Up Jumps the Devil dk-4 Page 6

  She didn’t wait for my answer. “So what I want you to tell me is, how can I get Uncle Jap’s power of attorney? Or maybe get me named his guardian?”

  “You can’t,” I said bluntly. “Not unless he agrees to it or you can show that he’s mentally incompetent. And even that might not do it if his nephew wanted to fight you for it. After all, he’s Mr. Jap’s closest kin. You’re only related through Mr. Jap’s wife and she’s dead.”

  “But I was blood kin to Dallas and I’m the one that’s been looking after Uncle Jap for years,” Merrilee argued. “Ever since Aunt Elsie died, whenever Dallas went on the road, he went easy, knowing I’d check on his daddy while he was gone. Even after he married Cherry Lou and brought her back here to that nice house he built for Mary Otlee, I’m the one Uncle Jap always called if he needed anything, not her. And certainly not Allen Stancil. What’s he ever done his whole life but crash in on Dallas and Uncle Jap every time he gets fired or wrecks his car or needs to hide out from some woman?”

  “Everybody knows how good you’ve been to Mr. Jap,” I assured her, “but unless you can show that he’s no longer competent, he can stand on top of the courthouse and fling his money to the four winds if he wants to and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Merrilee looked horrified at the thought.

  I looked at my watch.

  I’d been out fourteen and a half minutes, so no coffee for me this morning.

  Darned if Allen wasn’t doing it to me again.

  By lunchtime, we’d disposed of all the Guilty pleas and made a start on the Not Guiltys.

  Administering justice is like shoveling smoke. Justice Learned Hand said that.

  Shoveling smoke. That’s exactly what it seems like sometimes—the same petty offenses over and over, and yeah, I got caught but here’s why it’s not really my fault, Your Honor: I was just going with the flow; my speedometer was off; somebody was tailgating me and I had to keep out of their way; that stop sign I run was hid behind some bushes/too far off the shoulder/won’t there the last time I come through that crossing; if that lady didn’t slam on her brakes, I wouldn’t have rear-ended her; the only reason the officer stopped me is because I’m black/a teenager/a senior citizen/driving a red sports car.

  Actually, I’m always just a little sympathetic to that last excuse. Ask any cop. A bright red car is four times more likely to get pulled for speeding than a nondescript blue one. I myself haven’t had a single ticket since I smartened up and reluctantly traded my red Corvette for a dark green Firebird.

  Of course, except for the Possum Creek bottom and one other back-country stretch, I’ve pretty much quit speeding since I came to the bench. And for the record, no, I never asked anybody to fix a ticket for me before that. You can’t preach responsibility to others and then weasel out of the consequences of your own actions.

  Unlike our new “family values” congressman who washed in on the ultraconservative tidal wave last year.

  When his car passed another in a no-passing zone and caused an oncoming van to flip over, he swore to the patrolman that his wife was driving, even though five witnesses had him behind the wheel and two more said they saw him changing places with her immediately after the accident. The DA kindly offered to let him plead nolo contendere and he took the deal because, and I quote, “I didn’t want to spend the next six months proving that my wife was guilty,” which, I suppose, says something about family values?

  Some local wags said his greatest fear was that Jesse Helms would find out he’d been caught going left of the center, while others went out and made up a bumper sticker that said MY WIFE WAS DRIVING.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have anything quite that colorful on the day’s docket. We finished up shortly before four and I went looking for Dwight Bryant. He’s not seeing anyone right now and with Kidd a hundred miles away and most of my women friends tied up at night, I’m usually at loose ends during the week, too.

  I found him at his desk in the sheriff’s department. “Want to drive over to Raleigh and catch the early show at the Longbranch?”

  “Can’t. I’m overseeing security at East Dobbs’s football game tonight. It’s a makeup game.”

  As Sheriff Bo Poole’s chief of detectives, Dwight wasn’t exactly earning a shabby salary and I raised my eyebrows. “Moonlighting?”

