“Iron.”
“So, you approached Mr. Fortlow with ten pounds of iron in your hand?”
“How was I to know what would happen? For all I knew it was his dog. I wanted to help but I wanted to protect myself too. He looked, well, dangerous. And he was big. I knew I had to stop for hitting the dog but I wanted to protect myself too.”
“And did you say that you’d kill the dog with the weight? Didn’t you say that you wanted to stop his pain?”
“Absolutely not. I mean I never said that I wanted to kill the dog. I thought he was going to die, though, I mean you should have seen him. He was a mess.”
9
“That man right there,” said Marjorie Galesky. She was pointing at Benheim Lunge. Dolly Straight had already testified that Socrates Fortiow came to her clinic with the bleeding and crying black dog in his arms. He’d carried the sixty-two-pound dog eleven blocks to get him care.
“…I was sitting in my front yard,” seventy-nine-year-old Mrs. Galesky said, “like always when it’s over seventy-two degrees. It was getting colder and I was about to go in when I see this car run over that poor dog. It hit him and then the tires ran over his legs. This man,” she said, pointing at Socrates, “the black one, had gone up to help the dog when the other man, the one driving the car, comes running over with a brick in his hand. At least it looked like a brick. They say it was a weight, whatever that means, but it was big and that man came running over with it. He said something to the black man and then he tried to get at the dog. First off the black man pushed the white one and then he hauled off and hit him.” The old woman was a few inches under five feet and slight. She looked like an excited child up there on the stand. There was an ancient glee at the memory of the punch. Socrates tried to keep from smiling.
10
“Socrates Fortiow,” he answered when asked to identify himself.
“Yes I did,” he said when asked if he struck Benheim Lunge. “He hit the dog and drove off for all I knew. I went up and was tryin’ to see what I could do when he come up with a chunk’a metal in his hand. He was lookin’ all over an’ said that it’d be better to put the dog outta his misery. Then he said that he wanted to take the dog in his car. I said I’d go along but he told me that there wasn’t room for me an’ the dog too. I told him that I’d seen a animal hospital not far and that I’d carry the dog there. He said no. Then I said no. He went for the dog an’ he still had the iron in his hand. I put up my hand to stop’im but he just kept comin’. So I hit him once. You know I didn’t mean to do all that to Jim, but he wasn’t gonna take that dog. Uh-uh.”
11
“We find the defendant guilty of assault,” the foreman of the jury, a black woman, said. She seemed sorry but that was the decision and she stood with it.
12
While waiting for his sentence Socrates would go to visit Bruno every day. Dolly had made a leash with a basket woven from leather straps to hold Bruno up from behind. If Socrates could heft the dog’s backside Bruno found that he could propel himself forward by walking with his front legs.
“You could put a clothesline up around your yard, Mr. Fortlow,” Dolly said. “And then attach his basket to it with a pulley. That way he could walk around without you having to help him all the time.”
“Yeah,” Socrates answered. “Dolly, what you put up behind the ten percent for my bail?”
“The house,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
Bruno was leaping from one paw to the other, yelping a little now and then because his hip still hurt, and licking the hands of the two new friends.
“If you run I don’t care,” Dolly said. “But you have to take Bruno with you.”
13
Before the sentencing Brenda Marsh had a long meeting with Socrates. He cursed her and pounded his fist down on the table in the little room that the court let them use.
He refused to do what she asked of him.
“You wanna take ev’rything from me?” he asked her.
“I’m trying to keep you out of jail,” she said in her annoying way. “Do you want to go to jail?”
“There’s a lotta things I don’t want. One of ’em is that I don’t get down on my knees to no man, woman, or child.”
Brenda Marsh did not respond. It was then that Socrates realized that she was probably a very good lawyer.
14
Three days later, after the celebration for Socrates’ suspended sentence at Iula’s diner, Socrates went to his house with Right Burke, the maimed WWII veteran. They sat in Socrates’ poor kitchen while Bruno lay on the floor laughing and licking the air.
“I hate it, Right. I hate it.”
“You free, ain’t ya?”
“Yeah, but I wake up mad as shit every day.”
Brenda Marsh had set up a private meeting with Judge Hemp. She’d pleaded for Socrates’ freedom. But the judge said that he’d been found guilty and what could she do?
That’s when Brenda revealed her plan for Socrates to apologize to the court, to Benheim Lunge, and to, the community. He’d promise to write a letter to be posted on the bus stop where he’d assaulted Benheim and to go to Benheim and ask his pardon. He’d make himself available to the juvenile court to talk to young black children and tell them how he had gone wrong but that he wouldn’t do it again.
He’d do an extra fifty hours of community service and for that they could suspend his sentence.
“But you free, Socco. Free, man,” said Right, his best friend. “That gal did you a favor. ’Cause you know she musta begged that judge. You know after that big trial they just had the court wanna put ev’ry black man they can in the can. Shit. Guilty? Go straight to jail!”
“But you know it’s just ’cause’a the dog, Right. It’s just ’cause’a the dog I said yeah.”
“How’s that?”
“He needs me out here. Him and Darryl and you too, brother. I ain’t gonna help nobody in that jail cell or on the run. You know I woulda let them take that white girl’s house if it wasn’t that I had obligations.”
The dog barked suddenly and put his nose out to be scratched.
“You just a lucky fool, Socrates Fortiow,” Right said.
“You got that right, man. I’m a fool to be who I am and I’m lucky I made it this far. Me an’ this black dog here. Shit. Me an’ this black dog.”
Joyce Carol Oates
Faithless
from Kenyon Review
1
The last time my mother Cornelia Nissenbaum and her sister Constance saw their mother was the day before she vanished from their lives forever, April 11, 1923.
It was a rainy-misty morning. They’d been searching for their mother because something was wrong in the household; she hadn’t come downstairs to prepare breakfast so there wasn’t anything for them except what their father gave them, glutinous oatmeal from the previous morning hastily reheated on the stove sticking to the bottom of the pan and tasting of scorch. Their father had seemed strange to them, smiling but not-seeing in that way of his like Reverend Dieckman too fierce in his pulpit Sunday mornings, intoning the Word of God. His eyes were threaded with blood and his face was still pale from the winter but flushed, mottled. In those days he was a handsome man but stern-looking and severe. Gray-grizzled side-whiskers and a spade-shaped beard, coarse and grizzled too with gray, but thick springy-sleek black hair brushed back from his forehead in a crest. The sisters were fearful of their father without their mother to mediate among them, it was as if none of them knew who they were without her.