A Stranger in the Kingdom (12 page)

Besides, next to reassuring themselves that everyone else was working hard, the Folding Chair boys, as the half-dozen charter members of the club referred to themselves (though their cumulative age totaled upward of five hundred), were in fact much more interested in manufacturing and dispensing news than in acquiring it.

“Heard the latest, James?”

“No, Mr. Johnson. What's that?”

“You mean to say you ain't heard about the hotshot lawyer in town this afternoon?”

“You mean Charlie?”

“
No
, I don't mean Charlie. I mean that slick downcountry lawyer name of Moulton Charlie's imported up here to help him defend Cousin Resolvèd. Tall fella? Pale as a trout's belly in January? Distinguished-looking? Pulled up in front of the courthouse in a taxicab about an hour ago. You ain't heard about him, James?”

I shook my head.

“You'll know about him shortly, then,” Plug said. “Ain't that right now, boys?”

The boys duly agreed that it was right.

“Best defense lawyer in Vermont, is all Moulton is. You ask Farlow upstairs—he'll tell you all about him. And James.”

“Yes, Mr. Johnson?”

“Don't overdo, now.”

“I won't, Mr. Johnson. Aren't you coming inside to watch the hotshot lawyer?”

“Court's recessed until three forty-five, James. I guess old Charlie's meeting with him right now.”

I was puzzled by Plug's news. This was the first I'd heard of Charlie bringing in an out-of-town lawyer. Charlie was the hotshot, wasn't he? It seemed out of character for my brash big brother to resort to outside help, especially in a run-of-the-mill poaching case. By now I was really curious to see my cousin arraigned. But just inside the door I paused. Something about the name Moulton rang a bell.

Then it came to me. Moulton was the Montpelier prosecutor who had handled the infamous Ordney Gilson lynching case, which also happened to be Charlie's first important case and the making of my brother's own reputation.

Even today the Ordney Gilson case is well remembered in Vermont. Back in January, just after Charlie graduated from law school, a well-to-do farmer known locally as Ornery Ordney Gilson went out to his barn to milk at his usual ungodly time of 3:30
A.M.
A few hours later he was found bound in a bizarre way, with his wrists tied to his ankles beneath his thighs, and hanging by the heels from an elm on the village green—frozen stiff as a side of beef.

Somehow, what had apparently started out as a weird practical joke had turned into a murder.

The subsequent investigation revealed what everyone in the Kingdom knew anyway, that Ordney Gilson had a reputation as a hard man to work for. Over the years he had gone through more than a dozen hired men, and just that past Christmas Eve he had lost yet another employee. The man, Sheriff White's brother Titman White, who drifted from farm to farm and was considered throughout the Kingdom to be shiftless and a little softheaded, had evidently come to the barn that evening drunk. As he was wheeling two forty-quart milkcans down a short ramp to the milkhouse, he tripped and lost the entire load. According to Titman (so-called because he was the runt of the White litter), Gilson had flown into a towering rage and kicked him, “just the way the miserable son-of-a-bitch kicked his cows.”

Titman quit on the spot, moved out of the hired man's trailer across the road, and spent the next several days telling his story to anyone and everyone in the Common who'd listen, particularly the crowd that hung around Bumper Stevens' commission sales barn.

During the week between Christmas and New Year's, Gilson received several anonymous threatening notes and telephone calls. His wife was worried. He apparently was not. Not, at least, until the early morning of January 1st when he found himself trussed up like a New Year's turkey and dangling from an elm tree in thirty-degree-below-zero weather on the village green.

Titman White had an alibi for his whereabouts on New Year's Eve and early the following morning, he had been at a party at the commission sales barn, with ten or twelve other local roughnecks, all of whom confirmed his story. But Sheriff White, who had no love for his brother, had been able to prove that the rope Gilson had been tied up with had come from the overhead hayforks in Gilson's own barn, where Titman had worked for several months prior to the Christmas Eve blow-up. Murder charges were brought against Titman, who promptly engaged Charlie to defend him.

