The Blackstone Commentaries (7 page)

He was proud, no matter his being poor. He was big and strong, and of course she liked that, and he had hands that had worked all his life doing hard things. He did everything but the mining, which he hated and his uncle wouldn't let him do anyhow, and his hands were almost too big even for him, and she liked that, too. He would come up behind her and rest those hands on her hips, and they were like pillows, holding her softly to the earth while her heart flew. Because he was tough, but in a good way, he
encouraged a toughness in her, not the meanness she'd come to feel with Lonnie, and even before that while growing up, always wanting to hit back somehow or other.

He had taken a seat on the little chair by the dresser and was bent over, holding his head in his hands. “None of the killings, of which we have far too many in a county this small,” he said, “and the assaults, the beatings and affrays, with the exception of that murder-suicide with the doctor and nurse last year out at the veterans' hospital, ever involve educated people or people financially well off, have you noticed? The law isn't about them, Dru. The law has never been about them.”

She didn't reply. She knew better than to push. He would come to her when he was ready, and she would comfort him, but now there was too much choked up in there, and it made an almost physical barrier for him to tear through before he could reach her. She'd learned that a piece of him was like an animal that was still half wild, and it took patience.

“This wasn't even murder, tonight. But it's the damn
Titanic
, I tell you! It was her hand, Dru, a woman's hand just like yours, pale and feminine and soft, reaching after me as I climbed out of Junior's cruiser after talking to her and checking on the kids. She wasn't even looking at me, but it was like she wanted something from me I once felt I had to give. It would be Pemberton who's supposed to be involved.”

That's when she first felt the alarm. Until then, for all she knew, it was just another bad night. “What's Martin got to do with this?”

“And Eddie saying, ‘Back off, Charlie!' just like that, the moment we were alone in the car again. You know Eddie doesn't use my first name unless he's upset. ‘You can back away, take some heat,' he said, ‘and you know as well as I do, it won't be much. Mostly from the family.' ”

“Did you back off?”

She saw he didn't hear her, or that he was ignoring her or the question, and she felt a little panic and didn't know why. It was the last thing she expected to feel with Charlie after all these years. He was looking out the window now, where he could see the outlines of trees emerging from the edge of the field and even a couple of black lumps in the mist low to the grass that had to be his Angus cattle. His secret, those Angus. He raised them for an investment, he said, but mostly for sheer joy, and not many people knew he did it.

“I wonder where that old man's rotting,” he said.

“Who?” she asked, startled by the sudden loudness of his voice.

“The preacher.”

He talks about that preacher like he's a haunt, she thought. He tried to take Charlie back out of here, said it was Babylon, offered to bring him up to the pulpit and into Tennessee. But that preacher brought him to me, too.

“You should have seen Danny Carver, coiled like a blind, angry snake ready to strike at anything. Wants his justice. I don't know whether I can give it to him.”

“Charlie? What
is
it?” She was really alarmed now.

“Eddie knows me, Dru, knows how much I hate losing.”

“What happened?”

“It's a lot more than what happened,” he replied real softly, like he always did when he was trying to make up his mind about something.

VI

Elmore

Elmore Willis, lying on his back, gazed at the three huge, arched windows that filled most of the front wall of his law office on the top floor of the Trotter Building. The windows overlooked South Charlotte Street, four stories below, and the courthouse square. He had just awakened and was confused by the soft golden glow of the early-morning sun easing its way along the high ceiling and down the wall behind him. The window was open. Birds were singing. Trees were in leaf. It was warm, and he knew it was only April. This sure as hell wasn't New Haven.

Then he remembered where he was and knew at once he shouldn't look at the other end of the huge, old leather sofa on which he lay; he knew what he would find. He could smell her, and he could smell the night before. Without looking, he could see the almost-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's, the glass smeared with lipstick, his clothes scattered across the huge room and its scanty furniture, the old mission-wood oak desk.

