Home Fires (2 page)

“You ever wish you were an only child?”

“Frequently,” I sighed.

Old Highway 70 between New Bern and Kinston used to be as straight as a piece of uncooked spaghetti and fun to drive even if it was only two lanes and complicated by the small towns of Tuscarora, Cove City and Dover. The new highway is a well-divided four lanes and bypasses the towns, undulating lazily through flat monotonous stands of wax myrtle and marsh grass, then on past Weyerhaeuser pulpwood farms, every tree the same height and as regularly spaced as pickets in a fence.

Traffic was spotty this early in the day. By mid-afternoon it’d be one pickup or minivan after another pulling boats of all sizes and configurations back to Raleigh, Durham or Greensboro. At eight-thirty on a Sunday morning, though, most vehicles were heading east and I had the westbound side of the highway pretty much to myself.

Plenty of time to think about the aggravation of being at the beck and call of eleven older brothers.

Not to mention their wives and children.

Knowing that every time I turned around, the turning was endlessly discussed and dissected.

Nevertheless, I’d lied when I told Kidd I wished I was an only child. I’d had a taste of it my eighteenth summer, the summer Mother was dying, and I didn’t like it one little bit.

All the boys were caught up in their own lives then—several of them newly married or lately divorced, babies coming thick and fast, crops to house. That was their excuse anyhow. Mainly it was that they were too inarticulate with grief to talk to me or Mother.

She scared them the way she blazed with urgent purpose that summer. So many things to set in order before she died, from boxes of loose snapshots to closets full of shoe boxes, to secrets that no one wanted to hear except me.

“Go,” she said one muggy Sunday afternoon when I was desperate to get out of the house, to go swimming, to be eighteen and hang out with my friends even though they didn’t know what to say either. “I’ll be all right for a few hours.”

But I couldn’t bear to leave her alone.

Several of the boys and their wives and children had come for dinner after church, but they all left as soon as the dishes were done, terrified that Mother would make them talk about the cancer that was killing her. Even Daddy had gone off somewhere.

“Don’t blame them,” she said. “It takes some getting used to. They’ll be here when we need them.”

And she was right. They were. By the end of the summer, every son and stepson had let her say to him the things she needed to say and they did their best to shore me up when her voice went silent and—

I realized that my eyes were misting over and I fumbled in my pocket for a tissue.

I also realized that the needle on my speedometer was sitting on eighty-five and immediately took my foot off the gas till it settled back to a sedate sixty just as I passed under a cloverleaf. A white Crown Victoria was coming down the on-ramp and I moved over into the left lane so the driver could get in without slowing down.

As he passed me on the right, I glanced over and saw the unmistakable silhouette of a state trooper’s hat. A portable blue light sat on the dashboard. He gave me an approving nod for my courtesy. I gave a polite nod back and took a sip of my now-cold coffee.

My cousin Sue’s always saying she’d rather have my luck than a license to steal.

Two minutes sooner and that blue light would’ve been flashing in my rearview mirror.

Doesn’t look good for a judge to get a speeding ticket, especially since I sometimes feel as if every tenth driver licensed by the state of North Carolina has probably made an appearance in my courtroom.

Drunk drivers, hopheads, the myopics who cautiously take their half of the road down the middle, and the frustrated zip-arounds in perpetual search of wide-open lanes—they’re almost enough to make you want a Sherman tank when you get out on the four-lanes. As it is, I find myself driving a lot more defensively since I took the bench and had my eyes opened to just how much stupidity and road rage are out here sharing the highway with me.

(“Yeah?” said Jimmy White when I voiced that observation last week. Jimmy’s been servicing my cars ever since I took a curve too fast in front of his garage when I was sixteen. “You passed me last week on Forty-eight like I had my car in Park with my foot on the brake.”

(“I didn’t say I was driving slower,” I said sheepishly. “Just more defensively.”

(He grinned and shook his head at me. “Any more defensive, girl, and you’d’ve been airborne.”)

I consider myself a safe driver, courteous and mindful of others, and I’m trying really hard to keep close to the speed limit; but in all honesty, it’s too easy to go with the flow and unless I keep my mind on it or put the car on cruise control, I don’t always succeed.

