Time's Witness (2 page)

I didn’t have near enough the imagination for the first place I was shipped after high school, and after too long a while slithering through rice paddies in the Mekong Delta, I crawled back to Hillston as fast as my psychic state allowed. I wanted a college degree, and I wanted to get to know my wife, Cheryl. It turned out she’d made other plans with a fellow I used to like. She was my last living family, if you want to call her that. My folks are dead. A long time ago, my sister Vivian's boyfriend, going drunk into a curve at eighty miles an hour, smashed them both through a steel rail on Route 28. He survived, and died in a motorcycle accident three months after he got out of traction. His parents still owed Haver Hospital over twelve thousand dollars. For his personal motto in the Hillston High yearbook, this boy had them write, “I want to live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory.” That year, six different East Hillston guys had this same motto. Vivian's boyfriend was the second to get his wish.

My daddy walked into Hillston barefooted. The first big building he saw was Cadmean Textile Mills, so he took a job there sweeping floors. His folks worked a farm fifteen miles outside the town. They didn’t own it, and they couldn’t feed him. After forty-two
years on the Cadmean line, he didn’t own the house he died in. He did own a long series of large cheap cars loaded with chrome that he buffed with a shammy rag on Sunday afternoons. I don’t know if there was anything else he loved. Any dreams he kept, he kept private. Mama never learned to drive the cars. She had bad teeth and a purplish birthmark across her right cheek that she covered with the palm of her hand, and she was shy about going anyplace except the East Hillston A&P and the Baptist Church of the Kingdom of Christ. By third grade, I’d stopped asking her for help with my homework. Her tongue would stutter struggling to decipher the big printed letters, and a thin line of sweat would rise just above her lips, and her birthmark would blush purple.

I didn’t have the best thing, which is class. Here in the South that means an old family tree, with all its early rough graspy roots buried deep down in the past where nobody has to look at them. And I didn’t have the second-best thing, which is looks—because the hard fact is, resembling young Abe Lincoln is no asset at a high-school sock hop. But I had the third thing, which is brains. So I was lucky enough to learn how to see where the light was, and where to look around for the switch. I don’t mean moving out of East Hillston, but I mean that too. I’ve got a job that makes some use of my brain and is some use to other people. I’ve got eight walls of books. I’ve got a new white Oldsmobile my daddy would have just admired. I own a condominium in River Rise, west of town, so big I haven’t had time to furnish half of it. It's big enough for love to have some space, because let me tell you, love likes a lot of room; it's hate that does fine when it's cramped. I’ve got so many former neighbors to prove that fact, it comes close to breaking my heart.

Justin Bartholomew Savile V is a Liberal Democrat, a group just about abandoned by everybody except the upper classes. Justin's father (J.B.S. IV) was the kind of Virginian who’d name his son J.B.S. V; his hobby was running Haver University Medical School. Justin's mother is a Dollard. Well now, Dollards. For a couple of centuries they’ve sat slicing up the pie of the Carolina Piedmont and passing the pieces around to each other with polite little nods. “Why I don’t mind if I do, thank you so much.” Justin's great-great-grandfather Eustache Dollard was one of the state's
best-remembered governors (mostly because his daddy had led a charge into the Wilderness against the Yankees without bothering to see if anybody was behind him), but also because Eustache had chiseled his name into a hundred large-sized public buildings, including the state penitentiary. From what I’ve read about the governor, Dollard State Prison's a fitting memorial.

Like I say, Justin loves me. Once he even came real close to getting himself killed, leaping between me and a bullet. He didn’t think, his genes just jumped forward like they thought they were back in the Wilderness. So I keep that in mind, his body stretched over me, soaking my hair with blood, when I think about another time, the day I came to see him in the hospital. It was the look in his eyes when I told him the Hillston city council had just made me chief of police, and consequently his superior. That look was there for just a blink before pleasure took it over. Oh, it wasn’t envy or jealousy or distaste. It was a look of pure unvarnished surprise. See, it hadn’t—it couldn’t—occur to Justin that some East Hillston wise-cracking white trash, with a mama so ignorant she’d named him Cudberth by mistake, could walk so far off the line as to embody the Law. Lord knows what innocent notions Justin has of Abe Lincoln's political savvy. Now, personally, he was happy for me, and proud of me. He loved it when I taped my poster of Elvis up behind my desk. If I’d called him on that blink of surprise, he wouldn’t have had a clue to my meaning. And the God's truth is, Justin Savile's the kindest man I ever met.

