Bootlegger’s Daughter

6 there’s something for everyone in america

I’d warned Gayle that my campaign was going to come first, a good thing because the next few days were so jammed I hardly had time to shower and change clothes. It was the last weekend before the primary, my last chance to shake new hands in other parts of the district where I was less well-known to voters.

On Saturday morning, I got up early and drove over to Widdington in the next county. My first stop was at a Newcomers Club breakfast followed by a midmorning bake sale for the Widdington High School Marching Band Uniform Fund, where I bought an obscenely rich carrot cake with cream cheese icing that I immediately donated to the Mothers Against Drunk Driving at their lunch meeting in Hilltop, thirty miles further east from Widdington.

“If this is a bribe, I’m easy,” laughed a plump young mother.

While our hostess sliced the moist cake into seventeen equally fattening pieces, I described the number of drunk-driving cases I’d prosecuted when I’d worked as an assistant in the DA’s office.

One smartass Republican-looking mother asked if I hadn’t spent the last few years in private practice frequently defending drunk drivers. I took the high ground-“As long as the United States remains a democracy, even the sorriest hound’s entitled to a defense”-and kept the rest of the women on my side by confessing with pretty ruefulness that I’d lost over ninety percent of the DWI cases I’d tried to defend in court. (No point mentioning that most lawyers have an even worse conviction rate. If our DA doesn’t think the facts are incontrovertible, he doesn’t prosecute. Marginal cases simply don’t come to trial all that often, and I’m pretty good at getting pretrial dismissals; but that’s not something I like to brag about. Certainly not at a MADD meeting.)

“Win or lose,” I told them truthfully, “any time a client of Lee, Stephenson and Knott is charged with driving while impaired, we require them to sign up for a substance abuse program before we’ll accept the case.”

(Okay-yes, it does usually help mitigate a guilty verdict if you can say to the judge that your client’s already entered such a program voluntarily, but again that’s not something attorneys go around telling MADD groups. Especially if said attorney’s running for judge.)

“Of course, when we’re appointed to represent indigent defendants, we don’t have the option of turning them down if they refuse.” I smiled apologetically at the Republican. “I’m afraid that goes back to their Sixth Amendment rights again-the right to counsel, whether or not they take the counsel’s advice.”

The luncheon concluded in time for me to put in a quick appearance at the end of a noontime fish fry to benefit the hospital in Hilltop. I got to pull a raffle ticket out of a gallon jar, and the white-haired gentleman who won the VCR donated by the Hilltop Radio Shack fancied himself a roguish charmer. “I claim the right to kiss the prettiest candidate in the whole damn election!” he said as he came up to collect his prize.

I smiled-God, how candidates have to smile!-proffered my cheek and mentally put a big red asterisk beside his name. He’d be grinning out the other side of his mouth if he ever showed up in my court.

Midafternoon was Joplin ’s Crossroads. The volunteer fire department there was sponsoring an auction of surplus farm equipment, and my brother Will was auctioneer. Will is three brothers up from me, the oldest of my mother’s four, and a bit of a rounder. Everybody likes Will as long as they don’t have to pick up behind him and clean up his messes. He’s a fine auctioneer though and makes good money on the circuit. The crowds get to laughing at his fast-talking patter and hardly notice how high the bid’s gotten. He’d phoned me the week before. “Long as you’re going to be in the neighborhood, you ought to come on by and say hey to everybody. That firehouse is a polling place, and a lot of those men’ll vote for you if you smile at ’em pretty.”

So I climbed up onto the flatbed of a two-ton truck that he was using as a platform, flashed as genuine a smile as I could muster, and used his microphone to make a dignified appeal for their votes. Then, while some announcements were made and another consignment of machinery was rolled into place, Will took a break and I asked him if he remembered Howard Grimes.

“That old busybody? Oh, hell, yeah. Why?”

We were sitting on the far side of the flatbed away from the crowd with out legs dangling over the edge. I popped the top on a can of Diet Pepsi someone had brought us and took a sip. “I was remembering how he said he looked hard at the man in Janie Whitehead’s car that afternoon she disappeared because he thought at first she was Trish and he wanted to see who she was cheating on you with, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember,” he said sourly. His and Trish’s divorce had not been amicable. They fought over every single thing they’d acquired together-furniture, appliances, and the dogs; but the major sticking point, and one that almost unglued the settlement, was who was going to keep the album of wedding pictures. Even though she understood the psychological significance of the impasse, Mother wound up paying their photographer to duplicate the whole damn thing right down to the album’s white taffeta cover just so she wouldn’t have to keep listening to Will mouth about it.

“You dated Janie before she married Jed, didn’t you?”