A.K. could use some of my luck, I thought wryly as the unmarked patrol car exited at the next overpass.

Poor A.K.

And poor Andrew, too.

It’s hard for him to ask for help. According to Aunt Zell, it’s because he didn’t get to be a baby very long. Daddy’s first wife was a hard worker, but she was also a baby machine, kicking out one son after another at regular intervals like some sort of predictable assembly line. Andrew was the third of her eight boys, and less than two years after he was born, he was displaced not by one baby, but by two—Herman and Haywood, the “big twins,” so called because they’re older than Adam and Zach, the “little twins” who were born to my mother eleven years later.

“There wasn’t any room on Annie Ruth’s lap for even a knee baby,” says Aunt Zell, and she’s always had a soft spot for Andrew, even when he was sassing Mother and talking back to Daddy and ran off and got a Widdington girl pregnant before he was nineteen.

I only met Carol once. Her daddy forced the marriage when he heard she was expecting, but she got a divorce as soon as the baby was born. A little girl.

Olivia.

I’ve only met her once, too.

Carol took her and ran before the ink was dry on her divorce papers. Can’t say I blame her when I hear how wild Andrew was back then, always getting drunk and picking fights. He saw the inside of Colleton County’s jailhouse more than once during those years. His second marriage didn’t last much longer than the first, but at least there were no children.

April is his third wife, a sixth-grade schoolteacher who’s closer to my age than his. She gentled him, brought him back into the family, helped him settle down to farming with Daddy and the boys.

Hell, he’s almost a pillar of the community these days.

With time, I expect A.K. will be, too.

The wages of sin never go unpaid.

—Tabernacle Freewill Baptist Church

At my request, Doug Woodall had hastily calendared A.K.’s case for the following Wednesday afternoon. Since Luther Parker was sitting that session, Reid decided to go ahead with it rather than take his chances on getting someone more hard-nosed.

He’d tried to get A.K.’s trial separated from his buddies, but that hadn’t worked. Luther Parker was the candidate who beat me in a runoff primary a couple of years back, when I first ran for district court judge. He not only beat me in June, he went on to beat the white male Republican candidate in November to become the district’s first black judge.

I rushed through my own calendar and slipped into the back of Courtroom 2 as the case in front of A.K.’s was winding down.

The defendant here was a black youth who looked to be no more than sixteen or seventeen and he must have been found guilty of the charge because Parker was listening to a plea for leniency from a man who wore black pants and a short-sleeved white shirt with a dark red tie. From his words and measured tones, I immediately knew he was a preacher.

His back was to the spectators and I couldn’t see his face until he turned to gesture to an elderly black woman seated several rows behind him. I know most of the preachers in this district, black and white, but this face was unfamiliar. His skin was only a shade or two darker than mine, there was no gray in his hair and he was built like a linebacker. Yet there was a compelling gentleness in his voice when he spoke of the boy’s first lapse from the path of righteousness that his grandmother had set out for him.

“What’s the charge?” I whispered to the bailiff who’d opened the door for me.

“Shoplifting,” he whispered back. “Stole some of them electronic gizmos from the Wal-Mart. Worth about twenty dollars each.”

“This
is
his first offense, isn’t it, Ms. DeGraffenried?” asked Luther Parker.

“But not his last if the law doesn’t come down hard before he starts thinking that coming to court is no more onerous than sitting through one of Reverend Freeman’s sermons,” Cyl said sweetly.

“Sorry, Sister DeGraffenried,” Freeman said with feigned contrition. “I didn’t realize you were one of my congregation.”

Some of the attorneys and police personnel sitting on the side bench grinned. Reid was sitting there, too, but I was glad to see that he didn’t join in the ripple of mirth. He was finally getting some smarts about Assistant District Attorney Cylvia DeGraffenried, who was prosecuting today. I’d have been a lot happier if it was any other member of Doug Woodall’s staff, or even Doug himself.

Cyl is all things bright and beautiful. She prepares every detail of her cases, is up on precedents, and has a win/loss percentage that would look good on anybody’s scorecard. Mid-twenties. Law degree from Duke. Classic beauty. Drop-dead size-six figure. She even has what my African-American friends tell me is “good” hair. It waves above her large brown eyes and falls softly around her perfectly oval, dark brown face.

