell you,” said Jessica, “it wasn’t easy. He lives all alone in this dilapidated, falling-down lighthouse, halfway into the ocean. Heats the thing with logs. And get this: The guy doesn’t have a phone. Can you believe it?”

“So what’s your thinking?”

“Are we still off the record?”

“You know we are.”

“Linda, what do you think our chances are on this one?”

There was only the briefest of pauses before Linda answered, “Somewhere between slim and none.”

“I think you’re being charitable with the slim part.”

“So you’ve decided to go down to defeat with venerable dignity?”

“Something like that,” said Jessica.

“Well, good luck.”

“Thanks. And I appreciate the heads-up.”

April tenth. That was early in the term but still almost five months away. Jessica toyed with the idea of dictating a letter to Jorgensen, so he could circle the date. But then she decided against it: There was simply no need at this point. It wasn’t like he was carrying a caseload, like other lawyers, and might have a scheduling conflict. No, they’d let him know a month or so ahead of time, give him enough time to leave a bowl of food out for his dog.

For August Jorgensen, the next rainy day came sooner than expected. He awoke two mornings later to what he considered a medium fog. (A medium fog was one you could actually see in, and occasionally even see through. By way of contrast, a heavy fog was one that obscured absolutely everything, so that when you looked out one of the lighthouse’s portholes, you had the sensation that someone had draped a gray blanket over it from the outside.)

Within the hour, the fog had become supersaturated with moisture, which had begun to precipitate out as rain. When that happened, the fog dissipated to a certain extent, and the visibility became better. But if you went outside, instead of just getting damp from the fog, you got good and wet from the rain, and - this time of year, at least - good and cold, as well.

So Jorgensen cracked the door open just enough to let Jake slip out. When you were a Labrador retriever, damp was okay, but wet and cold - they were your briar patch.

Then the old man slid another log into the stove, gave it a poke to get it going, and reached for the Thom McCan shoe-box. Settling into the chair closest to the stove, he lifted off the lid of the box, put Nell’s cover letter to one side, and removed the rest of them, the ones tied together with the faded blue ribbon. None of the letters was dated, and it took him a moment to figure out that the most recent were on the top, so after he’d untied the ribbon, he turned the stack over, so that he could start at the beginning.

Dear Mama,

I went to the prison yestaday at Brushy Mt. It is a scary place when you first see it with a grate big wall. But onst you get use to it it is ok I guess. When they fond out I was ther to see Boy they was nice to me. I think they like him cause he is so quite and he dont give them no truble.

Boy is ok he reely is. He dont say nuthin but I can tell he recanize me. In a way I dont think been in prison will be as hard for Boy as it wood be for most fokes if you no what I means. They give him food and close and look after him. He was pretty clean to. Acourse Boy is never to clean if you no what I means. Ha. You rememba the time he came home afta plane in the mud down by the riva and alls you cood see of him was his 2 eyes. Rememba how we laff and laff. Even Boy laff that time.

Ο Mama there bees to much pane in this worl. I miss you and send you my love.

Your dawter Nell

Too much pain, indeed. Jorgensen put down the letter. He’d intended to work his way through the entire stack, hoping that, in the process, he’d somehow get to know Boyd Davies a little better. Already he was beginning to realize he might have been wrong, that there simply might be no getting to know Boyd at all. Maybe the most you could ever come away with was an image of a young man so covered with mud that only his eyes were visible. But then again, he’d laughed; or at least Nell had remembered him laughing. That was something, wasn’t it?

And as he sat there that morning by his stove, it occurred to August Jorgensen that, sooner or later, he was going to have to give it another try. He was going to have to go back to Brushy Mountain and somehow get through to Boyd Davies, whatever it took.

A single bark brought him out of his thoughts. He pushed himself up from the chair, walked to the door, and opened it. Jake, ever thoughtful, shook himself off before entering. Jorgensen found a dry towel. Jake obediently buried his nose between the old man’s legs, as if to suggest that while he had no use for the rubdown that was about to come, he’d suffer through it nonetheless just to please his master. Jorgensen’s own private suspicion was that Jake absolutely loved it, but was too embarrassed to let the smile on his face be seen.

“Better get some rest,” he told the dog. “As soon as the weather clears up, you and I are going to be hitting the road again.”