Alex Cross’s Trial

Abraham reached out and pushed the gun barrel away. Moody pulled back from him as if he were trying to take away her doll.

“She’s your granddaughter?”

“That’s right.”

It struck me that the girl had seemed as willing to shoot her grandfather as to shoot me. She walked boldly up to me, around me, looking me over as if I represented some species of animal she had never observed before and already didn’t like.

“Mr. Corbett is here from Washington,” said Abraham.

“You working for him?” said Moody. “Why would you?”

“We working together,” said Abraham.

“Well, if you ain’t working for him, how come he calls you Abraham, and you call him Mr. Corbett?”

“Because he prefers it that way.” Abraham knew that wasn’t so, but he fixed me in place with a look that stifled the protest in my throat. “Mr. Corbett is here by the instructions of the president of the-”

“Abraham,” I said. “We’re not supposed to talk about any of this.”

He nodded, dipped his head. “You are right, Mr. Corbett,” he said.

Moody gave me a disgusted look and said, “You should have let me shoot him while I had the chance.”

Chapter 36

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, gumbo was not something most white people would eat, unless they were Catholic and lived down on the coast. Gumbo was food for black people, or Creole people. Like chitlins and hog ears, it was the kind of thing mostly eaten out of necessity. Or so most people thought. My mother’s cook, Aurelia, used to whip up a big pot of sausage-and-crawfish gumbo and leave it to feed us through Friday, her day off.

So when Abraham suggested we stop in at a little gray shanty of a saloon with a crooked sign on the door, GUMBO JOE’S, I was a happy man. Also along for the meal was Moody and her brother Hiram, a handsome boy of nineteen with aspirations to be a lawyer.

I was surprised at the idea of a Negro restaurant in Eudora, but when I stepped inside the place, I saw it was 95 percent saloon, with a little cooker perched beside the open window in back. On the flame sat a bubbling pot.

An old black man came out from behind the rickety bar. I couldn’t help flinching at the sight of him: he had no chin, and his right arm was severed just below the elbow.

Without our asking, he brought three small glasses and a bottle of beer. “Y’all want gumbo?”

“We do,” said Abraham.

So much for a menu.

Abraham poured beer into all three glasses, and I took one. It wasn’t cold, but it tasted real good.

“What happened to that man?” I said softly.

“The war,” said Abraham. He explained that the old man had been a cook for Pemberton’s army at Vicksburg. The Yankee mortar shell that crashed through the mess tent was no respecter of color or rank.

“He lost half his face fighting for the side that was trying to keep him a slave,” I said.

“Wasn’t fighting, he was cooking,” said Abraham. “A lot of us did. The pay was good. Better than we got staying home. Those was good times, if you didn’t get killed.”

The War between the States had been officially over for forty-three years but had never actually ended in the South. The Confederate battle flag still flew higher than Old Glory, at least at our courthouse. There were Rebel flags hanging on the fronts of stores and from the flagpoles of churches. Ever since I was a boy I had recognized the old faded butternut cap as the sign of a Confederate veteran.

There had always been men with wooden legs or wooden crutches. I knew that an empty sleeve pinned up inside a suit jacket meant an arm had been left on a battlefield in Georgia or Tennessee. Maybelle’s handyman, otherwise a handsome old gent, had a left eye sewn shut with orange twine. The skin around that eye burned to a god-awful dry red that would have scared me if I’d been a child.

“That old man behind the bar?” said Abraham. “Before the war, he was trying to become a professional fiddler.”

I shook my head. “And now he has no chin to lean his fiddle on,” I said.

Abraham’s face broke open in a big smile. So did Moody’s and her brother’s. “Aw now, Mr. Corbett, I was fooling on you. Old Jeffrey wasn’t no fiddler. He was slingin’ beer back before the war, and he been slingin’ beer ever since.”

Moody saw the look on my face and busted out with a guffaw. “Papaw, Mr. Corbett ain’t too swift, is he?”

Chapter 37

THE CHINLESS OLD MAN RETURNED, bearing in his good hand a tray with three steaming bowls of dark gumbo.

“Look like we maybe gonna have some music too,” Hiram said, and his face lit up in a smile.

Two or three men had drifted in, still shiny-sweaty from the field. They ordered beers and shot nervous looks in our direction. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how out of place I was in here. It was the Negroes’ place; who was I to come in and sit down as if I belonged?

At least they had the courtesy to let me sit there, which would certainly not be the case if one of them tried to order a beer in a white barroom.