Technically, the trial should have been held in the Kingdom County Courthouse with Judge Allen presiding and Zack Barrows acting as prosecutor. But Zack had just gotten out of the Memphremagog hospital for his chronic drinking and was convalescing at home; and because of the tremendous publicity the case was receiving, Judge Allen ordered a change of venue to Montpelier, where one Sigurd Moulton served as prosecutor before a judge and jury from that area.

The trial was covered by every major paper in New England, and by the end of the first day two things were obvious to everyone. First, that in all probability Titman White had, at the very least, had a hand in Ordney Gilson's murder. Second, that he could not possibly have acted alone.

In a brilliant and melodramatic defense, Charlie paraded Farmer Gilson's myriad enemies through the witness box one after another, demonstrating that he was a hated man, the very antithesis of a good Vermont neighbor. Nor did my brother put Titman himself on the stand for Moulton to grill and confuse, though the prosecutor, who had never before lost a case, ruthlessly cross-examined each of Charlie's other witnesses.

The courtroom battle raged for two weeks. Then in his summary speech Charlie stunned everyone by requesting that the judge issue a little-used “directed verdict” of innocent to the jury, on the basis that not a shred of real evidence existed to link White with the murder. Astonishingly, the judge complied—-a decision which, however reluctantly, two courts of appeal and the Vermont Supreme Court ultimately upheld. White and his accomplices, whoever they were, went scot-free, and virtually overnight Charlie earned a reputation as a no-holds-barred, silver-tongued advocate who could win big cases.

Still, why would my brother need this Moulton, of all people, to help him in the most routine of poaching cases?

As I bounded upstairs toward the courtroom, which occupied most of the second floor of the building, I caught a spicy whiff of bay rum after-shave lotion and clove-scented hair tonic. Farlow Blake, Kingdom County's part-time bailiff and full-time barber, and a veritable walking barbershop of aromatic suffusions himself, buttonholed me on the landing. “Greetings, young James,” he said in his portentous courtroom tones. “Big doings this P. of M.
Very
big doings.”

Farlow gave me a canny wink. Moving like a blocking back in slow motion, he expertly steered me into a corner of the landing where he could impart his news in secrecy, though we were the only two persons within sight or earshot. Popping a wintergreen breath sweetener into his mouth and offering one to me (it was such small acts of thoughtfulness that made Farlow a universally popular man in Kingdom County; Charlie said he was the only bailiff in Vermont and probably all New England who could serve you a court summons and make you feel like a recipient of a Nobel Prize), he said in a near-whisper: “Brother Charlie's hailed in a ringer. Best lawyer in Vermont, James, name of Moulton. Just resigned from being prosecutor down to Most Peculiar to set up his own firm.”

“Most Peculiar” was Farlow's standard way of referring to Montpelier, the capital of all Vermont except possibly Kingdom County.

“Why would Charlie do that?” I asked in a foolish near-whisper.

“I'll tell you why, James, if you won't breathe a word to another soul. Honor bright, now? Not a word?”

Having received my solemn pledge, Farlow said, “Because for the past two days, old Zack's been telling it all round town that he's got Resolvèd dead to rights on this latest fish poaching business and for once Cousin R's going straight to jail. No extenuating circumstances. No plea bargaining. No
nothing
, James. They say Zachariah intends to show the voting public that he can still win a case, no matter what Dad K writes in the
Monitor
about him. They say that's why Brother Charlie's hailed in this ringer from Most Peculiar to help him—tall, pale, distinguished-looking fella they say never's lost a case in open court except once before—and that one to Charlie!”

Perhaps I should point out here that although Farlow Blake's principal responsibilities as courtroom officer consisted of announcing “All rise” when Judge Forrest Allen came out of his chambers and “Please be seated” after the judge sat down, he was also widely acknowledged to be unsurpassed at the subtle arts of swearing in witnesses, pampering bored juries in civil-suit cases by entertaining them with the latest magazines, newspapers, barbershop gossip, and Frenchman jokes, and maintaining the courtroom in spick and span condition. Yet in addition to being a sort of informal personification of the dignity and orderliness of the court, Farlow was a receptacle of all kinds of behind-the-scene information (much of which he had gleaned in his less glamorous capacity as town barber and some of which had actually been known to be accurate), which he dispensed in a conspiratorial and oracular manner to absolutely everyone who walked through the courthouse door, while simultaneously giving the impression of selecting his confidants only after enormous deliberation.

