The Last Juror (29 page)

The ten-minute limit meant nothing to Theo. He blew through it with a series of promises to cut taxes and waste and do something to make sure murderers got the death penalty more often. When he finally wound down, he thanked the crowd for twenty years of faithful support. He reminded us that in the last two elections the good folks of Ford County had given him, and Rex Ella, almost 80 percent of their votes.

The applause was loud and long, and at some point Warren disappeared. So did I. I was tired of speeches and politics.

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F
our weeks later, around dusk on the first Tuesday in August, much of the same crowd gathered around the
courthouse for the vote counting. It had cooled off considerably; the temperature was only ninety-two with 98 percent humidity.

The final days of the election had been a reporter’s dream. There was a fistfight between two Justice of the Peace candidates outside a black church. There were two lawsuits, both of which accused the other side of libel and slander and distributing phony sample ballots. One man was arrested when he was caught in the act of spray painting obscenities on one of Theo’s billboards. (As it turned out, after the election, the man had been hired by one of Theo’s henchmen to defile the senator’s signs. Young Warren still got the blame. “A common trick,” according to Baggy.) The state’s Attorney General was asked to investigate the high number of absentee ballots. “Typical election,” was Baggy’s summary. Things came to a peak on that Tuesday, and the entire county stopped to vote and enjoy the sport of a rural election.

The polls closed at six, and an hour later the square was alive and wired with anticipation. People piled in from the county. They formed little groups around their candidate and even used campaign signs to stake off their territory. Many brought food and drink and most had folding lawn chairs as if they were there to watch a baseball game. Two enormous black chalkboards were placed side by side near the front door of the courthouse, and there the returns were tallied.

“We have the results from North Karaway,” the clerk announced into a microphone so loud it could’ve
been heard five miles away. The festive mood was immediately serious.

“North Karaway’s always first,” Baggy said. It was almost eight-thirty, almost dark. We were sitting on the porch outside my office, waiting for the news. We planned to delay press time for twenty-four hours and publish our “Election Special” on Thursday. It took some time for the clerk to read the vote totals for every candidate for every office. Halfway through she said, “And in the Sheriff’s race.” Several thousand people held their breath.

“Mackey Don Coley, eighty-four. Tryce McNatt, twenty-one. T. R. Meredith, sixty-two, and Freck Oswald, eleven.” A loud cheer went up on the far side of the lawn where Coley’s supporters were camped.

“Coley’s always tough in Karaway,” Baggy said. “But he’s beat.”

“He’s beat?” I asked. The first of twenty-eight precincts were in, and Baggy was already predicting winners.

“Yep. For T.R. to run strong in a place where he has no base shows folks are fed up with Mackey Don. Wait’ll you see the Clanton boxes.”

Slowly, the returns dribbled in, from places I’d never heard of: Pleasant Hill, Shady Grove, Klebie, Three Corners, Clover Hill, Green Alley, Possum Ridge, Massey Mill, Calico Ridge. Woody Gates and the Country Boys, who seemed to always be available, filled in the gaps with some bluegrass.

The Padgitts voted at a tiny precinct called Dancing
Creek. When the clerk announced the votes from there, and Coley got 31 votes and the other three got 8 combined, there was a refreshing round of boos from the crowd. Clanton East followed, the largest precinct and the one I voted in. Coley got 285 votes, Tryce 47, and when T.R.’s total of 644 was announced, the place went wild.

Baggy grabbed me and we celebrated with the rest of the town. Coley was going down without a runoff.

As the losers slowly learned their fate, they and their supporters packed up and went home. Around eleven, the crowd was noticeably thinner. After midnight, I left the office and strolled around the square, taking in the sounds and images of this wonderful tradition.

I was quite proud of the town. In the aftermath of a brutal murder and its baffling verdict, we had rallied, fought back, and spoken clearly that we would not tolerate corruption. The strong vote against Coley was our way of hitting at the Padgitts. For the second time in a hundred years, they would not own the Sheriff.

