Brother Jobe looked down at his hands, knowing that what he knew was both inadmissible and so far out of the normal sway of other people’s expectations about reality that he dare not introduce it.
“What have you got, Loren?” Bullock said.
“Not much. A diagram of the scene. Notes on interviews, I guess you’d call them, with those who came to the house in response to the screaming.”
“Well, what the hell, Loren?”
“What the hell do you mean ‘what the hell,’ Stephen?”
“I mean . . . is that it?”
“It’s what we’re able to do,” Loren said, his voice rising. “We don’t have a professional police force here, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Believe me, I’ve noticed.”
“Is there some crime lab I haven’t been informed about where I’m supposed to send materials?”
“Okay, okay. Calm down. What about the murder weapon?”
“I left it in place,” Loren said.
“Where?” Bullock said. “What place?”
“In the chest of the victim,” Loren said.
Bullock made a face.
The others around the table swapped glances.
“I told him to leave it in there,” the doctor said. “The bodies were brought over to my place. I conducted a postmortem examination to determine the exact cause of death. It was self-evident in the case of the man, of course.”
“And . . .”
“I’ve written a report,” the doctor said, retrieving a tri-folded, handwritten clutch of papers from his inner coat pocket and handing them over.
“Don’t you miss the old Xerox machine?” Bullock said, taking the papers. No comments were offered. “Can you give me the verbal bottom line on this? Who killed who and how?”
“No, I can’t do that,” the doctor said.
“He can’t do that,” Sam Hutto, who had spent years in courtrooms, agreed. “Didn’t you go to law school, Stephen?”
“Yeah, I went to Duke,” Bullock said with visible pride. “Never actually practiced, though. The law just wasn’t in my blood.”
“Maybe you should eat a little more red meat,” Ben Deaver said.
Bullock scowled at Deaver but did not retort.
“You understand that the coroner doesn’t pronounce verdicts,” Sam Hutto said. “That’s what the regular procedure is for—hearing, grand jury, trial, and all that.”
“Oh, all right. Sorry I asked. What about the baby? You can summarize your medical findings about the baby without pronouncing a verdict, can’t you?” Bullock said, and then turned to Sam. “Can’t he?”
Sam didn’t object.
The doctor cleared his throat. “You have the spectrum of injury that’s consistent with what’s called shaken baby syndrome,” he said. “Retinal hemorrhage, that is, bleeding, subdural hemorrhage, bleeding in the outer layers of the brain, but chiefly this child died of a broken neck, a severe insult to the brain stem. The other injuries suggest that he’d been shaken before, probably more than a couple of times.”
“So, father shakes baby, kills him, and mother stabs father to death,” Bullock said.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Robert said. “It’s just conjecture.”
Bullock visibly struggled to contain his irritation.
“Let’s get the old ball rolling then, shall we,” he said. “You want to prosecute or defend, Sam?”
“Gawd, I was afraid it would come to this.”
“Well, how many lawyers have we got left around here? Not too goddamn many. There’s you and Dale Murray.” Dale Murray, Robert Earle’s predecessor as mayor of Union Grove, was rumored to be spending his late innings on planet earth drinking Battenkill light rye whiskey from dawn to dark.
“Oh, please, let’s not drag him into this,” Loren objected.
“I have the degree in jurisprudence,” Brother Jobe said, startling the others around the table, who now all turned at him.
“You’re kidding me,” Bullock said. “How is that possible?”
Brother Jobe now glared darkly at Bullock, and the latter seemed to shrink visibly from his hard gaze.
“I ain’t kidding one ding-dang bit, your honor. And it’s possible ’cause I applied and got in and grinded my goldurned way through the goshdarned program, is how.”
“And where’d you obtain this alleged law degree?”
“Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. We’re ole homeys, looks like.”
Bullock cackled unconvincingly.
