My Father and Atticus Finch (17 page)

Reading between the lines of my father's refusal to condemn his beloved Enterprise, I have concluded that he initially believed that the better class had the situation under control and that the rough element would move on.

That was a misreading of the rough element. Shunning was not a practical way for them to express their discontent: they had no real
social contact with a man of my father's class. On an unseasonably hot fall night, one or more of them, rumored to have been fueled by alcohol and resentment at Foster Beck's refusal to accept his loss, decided to take action.

“T
HE BETTER CLASS
doesn't want trouble here in Enterprise,” Foster said to reassure Bertha when she came to his office Saturday morning, after the incident. “Things will quiet down now.”

“Those business people don't want trouble because it hurts their pocketbooks, but you won't hear those cowards say a single word in public on your behalf,” Bertha said. She was not reassured. She had heard about the shattered office window, and no wonder: outside his office, for every passer-by to gape at, sat his crimson, leatherbound volumes of the
Code of Alabama
that he still owed payments on, Mr. M. L.'s fine rolltop desk, a small rug Bertha had brought from Weogufka and given to him, and two oak chairs. The nauseating smell of the two dead animals thrown through the broken window—a possum, selected for the animal's well-known cowardice, and a skunk, for its offensive odor—remained heavy in the humid noon air of the office, despite repeated scourings of the walls and wood floor by the two colored women Foster had hired. The women smiled hellos to Miss Bertha and continued their labors.

“I wish you hadn't come, Bertha,” Foster said, in a tone that made her sad. She sensed that he was not so much feeling defeated as embarrassed that he had been unable to defend his little domain. “Please, just leave,” he said, pausing to mop sweat from his brow.

“I came to invite you to a picnic,” Bertha said, her voice sprightly through the gloom.

“I have some more work to do here.”

“We can finish up, Mr. Foster,” called out Callie Mae, the younger of the two Negro women. “You go on with Miss Bertha.”

“I mean, law work.”

Bertha doubted that was true. From all she was hearing, Enterprise's better class was not giving Foster a whole lot to do.

“Then, how 'bout coming to church with me tomorrow?”

“No.”

Bertha exchanged a look with Callie Mae, then she turned to go.

Foster said, “Maybe a walk Sunday afternoon, when you get back from church, if it's not raining.”

M
Y FATHER'S CLOSENESS
with money was legendary. Growing up in Montgomery, I not only heard the stories, I saw it firsthand. I remember the time—I was nine or ten—when, to my mother's embarrassment, we walked out of a restaurant in Miami Beach without ordering because my father thought all of the items on the menu were too expensive. On another family trip, this one to Washington and New York when I was eleven, I remember with great relief finally running out of the sandwiches my mother had prepared all the way back in Montgomery so that we wouldn't have to spend money going out to eat.

I am sure part of my father's reluctance to spend was attributable to those childhood Troy shopping trips when his mother argued with the train conductors and bargained with the merchants. And in 1938, with the Deep South still very much mired in the Depression, my father was not only trying to feed himself but also to prop up his profligate father's tottering timber and mercantile businesses.
Knowing how my father worried about money, and remembering my mother's optimistic nature, it's easy to fill in the blanks about their date that Sunday after church.

“I'
D RATHER NOT
spend the money on gas if I don't have to,” Foster apologized when he came for Bertha on foot. It was sunny, but the sky was already showing clouds to the south. A drive out the paved part of the road to Dothan, in the car he shared with two other Enterprise men, would have been preferable, but, with his work drying up, he had little to spare for gas.

“Pshaw, Foster,” Bertha said, “I'd much rather go for a walk. You can see things when you walk that pass by too fast in automobiles.” She was wearing the same dress he had seen her in many times, dark blue with padded shoulders, splashy white print flowers and a big white collar. The dress was maybe an inch shorter than the droopy gray shrouds she wore to teach school, and it showed more of her waistline and figure. Her long black hair was pulled back, as always, in a bun, but a wisp or two had come loose and curled at her temples. He liked her hair that way and was glad she was not wearing one of her ridiculous hats to cover it up. At his suggestion, she was carrying a closed parasol in case a rain came up. In her other hand, she was holding a fruit jar filled with Miss Pauline's sweet tea and a couple of ice chips she had taken when her landlady wasn't watching.

