The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  Deciding that his little Dakota truck was too small for the errand, Abel took the wheel of the Skylark. Doro settled herself in front and Billy sat in back. They left town and drove north, taking Old 81. “America’s Main Street, this road was once called,” Abel said hopefully, instructively. “Runs from Minneapolis to Dallas, following approximately the Sixth Principal Meridian.”

  Doro thought something seemed off with the mission. Her father was too intent, as if this were his last chance to win the battle with his son, yet another hill to die on. Couldn’t he see that Billy was a wraith, too sick to be jailed? Her brother weighed less than she did. He could barely walk. Surely the time for punishment was past. But she also believed that no one stood above the law, having learned this truth at Abel’s knee. How many times had he said, “Do not presume to think you’re above the law,” as she and her brothers were growing up? Hundreds, if it was one. And what if this time was the charm and in jail her brother would get help and the cycle would finally cease?

  As they crossed the John Mack Bridge over the Ark River, Abel said, “Did you children know that in the thirties Indians coming up from Tonkawa refused to pay the bridge toll? Forded on horseback, they did. Right here.”

  “I should research that,” Doro said, her mind elsewhere. Her work on pulp novels had made her alert for the plot twist, for the captive to bolt for the scrub. She stole a look to see if Billy showed signs of making a getaway, but he appeared to be sleeping.

  Lulled by the warmth in the car—his father kept it cranked to Bikram level—Billy rested his head on the seat back. The opiates in his belly and the methadone in his nostrils assured him that time would pass no matter where he was, behind bars or in bed. Soon enough he’d be back at his blue-sky trades. This was a side trip, no more. He closed his eyes and entered the realm he thought of as Joyland, not an imagined place exactly, but a state of exquisite awareness that allowed him to range in memory, in present and past, to ponder the mysteries of blood and the story of himself on the planet.

  * * *

  Billy longed for illustrious ancestors. Not the yeomanry from whence he came, oh, no. Persons of good taste and an interest in art and music. His research into his genetic underpinnings yielded little in the way of a claim to brighter heritage, however. On a genealogy website he found family members who were descendants of the Landed Gentry of Ireland in the Time of Cromwell, Brian Boru, Anna of Hungary and Ferdinand I of Spain, Wenceslaus, Strongbow, and a long run of Spanish Habsburgs, but these lines appeared to wane in social class until they resulted in Hattie’s mother’s people, the Hensleys, who mingled with the Ennis line, which began in Ireland when a Sir John Ennis stowed away on a ship bound for the New World. Billy considered that this nobleman might be the seat of an auspicious connection, at least where a taste for fine things was concerned, but too soon he learned that Sir John had fled Ireland after murdering the tax collector. Billy had sighed so loudly that the library’s other computer users had looked up.

  The Hensleys and Ennises were farmers who moved west to Missouri, digging sassafras and ginseng and farming the flinty soil along the White River. One of the few early pictures of Hattie’s mother showed a thin girl in a flour-sack dress posed on bare dirt, tornado-stripped trees spiking the white background sky, and three dog-like shapes in the shadowy foreground that on closer look were revealed to be free-ranging razorback hogs. Again he’d had to face things: hillbilly blood ran in his veins.

  Hattie’s mother at eighteen went to a church social where a stranger with high cheekbones, bad teeth, and brown eyes, one of them slightly inward-turned, bid high on her sour apple pie. Lorenzo Dow Davies had come across the plains and down into the Ozarks to buy some mules. His young first wife had deserted him, took their infant son and fled, and he was in that year of 1918 as much in the market for a wife as he was for a mule. His line began in the New World with a conscript from Cardiff, who embarked on a career of swearing so foul that it was noted in the annals of the Maryland penal colonies. A bounder, this conscript served only four years of his indentured servitude before he bolted. Whether the darkness that showed up in the family later, in a few cousins who suffered from mental illness, was the legacy of the first criminal it was impossible to say, but Billy’s grandfather Davies possessed a hesitancy of being that spoke of some kind of family shame, as though he’d been burned early and badly.