“Right there on Towerview Road, West Campus,” Brother Jobe continued. “Sound familiar? I remember it like it was yesterday. Across the street on one corner was the science lab building and the Panda Express on t’other. I guess that outfit ain’t there no longer. Well, far as I know the whole shootin’ match is done for, things being how they are these days. Yessir, I been through that mill. Of course, I done it some years after you was there, I suppose. Didn’t see you around, anyways.”
Bullock’s jaw had dropped sequentially lower as Brother Jobe spoke since the landmarks he described were indeed as things were at Duke Law.
“How in the hell did they let you in there?” Bullock said. “I mean . . . no offense.”
“I think it was the interview that clinched it,” Brother Jobe said.
The others around the table tried to conceal their enjoyment of Bullock’s discomfort.
“But you . . . you don’t talk like a lawyer.”
“I guess you never met too many Virginia country lawyers.”
“No I haven’t.”
“Well, I can serve up a
casus belli
from
a priori
to
a
posteriori
all the livelong day when I want to.”
“And I suppose you practiced,” Bullock said.
“About eight months,” Brother Jobe said. “Scott County, V-A. It was mostly hillbilly law. Folks burning each other’s trailers, drug cookers, wife beaters, child rapers, and all like that. I didn’t take to it so well. Anyway the Lord Jesus saved me from a life of
animus nocendi et alii
. He saved me in more ways than one.”
“Can you act as prosecutor in this case?” Ben Deaver said.
Brother Jobe paused ruminatively before answering.
“I suppose,” he said.
Bullock shook his head and smiled, yet awash in incredulity.
“All right, then,” he said. “And you’ll defend, will you, Sam?”
“I will,” Sam said.
Bullock opened his leather folio with a flourish.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ve prepared all the necessary writs. We’ll arraign this poor girl this afternoon and proceed from there.” He looked over his reading glasses at Brother Jobe. “She’s held over at your compound, I understand.”
“That is correct.”
“Is it the appropriate place?”
“There’s no other secure place to confine her,” Robert said. “To use the old jail upstairs, we’d have to heat this whole building, and that would require cords of firewood and somebody standing by around the clock to keep it all going.”
“I’m told she’s not in her right mind,” Bullock said.
“That would be my observation,” the doctor said. “It’s in my notes.”
“Mine, too, at the scene of the crime,” Loren said.
“Obviously there’s no psychiatric facility with a locked ward,” Robert said.
“She’s safe and comfortable where we got her,” Brother Jobe said.
The doctor explained to Bullock the particulars of Mandy Stokes’s recent illness, and how it had affected her.
“Then it might seem this whole business will conclude in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity,” Bullock said, looking from one man to another around the table. None of them offered a comment or opinion. “Hasn’t that occurred to any of you? Okay, in that event what would we do with her then? Keep her locked up in a room at the old high school for the next fifty years like some crazy old aunt in the attic?”
“You’re putting the cart before the horse again, Stephen,” Deaver said.
“Why don’t we get on with the proceedings and take these things as they come,” Loren said.
“All I’m saying is that this case raises some very troubling issues,” Bullock said. “And I hope you’re all prepared for certain consequences.” He slapped his folio of writs shut. “Shall we get on with this arraignment then?”
Robert Earle, as nominal chair of the meeting, called to adjourn. Back outside on the street, before Bullock, Loren, and the two lawyers proceeded to the old high school, Bullock took Robert aside. A fine drizzle fell, glazing the sidewalk and making it slippery, and fewer people were out on Main Street than the day before.
“You know, sooner or later I’m going to have to adjudicate your role in the death of that other young man,” Bullock said. He referred to Shawn Watling, murdered in June at the town landfill, which operated as a salvage yard for building materials and other recycled manufactured goods no longer available. Robert had been in Shawn’s company at the time of the murder, and subsequently came to cohabit with Shawn’s widow, Britney Blieveldt. Aspersions were cast but no charges made against Robert. The matter had never been legally resolved.
“You do what you must,” Robert said.