T. R. Meredith got 61 percent of the vote, a stunning landslide. Theo got 82 percent, an old-fashioned shellacking. We printed eight thousand copies of our “Election Edition” and sold every one of them. I became a staunch believer in voting every year. Democracy at its finest.

CHAPTER 28

A
week before Thanksgiving in 1971, Clanton was rocked by the news that one of its sons had been killed in Vietnam. Pete Mooney, a nineteen-year-old staff sergeant, was captured in an ambush near Hue, in central Vietnam. A few hours later his body was found.

I didn’t know the Mooneys, but Margaret certainly did. She called me with the news and said she needed a few days off. Her family had lived down the street from the Mooneys for many years. Her son and Pete had been close friends since childhood.

I spent some time in the archives and found the 1966 story of Marvin Lee Walker, a black kid who’d been the county’s first death in Vietnam. That had been before Mr. Caudle cared about such things, and the
Times
coverage of the event was shamefully sparse. Nothing on the front page. A hundred-word story on page three with no photo. At the time, Clanton had no idea where Vietnam was.

So a young man who couldn’t go to the better schools, probably couldn’t vote, and more than likely was too afraid to drink from the public water fountain at the courthouse, had been killed in a country few people in his hometown could find on a map. And his death was the right and proper thing. Communists had to be fought wherever they might be found.

Margaret quietly passed along the details I needed for a story. Pete had graduated from Clanton High School in 1970. He had played varsity football and baseball, lettering in both for three years. He was an honor student who had planned to work for two years, save his money, then go to college. He was unlucky enough to have a high draft number, and in December 1970 he got his notice.

According to Margaret, and this was something I could not print, Pete had been very reluctant to report for basic training. He and his father had fought for weeks over the war. The son wanted to go to Canada and avoid the whole mess. The father was horrified that his son would be labeled a draft dodger. The family name would be ruined, etc. He called the kid a coward. Mr. Mooney had served in Korea and had zero patience for the antiwar movement. Mrs. Mooney tried the role of peacemaker, but in her heart, she too was reluctant to send her son off to such an unpopular war. Pete finally relented, and now he was coming home in a box.

The funeral was at the First Baptist Church, where the Mooneys had been active for many years. Pete had been baptized there at the age of eleven, and this was of
great comfort to his family and friends. He was now with the Lord, though still much too young to be called home.

I sat with Margaret and her husband. It was my first and last funeral for a nineteen-year-old soldier. By concentrating on the casket, I could almost avoid the sobbing and, at times, wailing around me. His high school football coach gave a eulogy that drained every eye in the church, mine included.

I could barely see the back of Mr. Mooney, in the front row. What unspeakable grief that poor man was suffering.

After an hour, we escaped and made our way to the Clanton cemetery, where Pete was laid to rest with full military pomp and ceremony. When the lone bugler played “Taps,” the gut-wrenching cry of Pete’s mother made me shudder. She clung to the casket until they began to lower it. His father finally collapsed and was tended to by several deacons.

What a waste, I said over and over as I walked the streets alone, headed generally back to the office. That night, still alone, I cursed myself for being so silent, so cowardly. I was the editor of the newspaper, dammit! Whether I felt entitled to the position or not, I was the only one in town. If I felt strongly about an issue, then I certainly had the power and position to editorialize.

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P
ete Mooney was preceded in death by more than fifty thousand of his fellow countrymen, although the military did a rotten job of reporting an accurate count.

In 1969, President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, made the decision that the war in Vietnam could not be won, or, rather, that the United States would no longer try and win it. They kept this to themselves. They did not stop the draft. Instead, they pursued the cynical strategy of appearing to be confident of a successful outcome.

From the time this decision was made until the end of the war in 1973, approximately eighteen thousand more men were killed, including Pete Mooney.