  Anyway, if he followed the chain of mitochondrial DNA he found clear title to membership in Haplogroup U5b1c, a genetic bottleneck that united Sami reindeer herders with Basque shepherds. And if he took the longest view, he could trace the chain of being that began in Africa and moved to an Iberian seacoast or the Arctic tundra, that traveled through Byzantium to the British Isles, bearing slowly westward, until it yielded the girl who would become his mother, who would come to a turning point in a school play yard in the cattle town of Wichita when she met a boy as scrappy and outspoken as her unknown great-great the foul-tongued conscript, a jug-eared, green-eyed, bandy-legged daredevil who was Abel Campbell and who would become her husband.

  The Campbell line was Ulster Scots, sired by one Alexander, an old-school Presbyterian and a dour messenger of doom. His offspring became farmers, preachers, teachers, husbandsmen accustomed to the habits of hard work and thrift that led to plenitude in Lancaster County. Land proud and industrious, they liked their own ways so well that over the generations they took to marrying each other, until enough first cousins had conjoined to yield thirty-eight students to the Ohio School for the Deaf. Despite their mild inbreeding, the family ran to smugness, temperance, and piety, even zealotry. From this line came Billy’s paternal grandfather, Oliver. In Oliver ran, along with piety, a terrible streak of mischief. In his youth in East St. Louis he learned the fighting Irish code of silence, to scrap and swear, to love a cold beer and a good fistfight. A big family story was that Oliver and a pal named Frankie McBride determined to disrupt a Billy Sunday revival by smuggling fireworks into the tent, planning to blast them off at altar call. The idea was to stampede the faithful like so many sheep and make the holy Joes think that Old Scratch himself was paying a visit. But the Campbell bent toward religion came out just in time when the preacher’s words rolled away the stone that was young Oliver’s heart and instead of the wild conflagration he’d planned he went forward, bawling like a motherless calf. On his way out of the revival tent he saw Alice Eliot handing out fliers for the Sunday School movement. She smiled and he was smitten.

  The Eliots lived in a fine house on a shady street. They had household help, music lessons, and good horses, but there the niceties ended. Alice’s father, Guy William Eliot, was a drinker and a rascal. He came of clannish folk that traced their history to the Border Reivers, criminals most. Alice’s mother had a horror of spirits, and eventually developed a horror of her husband. After her last child was born, she drove him from the house. Rather than fall upon alms she made a meager living baking and selling pies. Alice forbade alcohol and all low activities.

  So there was madness on the Davies side, striking some, missing others. Hensleys were shy and practical and not given to extremes of feeling. Campbells were proud, pompous, pugilistic. Eliots ran to extremes where drink was concerned, and also to gab and argument and guile. No matter how Billy put all these strains together, he wound up with mulligan stew. At the end of the line his parents, heedless of the perilous fit of alleles, mingled their DNA, begetting Doro, Nick, Jesse, ClairBell, Gideon, and himself. Surely, surely, surely, in all the souls that came before, there must have been some outlier, some kinsman, who would understand how it was with him. Someone to whom he could reach across the generations, for at times he felt like a lone boat adrift in a vast sea. A lone boat, he realized as the car pulled to a stop at a light, on its way to the county jail.

  * * *

  “All Great Plains rivers are a mile wide and an inch deep,” Abel said to break the silence in the car, but no one responded. While his daughter gazed out the window and his son drowsed
, he tried to still his jumbled thoughts, which centered on how hard he was finding it to drive. The well-traveled road seemed foreign, and it was as if another man, a weaker, older man with rabbit wire where once his mind had been, steered between the yellow lines. Among taco joints and tire stores he looked for the landmarks of his former life, the cattle auction grounds, the peach orchards, the salvage yard, but it was as if they’d never been. To ease his mind he flicked on the radio and the rest of the way as the prairie blurred past and the first clapboard bungalows appeared on the city’s outskirts they listened to the public station’s daily airing of Boléro.

  He had once known the courthouse complex, but so much had changed that the map in his mind was off. He undershot the right street by a block, landing them in front of the old courthouse rather than the new. He parked anyway, playing off his error as intentional. He grabbed his cane from the foot well and said briskly, “I thought we’d take a look at the grand old lady.”