“Of course, I could order a hearing and dismiss a complaint at any time.”
“Then why the hell don’t you, Stephen?” Robert said. “I thought we were friends. This is starting to get under my skin.”
“I understand. But all you people here in town, you wanted me to represent the law, to
be
the law, and the law doesn’t have friends. The way things look right now, I might have to hang this girl in the final end of all this. How is the town going to like that?” Then, loudly to the others, who stood at a remove, Bullock said, “Gentlemen, let’s go do our duty.”
F
IFTEEN
The arraignment was conducted in the room where Mandy Stokes was confined. She sat on the edge of her bed, still in her nightclothes, staring blankly ahead into some indeterminate space between herself and her interlocutors, and barely responded to the recitation of charges against her except to glance up at Bullock when he spoke the name “Julian.” Sam Hutto, with his long flat face and sympathetic manner, was introduced as her court-appointed defense attorney. She said nothing to him. Bullock set bail at five gold ounces—a sum so high as to preclude any possibility of release—and a date was set for a preliminary hearing. When the ritual was complete Brother Jobe walked the others back to the old lobby of the former high school, where Brother Boaz waited with something in a picture frame.
“Thank you, son,” Brother Jobe said.
Bullock acknowledged Boaz with a nod, but he wore a skeptical grin as if he suspected something was up.
“There she is, your honor,” Brother Jobe said as he handed over his framed diploma from the Duke University School of Law made out to one Lyle Beecham Wilsey, complete with stamped seals and signatures.
“Who’s this Wilsey?” Bullock said.
“That was my old times name. Our New Faith names are handpicked biblical. Ain’t that obvious?”
Bullock looked at the diploma and back at Brother Jobe several times.
“Don’t worry,” Brother Jobe said. “I got an old driver’s license and all kind of ID back in my quarters.” Bullock continued to stare at the document. “You think one of my people whipped this thing together on a computer the past hour since it first come up? Lookit here, this wax seal is the genuine article.”
Bullock handed it back.
“All I can say is, this world is just one astonishing goddamn thing after another.”
Brother Jobe appeared to take it as a compliment, but then the unusually small features of his large round face all bunched together fretfully.
“Uh, your honor, I’ll have to ask you to mind your language. This here is a sacred outfit.”
“Excuse me.”
S
IXTEEN
Despite the tragedy in Mill Hollow of the night before, the Christmas Eve service, called
Lessons and Carols,
went on as scheduled at the First Congregational Church of Union Grove with the Reverend Loren Holder presiding and narrating the vignettes from the Nativity, and all the musical instruments and voices soaring between lessons, and the children of town acting out in costume the doings long ago in the Holy Land. The spacious nave of the austere white wooden church was warmed by more than three hundred bodies, including farmers, tradesmen, and their families who had come from miles around, as well as a score of visitors from the New Faith compound with their own shepherd, Brother Jobe. The formal program was followed in the large, adjacent community room by a potluck feast of roasts, hams, sausages, smoked trouts, braised pikes, puddings, fritters, creamed this and that, pickles, cheeses, corn breads and pones, brandied fruits, glacéed pears, prune whips, custards, honey cakes, and hickory nut macaroons, with eggnog, beer, and cider to wash it down.
When the convocation broke up, and wagons and carts were mounted for journeys home, and the people of town walked to their homes, the rain that started earlier turned again to snow, an exuberant snow of large fluffy flakes whose wondrous hexagonal patterns could be discerned when they landed on wool mittens. Robert walked home arm in arm with Britney and eight-year-old Sarah, marveling at how much in love he was with them, and how unlikely it was that he had come to have another family after losing his first family—wife, Sandy, daughter Genna, both killed by epidemic illnesses, and son Daniel, who had left home at nineteen with Loren and Jane Ann’s boy Evan, to see what had happened out in America. It disturbed Robert when he realized that he loved his new family as much as the one that he had lost, and he wondered whether his feeling for one was a betrayal of the other.