The Butterfly

Chapter 14

When the deputy brought me to court, Jane was waiting, with Danny on her shoulder, trying to keep him quiet where he was crying because it was away past his bedtime. A whole bunch of people were there, because the Carbon City radio had put out about the arrest on the seven o’clock broadcast, and half the people in town came running over to the courthouse for the hearing. My case hadn’t been called yet, and while I was standing in the hall with the deputy, Jane came running over. “How could you do this to her, Jess?”

The deputy cut in to remind her that anything that was said could be used against me, but she didn’t pay any attention to him.

“You knew all along what it had done to her, Wash walking out like he did. You knew she was drinking. You knew she wasn’t herself, that she’d do almost anything that anybody told her to. And yet you would take advantage of her in the way you did.”

“You sure I did?”

“If you didn’t, wouldn’t she tell me? She don’t lie to me. If she won’t look at me and won’t say anything to me, that means you did just what they say you did.”

“There might be more to it than that.”

The jail warden’s wife came in about that time with Kady, and Jane left me and went over to her. A minute or two later Ed Blue came in, with every man, woman, and child from Tulip, and I knew what I was in for.

It was the same old judge and he watched us line up and asked the deputies a few things, like did I have a lawyer, and kept looking at me like I was some kind of a toad frog he was afraid would give him warts if he wasn’t careful. Then he began talking to me: “Jess Tyler, you stand before me accused of the crime of incest, consisting of sexual misconduct with your daughter, Kady Tyler, and of corrupting the morals of a minor, Kady Tyler. How do you plead?”

“What’s plead?”

“You plead when you enter a plea, declaring yourself guilty or not guilty. If you plead guilty, it will be my duty to set bail, and pending its deposit, to hold you for sentence by the circuit court. If you plead not guilty, or elect not to plead at this hearing, as you have the right to do, it will be my duty to hear the evidence against you, and if in my judgment, it is competent, material, and substantial, to hold you for action by the grand jury, set bail, and pending its deposit, to turn you over to the custody of the sheriff.”

“And what do you do to her?”

“Your daughter is not under charges.”

“She’s arrested just the same.”

“As a material witness, entitled to bail.”

“What I’m getting at, it looks to me like if I plead guilty and you hold me, then you wouldn’t need a witness any more and she could go home. But I’m not doing it without I make sure.”

“Mr. Prosecutor?”

A young fellow standing with Ed Blue spoke up and said: “Your honor, the only charge made against this girl was a complaint sworn out by the sheriff’s office which charges her with indecent exposure, but as it describes an act not committed in a public place it sets up no violation of the statute and I am accordingly quashing it. Otherwise, unless evidence not now known to me comes to light, if this man chooses to save the state the expense of a trial and avoid further scandal, he’s quite right. On his plea of guilty I won’t need the witness, and while the higher court may want to question her before passing sentence, I wouldn’t ask this court to require bail. To clear up our general attitude in cases of this kind, though not in any way binding myself or entering into a bargain of any kind, we rarely ask commitment to reform school, or penological steps of any kind, for a girl who is at the same time the mother of a young child, unless circumstances exist which compel us to. Does that answer you, Tyler?”

“I please guilty.”

“Then I set bail at five thousand dollars pending sentence. Are you prepared to furnish it tonight?”

“No sir, I’m not.”

“Take him to jail. Next case.”

The next case was a colored fellow that had been arrested for stealing a tire, and he was on the front bench of the courtroom, and stood up with a deputy. My deputy started off with me, but I heard the judge tell somebody to stand aside, and when I looked around Kady was still standing there. And then all of a sudden she looked up, stared the judge straight in the eye, and said: “He’s not guilty of anything.”

“Your father has already pleaded.”

“My husband, you mean.”

“What?”

“We got married.”

“Officer, bring that man back.”

The prosecutor, that had seemed like a nice young fellow, turned into a wolf, and he took at least an hour, snapping question after question at her, until he had it all, how we had gone to Gilroy that day and said in the marriage license bureau we had the same name but were no relation, that her father’s name was Hiram Tyler and he was dead, and that she was twenty-two years old. The judge cut in with a lot of stuff he wanted to know about, and after a while the prosecutor said: “Your honor, this is as shocking a thing as I’ve encountered in all my experience at the bar. Occasional morals cases come up, but this is the first time I ever heard of where two people went before an officer of this state and deliberately made a mockery of it and its laws. I don’t know where it leads to, but the very least I can ask of this court is to hold the girl for the action of the grand jury.”

“So ordered.”

She had plenty of back talk, and said I had done what I had done because I loved her, and things were due to happen between us anyway, and I wanted it in wedlock, like it should be, and didn’t know it was against the law. Where she got was nowhere. The judge tore into her and the prosecutor did, but all the time I was thinking of what they would do to her for perjury, and how at last I had to tell the truth, even if she hated me for it and I never saw her again. “I’m changing that plea.”

“And how about your new plea?”

“What new plea, your honor?”

“To the new charge, perjury.”

“My plea to that charge and both the other charges is not guilty. This girl is not my daughter, but she is my wife, and what law we’ve been violating I’d like somebody to explain me.”