My friend Justin's blink is sad proof of the power of the package and the program, the same ones that are walking a black man named George Hall into the gas chamber at Dollard State Prison on Saturday unless the governor changes his mind. So me, I’m for a new program, not to mention a new governor. Like George Hall, I can’t rely on kindness.

George Hall was over in Vietnam trying hard not to get killed when the death penalty went out of fashion back home. That was 1967. At the time some kind folks thought we had us a moral revolution going that couldn’t slip back; it was racing along the road to glory, chucking war and racism and sexism out the windows like roadside trash. These sweet Americans could no more imagine a backward slide than Romans could imagine their Forum was going to end up a cow pasture in something called the Dark Ages, much less a big litter box for stray cats tiptoeing through the condoms and cigarette butts.

So when I joined the Hillston police, everybody figured the death penalty was gone for good, like racks and thumbscrews. Turned out it was only gone for nine years, seven months, and fourteen days. Then a death row huckster told the state of Utah he wanted them to shoot him, and Utah had to fight off the volunteers eager to oblige, and the United States was back in the habit of killing people to stop people from killing people.

Nobody’d heard a word from the governor, so my state was still planning to kill George Hall at nine o’clock Saturday night. It used to be, before the moratorium, executions at Dollard State Prison were scheduled early in the morning. Then, after the Supreme Court changed its mind and told the state that capital
punishment wasn’t cruel and unusual after all, somebody over in the Raleigh legislature decided that on the other hand, it was cruel to make condemned prisoners sit up all night waiting to die at dawn, since studies showed that not too many of them could sleep. So they changed the time of death to midnight. But given the fact that our Haver County D.A., Mitchell Bazemore, held the national record for death penalty convictions (forty-four, so far, and still counting), before long the staff at Dollard starting protesting about the late hours—the doctor on call at the gas chamber had a daytime job in a clinic at Haver Power and Light— and eventually they scheduled executions for 9:00 P.M., or as close to it as they could manage.

George Hall was the first man I ever arrested in a homicide case. He was black, unemployed, and he shot an off-duty cop outside a bar in East Hillston. With the officer's own pistol. George was sitting on the sidewalk beside the gun when I happened to drive by. “I’m not running, just don’t shoot!” was the first thing he said to me. His nose was still bleeding from where this particular off-duty cop had stuck his pistol in it. At the time, a fidgety toady named Van Fulcher was chief of police; he showed up fast, and relieved me of the case even faster—not because he was wild about either justice or Bobby Pym, the dead cop, but because whenever a case looked likely to interest anybody with a camera (and a black man shooting a white policeman was about as likely as you could get in the Piedmont Carolinas), Captain Fulcher suddenly felt the urge to take a personal interest: “Go hands on” was how he put it. So Fulcher went “hands on” in the Hall investigation, which was a short one. So was the trial. George had a court-appointed lawyer who tried to persuade him against pleading not guilty since he didn’t think the jury would go for self-defense. This public defender wasn’t a very bright guy, but he was right about that jury. While half-a-dozen witnesses said it certainly looked like self-defense to them, there having been a reasonable appearance of the necessity for deadly force on George's part to prevent his own immediate death or serious injury, not a one of these witnesses was white. The jury didn’t even stay away long enough to order dinner. But, at the time, like I said, we all thought capital punishment was out of fashion for
good, except in places like Iran and South Africa. Nevertheless, after three appeals and seven years on death row, George Hall was about to become Mitchell Bazemore's next victory on his way to the national record. Friday morning I told George's brother I never thought it could go this way, and George's brother told me to go fuck myself. Friday evening I went to a dance.

