The Ordways (37 page)

“He was stolen from me. My neighbor took him. Will Vinson.”

“Ah-hah!” said the prosecutor with a look meant to speak volumes. “And when did this occur?”

“The seventh of last May.”

“You reported it to the authorities at once, of course? I'll have to ask you to speak so that you can be heard, please.”

“Well, shortly. Not at once. After two or three days.”

“Thank you. Now in future please face the jury and speak up when responding to questions. This child that was stolen from you, he was your only child?”

“No.”

“You have other sons?”

“Sons, no. Three little girls. Another child on the—”

“Ah, daughters. The stolen child was your only son, that is correct? Fair to assume, I suppose, that he was his father's favorite?”

“No, sir, it's fair to assume no such thing. I'm one father that tries not to play favorites among my children.”

“You wish the jury to believe that you valued your only son exactly as much, neither more nor less, than his three sisters?”

“Well, if anything,” said my grandfather, “I'm afraid little Ned was sort of neglected. You see, I …”

“That is a very interesting admission,” said the prosecutor. “In other words, it took a man to steal your boy to teach you to appreciate him?”

“I can't say I'm proud to have to admit it, but as I'm under oath, there is something in what you say.”

“A very interesting admission. Thank you. I ask you now,” he said, taking up the pistol from the table, “to look at this. Have you ever seen this weapon before?”

“It's mine.”

“Did you purchase—or in whatever way acquire it—recently? With this trip in mind?”

“No, I've always had it.”

“You have always had it?”

“Yes, it was my mother's.”

“Your mother's! Well! Did you say your
mother's
? Hmm. Perhaps we will go into that later. In any case, you brought this weapon from home with you? You took it with you in setting out on your quest? With what object in mind?”

But my grandfather had seen this question coming and promptly replied, “I thought I ought to have one. Traveling out here with money on me.”

The courtroom erupted with a mixture of hilarity and outraged civic pride. Now he had the audience against him, and from the looks on their faces he had cooked his goose with the jurors.

“Tell the court,” said the prosecuting attorney with a smirk, “exactly where you were between the hours of twelve noon and one p.m. on last December twenty-ninth.”

“Well, I was where he” (indicating Mr. Tutwiler) “said I was, in that thicket here on the edge of town. Only …”

“And did you or did you not say while in that thicket, as the witness has testified he heard you say, and I quote, Will Vinson, prepare now to meet your maker? Unquote.”

“Well, yes. But—”

“And did you or did you not say at the same time, quote, You thought I'd never find you, didn't you? But I was too smart for you. Not all the Texas Rangers could find you, but I found you, and now you won't get away. You have come to the end of your trail. Unquote. Did you say that?”

“Yes,” said my grandfather, very red in the face.

“And did you also say on that occasion …?”

But my grandfather could hardly bear to recall the rest of his own words which the prosecutor had quoted at him. He had to sit there and listen to himself boast and rant and rave and threaten and pretend to beat and stomp and murder Will Vinson, then had to confess to a crowded courtroom full of men that he had been all alone in that thicket, and that he was (had to say this three times before the prosecutor was satisfied that everyone had heard it) “just practicing.”

And with that the state rested its case.

The judge directed Mr. Parker to proceed with calling his first witness.

“Your HONOR,” said Mr. Parker, “the DEFENSE will call NO WITNESSES. We REST OUR case.”

The judge had to pound his gavel and threaten to clear the courtroom. Then he said, “Mr. Parker, the bench, mindful of your long experience before the bar, hesitates to instruct you. However, we would be remiss in our duty did we not point out to you that you may be putting your client in jeopardy by your—”

“IF my client WISHES OTHER counsel he is free to SEEK IT,” said Mr. Parker. “Meanwhile, I shall CONDUCT HIS DEFENSE in my own MANNER.”

The prosecuting attorney began his summation to the jury. He said that in a case of murder accompli, so to speak, it was necessary to establish a corpus delicti, to prove that somebody had existed, and had, through violence, ceased to do so. To establish a motive and to prove the accused guilty of the crime. In a case of intent to kill it was necessary to provide a prospective corpus delicti. This they had in the corpus of one Will Vinson, present whereabouts unknown. The accused's motive for the crime had been amply established. The murder weapon, or the intended murder weapon, had been introduced in evidence, the prisoner had acknowledged it to be his.