Like a good veteran newspaperman, Farlow never revealed his sources, attributing all of his inside lore to a mysterious entity known only as “they say.” Depending on the circumstances, “they say” could be anyone from Judge Allen to Sir William Blackstone, whose venerable tomes Farlow studied in slack times at the barbershop with all the assiduity of an apprentice attorney preparing for his bar exams. In this instance, however, I strongly suspected that “they say” was Charlie himself, since during my school lunch hour that day when I'd gone over to the
Monitor
to ran an errand for Dad I'd seen my brother and Farlow coming back from the hotel cheek and jowl together, with my brother laughing and doing all the talking.

Farlow checked quickly over his shoulder to make sure the coast was clear. “When I—when Zack got wind of what Charlie was up to, he was so mad he didn't know whether he was afoot or on horseback. They say he swore not to budge one inch this time, Most Peculiar lawyer or no. Catch you later, James, here come the Folding Chair boys. Dad K's sitting in the press area.”

Farlow glided toward the head of the stairs to waylay Plug Johnson and his cronies. I went inside the courtroom and sat down beside my father in what he called the press area, the back row of chairs nearest the door, where he could get up and leave whenever he felt like it without attracting undue attention to himself.

Dad looked up briefly from the northern New England edition of the
Boston Globe.
He nodded once, as though greeting a junior colleague, and returned to a front-page story headlined,
NO PROGRESS AT KOREAN PEACE TALKS
.

Charlie was sitting at the defense table in front of the judge's bench, on the left side of the aisle. As I sat down he turned around and grinned and gave me a thumbs-up high sign. He was wearing gray dress slacks and an L. L. Bean green-and-blue-checked flannel shirt, and looked as relaxed as though he were sitting in his cluttered office sipping a cold one and listening to the Red Sox trounce the Yankees. Beside him at the table sat my outlaw cousin, who as usual was wearing his tom red hunting jacket and wool pants and rubber boots.

In the first row of chairs behind them was a well-dressed stranger who I assumed must be Moulton, the Most Peculiar lawyer. He had dark hair, slicked straight back, and even from the rear he looked formidable.

Across the aisle from the defense table, Zack Barrows and High Sheriff Mason White were looking through some papers at the prosecutor's table. Zack wore ›an ancient bottle-green sports jacket and a wide crimson tie. Mason was dressed in his sheriff's uniform. The only other person in the room was Julia Hefner, who in addition to her duties as church organist was Kingdom County's court clerk and stenographer and all-time number one purveyor of half-baked local scuttlebutt. She sat at a small desk directly below the judge's bench, painting her nails. As I shifted in my chair to get comfortable, she looked up and shot me a frown.

My father handed me the sports section of the
Globe.
I'd just started a story describing the festivities planned at Fenway Park for Ted Williams Day—for the second time in his career, the Thumper was leaving the Sox for the Marines and active duty as a fighter pilot, this time in Korea—when Farlow ushered in the Folding Chair Club. As usual they sat in the second row back from the front, behind the prosecutor, so that they would have the best angle for watching Charlie's performance at the defense table. Farlow made sure all the water glasses were full, then took his seat beside the empty jury box.

Almost immediately Judge Allen came out of his chambers, heralded by Farlow's solemn “All rise, please.”

The judge sat down, glanced once quickly out the window, and without any further preliminaries said, “
The County
vs.
Resolvèd Kinneson.
”

More to himself than the court he added, “Again.”

 

If, over the years, Farlow Blake had cultivated the carriage and demeanor of a rather pompous judge, Forrest Allen had come to resemble nothing so much as a rangy, weather-beaten hunting and fishing guide. The last local direct descendant of Ethan Allen's nephew Ira, who had come north to Kingdom County soon after my own great-great-great-grandfather, Judge Allen had once confided to my father that since the death of his wife ten years ago, his chief satisfactions in life were sitting at home reading in the evening with his daughter Athena, landing a large trout on light tackle, hunting with his Brittany spaniel Frank James on a blue day in October, and hearing a well-argued brief—presumably in that order.