Chapter 7
Left
He had not broken his neck.
That was the first thing he understood, lying on his back in the dust with his eyes full of grit and a great gray roaring in his ears. His neck was all right. His head was all right, though it rang. He lay and counted what he could feel, as a person does after a car crash, from the toes upward. Toes. Ankles. Knees. A sharp hot pain in the right ankle that he did not care for. His back. His ribs, on the right, where something had struck him a flat blow, and where each breath, as it went in, ended in a short bright knife.
Four, he thought. Maybe five.
He tore the hood off. It had come half away in the fall. Dust blew into his face, and he coughed, and the cough went through his side like a nail, and he lay still with his mouth open, gasping, while the lamps swam into focus overhead.
He was at the bottom of the pit.
It was a long way up. The great girder ran across the dark like a black bar, and the pale faces looked down from the edge of the landing, small and white, like faces on a cinema screen. Somebody was shouting. A rope came snaking down.
He found that he could move his hands. He was lying on a mattress of soft black dust with a bed spring digging into his hip. He turned his head. A few feet from his face stood an old brown filing cabinet, with a drawer pulled out. In the drawer lay a rusted tin sign that had once hung on a wall. He read it slowly, in the way one reads in a dream.
MARLOW COUNTY COURTHOUSE ANNEX. ERECTED 1931. NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT ON COURT BUSINESS.
He lay and looked at it.
I know that sign, he thought. And then, with a small cold precise shock, like a coin dropped in a well: I've always known it. I've known where I was since the bus shelter.
He closed his eyes.
They got him up by the stair.
It was Frank and Tom who came down, on a ladder that Tom had found chained to a pillar. They did it badly. Daniel was a hundred and eighty pounds and could not stand, and the ladder was thirty years old, and every rung shook. Tom took his shoulders. Frank took his legs. They carried him up the stone steps in a sort of low sideways shuffle, with his head lolling and his breath whistling, and at the top, in the corridor, they laid him on the floor and stood panting like men who have moved a piano.
Helen Marsh knelt beside him.
She did it with difficulty. She had one hand pressed to her side, and the other on the wall. Her face was gray. But she put two fingers on his neck, and looked at his eyes, and laid the flat of her hand, lightly, on his ribs. He cried out.
"Right side," she said. "Not all of them. I'd say three. Maybe four." She was breathing in short rough gasps. "You're lucky. If one had gone through, you'd be spitting blood. Are you spitting blood?"
"No."
"Do you feel sick?"
"A bit."
"That's the pain. Don't try to sit up. Breathe in as far as it lets you. Small breaths. Keep doing it. If you don't, you'll get what I've got."
"What's that?" said Daniel.
She looked at him over her glasses with a dry expression, and he realized that it was a joke. It was an extremely feeble one. They both laughed, and it hurt so much that he saw white stars.
"Don't," said Helen. "Please. Don't."
"Sorry."
"My ribs would give out. And then where would we be?"
Over her shoulder, he could see them, standing in a half circle in the corridor. Greg, with his back to the wall. Ray, with his bandaged hand held against his chest and his eyes shut. Frank, sour and stiff and breathing hard. Tom, big and anxious and gray. And at the very back, as far from the rest as the corridor allowed, with her arms wrapped round herself and her face turned down, Nora.
She had not come near.
She was crying. It was not loud. She stood with her chin on her chest and her shoulders shaking, and the tears ran down off the end of her nose and fell on the front of her scrubs, and she did not wipe them. She was a long way away. He felt the distance, between them, like a cold space on his skin.
"Daniel," said Nora. "I'm so sorry."
Nobody spoke.
"I didn't, I swear to you. It wasn't, I didn't mean it. I got it wrong."
They put him in the lounge, on the sofa.
It was a battered green one with a spring that dug in. They propped him up with a pile of cushions and put a glass of water in his hand and a blanket over his legs. He sat very still, breathing in small shallow sips of air. The ankle was swelling inside his boot. Tom cut the boot off with a kitchen knife.
It was one o'clock. The strip light buzzed. The little black screen rose out of the table in the jury room, as it did every hour, to show them the clock and the child. They had gone to look, in a silent bunch, and then come back. Daniel had not gone. He had not wanted to see the numbers. He knew what they would say.
Two hours.
She's lost two hours because I stepped.
"Say it," said Frank Ross.