  “Yeah,” he said dejectedly. “Got a call from Jonna last week. Cal’s front teeth are coming in crooked and he’s going to need braces.”

  Braces on top of the maximum child support for his income bracket? Wasn’t going to leave him much walking-around money. Most of Dwight’s friends think Jonna took him to the cleaners in their “amicable” divorce, but we never hear him gripe about it.

  I was ready to gripe for him. “Cal inherits her teeth, and she can’t pay for the braces?”

  He shrugged. “What can I tell you? C’est la damn vie.”

  Sitting in domestic court a few days later, I thought of Dwight as I listened to a long string of excuses from the men who’d been hauled before me because they refused to recognize their responsibilities toward the children they had fathered. One man with a half a pound of gold around his neck and wrists explained that he’d gotten behind on his child support because he had to buy a new suit and a plane ticket to California. His brother was getting married and he was the best man.

  Best man.

  Right.

  Three more said they’d been laid off. No jobs, no money.

  I could have sent them to jail, but why should taxpayers support them and their kids, too? Instead, I’ve picked up on something a colleague over in Goldsboro’s been trying. When deadbeat dads (and the occasional deadbeat mom) quit paying because they aren’t working, the Honorable Joe Setzer fills their days with community service. They get to sweep gutters, pick up litter, rake leaves, mop floors, or wash windows—eight hours a day, zero pay. After a few days of working for free, most of these young men miraculously find jobs that let them resume their child support obligations.

  Along with everything else today, I also had a contested paternity suit from a few weeks earlier. Clea Beecham, the mother; Timothy Collins, the alleged father; and Brittany Beecham, a perfectly adorable two-year-old baby girl.

  The young mother swore that Collins was the only man she’d been with for six months before the baby was conceived.

  Collins admitted that he’d lived with Ms. Beecham during the pertinent time period, “But I’m not the first guy she ever slept with and I certainly wasn’t the last. That’s why we broke up. She was seeing the same guy she’d been with before me.”

  As is not unusual in proceedings like this, both parties had insisted on blood tests and I’d agreed to the postponement. My good friend Portland Brewer was representing Timothy Collins and from that kitten-in-cream look in her eye this morning, I didn’t really have to hear the testimony to know that the blood test had turned out well for her client. She stepped forward now to question the witness, a qualified technician from one of the medical labs in the Research Triangle who had taken the stand with a thin manila folder.

  Mrs. Diana Henderson was in her early forties. She wore a black skirt and a white silk blouse that was neatly knotted at the neck. Despite her businesslike air of competence as the clerk swore her in, Mrs. Henderson hadn’t entirely forgotten she was a woman. Her blouse was demurely styled, but so sheer that when she twisted around to retrieve a dropped document, I could clearly see the lace on her slip and even a dark mole on her left shoulder blade. That plain black skirt did nothing to disguise her slender hips, and her black patent T-straps had three-inch heels that drew attention to her slender ankles. Ash blond hair fell softly around her thin face.

  Not the most attractive face, unfortunately. She had nice eyes, but her nose was too long and her chin was almost nonexistent.

  Her voice was music though—soft, yet every word distinct and deliberate as she told in measured tones how she’d taken blood samples from Mr. Collins and Ms. Beecham and the baby
girl. She described the tests she’d performed and explained how the results proved conclusively that Mr. Collins could not possibly be this baby’s father.

  Ms. Beecham’s attorney gamely tried to get the technician to admit that the tests weren’t absolutely positively one hundred percent accurate, but Mrs. Henderson wasn’t having it “While they can’t prove conclusively who the father is,” she said authoritatively, “they do prove who the father isn’t. There is no way that the man who provided this blood sample could have fathered this particular child.”

  As I thanked Mrs. Henderson and dismissed the case, young Timothy Collins triumphantly kissed his new girlfriend—at least I assume from the length of the kiss that she was not his sister.

