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  (“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.

  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 max
imum 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?”