Immediately, the gallery seems crowded with noisy confusion — shouts in both French and English. Albertine, alarmed, swivels in her seat to examine the spectators. Littlefield bangs his gavel hard until finally there is silence. “Mr. Tucker, I have been searching for a valid reason to clear this court for the past hour. Thank you very much. Bailiff, will you help the audience to vacate the courtroom forthwith. Anyone who resists will be arrested.”
At the lectern Tucker remains motionless.
“Mr. Tucker,” says Littlefield, when the audience has been removed. “I think we are finally free of potential disturbances. You may begin.”
The aura of stillness surrounding Tucker begins to spread through the courtroom, as if in concentric circles.
“Your Honor,” he begins, “we cannot guarantee the education of the child once we bind over custody. The Texas Supreme Court in
1894
recognized this when it likened parental authority to a trusteeship subject to public oversight:
“‘The state, as protector and promoter of the peace and prosperity of organized society, is interested in the proper education and maintenance of the child, to the end that it may become a useful instead of a vicious citizen; and while as a general rule it recognizes the fact that the interest of the child and society is best promoted by leaving its education and maintenance, during minority, to the promptings of maternal and paternal affection, untrammeled by the surveillance of government, still it has the right in proper cases to deprive the parent of the custody of the child when demanded by the interests of the child and society.’
“Your Honor, we have seen here that Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc are deeply embedded in the Franco-American community of Ely Falls. They have said so, and their own counsel has said so. But the Franco-American community in this city has consistently shown itself to be in conflict with progressive views of childhood. As of this year, only three hundred and twelve out of a potential eight hundred and seventy-one school-age Franco-American children in this city have attended any school at all. That is only one-third, Your Honor. Seventy percent of all Franco-American children in this city between the ages of eight and fourteen work in the Ely Falls Mill. Let me remind the court of the child labor laws in this state: No child under the age of twelve is to be employed in any manufacturing or mechanical establishment. Nor any child under the age of fifteen during vacations of public school unless he has attended school for sixteen weeks of each year preceding his sixteenth birthday.
“How is it then that so many children are working in the Ely Falls Mill?” Tucker asks rhetorically. “The answer is simple. The parents of the Franco-American community evade the child labor laws by lying about their children’s ages. This is not opinion, but fact. They do so not because they are bad people. They do so because they do not believe it is wrong within the context of their culture and because they are desperately poor. I quote from a recent editorial in the Franco-American community’s own newspaper,
L’Avenir:
‘The child labor statutes of this state are badly enforced and ineffective since so many Franco-American parents falsify their children’s ages. Even the good sisters of the Order of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance have professed shock and dismay that so many young Franco-American children are working in the mills.’”
Tucker pauses to let the opinion of the sisters settle over the chamber.
“I have here in my hand a number of photographs that I should be glad to submit to the court,” Tucker says. “These sorry photographs were taken at the Ely Falls Mill this year. One shows six children, each of whom cannot be more than ten years old, looking dirty and exhausted, standing between looms that are at least two feet taller than they are. Another shows a poorly dressed boy, barefoot I might add, standing on a box to reach the controls of his machine.”
Tucker walks to the dais and hands the photographs to Judge Littlefield, who studies them. Sears does not ask to see them.
“Your Honor,” says Tucker, “we have long known about this situation here in Ely Falls, but we have more or less chosen to look the other way. I believe the city officials, both Yankee and Franco alike, have concluded that ‘Petit Canada’ should police its own. Which is not the matter precisely before the court, except insofar as it is relevant to the future of one little boy, Pierre Francis Haskell.
“This boy, if left in the custody of Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc, will enter the mills sometime before his twelfth birthday. Let me tell you what this will mean for him. Not only will he be deprived of schooling, but he will also work eleven hours a day, six days a week, with no fresh air or sunshine, and most likely in a lint-filled room. He will be subject to a wide range of diseases, including measles, diphtheria, and the treacherous white lung. He will probably be stunted in his growth and will compromise his eyesight. He will have no exercise except for the repetitious motions of his job. He will live in worker housing that is commonly infested with cockroaches, rats, and mice, and where filth and poverty encourage the breeding of diseases such as smallpox and cholera. Bishop Louis Giguere himself wrote the following this year in
L’Avenir:
‘The worker housing is indescribable in print. There are vile privies, stinking cellars of rubbish, and perilous stairways. Sewer pipes contain large holes that emit a noxious gas. The buildings are without adequate ventilation and water supply.’
“Your Honor, I do not mean to suggest that the specific room in which Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc reside is so indecent, but as a member of the Franco-American community, Pierre Francis Haskell will grow up in this environment. Moreover, he will emerge into adulthood, if he makes it into adulthood, with no place else to go except back to the mills. He will have no education to speak of, no other skills except the one he has learned at the looms. Is the state prepared to sentence Pierre Haskell to such a life? For make no mistake: To grant custody to Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc is to give the boy a life sentence of missed opportunities and poverty.”
Olympia glances over at the respondents’ table. Sears has his hand on Albertine’s arm, as if to restrain her. Telesphore mutters angrily,
“Non, non, non.”
“Your Honor,” says Tucker, “both women in question here today stand to either suffer terribly or have great joy as a result of your decision. But as my colleague Mr. Addison Sears himself said before the court, we cannot care about the joy or suffering of the mother. We must care first and, if necessary, only about the welfare of the child. And there can be no question but that the boy will be better served by being remanded to the custody of Olympia Biddeford, who guarantees, by her own example, the boy’s education, his financial security, and very likely his higher education as well. We are speaking here today of making either a future millworker or of making a doctor or a professor or even a judge. To take these opportunities away from the boy is nothing short of a crime.”
