Home Fires

3

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.

Now April, Andrew and Ruth, A.K.’s younger sister, sat in the front row behind the defense table, along with my brother Seth and his wife Minnie. Daddy sat straight as an iron poker between his two sons and kept his clear blue eyes fixed on the back of A.K.’s head. We’d tried to keep him from coming, but it was like trying to keep the wind from blowing. “I come for Andrew and I reckon I can come for Andrew’s boy, but I sure hope he ain’t gonna mess up as many times as Andrew did,” he said.

I recognized the Bagwell boy’s father and there was a faded woman about my age who might have been Starling’s mother. They had the same rabbity-looking features. Small noses in forward-pointing faces. Slightly buck teeth.

April had good cause to worry about the company A.K. was keeping these days. Both his friends had dropped out of school and both were working dead-end jobs for minimum wages.

When they worked.

I gathered that the Bagwell boy was steadier but that young Starling seemed to get fired a lot or walk off a job in a huff. Why he’d picked on the Crocker graveyard was anyone’s guess, but A.K. said it was Starling’s idea.

In his day, old Abraham Crocker had fathered a tribe at least as large as Daddy’s. Even if A.K. hadn’t been a defendant, I probably could have recused myself from hearing this case since my brother Haywood’s wife Isabel is Miss Martha’s niece and one of Daddy’s great-uncles had married a Crocker girl a hundred years ago. On the other hand, any judge whose family’s been in Colleton County this long would be just as likely to have some connection to the Crockers either by blood or by marriage, and for all I know, looking at Luther’s light brown skin, there could be a Crocker or two perched in his own family tree.

In fact, if we went looking hard enough, he and I both could probably even find a personal connection to the other two defendants as well. A pre-Revolution name doesn’t automatically guarantee an unsullied report card—my own family’s living proof of that. Bagwell and Starling might be old Colleton County names, but both these boys had stood before me since I came to the bench. Until today though, it had been for minor things: speeding, broken taillights, driving with open beer cans inside the car, barroom brawling, possession of marijuana—the usual et cetera young men keep getting hauled in for till they either settle down with a good woman or cross over the line between hurting themselves and hurting others.

This sort of destruction was pushing that line.

Reid might not have been able to separate the cases, but he was there solely to protect A.K.’s interests. Ed Whitbread was acting for the other two.

“How do your clients plead?” Luther Parker asked them.

“Not guilty,” said Ed Whitbread.

“Guilty with mitigating circumstances,” said Reid.

The arresting officer had color Polaroid pictures of the damage, a spray can of green paint abandoned at the scene, and a statement from the Home Depot clerk who’d sold five cans of it to Raymond Bagwell the afternoon the incident took place. (The police were unable to find who’d sold them the twelve-pack of Bud whose empty cans lay scattered among the gravestones.)

Cyl laid out the facts for Luther Parker as briskly as if she were prosecuting the Oklahoma bombing.

Overkill.

But she sure made a believer out of the defendants. A.K.’s sandy blond head was buried in his hands. When she rested her case, Luther turned to defense counsel. I could tell that Ed Whitbread was ready to throw in the towel then and there, but Reid was still defending A.K. against the spray painting. He introduced the shirts the three had been wearing that night. Bagwell’s and Starling’s shirts both had a fine mist of green paint across the front. A.K.’s didn’t.

“He was there, Your Honor,” Cyl said. “Who actually did what is irrelevant. He may not have held a paint can, but he acquiesced by his very presence.”

Luther agreed, and when defense rested he pronounced all three of them guilty.

Reid made a game plea for mercy.

“They did not go there that night intending any disrespect,” he said. “But you know how boys are, Your Honor, when they get out together and you add a little beer. They start egging each other on. Mr. Bagwell bought that paint for a job he was doing, not to deface private property, but one thing always leads to another, doesn’t it? These boys are sincerely sorry for what they did. My client has personally apologized to the Crocker family and he intends to do everything he can to restore their burying ground to its original state. His grandfather’s already hired a stone mason to see if the angel can be repaired and the cost will come out of my client’s pocket.”

“If they didn’t intend any mischief,” said Cyl, “why did they go armed with spray paint? And as for what happens when boys add in a little beer: that’s precisely why the state of North Carolina prohibits the sale of alcohol to anyone under the age of twenty-one. They were breaking the law the minute they popped the top on the first can.”