  Built of dressed limestone, the courthouse dated from the days just after Wyatt Earp. While they stopped to admire the stonework arches and arcades, Doro kept an eye on Billy, scanning the area to see which way he might hobble off. But he stayed close, drawing his Mavericks from his shirt pocket and shaking the pack her way. When she declined, he said, “Oh, that’s right.” He grinned devilishly, a flash of his old humor. “Quitter.”

  She had quit, but her mouth was parched. The gravity of what they were about to do lay heavily on her. She was putting her sick brother away, sending him to jail, and all for the privilege of doing right. Or was it because she wanted to please her father? Make peace in the house? She didn’t know. Just one puff would calm her, would set her mind straight. But she’d vowed not to yield, even in the cuckoo’s nest that was home, and so she shook her head. When Billy stubbed out his smoke they walked on.

  The lobby had been newly blocked into zones and this, too, rattled Abel. They would have to pass a checkpoint. His children went to stand in line and he followed, watching so that when his turn came he would know what to do. His daughter set her handbag in a plastic tub. Her sunglasses and watch she put in a felt-bottomed container that looked like a church collection plate. His son placed his cigarettes, lighter, and wallet in a similar vessel. The children walked under a gantry and passed through to gather their effects. It was his turn.

  There were three types of memory, he knew from reading an article in the journal Science: semantic, skill, and episodic. Somehow the obstacle he now faced was a puzzle of all three types and he couldn’t think of what to do first. He fumbled with his tweed cap, and then decided to unbuckle his belted jacket. He took off the jacket and put it in a bin to go through the sensor. He rested his cane against the conveyor belt and dug in his trouser pockets.

  An alarm sounded. At first he thought his hearing aid was squealing, but then the officer held up a horn-handled pocketknife, the boyhood rabbit-skinning knife he carried for luck. He tried to master his feelings, but his heart hammered against his chest wall. His cane clattered to the floor.

  “Here, Pops.” A female guard pulled him out of the line and patted him down, running her hands along his legs, groin, flanks, chest. His knees weakened, his belly pitched, his eyes went teary as he tried to remember the Fourth Amendment, the standards for unlawful search and seizure.

  “It’s almost over, old-timer,” the guard told him. She helped him put himself back together and then handed him his cane.

  When he was safe on the other side, Abel growled, “I’ve practiced here since the waters drew back and the ark came ashore. I’ll old-timer her!”

  Billy placed a hand on his shoulder. “Papa, do you need to sit down? There’s a bench over there. Let’s sit down a while.” Billy led him to the bench, waited until he sat, and then took a seat beside him.

  This kindness unmanned Abel. Billy’s finest trait was compassion. To the halt, the suffering, the needy, the broken-winged, the boy’s heart had always gone out. This nicked at Abel’s own heart, as he shared the trait and had long tried to hide it in the interest of manliness. It wasn’t too late to put a stop to the errand he just now couldn’t remember the importance of, to turn around and go home. For a long moment he considered, but then he remembered the principle he wanted, even at this late date, to stand for. “Let’s get done what we came to do.”

  Back at home, Hattie had come to the end of the ham. Her grinding arm quivered, her blouse sagged with sweat, and pink mounds of ground ham rose high as her sorrow at the cruelties her youngest, her gentlest boy had endured. He’d been bullied in school. In their cowboy-and-roustabout town he’d been mocked. And his treatment at home, by his own father, was callous. Abel hadn’t wanted their late-in-life child, held disdain for the purses and jewelry and dolls, the Easy-Bake ovens the little boy loved. His father and brothers and sisters saw only his crimes, but she saw past the shame to his suffering. She wasn’t a crier, but she put her face in her blistered, fat-slippery, ham-smelling hands, drew a deep breath, and let it out in slow, ragged spurts.

  At the courthouse, the elevator doors opened and the delegation rode up. Doro thought she might have to do the talking when they reached the jail’s intake counter, and so she stepped briskly toward it, but after his slump her father had recovered. He handed over the warrant to the officer, his voice again strong. “This is my son, presenting as ordered.”