He stood in the middle of the lounge with his arms folded, and he was not looking at Daniel. He was looking at Nora. She sat on the end of a cot with her hands tight together between her knees and her face to the floor.
"Say what?" she said.
"What happened. I was there. I heard it. I want to hear you say it to him."
"I told him left."
"After you told him right."
"I got confused."
"You got confused."
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was looking at him, and I was thinking, he's walking toward me, and it's, I was facing him. It's backward, from there. My left is his right." She drew a sharp breath. "I know how it sounds. I know. But it, it is. When you stand opposite someone it flips. It's the first thing they teach you when you're moving a patient. You say your left, not my left. I forgot. I said left and I meant my left, and I thought, oh God, he's — and I tried to fix it, and I made it worse. I looked at the beam, and the cut one was on, it was on my right, so I said, and then I thought, no, it's the, I couldn't think. I said left because I thought I'd said right and it was the wrong one."
"Say it again," said Greg.
"I can't. I don't know how to say it better."
"Because it sounds like a lie."
"Greg," said Helen.
"It sounds like a lie to me! I was there. She said right. She said no. She said left in a different voice. I've been selling cars for twenty-six years, I know a voice when it, she knew what she was doing."
"Then why did she cry?" said Tom.
"Because she got caught."
"She was crying before. Before he stepped. I could see her. I was standing right by the rail." He had gone red. "She was crying on the far side, with her hand over her mouth. She looked like somebody was pulling a tooth."
"That's a performance."
"It's a girl," said Tom.
They all stopped. It was a rare thing for him to raise his voice, and it had a heavy, slow, obstinate force. He stood with his big hands hanging, and they all looked at him.
"I'm not saying she didn't make a mistake," he said. "I'm saying she made one. There's a difference. I've seen a lot of people do a lot of things on the stand. I've seen a man lie for two hours with a perfectly straight face, and I've seen a boy tell the truth while he was sick on the floor. You don't have to be a judge to tell which is which." He looked at her. "I don't think she meant it."
Nora raised her head.
Her face was blotched and wet, and her eyes, in the light of the strip, were very large, dark and red-rimmed. She looked at Tom with an expression of such open, aching gratitude that Daniel found he could not look at it.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don't thank me."
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"Daniel," said Helen. "You were there. You were on the beam. What do you think?"
He did not answer at once.
He had thought it over a good many times already, with his eyes shut. He had gone back over it, step by step. Right. No. Left. He had remembered the way her voice had changed. He had remembered what he had seen, before the hood, with his own eyes. And he had remembered the thing he could not tell any of them.
I knew.
I stood there and I knew it was the wrong arm, and I stepped.
Because the clock was four hours, and I thought I could be wrong.
Because I wanted to believe her.
"I think," he said slowly, "that she's telling the truth."
"Do you?" said Greg.
"I think she believes it."
"That's not the same thing."
"No." He kept his eyes on Nora. "It isn't. But I'm not going to say it's more than that. I don't know. I don't know what I'd have done."
She was looking at him as if he had hit her.
"You don't have to forgive me," she said.
"I haven't."
"Okay."
"I haven't decided." He lay back against the cushions. It hurt to breathe. "I'll tell you when I have."
It was, he thought afterward, the cruelest thing he could have said, and the truest. She nodded. She sat very straight on the end of the cot. She did not ask for anything more.
It was Helen who spoke to Frank.
She did it at about three, in the corridor. Daniel was asleep, or near it, lying on the sofa with his eyes half open, and he heard it through the door, in the way you hear things from a long way down in water. She was leaning against the wall. Her voice was low and rough.
"Frank. We ought to have this out."
"We ought to have what out?"
"You know me."
"I know you."
"You know exactly who I am. You've known since the first hour. You've been very careful, looking at me, to look at everything else." A pause. "I've been doing the same. It's a very good method. You can do it for about a day."
There was a long, slow, dragging silence.
"I testified in front of you," said Frank, at last. "Nine, ten years back."
"Nine."
"Superior Court. Courtroom Two. You were sitting at the table, in a gray suit. You had a bottle in your bag."
"I did."
"I thought, I'll have her for breakfast."
"You did."
"I did not, as it happens."
"No," said Helen. "I'm afraid I didn't give you the chance."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that nobody asked you the right question. And I'm saying that you've been sitting at that table for three days, with a face like a, like a closed shop, and every time somebody says what do we have in common, you get up and look at the door." She coughed. It was a long, tearing, dreadful sound, and when it stopped she said, unsteadily, "I don't think either of us is going to be able to avoid it."
