Lay Down My Sword and Shield

  “All right, I’ll try to file an appeal. It takes time, but maybe with luck I can spring you on bond.”

  He took another cigarette from his shirt pocket, popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail, and lit it. The scar tissue around his eye was yellow in the flame. “A year ago I was ready to charge the hill with a bayonet in my teeth. Corporal Gomez going over the top like gangbusters with a flamethrower. I was ready to build life in the pen for our union, but three months in lockdown here, man, it leaves a dent. Every night when that bastard sticks a plate of grits and fried baloney through the slit I say hello to his fingernails.”

  “You know what you’re doing is crazy, don’t you?”

  “Why? Because we’re tired of getting shit on?”

  “These people have lived one way for a hundred and fifty years,” I said. “You can’t make them change with a picket sign.”

  His face sharpened, and his yellow-stained fingers pressed down on the cigarette.

  “Yeah, we been eating their shit for just about that long. But we ain’t going that route no more. We got more people than the Anglos, and this land belonged to us before their white ass ever got on it.”

  “You can’t alter historical injustice in the present. You’re only putting yourself and your people up against an executioner’s wall.”

  “You can jive about all that college bullshit you want, but we been picking your cotton for six cents a pound. You ever do stoop labor? Your back feels like a ball of fire by noon, and at night you got to sleep on the floor to iron out your spine. All you Anglos are so fucking innocent. You got the answers counted out in your palm like pennies. You march off every Christmas and hand out food baskets to the niggers and greaseballs, and then for the next twelve months you congratulate yourself on your Christianity.”

  He drew in on the cigarette and pushed his long black hair out of his face. He looked at the table and breathed the smoke out between his lips. “Okay, man, I’m sorry. I sit in my cell all day and think, and I don’t get to talk with nobody except the hack. So I just made you my dartboard.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “But learn something about our union before you start to piss on us.”

  “All right.”

  “Like maybe we ain’t just a bunch of uppity niggers.”

  “The deputy’s going to be back in a minute.”

  “Look, watch out for that motherfucker. The other night one of the blacks started screaming in the tank with the d.t.’s, and he kicked him in the head. I think he’s a Bircher, and the guys in here say he’s got a bad conduct discharge from the Corps for crippling a guy in the brig.”

  “Okay, let’s finish before he gets back. Were there any Mexicans on the jury?”

  “What world do you live in, man?”

  “We can use jury selection in an appeal, even though I’d rather hang them on the charge itself. I’ll have to get a transcript of the trial and talk with your lawyer.”

  “Don’t fool with him. I told you he wouldn’t pour water on me if I was burning. He’s a little fat guy with a bald head, he owns five hundred acres of blackland, and he thinks I was brainwashed in Korea. When I asked him about an appeal he chewed on his pipe and farted.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “That’s Mr. Cecil Wayne Posey. His office is right across the street.”

  “Why didn’t you write me before the trial?”

  “I don’t like to bruise old friends.”

  “Well, you sure picked a shitty time to bring in a relief pitcher.”

  “You’re a good man, Hack. I trust your arm.”

  I heard the stairway door slam and the deputy walking down the stone corridor in his brogans.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “You want anything?”

  “No, just watch after yourself in town. They’re pissed, and that southern accent of yours won’t help you none when they find out you’re working with our union.”

  “I don’t think they’ll roll a congressional candidate around too hard.”

  “I mean it, Hack. They don’t give a damn who you are. We stepped on their balls with a golf shoe. There ain’t been any Klan activity here since the 1920s, and last week they burned a cross on an island in the middle of the river. You better keep your head down, buddy.”

  Art lit another cigarette off the butt while the deputy unlocked the cage.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “Yeah, stay solid, cousin.”

  I looked at the black soles of his bare feet as the deputy led him back to his cell. The deputy clanged the door shut, shot the bolt, and stared at me with a fixed gaze while I tore the cellophane wrapper off a cigar. I bit the end off and spit it on the floor. I could feel his hot eyes reaching me through the wire screen. He rattled his change in one pocket with his hand.