I ran my editorial on the front page, bottom half, under a large photo of Pete in his Army uniform. It read:

The death of Pete Mooney should make us ask the glaring question—What the hell are we doing in Vietnam? A gifted student, talented athlete, school leader, future community leader, one of our best and brightest, gunned down at the edge of a river we’ve never heard of in a country we care little about.

The official reason, one that goes back twenty years, is that we are there fighting Communism. If we see it spreading, then, in the words of ex-President Lyndon Johnson, we are to take “… all necessary measures to prevent further aggression.”

Korea, Vietnam. We now have troops in Laos and Cambodia, though President Nixon denies it. Where to next? Are we expected to send our sons anywhere and everywhere in the world to meddle in the civil wars of others?

Vietnam was divided into two countries when the French were defeated there in 1954. North Vietnam is a poor country run by a Communist named Ho Chi Minh. South Vietnam is a poor country that was run by a brutal dictator named Ngo Dinh Diem until he was murdered in a coup in 1963. Since then the country has been run by the military.

Vietnam has been in a state of war since 1946 when the French began their fateful attempt to keep out the Communists. Their failure was spectacular, so we rushed in to show how wars are supposed to be run. Our failure has been even grander than that of the French, and we’re not finished yet.

How many more Pete Mooneys will die before our government decides to leave Vietnam to its own course?

And how many other places around the world will we send our troops to fight Communism?

What the hell are we doing in Vietnam? Right now we’re burying young soldiers while the politicians who are running the war contemplate getting out.

Using bad language would be good for a few slaps on the wrist, but what did I care? Strong language was needed to give light to the blind patriots of Ford County. Before the flood of calls and letters, though, I made a friend.

When I returned from Thursday lunch with Miss Callie (lamb stew indoors by the fire), Bubba Crockett was waiting in my office. He wore jeans, boots, a flannel shirt, long hair, and after he introduced himself he thanked me for the editorial. He had some things he
wanted to get off his chest, and since I was as stuffed as a Christmas turkey, I placed my feet on my desk and listened for a long time.

He’d grown up in Clanton, finished school here in 1966. His father owned the nursery two miles south of town; they were landscapers. He got his draft notice in 1967 and gave no thought to doing anything other than racing off to fight Communists. His unit landed in the south, just in time for the Tet Offensive. Two days on the ground, and he had lost three of his closest friends.

The horror of fighting could not accurately be described, though Bubba was descriptive enough for me. Men burning, screaming for help, tripping over body parts, dragging bodies off the battlefield, hours with no sleep, no food, running out of ammo, seeing the enemy crawl toward you at night. His battalion lost a hundred men in the first five days. “After a week I knew I was going to die,” he said with wet eyes. “At that point, I became a pretty good soldier. You gotta reach that point to survive.”

He was wounded twice, slight wounds that were treatable in field hospitals. Nothing that would get him home. He talked of the frustration of fighting a war that the government would not allow them to win. “We were better soldiers,” he said. “And our equipment was vastly superior. Our commanders were superb, but the fools in Washington wouldn’t let them fight a war.”

Bubba knew the Mooney family and had begged Pete not to go. He had watched the burial service from a distance, and he cursed everybody he could see and many he could not.

“These idiots around here still support the war, can you believe that?” he said. “More than fifty thousand dead and now we’re pulling out, and these people will argue with you on the streets of Clanton that it was a great cause.”

“They don’t argue with you,” I said.

“They do not. I’ve punched a couple of them. You play poker?”

I did not, but I’d heard many colorful stories about various poker games around town. Quickly, I thought this might be interesting. “A little,” I said, figuring I could either find a rule book or get Baggy to teach me.

“We play on Thursday nights, in a shed at the nursery. Several guys who fought over there. You might enjoy it.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah, around eight. It’s a small game, some beer, some pot, some war stories. My buddies want to meet you.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, wondering where I could find Baggy.

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