Uncle Gavin’s voice was quiet, almost monotonous, not ranting as criminal-court trials had taught us to expect; only the words were a little different from the ones he would use in later years. But even then, although he had been talking to them for only a year, he could already talk so that all the people in our country — the Negroes, the hill people, the rich flatland plantation owners — understood what he said.
‘All of us in this country, the South, have been taught from birth a few things which we hold to above all else. One of the first of these — not the best; just one of the first — is that only a life can pay for the life it takes; that the one death is only half complete. If that is so, then we could have saved both these lives by stopping this defendant before he left his house that night; we could have saved at least one of them, even if we had had to take this defendant’s life from him in order to stop him. Only we didn’t know in time.
And that’s what I am talking about — not about the dead man and his character and the morality of the act he was engaged in; not about self-defense, whether or not this defendant was justified in forcing the issue to the point of taking life, but about us who are not dead and what we don’t know — about all of us, human beings who at bottom want to do right, want not to harm others; human beings with all the complexity of human passions and feelings and beliefs, in the accepting or rejecting of which we had no choice, trying to do the best we can with them or despite them — this defendant, another human being with that same complexity of passions and instincts and beliefs, faced by a problem — the inevitable misery of his child who, with the headstrong folly of youth — again that same old complexity which she, too, did not ask to inherit — was incapable of her own preservation — and solved that problem to the best of his ability and beliefs, asking help of no one, and then abode by his decision and his act.’
He sat down. The district attorney’s assistant merely rose and bowed to the court and sat down again. The jury went out and we didn’t even leave the room. Even the judge didn’t retire. And I remember the long breath, something, which went through the room when the clock hand above the bench passed the ten-minute mark and then passed the half-hour mark, and the judge beckoned a bailiff and whispered to him, and the bailiff went out and returned and whispered to the judge, and the judge rose and banged his gavel and recessed the court.
I hurried home and ate my dinner and hurried back to town. The office was empty. Even grandfather, who took his nap after dinner, regardless of who hung and who didn’t, returned first; after three o’clock then, and the whole town knew now that Uncle Gavin’s jury was hung by one man, eleven to one for acquittal; then Uncle Gavin came in fast, and grandfather said, ‘Well, Gavin, at least you stopped talking in time to hang just your jury and not your client.’
‘That’s right, sir,’ Uncle Gavin said. Because he was looking at me with his bright eyes, his thin, quick face, his wild hair already beginning to turn white. ‘Come here, Chick,’ he said. ‘I need you for a Infinite.’
‘Ask Judge Frazier to allow you to retract your oration, then let Charley sum up for you,’ grandfather said. But we were outside then, on the stairs, Uncle Gavin stopping halfway down, so that we stood exactly halfway from anywhere, his hand on my shoulder, his eyes brighter and intenter than ever. This is not cricket,’ he said. ‘But justice is accomplished lots of times by methods that won’t bear looking at. They have moved the jury to the back room in Mrs. Rouncewell’s boardinghouse. The room right opposite that mulberry tree. If you could get into the back yard without anybody seeing you, and be careful when you climb the tree—’
Nobody saw me. But I could look through the windy mulberry leaves into the room, and see and hear, both — the nine angry and disgusted men sprawled in chairs at the far end of the room; Mr. Holland, the foreman, and another man standing in front of the chair in which the little, worn, dried-out hill man sat. His name was Fentry. I remembered all their names, because Uncle Gavin said that to be a successful lawyer and politician in our country you did not need a silver tongue nor even an intelligence; you needed only an infallible memory for names. But I would have remembered his name anyway, because it was Stonewall Jackson — Stonewall Jackson Fentry.
‘Don’t you admit that he was running off with Bookwright’s seventeen-year-old daughter?’ Mr. Holland said. ‘Don’t you admit that he had a pistol in his hand when they found him? Don’t you admit that he wasn’t hardly buried before that woman turned up and proved she was already his wife? Don’t you admit that he was not only no-good but dangerous, and that if it hadn’t been Bookwright, sooner or later somebody else would have had to, and mat Bookwright was just unlucky?’
‘Yes,’ Fentry said.
Then what do you want?’ Mr. Holland said. ‘What do you want?’
‘I can’t help it,’ Fentry said. ‘I ain’t going to vote Mr. Bookwright free.’
And he didn’t. And that afternoon Judge Frazier discharged the jury and set the case for retrial in the next term of court; and the next morning Uncle Gavin came for me before I had finished breakfast.
‘Tell your mother we might be gone overnight,’ he said. ‘Tell her I promise not to let you get either shot, snake-bit or surfeited with soda pop…. Because I’ve got to know,’ he said. We were driving fast now, out the northeast road, and his eyes were bright, not baffled, just intent and eager. ‘He was born and raised and lived all his life out here at the very other end of the county, thirty miles from Frenchman’s Bend. He said under oath that he had never even seen Bookwright before, and you can look at him and see that he never had enough time off from hard work to learn how to lie in. I doubt if he ever even heard Bookwright’s name before.’
We drove until almost noon. We were in the hills now, out of the rich flat land, among the pine and bracken, the poor soil, the little tilted and barren patches of gaunt com and cotton which somehow endured, as the people they clothed and fed somehow endured; the roads we followed less than lanes, winding and narrow, rutted and dust choked, the car in second gear half the time. Then we saw the mailbox, the crude lettering: G. A. FENTRY; beyond it, the two-room log house with an open hall, and even I, a boy of twelve, could see that no woman’s hand had touched it in a lot of years. We entered the gate.
Then a voice said, ‘Stop! Stop where you are!’ And we hadn’t even seen him — an old man, barefoot, with a fierce white bristle of mustache, in patched denim faded almost to the color of skim milk, smaller, thinner even than the son, standing at the edge of the worn gallery, holding a shotgun across his middle and shaking with fury or perhaps with the palsy of age.
‘Mr. Fentry—’ Uncle Gavin said.
‘You’ve badgered and harried him enough!’ the old man said. It was fury; the voice seemed to rise suddenly with a fiercer, an uncontrollable blaze of it: ‘Get out of here! Get off my land! Go!’
‘Come,’ Uncle Gavin said quietly. And still his eyes were only bright, eager, intent and grave. We did not drive fast now. The next mailbox was within the mile, and this time the house was even painted, with beds of petunias beside the steps, and the land about it was better, and this time the man rose from the gallery and came down to the gate.
‘Howdy, Mr. Stevens,’ he said. ‘So Jackson Fentry hung your jury for you.’
‘Howdy, Mr. Pruitt,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘It looks like he did. Tell me.’
And Pruitt told him, even though at that time Uncle Gavin would forget now and then and his language would slip back to Harvard and even to Heidelberg. It was as if people looked at his face and knew that what he asked was not just for his own curiosity or his own selfish using.
‘Only ma knows more about it than I do,’ Pruitt said. ‘Come up to the gallery.’
We followed him to the gallery, where a plump, white-haired old lady in a clean gingham sunbonnet and dress and a clean white apron sat in a low rocking chair, shelling field peas into a wooden bowl. ‘This is Lawyer Stevens,’ Pruitt said. ‘Captain Stevens’ son, from town. He wants to know about Jackson Fentry.’
So we sat, too, while they told it, the son and the mother talking in rotation.
That place of theirs,’