That’s the only thing soft about her.

No sense of humor and even less compassion.

“Mitigating circumstances, Your Honor,” defense pleads.

“Rationalization,” she snaps back.

And tough as she is on white offenders, she’s even tougher on blacks. Especially young black men.

We still have a couple of white judges who like her attitude. Although less quick to agree when it’s a white face, they nod solemnly when she pushes for the maximum sentence for a black one.

The rest of us have quit trying to get DA Douglas Woodall to rein her in.

“Is she unprepared? Shaky on her precedents? Prosecuting on frivolous charges?” he asked me when I first complained that his new ADA ought to ease up.

No, no, and no, I had to admit.

“Number four in her class,” he said happily. “Sharp young black woman like her, she could be clerking for one of the Justices up in Washington. Or pulling in high dollars at some politically savvy law firm. I won’t be able to keep her once she decides where she wants to go. In the meantime, I’d be a fool if I did anything to rush her.”

The last time I grumbled, Doug just smiled and murmured something about approval ratings.

“You know how good she makes him look to the black electorate?” asked the pragmatist who sits on one side of my head.

The preacher who paces up and down on the other side nodded his own head sagely.

That was two years ago and Cyl DeGraffenried’s still here. Still pushing for the max even when the offense is minimal. My sister-in-law Minnie’s convinced that Cyl’s a closet Republican, since most of the courthouse is Democrat and she seldom socializes. Oh, she comes to every official function, but I’ve never seen her actually enjoying herself or dishing with any of our colleagues.

No, Cyl DeGraffenried’s the cat that walks alone, and, like most of my fellow judges, I’ve almost quit wondering why she hasn’t yet moved on to bigger things. As a rule, I just ask her what the State’s recommending in the way of punishment and then cut it in half.

Happily, Luther Parker is usually of the same mind even after all these years of practicing law. On the other hand, he’s not a fool either.

“You’re new to Colleton County, aren’t you, Reverend Freeman?”

“Yes, sir. My family and I were called to Balm of Gilead about six weeks ago.”

“From Warrenton, I believe I heard somebody say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So it might be it’s a little early for you to know this young man as well as you might think you do?”

“Man looketh on the outward appearance, Your Honor. God has shown me his heart and it’s a good heart.”

Coming from just about anyone else, those words would have sounded sanctimonious as hell, but somehow the Reverend Freeman made them sound earnest and sensible.

Luther Parker nodded and spoke to the boy. “Ten days suspended on condition that you pay costs, make restitution to Wal-Mart, do twenty-four hours of community service and meet with Reverend Freeman here for counseling once a week for the next six weeks.” He glanced at the preacher. “If that’s agreeable with you, sir?”

“His grandmother and I thank you for your compassion.” He put his broad hand on the boy’s shoulder. The youth straightened himself and said, “Thank you, Judge.”

“Don’t let us down, son,” said Luther, who really can be a softie at times.

As the charges were being laid out against my nephew and the other two boys, I took a seat on an empty back bench and hoped that some of Luther’s grandfatherly compassion would slop over onto A.K. and his two accomplices.

Raymond Bagwell was eighteen, Charles Starling was twenty, three years older than A.K. Both white. The three of them were charged with a Class I misdemeanor—desecrating gravesites.

“More specifically, Your Honor,” said Cyl DeGraffenried, “they knocked over gravestones and used spray paint to deface the walls of a small family cemetery near Cotton Grove.”

Several members of the offended Crocker family filled the first two rows of benches behind the prosecutor. Old Mrs. Martha Crocker Rhodes was purple with outrage. As Cyl read out the charges, Miss Martha nodded vehemently and filled in around the edges with low mutters about white-trash ne’er-do-wells who could commit such lowdown, snake-belly acts of vandalism on the graves of her forebears.

The mutters were mostly directed at A.K.’s cohorts since the Crockers were Cotton Grove neighbors and Andrew and Daddy had marched A.K. over there on Sunday afternoon so he could apologize for his part in the vandalism and promise to help put things right.