He set his Pepsi down between us, pushed his gray poplin hat on the back on his head, and fumbled in the pocket of his windbreaker for a cigarette. “So?”

“So was Janie cheating, too? Is that why she and Trish quit being friends?”

Will put the cigarette between his lips and cupped his big hands around a Zippo so old and battered that its square corners were rounded off. It was Mother’s originally, a souvenir she’d brought home from the Seymour Johnson Airfield after World War II.

The lighter is burly and masculine-looking, made of stainless steel and engraved with the insignia of the Army Air Forces Technical Training School where she’d worked. It always looked so incongruous in her lovely smooth hands with those long pink fingernails, yet she was never without it. When she died and her things were divided, there were the usual two- and three-way battles, and some of those battles went all the way to skinned knuckles and bloody noses; but that beat-up Zippo was the only item all the boys fought over-not just her sons but her stepsons, too. Even the ones that didn’t smoke. Yet I was the only one who knew who’d given her the lighter and why she kept it. None of them had ever thought to ask.

Or maybe they had and she just hadn’t answered them.

Like Will wasn’t answering?

I waited till his cigarette was going good. “Was she?”

He narrowed his eyes at me as a mild spring breeze blew the cigarette smoke back in his face. “How come you asking something like that after all these years?”

“Gayle wants me to help her find out why Janie was killed,” I said.

“Should you ought to be doing that while you’re running for judge?” he asked.

Before I could answer, we were interrupted by calls for the auction to resume. He poured the rest of his Pepsi on the ground, crushed the can in his hands, then swung himself back upright on the flatbed and picked up the mike again.

Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to take him longer than usual to work back into his patter and get that first laugh. I smiled my way back to my car, shaking hands as I went, but faces and hands were blurred by the sudden memory I had of Will kissing Janie.

For the life of me I couldn’t remember whether it was before she married Jed or after.

Back in Dobbs, I showered, changed clothes, and collected Aunt Zell for a Democratic rally down in Black Creek.

Aunt Zell’s my mother without the wild streak-one of those good people that help hold the world together. They pick up the pieces, clean up the messes, and try to make sure nobody goes to bed hungry. If that makes her sound trivial, try running the world without women like her in it.

All her babies died before they walked, but that doesn’t mean she took me to raise when I moved in on her and Uncle Ash during college. Still, I think I’m a comfort to her. Anyhow, I try to remember to be.

Not a large turnout in Black Creek, but when you’re running for a local office, wherever one or two be gathered in your name, that’s where you go. The Women’s Missionary Union from Harrison Hobart’s church was well represented and gave me a warm welcome. I’d like to think it was because they approved of me personally, but I had a feeling it was because Aunt Zell was with me. She’s been active in the WMU all her adult life, even holding district office. Everybody respects her, and some of that respect rubs off on me, a distinct asset for a single woman in a society that still gets a bit uneasy when a halfway attractive woman doesn’t marry and settle into monogamy by the time she’s twenty-five; thirty if she was ever divorced.

I’m thirty-four and no man’s ring is on my finger at the moment.

On Sunday, Aunt Zell and I visited all three of the churches I’d grown up in. The morning began with Sunday school at Fresh Hope, then a quick fifteen-mile drive to Bethel Baptist for morning preaching by Barry Blackman, an old high school boyfriend long married now and the father of three. For dinner afterwards, Aunt Zell and I had been invited to the Bryant-Avery family reunion there in the neighborhood.

The spring day was gloriously warm and sunny. Azaleas and dogwoods were almost finished, just scattered blossoms here and there; but wisteria still draped soft purple ribbons up and down the tall trunks of longleaf pines, and wild cherries had already made me re-memorize Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees.”

Aunt Zell and I drove through a lush green landscape perfumed with wild crabapples and Carolina jasmine. Pears were fully leafed, but I could still see some of the limb structure of the huge oaks when we turned into the yard at Kate and Rob Bryant’s house.

At least a hundred Bryants and Averys had gathered under the trees behind the old white wooden farmhouse to spread a picnic dinner on one long table made of planks and sawhorses and draped in white sheets.

Rob’s a Raleigh attorney. His brother is Dwight Avery Bryant, head of the detective unit at the Colleton County sheriff’s department, and their mother, Emily Wallace Bryant, is principal at nearby Zach Taylor High School. She’s a catbird: bright orange hair, bossy, talks ninety miles a minute, asks the most astonishingly personal questions, and is a yellow dog Democrat of the first water.

As our nominal hostess, Miss Emily perched her infant step-grandson on her hip-at nine months old, Kate’s son Jake was currently the youngest member of the clan-and welcomed everybody, “especially Bo Poole, who, as y’all know, is running for sheriff again; and Deborah Knott, who’s going to make us a mighty fine judge if all y’all get out and vote as you should on Tuesday. Now neither one of them’s a Bryant or an Avery, but they are Democrats and that makes them kin in my book!”