“What do you mean she’s not your daughter?”

“I mean what I say.”

“Whose daughter is she then?”

“Man by the name of Moke Blue.”

“That’s a lie!”

It snapped out of her before she even knew she was going to say it, and right away she apologized for it.

“I’m sorry, Jess, to use that word. I take it back, but you’ll have to take back what you said too. Even if it’s to save me I can’t bear to hear that.”

“It’s not a lie and I don’t take it back.”

“Who’s Moke Blue?”

I told them who Moke was, how he had broken up my home, how he and Belle had gone off together, how it had all started about a year before Kady was born. I didn’t have any of it learned by heart or anything. I didn’t even know what I was going to say next. “And you knew Moke Blue was her father?”

“I knew I wasn’t.”

“But you raised her just the same?”

“I never saw her from the day my wife took her away with her till a year ago when she came with me to live.”

“And you started sleeping with her?”

“I did not.”

“When did you start?”

“After we were married.”

“You lived with her all that time in the same house and did nothing to her at all and then all of a sudden you decided it was time to marry her. Why didn’t you marry her before?”

“I was already married.”

“So we’ve got a little bigamy here too?”

“My wife, my first wife, this wife’s mother, died. The day after that I asked Kady to marry me. She said all right and we went to Gilroy.”

“You had her misrepresent her age?”

“I’d forgotten her age.”

“And misrepresent the name of her father?”

“After we were married, when she told me she had put down her father’s name as Hiram Tyler, was the first I knew she really thought I was her father. I thought she knew about Moke.”

“Didn’t you tell her?”

“Then? I tried to, but I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“You heard her just now. Moke was a shiftless, no-account nothing, and if I told her the truth about him I thought she’d hate me for it and I loved her and didn’t want her to.”

“Where is this Moke Blue?”

“I don’t know.”

The judge and the prosecutor looked at each other, and then the judge said to Kady: “Young woman, do you believe any of this?”

She didn’t answer, and he asked who Jane was and asked the same thing of her. She didn’t answer, either. “Is there any neighbor of this man, who knew him and his wife at the time they were living together, who will testify he believes it, or had any knowledge of it at the time?”

Nobody said anything. I said Moke had the same butterfly on his stomach that Danny had, that only the men in his family were born with it, and that Kady didn’t have it but the boy did, and they didn’t even bother to wake Danny up to look, where he was stretched out on the desk, with Jane’s hat over his eyes to keep the light out. I was sunk, and I knew it, and Kady was sunk, and I knew that too. Until, all of a sudden, I happened to look at Ed Blue, and the look on his face told me I wasn’t sunk, that I was going to win, that I’d rip it right out of him, what I had to have to be turned loose. The judge got ready to wind up the case. “Well, Tyler, until you get Moke Blue in court and produce some sort of direct substantiation of what you say, I’m afraid I’ll have to regard it as a farfetched invention to escape the consequences of several serious crimes, so—”

“I can’t get him up here.”

“Why not?”

“He’s afraid to come.”

“What’s he afraid of?”

“That I’ll kill him.”

“Why would he be afraid of that?”

He was looking at me like I was making a fool of myself and didn’t know it but he would give me all the chance I wanted, and that was just how I wanted him to feel. “Because I ordered him off the creek when he tried to kill me, with a rifle that was lent him to do it with by this lying rat that’s come in here to testify against me, that’s his half brother and that has the same butterfly on his stomach this child has and that he’s not saying anything about because he wants me sent up for something I didn’t do!”

If you think that don’t set off a bombshell in that courtroom, you don’t know what a judge feels like when he thinks somebody has been trying to put something over on him. He was so sore I thought he’d hit Ed. He had him take off his shirt, and unbuttoned Danny’s little suit himself, so gentle it was like he was his own son. And on Ed, sure enough, was the butterfly, all fixed up with curlicue feelers and red border, from the time he fired on the railroad and a tattoo man in Norfolk had fixed him up, or so he told the court.

“And this half brother of yours, this Moke Blue, has this butterfly too?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Do you want to be charged with perjury too?”

“Yes sir, he has it.”

“And only the men in your family have it?”

“I heard so.”

The judge drummed on the desk with his fingers, then leaned over and whispered with the prosecutor. Then: “Tyler, in the light of this piece of evidence, I’m not at all sure that I’m convinced of your innocence. Morally, it seems to me there was something queer about your failure to tell this girl of her parentage, and let her go on thinking she was guilty of something that must have struck her as utterly loathsome. But I am convinced that if these birthmarks are shown to a jury, whether Moke Blue can be located or not, it is going to be impossible to get them to convict you. So I’m dismissing the charge. But God help you if you’re in trouble, on the basis of new evidence, in connection with this case again.”

“I won’t be. I’m not guilty.”

“That reminds me: Why did you enter your plea of guilty in the first place? That still seems a queer thing to do.”

“I told you, I didn’t want her to know.”

“About Moke Blue being her father?”

“That’s it.”

“You must indeed be in love with her.”

“I might be.”