To accuse a man of intent to kill, said the prosecutor, was to accuse him of intending the gravest sort of murder. For the law, he said, distinguished three kinds or degrees of homicide. The gentlemen of the jury were not lawyers, but no doubt they knew, as it was common knowledge, that first-degree murder was the most severely punishable and third-degree murder the most leniently punishable, with second-degree murder standing midway between. In third-degree murder death was held to ensue upon a chance encounter between the two principals, to have been committed in the heat of ungovernable passion, and with whatever weapon lay to hand, whereas first-degree murder was premeditated and done in cold blood. Roughly speaking, if two men had a falling out on a downtown street corner and came to blows and one of them tore up a paving stone and hit the other over the head with it and the victim died of the blow, that was murder in the third degree. If they parted and one fellow then whipped out his knife and took out after the other and caught him down in the next block and stabbed him then and there, that was murder in the second degree. But if he went home and brooded on it overnight and next day loaded his gun and took a streetcar and rode across town and took aim and shot his victim through the window as he sat eating his breakfast, then that was murder in the first degree, premeditated and with malice aforethought.

Now the defendant in this case had been brooding for some nine months on his revenge. He had come halfway across the state of Texas on his grim mission. He had brought with him from home a fully loaded weapon merely to heft which required premeditation. He had been overheard and had confessed to rehearsing in preparation for his act of retribution here in the purlieus of their own peaceful and law-abiding community. This was surely intent to murder in the first degree, and for such determined bloody-mindedness nothing short of the maximum penalty under the law was thinkable: a stiff jail sentence, a heavy fine, an order of restraint, a bond to keep the peace, confiscation of the man's weapon, and payment of court costs.

He cautioned the jury against any attempt on the part of the counsel for the defense to claim for his client the extenuation of “cooling time.”
*
That the accused was an injured man no one would deny. To steal a man's son was no light provocation. But nine months was time enough for any man to cool down, especially one who had admitted on the stand that it had taken the theft of his son to teach him to appreciate him.

He also foresaw and warned against the possibility that counsel for the defense might take a different line, and raise the question of the posture and attitude of the intended victim at the moment of the commission of the act of which his client stood accused of the intent. In other words, he might suggest that it was reasonable to doubt that Will Vinson was just going to stand and let his client shoot at him like a bottle on a stump. That what his client was guilty of at most was intent to kill in self-defense. This, he cautioned the jury, lay in the realm of pure conjecture. None of them knew Will Vinson. None could predict what he might or might not do. They were not there to try Will Vinson. Moreover, on the basis of the evidence and the testimony which they had heard, there was no reason whatsoever to suppose that Samuel Ordway was the sort of man to give Will Vinson a fighting chance to draw and defend himself. This was not the way of the Samuel Ordways.

“Let us,” he said, “enact this intended, this as yet uncommitted, this still-preventable murder. Time: we'll say six months from now” (an estimate at which my grandfather could scarce repress a groan). “Place: a small town on the Texas-New Mexico border” (another near groan from my grandfather). “Towards nightfall a man stands looking down from a bluff onto the town where he has reason to believe his long, long trail has come at last to its end, its sanguinary end. Bearded and in rags, his eyes glazed with an animal hatred, steadily mumbling to himself, does he, on entering the town, report the suspected presence of the man who has wronged him to the local authorities? No, gentlemen. There is not enough disrespect for the law in Texas but this Samuel Ordway has got to add his bit. He has come a thousand miles for this one moment. He has not eaten in days. He is afoot, having sold his horse to continue his mad quest, and walked the last seventy-five miles over burning sands. Through rain and shine, blizzards and tornadoes, through hunger and thirst he has come. Now he takes out his pistol.” The prosecutor picked up the pistol. “He checks the cylinder. It is fully loaded. Five shots. And he intends to use them all. He smiles a cruel, a pitiless smile. He hardly remembers any more the original cause of his quarrel with the man he seeks. That he has a little boy, he has all but forgotten that. Now he finds his way to the home of his victim. He creeps to the wall of the house. He peers through the window. There, unsuspecting, unarmed, sits the object of his hatred. He takes aim. He cocks the pistol.” The prosecutor suited his actions to these words. That is, he aimed the pistol at the window. But cocking it gave him some little difficulty. He tried again, repeating, “He cocks his pistol.” No go; the hammer was stuck. With both hands he tried again, saying between clenched teeth, “He cocks his pistol.” By now out of at least a hundred hip pockets pistols of every caliber had appeared and were being waved in the air. “Here, Ed, try mine!” “Hurry, goddammit, 'fore the bastard gets away!” “Here, have a shot at him with mine, Ed!” voices cried.