Barry Blackman asked the blessing, then the younger mothers in their flowery spring dresses moved in on the table to fix plates for. their children.

I love family reunions, even when they’re somebody else’s family. I love listening to the old-timers reminisce about people dead fifty or a hundred years. I love watching flirty teenagers discover a cute third cousin whose voice has changed since the last time they saw him. And I particularly love it when the eight- to ten-year-olds stand in front of the family tree chart and find themselves down on the crowded bottom row, as if all those births and deaths and marriages took place all those long years ago just so the multiple branches could lead inexorably to their own names.

Every family had brought a hamper of favorite food, and every square inch of the communal table was filled with heaping platters: fried chicken and pork chops, chicken pastry, and country ham; hot rolls and biscuits; corn, butterbeans, and tender new garden peas; a dozen different cakes and desserts, including pecan pie and chocolate seven-layer cake. Two wooden tubs sat at the end of the long table. One held sweet iced tea, the other homemade lemonade.

I wanted some of everything.

“Now you’ve got to win,” Dwight Bryant teased when I went back for a helping of fresh strawberry shortcake smothered in heavy cream. “You keep on eating like that and a judge’s loose gray robe’s going to be the only thing’ll fit you.”

“Not that anybody’s counting or anything,” I said, “but didn’t I see four of Aunt Zell’s angel rolls on your plate? They may taste like air, but I’ve watched her make them. A whole pound of butter, my friend.”

“Yeah, but I’ve had help,” he said, smiling at a sandy-haired little kid who grinned back and snitched another roll from Dwight’s plate.

“That’s not Cal, is it?” I asked as the child darted off to watch the horseshoe pitching that had begun down by the barn. “Lord, Dwight! He was barely walking the last time I saw him.”

“Yeah. Every time Jonna lets me have him for the weekend, I notice how he’s grown up just a little bit more.”

There was such painful resignation on his big good-natured face that his brother Rob handed over his squirming redheaded stepson and said, “Here, wrestle with this one for a minute.”

Baby Jake grabbed the strawberry atop my dessert and, before anyone could stop him, squashed it in his chubby little hand. Red juices dribbled over Dwight’s chinos and Kate swooped in with a wet cloth.

“No, no, no!” she scolded, wiping pureed strawberry and whipped cream from her son’s tiny fingers. The baby merely laughed at her and patted her face.

“It’s okay,” said Dwight. “ Cal was just as bad at this age.” He placed Jake astride his broad knee and began to jiggle it up and down like a bucking horse while Kate and Rob watched with foolishly fond smiles.

Whenever the unabashed happiness and stability of couples like Rob and Kate make me start feeling maybe I’ve made bad choices somewhere along the way, the Dwights help put things in perspective.

Aunt Zell and I wound up the day at an evening sermon at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist Church, a mile or so from my family homeplace. It’s the church I joined when I was twelve years old, brought stumbling down that aisle of humility and repentance by adolescent guilt, a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, and the lovely yearning strains of the invitational hymn:

Just as I am, without one plea,

But that Thy blood was shed for me.

And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee.

O Lamb of God, I come! I come!

The preacher knew I was expected that night, but he’d already used Judges 4:4 as a text when I was there back in February. (Since announcing my candidacy, I’d sat through at least six sermons inspired by “And Deborah judged Israel at that time.”) Tonight’s text was Proverbs 3:3, “Let not mercy and truth forsake thee; bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart.”

It was the first quiet time I’d had in days, and with the preacher’s words twisting in and out of my subconscious, I thought about truth and mercy and of actively judging another human being. As a professional. When it would affect, perhaps even alter forever, the course of their lives.

The practice of law-though never Justice itself-has always been something of a game for me, not unlike playing bridge for a penny a point-stakes high enough to be taken seriously, but not so high that the loss would seriously inconvenience me. Like bridge, it’s a partnership in which my client and I defend a bid of innocence against the DA and the state, who hold most of the trump cards. I’ve always been competitive-too damn competitive for a woman according to most of my brothers, some of whom will no longer play cards when I’m at the table because I hate to lose with a purple passion. (On the other hand, there are those who say I lose much more graciously than I win.)

