Bootlegger’s Daughter (10 page)

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.

I was in early on Monday morning and already into my second cup of coffee by the time Sherry and the clerks arrived at the office. They were willing to talk about their weekend if I was interested, but when I mumbled around my jelly doughnut that I hadn’t had a chance to read the newspapers since Friday, they left me to get on with them.

The biweekly Dobbs Ledger is owned by a family with unabashedly liberal leanings, and Linsey Thomas, its current editor and publisher, had come out for Luther Parker the week before, citing the need for more minorities on the bench. I suppose white women do hold a narrow margin over black men and Parker would have been my choice, too, if I weren’t running. But I was, and it hurt my feelings not to have my own hometown paper endorse me. On the other hand, Friday’s letters-to-the-editor columns had carried several letters written in my support and they’d positioned my ad-Deborah Knott for District Court Judge… isn’t it time?-very nicely, just above the fold on the obituary page.

People here usually turn to the deaths before the engagements and weddings, so that’s the most read page in the paper.

Doesn’t matter whether the deceased are stillborns or pushing a hundred. If somebody has a local connection, the Ledger will list parents (and sometimes both sets of grandparents) even if they’ve been dead fifty or sixty years, followed by the names of all immediate survivors, cause of death, and what the deceased did for a living. Each obituary concludes with the name of the funeral home, visiting hours, what church, who’s preaching the funeral, and where the body’s to be interred. No mistaking one Willie Johnson for another by the time the Ledger gets finished. My picture was small, but I thought it conveyed competence without grimness. I also hoped that the contrast to all those sober suits and short male haircuts in the other ads would add subliminal appeal, remind the electorate that they might need a judge with a woman’s tender heart sometime.

John Claude arrived at his regular time and acted surprised to find me there on the sunporch already leafing through the newspapers. Usually he’s the first one in after Sherry and, despite pro forma grumbling about Reid and me wandering in at all hours, he prefers it that way. Gives him a chance to drink his coffee in peace. Sherry knows better than to let the clerks disturb him. Not that he’d be rude to them-John Claude is seldom rude to anyone-but pained shadows do cross his thin patrician face; and while Sherry never notices my exasperated sighs, she’s alert to John Claude’s every nuance. Must be fun being a man in a Southern town.

The pained shadows fought with pleasantries as he saw the shambles I’d made of the paper. (Okay, so I notice nuances, too. But I’m older than Sherry. My generation was raised to notice. Doesn’t mean I still react with an automatic “I’m sorry” or “Let me take care of whatever’s bothering your little ol’ manly sense of rightness” the way she does.)