"I'm not saying anything."
"No. I don't suppose you are."
"It was a long time ago."
"It's always a long time ago," said Helen.
He heard footsteps, slow and heavy. A door shut.
He lay still on the sofa, looking at the ceiling, which had a long brown crack in it like a river on a map. He thought of what Frank Ross had said. Courtroom Two. Nine, ten years back.
Courtroom Two.
He did not let himself finish it.
At six the speakers woke.
It was a long evening, and they had not eaten. Someone had made sandwiches, and left them on a plate. Someone else had opened a can of soup and left it to go cold. They sat round the long oak table in the jury room, the seven of them, in the strip light, not talking, like the last guests at a party that has gone on too long.
Daniel was in the chair at the head. He had insisted. He could not bear the sofa. Helen had bound his ribs with a torn sheet and said that if he'd rather suffer, that was up to him, and Tom had made a kind of splint for the ankle out of two table knives and a sock. He sat propped upright with his hands flat on the oak. Every breath was a small deliberate act.
Six o'clock, he thought. Thursday.
Forty-four hours.
"Good evening," said White.
Nobody jumped. They had all been waiting for it. It was an extraordinary thing, he thought, how quickly the mind makes room for horror. Thirty hours ago they had screamed. Now they only looked up, with the weary politeness of people at a meeting.
"For the record," said the voice, "I regret that Mr. Wells has been hurt. I should like it noted that I did not intend it to be so severe." It paused. "The Crossing was a fair game. It was lost. The clock has paid its price. I think we may agree that the court was not unkind."
"Not unkind," said Greg, bitterly.
"I did say I would not lie to you about the costs."
"You made a child pay for it."
"I made nothing. Mr. Wells made a decision. He chose his guide, and the guide made a choice, and the game followed." The voice was level. "I find, Mr. Pruitt, that the people who say you made a child pay are very seldom people who ask what the child would have wished."
Nobody answered.
"I'd like to say something to Mr. Wells," said White.
Daniel lifted his head.
"I wonder how you are feeling. Not the ribs. I mean the other thing. I think you stood on that beam knowing it was wrong." The voice was gentle, almost kind. It might have been talking to a patient. "I think you saw the cut arm. I think you remembered. And I think you stepped anyway, because a number on a clock said four, and because you wanted, very much, for it to be someone else's mistake."
The room was perfectly still.
"That's called a reason," said White. "It is the commonest thing in the world. I do not say it unkindly. I say it because you will want to remember it, later. When it comes to the other thing."
"What other thing?" said Frank.
"Mr. Wells knows."
"I don't know what you're talking about," said Daniel.
"No. Of course. You are tired and in pain, and I'm being obscure." A faint sound, a small dry click, as of a man putting down a pencil. "I will be plainer. Your wife kept her recipes in a blue tin, Mr. Wells. It had a lighthouse painted on the lid. It sat on the top shelf in your pantry, behind the pickles, for nine years."
Daniel did not breathe.
"I'm sorry I took what you had put in it. I should have asked. I'll give it back to you." The voice went on, kind and reasonable. "It is safe. It is waiting in Courtroom Two, on a table, under a lamp. I think you will know the room."
"What's in the tin?" said Greg.
He had half risen. He was staring at Daniel. They were all staring. They were all, he saw, suddenly very quiet, very still, and very close, like a bunch of people who have been standing on a pier and have just heard something move in the water below.
"A piece of paper," said Daniel.
"What paper?"
"It's nothing. It's, it was my wife's. It was a recipe."
"It was not a recipe," said White, softly.
"Daniel," said Helen.
He looked down. His hands lay flat on the oak, one on each side of the white king, and they were steady. It was an odd thing. He felt as if the whole room had receded to a great distance. In the middle of it, small and clear and unavoidable, was one fact. He had told nobody. He had not told Anna, because he'd not yet had it to tell. He had told no friend, no priest, no lawyer. He'd put it in a tin and shut the lid. And nine years later, in a condemned courthouse, a voice on a wall had said the word lighthouse in front of six strangers, and the strangers had heard.
Courtroom Two.
I think you will know the room.
"I don't know what he means," he said.
It was the second lie of the day, and it was worse than the first.
"For the record," said White, "he does."