The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (12 page)

Carl knew the ritual well enough: he must be resolutely courteous to these men, regardless of provocation; he must not argue with the pronouncements made by any of the group; and he must affect gratitude for their tolerating his presence. In exchange for his deference, he would be granted whatever wisdom they had to offer.

A cherubic-looking man, with rimless spectacles and wisps of white hair wreathed around a bald spot, motioned for him to drag another chair up to the stove. Carl took a spindly ladderback chair out of a corner next to some shelves, unobtrusively brushing away most of the cobwebs as he dragged it into the circle. Before he sat, though, he introduced himself and shook hands all around. He didn’t quite catch their names, and he got the impression that they hadn’t intended for him to, but his show of courtesy seemed to pass muster, because as soon as he was safely seated on the swaybacked chair, someone offered him a cigar, which he declined. The burly man beside him handed
over a glass of bourbon, which he knew better than to refuse. Then the conversation resumed as if he were not there.

After a few more minutes of desultory discussion about local politics and speculation about the weather, during which Carl tried to pretend he wasn’t there, they took pity on him and steered the talk into more useful channels.

“Good thing the trial is in
Wise
,” one of them said. “That’s as close as those New York fellers will ever get to experiencing that condition.”

The remark drew laughs and nods of agreement, but Carl suspected that the quip was a standard jest made by the local wits, and that it had been trotted out solely for his benefit.

The grizzled old fellow in rimless spectacles turned to Carl. “So you’re covering this trial, too, are you?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a wonderful chance for me. First big story.”

“But are you lost, son?” His smirk drew answering smiles from the other elders. “I ask only because the trial is taking place over in Wise, and here you are, sitting smack dab in the middle of Abingdon, which is a couple of counties away, doncha know. I hope you noticed that the trains don’t even run from here to Wise.”

It seemed to Carl that the elders went very still, waiting for his answer.

“No, sir, I know they don’t.”

“You could have got there directly from Johnson City, though,” another man called out.

A silver-haired man who looked accustomed to command summoned a mirthless smile. “It’s not that we doubt your veracity, young man. No, indeed. It is your common sense that we are questioning.”

Since no plausible face-saving lie occurred to him under this sudden cross-examination, Carl settled for the embarrassing truth. “I came here to Abingdon on purpose, sir. I heard that the famous journalists were staying here at the Martha Washington Inn.”

The silver-haired man nodded, and his expression indicated that he had already guessed that. “And yet here you are in the back room of a tin shop which has heretofore
not
been mistaken for that renowned establishment, the Martha Washington Inn.”

Another of the men waved a cigar in the general direction of his companions. “And you have our solemn word that not a soul among us can lay claim to being a northern newspaperman. We are none of us as drunk as that.”

“Nor as uneducated.”

The elders were having a joke at his expense, a test to see how he would react to the provocation, but Carl thought that he probably deserved the ribbing, because, in retrospect, he realized that coming to Abingdon to hobnob with the famous reporters had indeed been a fool’s errand. He saw that now, so he let them laugh, and made no move to excuse his behavior.

“Just as well you didn’t find them, boy,” said the silver-haired patrician, when the merriment subsided. “I don’t think you would have learned much from that bunch, anyhow.”

The others nodded. “I reckon you’re better off going with what you already know,” said another. “At least you’re acquainted with mountain ways, which is more than any of them can claim.”

“Of course, that won’t stop them from claiming it. I’m sure that every one of them will trump up some excuse for declaring brotherhood with the good citizens of Wise, so that they can attest to the wherewithal to get at the truth of the case.”

“Or at least the most popular lies.”

“Now, you might be the one to get to the bottom of it, young man. At least you know this part of the world, instead of making it up as you go along.”

Carl took a fortifying sip of Washington County bourbon. “Yes, sir.”

“And they’ll be quoting that infernal book as if it was Holy Scripture.”

“Mr. John Fox, Jr.’s book, do you mean, sir?”

“I do.
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
, published in 1906, and set even earlier, but that’s the world those buzzards came looking for, and they won’t rest until they’ve found it.”