Luther Parker looked from one boy to the other, then back to Cyl. “Previous convictions, Ms. DeGraffenried?”

“Level Two, Your Honor. Mr. Knott has had one previous conviction, Mr. Bagwell’s had three and this will make Mr. Starling’s fifth.”

She handed up their records. All were misdemeanors. I’d looked it up. And A.K. had finally had a bit of luck. His suspension on the marijuana charge had been up at the end of May so that wasn’t going to land on him.

“And what’s the State asking?”

“All three have had at least one suspended sentence, they’ve had fines, they’ve had community service, and they’re still breaking laws, Your Honor. The State feels maybe it’s going to take some jail time before they get the message. We’re asking the full forty-five days.”

In other words, the maximum sentence for a Level 2, Class I conviction.

Before Luther could rule, a soft, apologetic voice interrupted from one of the rear benches. “Your Honor, may I speak?”

“Mrs. Avery?”

Till that moment, I hadn’t noticed the small-boned white woman seated across the aisle from me at the back of the courtroom.

Luther motioned for her to come forward and, as always, Grace King Avery reminded me of the self-effacing little guinea hens that used to run around my Aunt Ida’s farmyard. She has the same tiny bones and the same dainty steps as one of those guineas picking its way across the grass. Instead of smoothly rounded gray feathers, she still wore her gray hair in a slightly bouffant French twist I remembered from twenty years ago, and her neat powder-blue shirtwaist could have been the same one she was wearing the first day I stepped into her sophomore English class.

She was never my favorite teacher. Passive-aggressive people have always irritated the hell out of me. After ten minutes I’m ready to run screaming in the opposite direction. Besides, what teenager wants to concentrate on gerunds and punctuation or split infinitives and diagrammed sentences when pheromones are swirling through the classrooms and your parents have finally agreed that you can get in a car with a boy if there’s another couple along and you’re still agonizing over who that boy should be?

But a single-minded and determined nagger was evidently what it took to give us a mastery of the mechanics of English by year’s end, something none of our more straightforward or sweet-tempered teachers had managed up till then.

Law briefs are a lot easier to read and write when you have a sound grasp of semicolons and understand the difference between subordinate and independent clauses. I have blessed Grace King Avery more than once over the years. (And it’s always Grace King Avery, as if she thought the Kings really were royalty instead of merely hardworking farmers who’d acquired a hundred acres of sandy farmland last century and managed to hang onto it throughout this one.)

“Your Honor, before you pass judgment on these young men, could I say a word on behalf of Raymond Bagwell?”

“Certainly, Mrs. Avery,” Luther Parker said. “Was he one of your students?”

“He was.” Her neat head bobbed in Bagwell’s direction and her bright eyes softened with indulgence. “And while he may not have applied himself and finished school, he’s smart with his hands and he’s not a bad boy. His grandfather farmed with my Grandfather King and so did his father. All good, hard-working, Christian people.”

She gestured to the weather-beaten man sitting behind my family. He gave a short nod as if embarrassed, and I almost expected to see him pull his forelock.

“And now that I’ve moved back to the King homeplace, Raymond’s helping me fix up my house and my yard. Mr. Stephenson is right when he says Raymond didn’t buy that paint to do bad. I gave him the money to get it for some lawn chairs he’s painting for me. He always arrives on time and he gives me a full hour’s work for a full hour’s pay. It’s just that on the weekends... well, he maybe drinks too much and he does tend to keep bad company, but if you could find it in your heart to give him another chance?”

It was that same wheedling tone of old. (“Now, Deborah, if you could just diagram the rest of those sentences/rewrite this paper/correct all the punctuation/pay attention to your pronoun cases...”) If the Bagwell boy worked for her full-time, I knew he was earning every penny. That can of misused spray paint would come out of his wages, too.

In all fairness though, the King homeplace has really begun to gleam since she retired from teaching this past May and moved back there. Her penny-pinching bachelor brother hadn’t spent a dime on it since their mother died fifteen or more years ago and people say he left Mrs. Avery quite a nest egg. From what I’d heard of the way she’s been spending this last month, that nest egg must have been laid by the golden goose.