Tucker pauses.
“Your Honor, Olympia Biddeford was herself a child when she discovered she was with child. Since that day, she has conducted herself in a manner any Christian woman might envy and aspire to: She has secured a higher education, she lives a clean and sober life, and she uses wisely the advantages given to her by dint of her birth, namely, good descent and respectable fortune. I do not think any of us here today doubts for one minute that she will be a good mother to the boy.”
At the lectern, Tucker gathers his notes together.
“The court is entrusted with the decision of a great question of morals as well as law: To whom belongs the custody of the child?”
Tucker looks pointedly at Judge Littlefield and then slowly turns to Olympia. He holds her gaze for what seems a long minute.
“Let us restore a child to his rightful mother,” he says.
J
udgment to be read tomorrow three o’clock. Will collect you eleven o’clock for meal. Courage. Tucker.
She slips the yellow telegram into the pocket of her dress. Closing the back door, she watches as the lithe telegraph boy sprints out onto the road with his tip. She walks directly into the butler’s pantry and pours herself a drink to steady her nerves, which is not like her. For what occasion did she purchase this bottle of whiskey? she wonders. The decanter is old, cut-glass, her mother’s mother’s. Drink in hand, she moves into the front room and stands at the windows. The dying sun turns the water teal, a color nearly leached in the next instant. She sets her glass on the windowsill and unpins her hair, holding it in great handfuls in front of her.
A judgment has been rendered. Her fate is sealed, and she does not know what it is. She is surprised at how quickly the waiting is over. Tucker said it would take at least a week for Littlefield to arrive at an opinion, but it has been only four days. She is not prepared for this.
She sits in her Windsor chair and takes up again the nightshirt she has been working on. She slips the pearl-headed pins from the fabric and pokes them into the old horsehair pincushion she once embroidered as a child. With her scissors, she snips the tails of thread still caught in the seams. All about her on the floor are scraps of linen and cotton. The nightshirt might have been finished earlier, but all afternoon she has been disturbed by recurring images of the hours she spent in the courthouse last week, vivid pictures that make her pause in her sewing and set her needle and thread in her lap.
She thinks of Tucker and the way he returned to their table after his final address, his face white, his hands trembling slightly, and how she understood, even then, how difficult it had been for him to put forth that particular argument, knowing as he did that he was taking on an entire culture. Where another man might have been exuberant, Tucker had seemed subdued. “A risky gambit” was all that he said to her when she later tried to thank him.
She thinks of Sears as he was delivering his own address at the end, the stout, bald man stabbing the air and hurtling accusations at Olympia, his anger at Tucker fueling every word. His summation, not unlike his opening statement — although more ferocious and perhaps more persuasive — was at least as strong as Tucker’s. Numerous times Sears made the point that one could not judge the behavior of an individual by the behavior of a culture. And when he was done, it was not at all clear to Olympia which argument might have moved the judge more.
She recalls her own time in the witness box, the wretched questions she was forced to answer about the manner in which she and Haskell had once loved each other. She thinks of her father in the box as well, pale and shrunken, clearly wondering how it was his life had arrived at this terrible juncture. She thinks of Josiah’s astonishing story of journeying up to Ely Falls with the infant, a journey that would have been a torment for Lisette. She remembers Mother Marguerite in her habit and starched wimple, each word she spoke having the weight of truth. She thinks of Dean Bardwell in her tweed suit, with her unexpected tale of Averill Hardy and his self-serving accusations. And she thinks of Cote squirming at the end of his testimony, and how deliciously satisfying it was to see the man left hanging, how even Judge Littlefield appeared to be certain Cote was lying.
And then, in her mind’s eye, she sees Albertine Bolduc in the witness box — Albertine with her broken English, her obvious love for the boy, and her painfully eloquent photographs. Olympia shakes her head quickly. She cannot think about Albertine now.
She lifts the nightshirt, holds it away from her, and studies it for a moment. Last month, in a moment of whimsy, she purchased in Ely Falls five horn buttons of different animal shapes, which she has put on the shirt: an elephant, a monkey, a bear, a giraffe, and something that might or might not be a buffalo. She walks with the shirt into the kitchen, where she has set up the ironing board and has put the iron on the stove to heat. As she presses the seams flat, she thinks about the trunk upstairs, nearly filled now with shirts and short pants and socks and underclothes and sweaters and jackets that she has sewn or knitted for the boy. It has been a true labor of love, and something more — the only thing that has kept her calm during the long winter months of waiting for the hearing to begin.
The doorbell rings again, surprising her. She holds the iron in her hand and listens. Two summonses in twenty minutes? Perhaps it is another telegram. Has Littlefield, in his impatience, read his judgment today? No, surely not. She puts the iron on a brick and walks around the corner into the back hallway.
He is standing at the door, having already rung. She can see his face through the glass panes. She puts a hand out to the wall to steady herself. He has on a suit jacket, a gray fedora. A vest that buttons high on the chest. Beyond that, she cannot make out much because the sun is behind him, low in the sky and glinting painfully through the bare trees.
A moment of joy. Then of disbelief.
As if in a trance, she moves the six or seven steps to the door and opens it.
“Olympia,” he says.
She backs away from the door, and he steps over the threshold. He gazes steadily at her, as if he, too, cannot believe in the apparition before him. She turns and walks into the kitchen, knowing that he follows her. Her heart beats so hard inside her chest, she has to press a hand to the bodice of her dress to still it.
“Olympia,” he says again.