The patrician scowled. “I don’t reckon those big-time reporters can be trusted any farther than you could throw one. Are you old enough to remember the Floyd Collins story, son?”

Carl nodded, knowing that this was not an invitation to speak but a preamble to a long story that he was not to spoil by admitting that he already knew it. The tale was not going to be trotted out solely for his benefit, but he would serve as the excuse for the telling of it, and, familiar or not, he would be obliged to find it fascinating.

Carl did remember the case, though. He had been ten years old in 1926, when an obscure Kentucky farmer, whose hobby was cave exploring, had got himself trapped underground, capturing the attention of the entire country. Maybe it was the first news story that ever did unite the nation, thanks to the relatively new mediums of radio, telegraph, and telephones, spreading the news faster than it had ever been sent before. Since that event nearly ten years ago, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby might have gripped the nation longer and harder, but, before that trial, Floyd Collins had become a national sensation overnight, just by getting stuck in a cave.

Collins, a tall, spare farmhand in his late thirties, had lived in the limestone region of western Kentucky, south of Louisville, only a few miles from Mammoth Cave. For years he had been spending his spare time in the fields and woods, crawling into holes in the ground, in hopes of finding a subterranean route that connected to the nearby Mammoth system of caves.

Floyd Collins’s luck ran out on a soggy day in January, when,
burrowing deep into a narrow hillside passageway, he dislodged a ham-sized rock that pinned his foot to the cave floor, trapping him alone underground. When he didn’t come home by morning, his family and neighbors managed to locate the missing man, but he was deep underground, and they had difficulty getting to him. His foot was caught under that slab of rock, and they couldn’t get him out.

Collins wasn’t badly hurt. He just couldn’t dislodge the rock that pinned his leg, and the long passageway in which he was trapped was so steep and narrow that it was difficult—and terrifying—to try to reach him. He was at least two hundred feet from the entrance, in a narrow channel of rock perhaps two feet high, and only a little wider than the body of a man. Anyone who managed to reach him found that there was no space to use tools to free him. Another concern was that any activity in the passage would set off another rock fall, perhaps trapping the rescuer as well as Collins himself.

The news of his predicament seemed to spread in concentric circles from the local newspaper articles and radio station coverage on to bigger news organizations in Louisville and Cincinnati, and from there on to every major news outlet in the country. By the time the farflung nation heard the news, three days had passed, and Floyd Collins was still trapped in that channel of rock, with his foot wedged under a boulder. Would-be rescuers would crawl down the narrow passage, calling out to him, and the trapped man would answer readily enough. He was chipper at first, confident that with so many people involved in the rescue attempt, his deliverance was only hours away.

But it wasn’t.

While he huddled in the sodden darkness, chilled and wet and hungry, rival teams of self-appointed rescuers stood in the field aboveground at the cave entrance, bickering over how best to save him. Everybody agreed that trying to enlarge the passageway in which Floyd Collins was trapped might trigger a cave-in and kill
him. The rockfall that had trapped his leg proved how unstable the surrounding sandstone was. The rescuers proposed two alternate plans: either to amputate his leg, so that he could be dragged out of the cave without the need of excavation, or to dig a vertical shaft a few feet away from his location, and tunnel from there over to him and remove the rock. Collins was willing to sacrifice his leg to gain his freedom, but some of the rescuers argued that the man would surely bleed to death before he could be brought to the surface.

Either plan might have worked, if only they had tried them quickly instead of standing in the barren field outside the hole arguing about it. The cold, wet January days passed slowly, and, deep in the sandstone cave, Floyd Collins, stranded for days without food or water, began to pray.

The national reporters arrived in the first few days of the crisis, telegraphing stories back to their respective papers or broadcasting news bulletins from the soggy field. As the hours passed with no new developments in the case, they had to think up ways to keep the story fresh for the national audience. Some of them tried to find a grieving sweetheart that they could exhibit to mourn for the avid public, but nobody ever located one. Floyd Collins had been a solitary, unexceptional little man whose chief passion in life had been exploring the caves of his home county. His parents and friends were distressed, but they did not provide good theatre to captivate the listening masses. A beautiful and tearful girl would have fueled the story like wildfire, but there were no suitable candidates for the role.