A church bell began to ring, the sound clear and salutary. It was Sunday, a beautiful day, the sky, cleansed by the night's storm, a rich blue.
He shook his head, trying to reconcile the madness he'd witnessed on the square hours earlier—Dugan playing justice with bootleg whiskey, and the violence of the storm itself—to this Southern morning.

He had hours of work to do—three cases to plead on Monday alone, one nonsupport and a driving under the influence. The third involved speeding and reckless driving, and the man would lose his license, and so probably his job, if convicted this time. Two kids and a mortgage. No one would notice. The man was guilty. Small, ordinary cases, small fees, people without much money or influence who had come to him right from the start, not in droves, not even in quantities sufficient to pay the rent and board, but they'd appeared, and because of a name—his father's name, Doc Willis. They actually seemed to think that because they'd known his father, they knew who the son was, and what to expect from him.

He opened his eyes—he'd been snoozing. The bright, sun-flooded room floated into focus again. Then he knew he had to get up and out into that blue sky, free and clean. Forever, if possible. That's what had brought him to Damascus in the first place. Now he was feeling hemmed-in once again, by the woman sleeping at the other end of his sofa, but even more so by Dugan, his late father's friend.

Elmore was learning fast. To hear it said all these years later, his father had been a friend to virtually everyone in Blackstone County. Myths or legends of that sort had a way of growing in the mountains—sainthood for a variety of sins was not uncommon. The exception in his father's case had been the Damascus elite, the lawyers and doctors and other professionals, the wealthy families who had built the mills, the aging and often eccentric direct descendants of the aristocracy—the would-be cavaliers of the Lost Cause, that greatest of all romances. To them, his father had been at best a communist and at worst a traitor to his class, if not exactly his profession, to be held forever suspect, tolerated only because he was a doctor and therefore by rights one of them.

Dugan was something else. That was his, Elmore's, territory. The law as presented in the courtroom was theater, true, and Elmore was learning to enjoy it. But the night before, all he had felt was revulsion at Dugan's wild assertion of self, of bald power and inherent violence under the guise of law. Worse, it had seemed that only the gods—lightning, thunder and rain—had been able to shut down that travesty.

Now, more than at any moment since his return to Damascus, everything felt tentative, fragile and alien.

He recalled driving south out of the gray rain and patches of dirty snow that winter, propelled by a dream, a siren call that had affected his sleep for months, and finally even his ability to have a cup of coffee and just relax. Driving south, excited because he'd finally made a decision, he'd wondered at the lure of Blackstone County, where he'd lived such a short time so many years before.

It was his father's funeral that uncorked it all. Elmore was not what the people gathered in Damascus had expected that day, he knew that even then. Rather, what he looked like wasn't what they expected. He knew there had always been a lot of his father in him, though he was bigger in stature and far more of a hothouse creature in those days, pampered in the private schools he'd hated and college—Yale Law was still to come—all according to his mother's design, not his father's. His prior residency in the South had been limited to the three years they lived there as a family before his mother left to return north to hate his father from a safe distance, taking their boy with her. Elmore had never made a visit back; his father had always come north to see him. So the sense of surprise among the crowd when he stepped from the car at the cemetery that day was palpable, a kind of curiosity verging on wonder, as though maybe his father hadn't died. It was eerie; Elmore had felt himself being almost physically possessed by this expectation or hope, whatever it was. Then, it had been seductive. Now, it was a burden.

For it was this desire, of course, that he felt from the people knocking on his office door. “No secretary?” they sometimes said, looking around with an almost startled look as they realized they were looking right at him, that there were no barriers to their access. “Yes, your daddy was like that, too,” they might add. Then they'd depart, satisfied, for the bench he'd placed out in the hall alongside a small table with magazines, if he hadn't already asked them through the closed door to wait there because he had a client.