“I couldn't think of anything else we could . . .” He paused and slowed his step to speak to an approaching white couple dressed in Sunday best, on their way home from a late church service. The couple crossed over the empty road and passed them by without nodding or saying a word, the man not even tipping his hat to Bertha.

“It doesn't bother me one speck,” Bertha said. Foster knew she was talking about the couple, not the heat, and that she was not being truthful. The rudeness had to have bothered her. She was social; she liked being around people, whereas he was a loner in comparison, content, if necessary, with just his family and a few good friends. And it was wrong that she was now being ostracized for what was solely his conduct; it made him mad in a way that the broken window had not.

They reached the edge of town on their walk. The small shops and the modest frame homes, some whitewashed, some not, gave way to open land, a pecan orchard on their side of the road, a pasture on the other. The wide front porch and yard of a farmhouse up ahead was empty of life save for a blue tick coon dog. The dog raised its head for just a moment, but did not otherwise stir or bark.

“I'm not going to stand for it,” he said firmly.

“Do they know who broke your window?”

“I'm not talking about the window, Bertha. I mean the way they acted back there toward you. But I'm not going to let them kill Charles either. I'm going through with the appeal.”

She was not as much surprised by what he said as by how he said it. Foster had always seemed to her a measured man, but now he sounded emotional, and she had not heard much of that before. “You said the appeal transcript would be expensive.”

“I'll use some savings.”

“I can give you close to seven dollars.”

“I won't let you do that. The Court Reporter said he'll work it so I can pay in installments. I think he agrees with some of my objections, though he has to be careful letting on.”

“Foster, the talk here in town is that girl was feeble-minded.”

“And that's preposterous. That was what they had to come up with since there was no sign of any force. They had to show she was mentally too weak to consent.”

Consent to exactly what? Bertha wanted to ask. She knew he would be embarrassed to speak of Elizabeth's condition, much less tell her who did what. People in Enterprise had heard tales that Charles bewitched Miss Elizabeth, putting some kind of a “salve” on her, but no one knew any more than that, though there were rumors: the salve was a magic potion, made from the menstrual blood of white women; the salve was a powerful aphrodisiac secreted by slaves in the galleys of the slave ships; and other such nonsense. She had not mentioned the salve before, knowing that when it came to the carnal, Foster was a lot like her father, who had used his straight razor to cut out the page with the nude male drawing from her college biology textbook. Foster was not quite that extreme, although, after three years, they were still chaste
,
something more important to him than to her.

Overhead, a distant slice of Alabama sky was beginning to turn dark. The cloud that had been hanging further south in Florida, over the Gulf, was coming closer. Sometimes a cloud would rain itself out over the Gulf and move on across the Florida Panhandle; other times the cloud would blow north toward Enterprise. Foster suggested they head back.

Bertha didn't want to. “I don't care if it does rain,” she said, brandishing her parasol.

Foster turned to her. “Maybe he took some advantage,” he said over a thunderclap as they felt the first breeze of the walk. “But he shouldn't have to die for it.”

“I remember your saying before the trial that you could have
done worse than Judge Parks. But sentencing Charles to death—he hasn't impressed me as such a fine man.”

“I said I could have done worse back then, when I thought we had a chance. But Judge Parks buckled. All it took was for him to realize what Troy would think if he overruled the jury.” Foster paused. He was afraid that he must sound as if he were making excuses for losing. “Judge Parks did some good things, bringing the Highway Patrol to Troy, the way he controlled the courtroom, kept E. C. in line. I understand the pressure he felt.”

The first thin spray of rain swept over them. Bertha wiggled her parasol but did not open it. The spray felt refreshing, but they both knew it might get worse and quickened their steps back toward Miss Pauline's. There was another thunderclap, closer and louder than the first one.