The reporters decided that there was nothing for it, but to try to interview the trapped man himself, but to do so was the stuff of nightmares.

In order to converse with Floyd Collins a man had to crawl on his belly through the damp earth two hundred feet down a passageway that was only inches higher and wider than the man who entered it. There was no room to turn around. In order to leave, you
would have to back out the way you came—two hundred feet—and there was always the possibility that further movement in the cave would dislodge more rock and trap the reporter, too.

But it was the only way to get the interview.

The only stipulation made by the rescue teams was that anyone who wanted to venture down the passage must take food and drink to the trapped man. This stipulation was only common decency, and all the reporters readily agreed to it.

All this Carl knew already, but he listened to the tale with an expression of rapt interest. After a pause to refill his glass of whiskey, the raconteur came to the part of the story he hadn’t known.

“One at a time, every couple of hours, a reporter would take a packet of sandwiches and a flask of water, and set off down the hole with everybody watching him go, calling out messages of encouragement for Floyd. Then ten or fifteen minutes would pass with everybody in the field standing there staring at the opening, hoping that there’d be no compounding the tragedy. Then, by and by, a somber, damp, and muddy big-city journalist would emerge, backing out of the hole empty-handed, and the whole crowd would surround him, clamoring for news of the prisoner.”

“Vultures,” said one of the listeners. “Too craven to make the trip down there themselves. I hope the reporter who braved that hole made them credit him in their news stories, John.”

John drained his glass. “You may think otherwise by and by, Bob,” he said. “The reporter who had just emerged from that hellhole would say something like, ‘Why, he’s in good spirits, considering. He thanks you all for your efforts, and says he’s confident that you will deliver him from this cavernous tomb.’

“Then a few hours later another reporter would work up the nerve to make the descent, and, armed with another load of provisions, off he’d go, and then he’d come back with much the same tale as the others.

“Now, what I’m about to tell you . . . the fellow I heard this from was a skinny young Kentucky journalist. He put me in mind of you, boy,” he said, nodding toward Carl.

A portly balding man in shabby tweeds interrupted. “I hope you’re not fixing to insult our visitor, John. That wouldn’t be neighborly.”

“Now you fellas know me better than that,” said the raconteur. “That young Kentucky journalist I was speaking of is the only one of that passel of newsmen that was worth a bucket of warm spit. Now let me tell the tale.”

“Go on ahead then,” said the man in tweeds, waving his cigar in the air. “We’re all ears.”

“All right, then. For the better part of a day, as I told you, those city reporters were crawling down that sandstone conduit to get their interviews with poor Floyd Collins, and finally the skinny youngster from the Kentucky paper reckoned he’d take a turn. So they loaded him down with a packet of sandwiches and a thermos, and the crowd escorted him to the hole, wishing him godspeed. He said he scooted down the passage in a cold sweat, taking a good many minutes that seemed like hours to make progress, and finally he reached the place where the passage widened a bit, and took a sharp turn to the right, where it got even narrower. At that point you were still a hundred feet short of reaching the trapped man, and you were a good long ways from safety. And what do you think that Kentucky reporter saw when he reached that turning place?”

His listeners shook their heads. Despite the warmth of the wood-stove and the bourbon in his gullet, Carl felt a chill of dread. “Out with it, John,” someone called out. “What did the boy find down there?”

“Packets of sandwiches.” The old man’s lip curled in disgust. “A whole pile of food stacked there at the junction of passageways. Cartons of coffee. Apples. About two days’ worth of provisions.
Everything that those big-city journalists had taken down to give to Floyd Collins had been discarded right there. When the going got rough, when they had been gone long enough and got far enough from the entrance, those gutless wonders dropped the food in the passageway thirty yards from Collins himself, and they hightailed it right back out of the cave.” He shrugged. “I can’t say I blame them for that. My backbone turns to ice just thinking about having to squeeze into a cold, damp hole in the ground and crawl for a hundred yards or more into that narrowing dark. Maybe getting trapped there myself.”