  And judging by the baffled yet grimly determined expression on Clea Beecham’s face, I had a feeling I’d be seeing her back in court as soon as her attorney could serve papers on her other ex-lover.

  They left my courtroom and a social worker came forward to petition for the termination of parental rights to two young half-brothers barely out of diapers. The mother was a seventeen-year-old crack addict who left the boys alone for hours at a time. They had been in foster care several times. The final straw for Social Services was when she left them locked in a closed car on a hot September day and they nearly suffocated before someone noticed and broke open the door.

  Several witnesses, including her own aunt, took the stand to testify as to her unfitness to care for the boys.

  “I’d take ’em myself,” said the aunt, as tears cut new furrows in her cheeks, “ ’cepting I’m already raising one for my boy and two for my girls and I just can’t do no more.”

  Both fathers were unknown.

  The mother had not bothered to come to court.

  The woman who had fostered the boys almost from birth wanted to adopt them permanently. After testifying on the sorry state of the boys’ health and physical dirtiness each time they were returned to her care, she took a seat on the front row and watched me anxiously.

  I went back through both case jackets and still saw nothing to indicate that the natural mother had half the maternal instincts of the average alley cat. Carrying a child in her womb for nine months doesn’t automatically turn any female into a mother; and much as we’d like to think every baby’s wanted and loved, wishing’s never made anything so.

  The foster mother had only a grade-school education, but Social Services called her a decent, caring person. God knows those boys could use some decency and caring.

  I signed the termination forms and called for the next case.

  Shoveling smoke.

  5

  « ^ » Upon their arrival among their friends and countrymen in North Carolina, Highlanders are kindly received and sumptuously entertained...“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

  Homemade music permeated all layers of my childhood—Daddy’s fiddle, Mother’s piano, Aunt Sister’s dulcimer, my brothers and cousins and their children, each with banjo, guitar, or mouth organ. “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” “Golden Bells” and “Golden Slippers,” and “Shall We Gather at the River?” Those that couldn’t play could always clap and sing.

  They rollicked me out of bed on Saturday mornings with “Hell Broke Loose in Georgia” and lullabyed me to sleep with “Whispering Hope.” I can never hear Soft as the voice of an angel... without getting a warm snugly feeling of peace and utter security.

  Mother and Aunt Ida’s daughters had high, clear soprano voices; Aunt Rachel sang alto; Daddy half-talked, half-hummed; and the boys ranged from bass to tenor.

  Mother, Aunt Ida and some of the older cousins are gone now, Aunt Rachel lives with her middle daughter over near Durham, four of my brothers live out of state, nieces and nephews are scattered from Manteo to Murphy, and Daddy doesn’t like to leave the farm much anymore.

  Nevertheless, there are plenty of us that didn’t roll far from the tree and on Wednesday nights, after choir practice or prayer meeting, anybody in the mood for more music shows up at a barbecue house halfway between Cotton Grove and Makely for a late supper and a little picking and singing with the owner, a second cousin once removed who plays a righteous fiddle. Counting spouses and kids, there’re never more than fifteen or twenty of us at any one time, but we flat-out raise the roof when we all get going.

  I can hold my own with a guitar and since nobody’s ever thrown off on my voice, I also sing harmony or lead if we’re a voice or two short.

  Outside the barbecue house, the November night was cool and damp. Inside, an open fire, the first of the season, was cheerfully burning on a central glass-and-stone hearth. We had finished eating, pushed back the chairs and table to clear a space in front of the hearth, and now we were working on the second verse of “Have a Little Talk with Jesus,” which is a staple whenever Herman joins us. He has trouble staying on pitch with most songs, but loves to take his deep bass all the way down to the bottom of the well. Since it looks as if his wheelchair is going to be permanent, the rest of us are happy to indulge him.

  He and Annie Sue, his teenage daughter, were bouncing the chorus back and forth between them when the front door of the restaurant opened and my brother Zach held it wide while gusts of chilly November air rushed across the warm room and made the fire blaze up before us.

