Gammon told the deputies that the doc said they’d have to delay the trial if the boys got sick or hurt and he’d heard the sheriff complaining already about how much the damn trial was costing the county; he tried that.
“You the ones costing the county,” Deputy Fred Wirkle said with a slapped-on smirk. “You ought to plead those jigs out and let us get on to frying em.”
Gammon gave a weak smile. “We were gon do that, but if we did these New York slickers would just start the appeals and then we would really be in a mess.”
“You the one’s a mess, Billy boy,” Deputy Bee Banks said.
He lived now in the hotel and liked being there in his little room that looked out on the alley. When it rained, water ran down the alley, carrying bits of grass and twigs and chunks of crumbling yellow dirt in a foamy stream that gurgled as it ran. It was as if he was living in a forest and not right in the middle of town. A maid came in every week to change the sheets and towels. He called his mother a couple times a week and they talked about how things were out on the farm. He had attended the state university and then the law school and she had made him promise to come back to Big Cumber county after that. He planned to leave as soon as the trial was over. Those two youngest boys didn’t understand yet that they were being tried. “But, mister,” fifteen-year-old Bony Bates said, “I aint done nothing. Tell em I aint done nothing.” The youngest, thirteen-year-old Little Buster Wayfield liked to play with a piece of string one of the deputies had given him. He made a cat’s cradle and swung a little acorn baby in it. He couldn’t concentrate enough to make out the charges. He smiled at whatever was said to him and reckoned, so he said, that the white mens were going to do what they needed to. Yes, Little Buster, they were. The boy didn’t seem to mind being in jail. He was a skinny child who had never gotten enough to eat and figured he was doing pretty well now. Most of the others couldn’t read or write. The one who understood best was the one who had started it all when he talked back to Carl Willis. Willis looked like a Sunday school boy. Walker was as black as Africa. Even among the colored folks he was considered low class. He had too much smartness in his eyes. But he was young too and Billy could see how scared he was. “How you going to get me free of this, Mr. Gammon?” he had asked. “What you going to do?”
It was obvious those girls were lying. One of them, the skinny one, looked like all she wanted to do was sneak off and forget the whole thing. Billy had talked to her about the Lord, His stand on deceit. She had gotten a sick look on her face when he told her that sending them to the electric chair on a lie was the same as murdering them. But she didn’t change her story. You got locked in, he knew that. Fear — and pride, the old devil. Marcus Worley, the county attorney, had told him if he ever came near those girls again he would have him disbarred. People talked like that, but they all had to live with each other down here. After these boys — white and colored — were gone the rest of us would have to go on living together side by side. It wasn’t like up north where people didn’t live together like we do down here. When you’re close, you got to have an assigned sacrificial lamb. Local version. “Hell, I aint hardly barred as it is,” he’d told Marcus, and they’d both laughed.
He’d grown tired of legal work, but it didn’t matter, still the years rolled on. His spirit had taken the shape of the suit the profession fit him for.
“Lord, don’t you let these crackers run me to the electric chair over some false testimony by women I don’t even know.” These words from Walker made sweat break out. The tone, the word crackers, made Billy want to slap the little seal’s face. Pullen had got to his feet and leaned over the table and said, “You better start practicing your manners if you want to come out of this alive, boy.” He was as bad as the prosecutors. Only Harris had been silent. Watching the exchange with a bemused expression on his hawkish face. He thought he was above all this. Thought he was smart enough to figure a way around a Dixie judge and jury. He’d find out on that one.
The trial jounced on like a runaway wagon. The big girl, Lucille Blaine, could talk all day. She sneered even at the prosecutor. She wore a dark blue crepe dress with white leather belt and white shoes and you could hear her stockings sizzle like searing meat as she walked from the rear of the courtroom. In the high-backed rail chair she had the confidence of the unreachable. Poking from her bland extruded face you could see the ridges of stony refusal, the uncomplicitous aggrievement and hatred. The world has come to this, Billy thought. It was decaying to stone before our eyes but we took no notice. He had no love for these black fellows but sometimes he wanted to go into a small quiet room and weep there. Wrath, he thought, like the Bible turned inside out.
What had been done to this woman could not be undone and this scared him.
“I wouldn’t have no truck with a nigra,” she said. “Who would? They got diseases and, well, it would make me sick to my death.”
She showed her big shiny teeth to the jury and the jury shrunk back. She would eat the ones who disagreed. The courtroom smelled of gravy sandwiches and grease. “This one here, and those other ones,” she said, “came at me in that train car like I was a chicken they was trying to cut its head off with a ax. They was all laughing and they had a fire in their eyes. They pushed me down in this old messy straw. The straw dust got up my nose and made me sneeze. I couldn’t stop sneezing even when they threw my dress up over my head and went at me. I was crying and sneezing at the same time. And yelling to Jesus. That’s how I got the big bruise on my face. One of them — I think — and I think — and I think—” and Pullen stopped her because the judge wouldn’t and in his most affable manner asked the judge to explain to the young lady that she could only testify to what she had seen — not speculated. The judge smiled at the woman whom he would never have in his house, or even in his yard — or his street or his town that had a rose-twined arch under which travelers passed as they entered from the western environs — if he could help it, and reminded her of the rules. But when the traveler did it again, saying that she thought (and thought and thought and thought) it was — stopped by Pullen — the judge frowned at the lawyer and told him to quit harassing the witness. The traveler shed a smile like a bitter cry and plunged on, wielding her heavy knives and cannon and sorrow.
So she can’t let on, Billy thought — not anywhere on earth or in heaven — that she, a white woman, had let a black man have his way with her. (Somebody had — so the doctor said — but that somebody had probably paid and got his favor before she even left the rail yards up in Chattanooga. That was what she was doing on the train — working.) Even if the nigra paid, she had still let him. If she told the truth, the bottom might fall out of the bucket. Like everybody here, he thought — each one of us fighting and dodging and swinging whatever weapon we can lift — she was trying to fend off the shame of it.