  When Billy stepped forward, extending his wrists for handcuffs, his fingers for the ink pad, Doro had to turn away. He looked so small, so thin. He was the baby brother she’d sung to, the infant whose plump cheeks she’d kissed with a love so strong it had weakened her knees. She understood suddenly that while Billy was doing this for their mother, to lighten Abel’s pressure on her, he was also doing this for her, so that he might do right in her eyes. The words “like a man” came to her, the highest praise of their male-centered family applied to its least so-called manly member, and even though she saw the words as retrograde and even insulting, somehow they applied. Courage, it was, rather, or gallantry maybe—his choice not to make a scene. Or was it grace? When she turned back around to wave, he was gone.

  Already on his way out, Abel hurried along the hallway. Doro followed him as he took the elevator to a lower floor and stopped at a courtroom’s double doors. When he saw B. Gerald Jameson’s nameplate he removed his cap and entered, motioning her to follow. They took seats at the rear.

  Abel intended to speak to his old colleague. It seemed wrong to be in the city after so many years away and fail to pay a courtesy call. As he settled into his seat, a rise of almost-forgotten power returned to him. He wasn’t sure what it was—rightness, order, the satisfactions of ritual?—but whatever it was he had missed it. Why had he left the practice of law? He was as fit-minded as the day he’d been admitted to the bar. And it mattered, the law. In the ruin of his family life, the sorrows and disappointments, the low doings of his children, he sometimes forgot.

  Before the bench a tattooed longhair with eyebrow piercings was being arraigned on a charge of growing five or more marijuana plants, a felony. “Why didn’t the stupid kid stop at four?” he whispered to Doro. “If you’re going to break the law, aim for the misdemeanor.” He had nudged his daughter to make certain she took his point before he remembered that she was the only one of his children who needed no instruction. Like her mother, she would obey a law even if it was wrong. Or so he told himself; sometimes he wondered if behind her law-abiding mask there lurked a criminal mind—she was certainly smart enough, and some of the plots in her shoot-’em-up books might point to a nefarious streak.

  When the docket was empty he hooked his cane over the seat back and stood. “Your Honor, may I approach the bench?”

  Judge Jameson took off his reading glasses. “Why, if it isn’t Abe Campbell,” he called out warmly. “Approach.”

  Though it made his neck ache to look up at his former colleague as they spoke, Abel felt readmitted to the inner circle of justice. They talked of times gone by in a tow
n that revered its rogues, the fighting Hallacy brothers and the Pappas boys. The arsonist Gus Pappas had recently died, not by the sword he lived by, but by falling down his basement stairs at the age of ninety. Old Pappas had been convicted of gambling, racketeering, assault, burglary, larceny, and arson, but he was generous, charming, beloved of waitresses, widows. He’d written his memoirs, had run for city council, was mourned. “By God, they don’t make crooks like that anymore,” Abel said.

  Talk of the sainted old outlaw had loosened his tongue and he found himself saying, “Your Honor, a boy of mine’s up on the sixth floor for failure to appear. When he comes before you, deal with him as you would any other. I ask no special treatment.”

  With his spine held straight he took his leave, retrieved his cane and his daughter, and went down to reclaim his knife.

  All the way home he was in high spirits. His mind had returned to working order. He flexed his hands on the steering wheel. “I ever tell you about the Clutter murder trial out in Finney County? Hickok and Smith?”

  Doro’s mood rose to meet his. He’d spoken of the trial many times—she’d been eleven when the murders gripped the state—but she wanted to hear the story again. She’d read In Cold Blood more than once and could recite the opening lines. And she loved it when he told stories, her ear tuned for sixty years to his syntax, his figures of speech, the timbre of his voice. It was then that any uneasiness she felt around him went away.

  “Nineteen sixty,” he began. “My partner Red was the best trial lawyer in the region, bar none. A bona fide barn fire, he was. Out there on the high plains the local guns were having a shoot-out with due process and Red decided to pin a star on himself and out west he went with his chest puffed up like a little cock grouse. High-handed around, I’d lay odds, and hound-dogged those farm girls, no question. Took off at a trot when the whiskey bell rang.”