  Zach’s the assistant principal at West Colleton High where he also teaches math and science. He knows the physics of heat and cold, yet he stood in the open doorway, letting all our warm air escape into the night.

  There were cries of “Shut the door, you fool!” and “Were you raised in a barn?” but Zach just stood there grinning at us till he had our attention good, then all of a sudden, he stepped aside.

  And there in the doorway stood another Zach.

  It took us maybe ten or twelve seconds before it registered that we really were seeing double.

  “Adam?” said Will. “Well, I’ll be double-damned!”

  Adam and Zach are six and a half, almost seven years older than me. In our family, they’re called the “little” twins to distinguish them from Herman and Haywood, the “big” twins, who are actually two inches shorter but almost eleven years older. Herman and Haywood don’t look much more alike than Robert or Andrew or Ben, but Adam and Zach are almost identical. We can see their differences, of course, but teachers and casual friends were always getting them mixed up.

  As you might gather from their names, Mother and Daddy thought they were absolutely the end of the family and whenever Adam and Zach griped about the A-to-Z teasing they got at school, Mother would tell them, “Just be grateful I didn’t let your daddy name you Alpha and Omega.”

  It’d been so long since Adam last visited that if it hadn’t been for Zach’s face keeping us familiar, we might not’ve recognized him.

  There were awkward hugs and handshakes and lots of questions and exclamations: When did he get in? Why didn’t he let everybody know he was coming? Had he been home to see Daddy yet? How long was he staying? And where was that good-looking wife of his?

  I stayed perched on the edge of a table and watched, so I was probably the only one who saw the cloud pass over Zach’s beaming face when Karen was mentioned. There was something different about Adam but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

  Adam was always a focused, eyes-on-the-prize kid. Family legend has it that at the age of five, when sent to the field to help pick up sweet potatoes before a sudden, and unexpectedly early, temperature plunge could freeze the exposed yams and turn them to mush, he marched up to Haywood, who was happily loading the heavy crates onto the tractor flatbed, and said, “Have I got to be a farmer when I grow up?”

  Haywood, with his inarticulate love of plowing and planting, was puzzled. “Well, what else would you want to be?”

  “Somebody who doesn’t have to burn up in the summertime or freeze his poor little tail off in the winter,” Adam said resolutely.

  From the moment he saw his first hand-held calculator, he knew that he wanted to work in electronics. Wil
l and Jack still say that the real reason he chose computers was because most electronic research is done in a temperature-controlled environment.

  “Beats housing tobacco in July,” Adam retorts.

  He won all the science medals West Colleton High had to offer, graduated with a 4.0 from NCSU, then landed a teaching fellowship at Stanford. While working on his doctorate, he moonlighted part-time at NorCal Polytronics, which was where he helped design one of NorCal’s first patented microchips. That chip was almost immediately superseded by newer technological breakthroughs, but it got him the doctorate that put him on a fast track at Crystal Micronics International, one of the hottest of the hotshot companies to spring up in Silicon Valley.

  Of all my brothers, Adam’s the one that’s prospered most materially. He’s the only one with a Ph.D., and his early fascination with microelectronics has brought him a wealth of fine things—he and Karen have a big sprawling house out near Palo Alto with a pool, a gardener, his-and-her Jaguars in their four-car garage, a boat they keep berthed in a marina over on the San Francisco Bay, and, oh yes, two snotty kids in expensive prep schools who have to be bribed by their mother to come east with her every summer.

  So there was a little stiffness after the first spontaneous exclamations. Some of the older boys are resentful that Adam’s been home only four or five times in twenty years.

  “Got the big head, didn’t he?” Andrew or Robert or Herman will say. “Staying out there in California with his fancy job and fancy living?”

  Envy’s part of it, of course. They can’t help feeling jealous that Adam is so much more richly rewarded when they work just as hard. Mostly, though, it’s a suspicion that maybe Adam has gotten above his raising and turned his back on us.