Her husband left her nicely fixed, too, and the house they’d shared in Cotton Grove was bigger than this one even though they had only the one daughter, now married and living in D.C. But that house had been built in the fifties—“No history,” Mrs. Avery used to say with a sniff. (She was big on history, especially family history, and had done her genealogy back to England and the sixteenth century.) As soon as her brother was decently buried in the cemetery behind Sweetwater Baptist, she’d put the house in Cotton Grove up for sale and moved back to her childhood home like a hereditary princess reclaiming her birthright.

Every time I drive out to check on the progress of my own house, I see something new on the King homeplace. New roof for the house, new tin for the barn, new screening for the back porch, fresh paint everywhere, not just on those old wooden lawn chairs everybody used to own. It’s going to be a color spread out of Southern Living by the time she’s finished.

Luther thanked her for coming to speak on the young man’s account, then had the three stand.

From behind, A.K. was the most solidly built. The Starling boy was a little taller and bone skinny, with long yellow hair tied back in a ponytail. Young Bagwell, with his closely clipped brown hair, was shortest, but beneath his dark blue T-shirt there was a wiry strength in his shoulders as he and the others listened to Luther’s short lecture on the sanctity of private property and the respect due to the dead.

“The District Attorney thinks it’s going to take some time in jail for you to get the message and I’m afraid I agree with her this time,” he told them.

Based on the number of each boy’s previous convictions, A.K. was going to be spending the next three weekends in jail. The Bagwell boy would do four weekends and Charles Starling got five. That meant they would report to the jail at six P.M. on Friday evenings and get out at five P.M. on Sunday.

I’d warned Andrew that this was what would probably happen, although Luther had actually gone a little easier than I’d expected.

Andrew nodded grimly as he heard the sentence pronounced and I foresaw a rough July for A.K. Andrew would keep him humping in the fields all week, then jail for the weekends.

Luther also sentenced them each to twenty-four hours of community service, “and that’s not counting the time it takes for you three to clean up the Crocker family’s cemetery. You can thank Mrs. Avery that I’m not giving you the full forty-five days of active time.”

Starling looked indifferent, but Bagwell and A.K. shot Mrs. Avery shamefaced smiles.

Luther adjourned court and as I started to join my family, who had headed out the rear door, Mrs. Avery stopped me.

“I wasn’t speaking up for that trashy Starling boy, Deborah—he always was a problem—and I never taught your nephew. I only meant Raymond.”

“I understand, Mrs. Avery, but they were equally guilty. Judge Parker couldn’t punish one much more severely than the others.”

“I don’t see why not,” she said, her small head shaking from side to side in disapproval. “I really don’t see why not when Raymond’s such a nice boy, and that Charles Starling’s a wicked influence.”

“Nevertheless—”

“The day he quit school, he broke the antenna on my car and put a big long scratch right across the trunk. I know it was he even though Sheriff Poole couldn’t prove it. And all because he flunked my English class and couldn’t stay on the baseball team. As if it were my fault he wouldn’t do his work. And now here’s more willful vandalism. They really ought to send him to prison for a whole year. Give Raymond a chance to be with better boys.” She pursed her lips. “And I have to say I’m surprised and disappointed in your nephew.”

“Me, too,” I admitted. “Maybe this will be a wake-up call for all of them.”

“You mark my words, Deborah. This little slap on the wrist Charles Starling got will be like water off a duck’s back. He’s going to cause a lot more trouble for those boys before he’s finished. You wait and see.”

✡ ✡ ✡

Out in the rear hallway, Charles Starling had lit up a cigarette. “They all stick together, don’t they?”

A hank of yellow hair fell across his rabbity face and short angry streams of smoke jetted from his nostrils.

“How come that nigger gets a suspended sentence and I get five weekends of jail time?” he snarled at Ed Whitbread. “Hey man, chill,” said A.K.

Andrew put a heavy hand on his son’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said sharply.

Thankfully, Daddy didn’t seem to have heard it.

I sometimes think back to that afternoon and wonder if it would have made any difference if I’d listened harder, taken more seriously all I saw and heard.

“Probably not,” the pragmatist says comfortingly.

“You can’t know that,” says the stern preacher. “Arthur Hunt might still be alive you’d paid more attention.”