For ninety-six years running, on the Saturday before Christmas, the Hillston Club had held its annual Confederacy Ball. Every year the town's inner circle, which liked to refer to itself as “our number” or just “us,” let a committee at the Club tabulate this “number” and send them creamy gilt-bordered invitations. The elected drove through North Hillston, where they all lived on windy roads, over to the Club, and there they two-stepped around a mildewed ballroom for a couple of hours, pretending it was 1861 and still possible they were going to win the War. The men grew mustaches and strapped on swords they claimed were inherited. The women ballooned out of BMWs in hoop skirts, with gardenias pinned to their hair. My information comes from Justin, who loved any excuse to dress up in a costume, and had a handmade gray brassy outfit looped with gold tassels that he frisked about in there every year.

Except this year. This year the entertainment committee had not only dropped the word
Confederacy
from their invitations, they’d changed the date from Saturday to Friday. A black man was scheduled to be executed at Dollard Prison on Saturday and there’d been considerable publicity regarding the case, because in the years George had waited on death row, his younger brother, Cooper Hall, had become a pretty well-known political activist with an instinct for what his enemies (and that was most of Hillston) called media manipulation. I’m not saying the Hillston Club acted out of worry over what Coop Hall could do with their planning to dance the Virginia reel while his brother was being gassed to death. The number’d been raised on good manners, and they were feeling genuinely queasy. Peggy Savile, Justin's mother and my source, made a motion to cancel the ball entirely, but after some “frosty” discussion the motion was defeated five to four in secret ballots that fooled no one. Still, even Judge Henry Tiggs, Retired, who’d once called an attorney with a sardonic black colleague up to his bench
and drawled at him, “Get that nigrah out of my courtroom,” even Judge Tiggs probably wasn’t comfortable with the thought of stumbling through a waltz under the mistletoe at the exact same moment somebody he’d sentenced to death was paying his debt to society by inhaling for three or four minutes (up to six, if, like Caryl Chessman, he was determined not to breathe too deeply) the vapors from a sack of sodium cyanide eggs dropped into a little sulfuric acid.

So it was decided to move the dance to Friday, and unanimous to substitute black tie and formal gowns for the antebellum costumes, which undeniably had the smack of nostalgia for the Age of Slavery, or at least might give that tacky impression to people not of the number. That last included me, but the doorman didn’t notice when I tugged Justin's invitation out of my rented tuxedo, laid it out on his open white glove, and strolled into the foyer, ducking a chandelier that burned real white candles.

Earlier, back at my bureau mirror in River Rise, I’d tried putting different hands in different pockets, looking for the nonchalant effect. Martha Mitchell was disgusted; Martha's this little more-or-less poodle I found dumped out, just a puppy, on Airport Road the day I got home from Vietnam; she had the deceased Mrs. Mitchell's nose and bangs, and she appeared to have been treated about the same by her relations. Since I knew the feeling, what with the Nixon gang dicking us both around in the worse way, I gave her a ride to Hillston, and we’ve been splitting Big Macs for years. So Martha, lying on my king-sized waterbed, lets go with this sigh while I’m practicing nonchalance at the bureau. She's a proud lady. Well, hey, here I am, youngest chief of a city this size in the whole South, modernized my department with some drastic innovations like computers, women, and blacks; dropped the crime rate 11.75 percent my first year, not to mention the crime rate
inside
the force—bribery, bigotry, and occasional mild brutality being the oldest favorites; with a half-column and my picture in
Newsweek
magazine stuck to my refrigerator door by a magnetized tiny pineapple. SCHOLAR COP is the headline on this piece: I’m going for a history Ph.D. at a slow pace.

So Martha squirmed on the waterbed, embarrassed for me, while I tried out one hand versus two in the slippery pockets of
those rented trousers. I told her, “Honey, don’t give me that Marxist wheeze. There's things about my life story you don’t even know, so get your toenails out of my waterbed before I find you floating around in the closet.” Martha's listened to my conversation a lot longer than my ex-wife Cheryl did; she's not much on repartee, but she hangs in there.