Down at the far end of the table, with a big manila folder open in front of him, sits Barry Lancaster, the district attorney, a man whose name she’s going to be seeing in newspaper articles a lot in the next twenty years. He’s just turned thirty, and though it’s still warm out, he’s wearing a black suit, with a sparkling white shirt and a glossy black tie.
Barry Lancaster has the reputation of being tough on crime, and he’s going to ride that reputation all the way to the Mississippi attorney general’s office and then to a federal judgeship. When he came to see her a few days ago, it was his reputation that concerned him. After using a lot of phrases like “true bill” and “no bill” without bothering to explain precisely what they meant, he said, “My reputation’s at stake here, Dee Ann. There’s a whole lot riding on you.”
She knows how much is riding on her, and it’s a lot more than his reputation. She feels the great mass bearing down on her shoulders. Her neck is stiff and her legs are heavy. She didn’t sleep last night. She never really sleeps anymore.
“Now Dee Ann,” Barry Lancaster says, “we all know you’ve gone through a lot recently, but I need to ask you some questions today so that these ladies and gentlemen can hear your answers. Will that be okay?”
She wants to say that it’s not okay, that it will never again be okay for anyone to ask her anything, but she just nods.
He asks her how old she is.
“Eighteen.”
What grade she’s in.
“I’m a senior.”
Whether or not she has a boyfriend named Chuckie Nelms.
“Yes sir.”
Whether or not, on Saturday evening, August 2nd, she saw her boyfriend.
“Yes sir.”
Barry Lancaster looks up from the stack of papers and smiles at her. “If I was your boyfriend,” he says, “I’d want to see you every night.”
A few of the men on the grand jury grin, but the women keep straight faces. One of them, a small red-haired woman with lots of freckles, whose name she doesn’t know and never will know, is going to wait on her in a convenience store over in Indianola many years later. After giving her change, the woman will touch Dee Ann’s hand and say, “I hope the rest of your life’s been easier, honey. It must have been awful, what you went through.”
Barry Lancaster takes her through that Saturday evening, from the time Chuckie picked her up until the moment when she walked into the kitchen. Then he asks her, in a solemn voice, what she found there.
She keeps her eyes trained on his tie pin, a small amethyst, as she describes the scene in as much detail as she can muster. In a roundabout way, word will reach her that people on the grand jury were shocked, and even appalled, at her lack of emotion. Chuckie will try to downplay their reaction, telling her that they’re probably just saying that because of what happened later on. “It’s probably not you they’re reacting to,” he’ll say. “It’s probably just them having hindsight.”
Hindsight is something she lacks, as she sits here in a hard chair, in a small room, her hands lying before her on a badly scarred table. She can’t make a bit of sense out of what’s already happened. She knows what her daddy was and she knows what he wasn’t, knows what he did and didn’t do. What she doesn’t know is the whys and wherefores.
On the other hand, she can see into the future, she knows what’s going to happen, and she also knows why. She knows, for instance, what question is coming, and she knows how she’s going to answer it and why. She knows that shortly after she’s given that answer, Barry Lancaster will excuse her, and she knows, because Lou Pierce has told her, that after she’s been excused, Barry Lancaster will address the members of the grand jury.
He will tell them what they have and haven’t heard. “Now she’s a young girl,” he’ll say, “and she’s been through a lot, and in the end this case has to rest on what she can tell us. And the truth, ladies and gentlemen, much as I might want it to be otherwise, is that the kid’s gone shaky on us. She told the sheriff one version of what happened at the grocery store that Saturday night when her daddy came to see her, and she’s sat here today and told y’all a different version. She’s gotten all confused on this question of time. You can’t blame her for that, she’s young and her mind’s troubled, but in all honesty a good defense attorney’s apt to rip my case apart. Because when you lose this witness’s testimony, all you’ve got left is that dog, and that dog, ladies and gentlemen, can’t testify.”
Even as she sits here, waiting for Barry Lancaster to bring up that night in the grocery store — that night which, for her, will always be the present — she knows the statement about the dog will be used to sentence Jim Wheeler to November defeat. The voters of this county will drape that sentence around the sheriffs neck. If Jim Wheeler had done his job and found some real evidence, they will say, that man would be on his way to Parchman.
They will tell one another, the voters of this county, how someone saw her daddy at the Jackson airport, as he boarded a plane that would take him to Dallas, where he would board yet another plane for a destination farther south. They will say that her daddy was actually carrying a briefcase filled with money, with lots of crisp green hundreds, one of which he extracted to pay for a beer.
They will say that her daddy must have paid her to lie, that she didn’t give a damn about her mother. They will wonder if Chuckie has a brain in his head, to go and marry somebody like her, and they will ask themselves how she can ever bear the shame of what she’s done. They will not believe, not even for a moment, that she’s performed some careful calculations in her mind. All that shame, she’s decided, will still weigh a lot less than her daddy’s life. It will be a while before she and Chuckie and a girl who isn’t born yet learn how much her faulty math has cost.
Barry Lancaster makes a show of rifling through his papers. He pulls a sheet out and studies it, lets his face wrinkle up as if he’s seeing something on the page that he never saw before. Then he lays the sheet back down. He closes the manila folder, pushes his chair away from the table a few inches, and leans forward. She’s glad he’s too far away to lay his hand on her knee.
“Now,” he says, “let’s go backwards in time.”
Contributors’ Notes
David Ballard was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, the son of two teachers. He majored in English at Miami University, and he received his law degree from the Ohio State University. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife, Jeanne, and his son, Jack. “Child Support” is his first published story.
• I am addicted to games. I also love reading suspense stories where a character encounters some sort of contest or wager, whether by choice or coercion, and naturally the stakes are high. My earliest influences are the stories of Roald Dahl, Richard Matheson, and the early nonsupernatural stories of Stephen King.
“Child Support” is that kind of suspense story. The idea began as a “what if’ scenario while I was throwing Frisbee in the park with Jake, our black Labrador, and Jack was watching in his stroller. I began playing a mental game of how many Jake could catch in a row, and then it struck me just how secluded we really were in that park as it was getting darker.
I listen to movie soundtracks as I write. I’ll pick a certain one to set the right mood for a particular story, and then I’ll play it over and over until the story is finished. For “Child Support,” I must have listened to the soundtrack for Pulp Fiction at least three hundred times.