How would it be, I wondered solemnly, if I were no longer in the battle but above it, face-to-face with pure Justice in all its awful majesty, with only the imperfect tools of Law to mitigate the whole force and weight of government upon the petitioner at my bar? Now comes the plaintiff, complaining of defendant, who alleges and says-

I thought back to the anger I’d felt over Perry Byrd’s blatant racism and how I’d filed for election on what might have looked like a whim. Yet, in the end, it really didn’t matter whether my decision to run was based on impulsive whim or reasoned judgment. Sitting that night in Sweetwater Church amid citizens of Colleton County that I’d known all my life, I made a solemn vow to myself then and there that I’d never misuse the office to indulge my personal biases. If I won, I’d be entrusted with the full power of the State of North Carolina to dissolve marriages, set child support payments, send malefactors to prison and-

“Right,” said the cynical pragmatist who sits jeering at the back of my brain when the preacher in the forefront starts acting too pious. “We’re not talking Supreme Court here, you know. More like Judge Wapner.”

True. Even if I won, district judges are only one step up from magistrates. I’d have original jurisdiction over misdemeanor cases and I could hold probable cause hearings for felony cases; but I’d be limited to judgments of under $10,000 and I couldn’t send anyone to jail for more than two years.

“Still,” whispered the pragmatist, “there’ll be power, power no less real for being minor. Just as a sandspur jabbing in your foot can make walking every bit as painful as a broken bone, you can make life difficult for criminals and mean-minded no-goods. And people will stand for you when you enter or leave the courtroom. Other attorneys will have to address you respectfully. DA’s will-”

At the piano to the left of the pulpit, the fifteen-year-old pianist rippled flawlessly through a handful of chords, and the youth choir stood and sang:

Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin;

Each vict’ry will help you some other to win…

Be thoughtful and earnest, kind-hearted and true.

Look ever to Jesus. He’ll carry you through.

Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor.

Abashed, I consciously subdued vainglorious thoughts and tried to put myself into a properly reverential mood.

No one else ever seems to have the same trouble concentrating in church that I do. Aunt Zell’s face was smoothly contemplative beside me. Beyond her, my brother Seth and his wife sat in stolid meditation. Across the aisle and two rows nearer the pulpit, the patrician profiles of Dr. and Mrs. Vickery were inclined attentively to the minister’s closing remarks. Even the teenagers in the choir seemed to be taking his words deeply to heart. Of course, I suppose a casual observer might say the same of me. I wasn’t actively fidgeting or coughing or turning my head. Only my eyes roamed the church.

They came to rest on the Vickerys again and I idly wondered what they were even doing here at Sweetwater. Evelyn Dancy Vickery’s personal wealth was well beyond “comfortable.” Dr. Charles Vickery had been our family GP, but he’d retired before routine lawsuits and astronomical insurance rates ate into a doctor’s income, so together they were probably even a few zeroes past “affluent.” I was under the impression that they usually worshipped at First Baptist of Cotton Grove where “Almost Persuaded” on a piano had been replaced by organ chorales.

Then I remembered that Dancys had helped found Sweetwater and many of Mrs. Vickery’s forebears were buried out there in the churchyard.

After Janie died, Jed moved in with his parents so Mrs. Whitehead could help with Gayle. Then he went into business with his father, married Dinah Jean Raynor, and bought the Higgins place on South Third. But when I first used to baby-sit with Gayle, Jed and Janie lived in a modest little house with a backyard that bumped up against the Vickery grounds.

I’d stand at Janie’s kitchen window and gaze across to the tall Palladian windows that overlooked a flower garden as exquisite as anything ever seen in a Burpee’s seed catalog. Camellias and thick oaks formed a partial screen, yet I glimpsed lighted candelabra when the formal dining room was used or heard music when the dinner party spilled out onto the terrace. I used to daydream about what life in the large brick house must be like.

Although I never wanted for anything growing up, Knotts do tend to keep their money in land. Stephensons, being town-bred, may spread themselves a little more lavishly-Aunt Zell married well, and her house in Dobbs is almost as large as the Vickery house in Cotton Grove-but no one in our immediate family ever aspired to the things the Vickerys aspired to. Mother and Aunt Zell might take some of us shopping in New York once a year, and yes, we always saw a comedy or musical while we were there; but the Vickerys had season tickets to the Met and seemed to think nothing of flying up during the middle of the week to hear a noted tenor or soprano.

My brothers played guitars and banjos by ear and those that wanted more education went to State or Carolina and were then expected to earn their own livings. The three Vickery offspring went to Smith, Vassar, or Yale, and all of them had trust funds to play around with. Which is probably why none of them felt the need to go into medicine or banking, the traditional professions in their family.

The two Vickery daughters lived on opposite sides of the continent. One was in the film industry, something to do with the production side of it, I believe; the other was currently married to an avant-garde composer in Toronto. But Michael had come out of the closet years ago and he still lived out at the Pot Shot.

It was unlikely that any of the senior Vickerys had paid much attention to the doings of the junior Whiteheads at the other end of their garden, but I wondered if Michael had?

“Let us pray,” said the preacher.