For his father's funeral, vehicles of every sort had parked all the way back downtown as far as the courthouse square, a mile away. And they were parked just as far in the opposite direction, as well as down the side streets. That cemetery with its rolling, manicured lawns and elegant head-stones
and old, enshrouding trees was just where his father belonged, Elmore's mother had insisted to Harlan Monroe, publisher of the Damascus paper, when he called to report his father's death. He belonged there among “the county's finest and the brave fallen of the War Between the States,” she had said, her contempt just below the surface, there for the taking. But Harlan was a gentleman and chose to accept things at face value, though Elmore knew now how it must have saddened him. His father had specifically asked to be buried near his clinic up in the forests of Rainer Cove, any pretense of rank having always been a great irritation to him.

Harlan said it was like nothing he'd ever seen, the hundreds of people who filed down out of the mountains from the north and west, the slow, measured flow of the cars and trucks through town having an ominous feel for any would-be aristocrat. “You just want to take your hat off and pray,” Harlan said, “and mostly for yourself. And here I thought we'd lost the art of celebrating death.”

But Elmore wasn't like his father then any more than he was now, he thought, feeling the leather of the old sofa suck at his skin as he moved ever so carefully, trying not to awaken the beast at the other end.
My mother sure as hell didn't have to be afraid of my being him
.

But he didn't think she really was afraid by the time of the funeral, just that the pretense was simpler than the truth. She was, he was convinced, afraid of something else: that huge crowd's display of love for Dr. Willis, “Doc,” the apparent simplicity of that feeling that wasn't really simple at all, any more than his father's love for them had been. She was afraid of the implied reproach, too; if one thing characterized his parents' marriage, it had been competition.

It wasn't clear if the wives of the good doctors, lawyers and businessmen of Damascus—the New South, as Harlan put it with his curious mixture of pride and irony—who showed up really came to pay their respects to the deceased doctor or to catch a glimpse of her. It had been over twelve years since they last saw her, those who had actually known her. Harlan had probably been his father's closest friend. He'd called Elmore and his mother when Doc died suddenly, fighting, even hiding, the cancer as long as he could. Then Harlan had arranged the funeral when it became clear that, except to defy his father's last wish, Elmore's mother was all too willing
to have someone else do the work. Elmore took to Harlan from the moment the publisher wandered out to meet him at the plane in Charlotte.

Harlan saw the crowd's reaction to Elmore that day, too, which confirmed what the young man had been feeling. He needed a lot of confirmation about a lot of things. And then Elmore did that crazy thing that all but guaranteed his eventual return: he refused at the conclusion of the committal to get back in the big black car. Leaving the funeral director holding the door in obvious distress, he walked that mile back downtown, meeting as many of those people as he could—factory workers, policemen, farmers, children and their parents—shaking all kinds of hands, gnarled and callused, soft and shy, hearing what they had to say about Doc, the first of the two Docs in his life, all kinds of voices and words, and beneath them a startling, deep kindness. He didn't think he'd ever heard such kindness and sincerity. He drank in the sweat and perfume and the sweet spring scent of the land itself. He even occasionally saw tears in faces he'd never seen before and scarcely imagined, people who up to that time had been prohibited to him, who seemed strange even in the way they looked and dressed but who claimed him the moment he stepped from that funeral car. He was able to do that crazy thing only because his mother hadn't possessed the courage or the will or even the desire to show herself that day, had stayed up north and so couldn't maintain the prohibition. Those people were grateful to his father. And more to his surprise, they spoke of him as someone gentle, which didn't set with the facts as he had been taught them.

So perhaps for that alone, he now supposed, it was inevitable he'd eventually return. No. More than that. In the dizziness of his journey through a blur of faces and emotions that funeral day, a feeling was sown that at last he belonged, or might belong, somewhere in the world. That was the dream.

He glanced longingly now at the blue sky out the windows, then eased off the sofa. After picking up his underwear, he made his way for the door and the lavatory in the hall outside his office. And he looked. She was sleeping naked with her knees pulled into her stomach, her back toward him hiding her breasts and the face, which was pretty, the long hair dyed a solid red that was too obviously not natural but pretty enough, especially in the muted light of a honky-tonk. But seeing her now, he felt no desire.
Her unguarded repose suddenly made him feel sorry for her and for himself and for every damn fool like them.