Boom!
There was a shattering roar and the prosecuting attorney disappeared in a cloud of smoke. He came staggering out, coughing, pistol pointed towards the ceiling from the recoil. There was a moment's silence. Then from the rear of the courtroom came, in a disgusted voice, “Hellfire, Ed. You missed him a country mile.”

Mr. Parker's defense was brevity itself. A famous jurist of the state, he began, had said that in a Texas murder trial the first thing to be established was whether or not the deceased ought to have departed. He believed, he concluded, that the same principle should apply in cases of intent to kill.

The jury, out ninety seconds, returned a verdict of not guilty, plus a pool of thirty-six dollars to be presented to the acquitted with which to buy himself a more reliable firearm.

Dallas is the capital of East Texas. Cotton town. Market for dirt farmers' crops. Fort Worth, just thirty miles away, is the capital of West Texas, a stock breeders' and cattle ranchers' town. Men in Dallas are much like men everywhere. They wear shoes. Those in Fort Worth wear high-heeled boots and walk bowlegged. “Where the West begins,” is the way Fort Worth advertises herself. There you leave the blackland prairies and launch upon the plains. Looking back, you can see the sparse low timberline receding like a shore, like a continent's end. Looking ahead, you can see nothing.

Onto the plains you issue as onto a lighted stage, and with that sudden sense of isolation and exposure. The farther behind you leave the now-familiar prairie, the fewer people you see, the stronger grows the sensation of being watched. The silence sharpens the ear, the emptiness the eye. An ambiguous, double sensation comes over you: you feel at once taller, a very tall man, and smaller, a very small creature. The changeable winds pass and repass over the dry grass with a sound like shifting sands, and running before the wind, the grass turns its nap, first this way then that way, like velvet pile when a hand is run idly back and forth over it. Flat as a marble floor, the land stretches away empty and endless as the bare boundless sky above. The eye strains ahead for a landmark, a rooftop, a spire, a tree, anything vertical, anything that thrusts above the brown level monotony.

Looked at long enough—and once embarked upon it, you look for a long, long time—the land will seem to exhibit that phenomenon called
seiche
, to rock slowly from side to side like the wallowing of a lake. That, and the absence of objects to relate yourself to, bring on land-sickness. Even the sun gives no direction, but hangs straight overhead all day, as if uncertain of the way. Under moonlight the plain whitens like an arctic snowfield. When you do see a man you first see him at such a distance that he is like a fly crawling on a tabletop. There is no horizon. Rather, there is horizon everywhere. The horizon is created whenever something or somebody stands up somewhere in the landscape. Then where a rooftop rises, the barren eye eagerly draws all lines towards it. You see clouds underneath the belly of a cow, see the sky winking between the legs of a walking man. It is a place without perspective, and things thrust themselves up isolated, unsurrounded by any of the close familiar objects by which one judges distances and size; and so the eye, as if out of focus, cannot judge, cannot relate it: is that a child nearby or a man far off, a haystack or a hummock, an insect or a bird—or nothing at all, a mirage? And because you have any landmark or person for so long in view, nor ever lose it, or him, under a hill or behind a bend, you seem to take forever getting there, and time hangs suspended and unreal. And yet when you finally reach the place no time has elapsed, for across that unarched plain of a sky the sun inches along and it is noon all day. Across the plain west from Fort Worth the road runs straight as the line left when a woman pulls out a thread to cut a piece of cloth along.