“You don't buckle, Foster, you stand for what you believe. Papa would have been so proud of you for taking this case.”

“And you? Are you proud of me?”

“You know I am. I hated to see you take it on because, well, I thought he was guilty at first, but after you said he was innocent—”

The first fat drops of Gulf Coast rain interrupted her. Bertha opened her parasol and took his arm, pulling him close so that each would stay at least partially dry.

As always, her praise restored his spirits and his resolve. He could ignore a little rain.

F
OSTER
B
ECK
filed thirty-six Assignments of Error, the largest number anyone in Troy or Enterprise could recall in a case tried by Judge Parks, many directed to the court's admission of opinion testimony
as to the mental capacity of Elizabeth Liger, and he mailed a carbon copy of all thirty-six to Charles White, who was in Kilby prison in Montgomery awaiting execution. “The truth is,” Foster wrote to Charles, “I never expected we would win at trial in front of that jury. But I am very confident the Alabama Supreme Court will reverse. That is what our appellate courts are for, Charles, to look at the law dispassionately. That is the beauty of our system of law. The Supreme Court of Alabama will not allow this travesty to stand. Do not give up hope. As for me, I am more determined than ever to see justice done and am redoubling my efforts to bring it about.”

   Chapter 30

M
Y FATHER WAS
hardly a stereotypical sportsman. Although he would hit feeble grounders to me in the backyard in Montgomery when I was trying out for a Little League baseball team, most of our sports interaction occurred in front of the television set on Saturday afternoons, watching Dizzy Dean announce baseball games in the summers, cheering for the Alabama Crimson Tide in the fall. My father's great passion was not baseball or football, however, but fishing in the spring and hunting in the fall. I know he hunted in and around Enterprise, and I know he attended at least one of the annual invitational dove shoots arranged by prominent local farmers with large cornfields.

“M
AYBE YOU
shouldn't go this year,” Bertha said. “Somebody might shoot you and then say it was an accident.”

“It'll be safer to go than to turn down an invitation—that is, if I get one, Bertha,” he said.

The previous year's shoot had been the largest ever, with fifty
carefully chosen gunners, Foster Beck among the select—he had proudly told Bertha all about it. Most of the men were from Troy, Enterprise, and Dothan, but some came from as far away as Selma and Montgomery. That year, Foster explained, as in every prior year, some corn was deliberately left unpicked, then pulled from the stalk and shucked, right there in the field, two days before the shoot. The yellow kernels lying on the ground never failed to attract doves. Because doves were a migratory bird, however, they were regulated by both the U.S. government and the state of Alabama, and “seeding” a corn field to attract doves was illegal under both jurisdictions. So, a little something had to be “left on the ground for the game wardens,” as the landowner liked to put it when he passed the hat for the “admission fee.”

Each year, at dawn on the day of the shoot, Negroes driving mule-drawn wagons were paid a little something to pick up white men with shotguns at the barn and deliver them to their assigned locations, the white men taking up positions a step or two back in the piney woods that surrounded the cornfield, more or less out of sight of the hungry doves. Once all the shooters were in their places, the Negro drivers returned to the barn and loaded their wagons with thick chunks of ice, ice picks, bourbon, glasses, crackling bread, and sides of barbecued pork, slow-smoked the night before. The wagon drivers circled the field throughout the rest of the day, pouring bourbon and serving pork ribs, while other paid Negroes darted out to retrieve dead or wounded birds for their assigned shooters. “Last year,” Foster told Bertha with a rare chuckle, “one shooter brought a retriever. That dog would run out in the field and bring a dead bird to his master whenever he saw one fall to the ground. But the dog couldn't tell whether a falling dove was its master's or another
shooter's nearby, so there were some threats to shoot the dog if it was brought back.”

Foster and his twenty-gauge double-barrel had placed second in kills in 1937, the first year he was invited, and it had been understood, in view of such a fine showing, that he would be invited this year as well; and he would have been but for things heating up over the appeal. The better class—trying to keep a lid on the rough element ever since they broke Foster's office window—realized it would not be helpful to invite him in 1938.