I liked the man. While he and I prepared for trial, my wife. Dorothy, and I had him out to dinner a few times and twice even look him to my family’s old shanty on the Gulf Coast for the weekend. He and Dorothy hit it off well. Each was a lover of classical music (Doro had studied piano at the university until she gave up her hope of composing and switched to music history), and he was a tolerable pianist. They discussed the usual figures. Schubert and Brahms and Mozart, etc., as well as names I’d never heard of. They sat at the piano to study a particular phrase. They retired to the den to play old LPs Doro had brought to our marriage but which had gathered dust during the years I’d built my practice, never having had the energy to listen with her after dragging in at near midnight with a satchel full of work for the next morning. I often awoke at one or two in the morning, tie twisted and cinched against my throat, the dregs of a scotch and water in the glass in my lap, while the stereo needle scratched at the label of a recording long done easing strains of Sibelius from its grooves. In the bedroom I’d find Doro turned into the covers, her arms tossed over a pillow that covered her head, as was her sleeping habit, as if she were trying to smother herself.
I can look back now and see things. I pursued her when she didn’t necessarily want to be pursued. The law school was just two blocks from the music school, and I would wander down the boulevard and into the resonant halls of the studios and to the room where she practiced and composed. I would stand outside the door, looking in through the narrow window no wider than half my face, until she looked up, would have to look up, with her dark eyes as open upon mine as an animal’s in the woods when it discovers you standing still and watching it, and it is watching your eyes to see if you are something alive. I did not do this every day, but only when my blood was up too high to sit at the law library desk and, thinking of the last time we had been together, I had to see her. One day when she looked up, I knew that she had not wanted to but for some reason had been unable not to, and when she did look up she knew that was it, she was mine. It was the moment when one is captured by love in spite of one’s misgivings and is lost.
But light bends to greater forces, and so does fate, in time. I should not have been so stricken when she left with my client after the trial, but of course I was. An overweight man who eats bacon, drinks heavily, smokes, and never exercises should expect a heart attack, too, and does, but is nevertheless surprised when it comes and he is certainly stricken. I’d given my all to the case. I’d fought for the man. Work had become my life, after all. I’d exposed the cousin as a bankrupt, scheming bitch, read letters between the brothers that were full of fraternal endearments, and I borrowed and brought into court an expensive, full-size oil copy of Durand’s famous painting. Kindred Spirits, depicting the painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Bryant standing on an outcropping in the Catskills, a spot less lofty than the scene of my client’s alleged crime, but more beautiful in its romantic, cloistering light, and I asked them how a brother, in a setting such as this, and with witnesses less than ten feet away, could do something so unnatural as pitch his own flesh and blood to a bloody end. It was a stroke of brilliance. No one sees that painting without being moved to sentimental associations. Rosenbaum, the D.A., was furious I got away with it. My client also had a noble face: a straight nose, strong brow, high forehead, strong jaw and chin, clear brown eyes that declared a forthright nature. But in the end, after the hung jury and the judge’s bitter words, my client and my wife moved to Tennessee, of all places, where he would set himself up in the insurance business. And here is my point, I suppose, or what makes the story worth telling.
When she began to call me three years later, in secret, explaining how he had become a cold and manipulative man, she told me he had admitted to her while drunk that he had indeed pushed his brother off the lookout, and he’d said that only I had any evidence of this, in a statement I’d taken wherein he slipped up and said the one thing that could have convicted him had the D.A. gotten his hands on it. I could hear the ghosted voices of other, garbled conversations drifting into our line. What one thing is that? I said. I don’t know, she said. He wouldn’t tell me. There was a pause on the line, and then she said. You could find it, Paul.
But I have never opened the file to search for the incriminating words. Moreover, although I have acquired an almost tape-recorder memory of the utterances of people in trouble, I have not bothered to prod that little pocket in my brain. I have detoured around it as easily as I swerve around a sawhorsed manhole in the street. I protected my client, as any good attorney would. I’ve moved on.
We walked down into the grove, past the thin smoking curtain of heat at the edge of the pit, its buckled tin, and up to the heavy-gauge wire fencing that surrounded about a half-acre of wooded area bordering the cove. Here there was no grass, and the moist leaves were matted on the rich, grub- and worm-turned earth. Through the rectangular grid of the fencing we saw small pockets of ground broken up as if by the steel blades of a tiller where the pigs had rooted, and slashes and gouges in tree trunks where they’d sharpened their tusks.
I looked over at Bailey swirling the crushed ice in his cup, the righteous tendons in his jaw hardening into lumpy bands of iron. He was seething with his own maudlin story. But before he could start up, we heard a rustling followed by a low grunt, and a wild hog shot out of the undergrowth and charged. We all jumped back but Bailey as the hog skidded to a stop just short of the wire, strangely dainty feet on scraggly legs absurdly spindly beneath its massive head. Its broad shoulders tapered along its mohawkish spinal ridge to the hips of a running back and to its silly poodlish tail. The pig stood there, head lowered, small-eyed, snorting every few breaths or so, watching Bailey from beneath its thick brow. Bailey looked back at the beast, impassive, as if its appearance had eased his mind for a moment. And the boar grew even more still, staring at Bailey.
The spell was broken by the loud clanging of a bell. Russell, clanging the authentic antique triangle for our meal. The pig walked away from us then, indifferent, stiff-legged, as if mounted on little hairy stilts.
We made our way back to the porch. Russell and one of the men who’d been tending the pit came out with a broad tray of meat already sauced, and a woman (no doubt one of Russell’s daughters or granddaughters) came out and set down on the table a stack of heavy plates, a pile of white bread, an iron pot full of baked beans, and we all got up to serve ourselves. When we sat back down. Bill Burton, who’d dug into his food before anybody else, made a noise like someone singing falsetto and looked up, astonished.
“By God, that’s good barbecue,” he said through a mouthful of meat. Burton was a plumbing contractor who’d done the plumbing for Bailey’s house. He said to Skeet Bagwell, “Say you shot this pig?”
“Well,” Skeet said, “let me tell you about that pig.” Like me. Skeet is a lawyer, but we aren’t much alike. He rarely takes a criminal case, but goes for the money, and loves party politics and the country club and hunting trips and all that basically extended fraternity business, never makes a phone call his secretary can make for him, and needless to say he loves to tell big lies. His compadre Titus built shopping malls during the 1980s and doesn’t do much of anything now.
“Titus and I captured that pig,” Skeet said, “down in the Florida swamps. Ain’t that right, Titus?”