  “You want to get out of here this morning, Mr. Holland?” he said.

  Upstairs by the office door a girl leaned against the wall with a carton of cigarettes in her hand. She wore sandals, bleached blue jeans, and a maroon blouse tied in a knot under her breasts. She had on large, amber sunglasses, hoop earrings, and a thin strand of Indian beads around her neck. Her skin was brown, her body lithe and relaxed, and her curly brown hair was burned on the ends by the sun. Her eyes were indifferent through her glasses as she looked at me and the deputy.

  “Would you give these to Art Gomez, please?” she said. Her voice was level, withdrawn, almost without tone.

  The deputy took the carton of cigarettes and dropped it in his desk drawer without answering. He sat down in his chair and began to sharpen a pencil with his pocketknife into the wastebasket. I knew that each stroke of that knife was cutting into his own resentment at the restraint his job forced upon him in dealing with a hippie girl and a slick, outside lawyer. He bent over his traffic forms, his knuckles white on the pencil, and began to print out his report as though we were not there.

  The girl walked back toward the entrance. There was a pale line of skin above the back of her blue jeans, and her bottom had the natural, easy rhythm that most women try to learn for a lifetime. Everything in her was smooth and loose, and her motion had the type of cool unconcern that bothers you in some vague place in the back of your mind.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She turned around, framed in the square of yellow light through the entrance, and looked at me. She wore no makeup, and in the black shadow over her face she looked like a nun in church suddenly disturbed from prayer.

  “I expect you work with Art’s union. My name’s Hack Holland. I’m trying to file an appeal for Art before he goes up to prison.”

  She remained immobile in the light.

  “I’d like to meet some of the people in your union,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “Because I don’t know anybody in this town and I might need a little help.”

  “There’s nothing we can do for you.”

  “Why don’t you give me a chance to see?”

  “You’re wasting your time, man.”

  “I’d like to see Art out in the next light-year, and from what I understand so far I can’t expect any help from his lawyer, the court, or the clerk of records. So I can either wander around town a few more days and talk with people like the deputy in there or cowboys in the beer joint, or I can meet someone who’ll tell me what happened on that picket line.”

  “We told what happened.”

  “You told it in a local trial court that was prejudiced. I’m going to take the case to the Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin.”

  “What’s your thing with Art?”

  “We were in Korea together.”

  “You can’t do any good for him. The A.C.L.U. has had our cases in Austin before.”

  “Maybe I’m a better lawyer,” I said.

  “Believe it, man, you’ve got a bum trip in mind.”

  “I believe in the banzai ethic. At least I’ll leave a dark burn across the sky when I go down.”

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p; “You ought to find a better way to pay back army debts.”

  “I was a Navy corpsman, and I paid off all my debts before I was discharged.”

  She turned back into the light to walk outside.

  “Do you want a ride?” I said.

  “I’ll walk.”

  “You don’t want to miss a good experience with the most arrested driver in Texas. Besides, I need some directions.”

  “Stay away from our union headquarters if you want to help Art.”

  “I don’t expect that we’ll all end up in the penitentiary if I drive you home.”

  We walked down the courthouse sidewalk under the shade of the oak trees to my automobile. The sun had risen high in the sky, and the tar surfacing on the street was hot and soft under our feet. The heat shimmered off the concrete walk in front of the hotel.

  We drove into the Negro and Mexican section back of town. The dirt roads were baked hard as rock, and clouds of dust swept up behind my car. The unpainted wood shacks were pushed into one another at odd angles, the ditches strewn with garbage, and the outhouses were built of discarded boards, R.C. Cola signs, and tar paper.

  “I have to see Art’s lawyer after I drop you off, but I’ll come back a little later,” I said.

  “I thought you didn’t expect any help from him.”

  “I don’t, but maybe I can use inadequate defense as a reason for appeal.”

  She took a package of cigarettes from her blue-jeans pocket and lit one. I glanced at the smooth curve of her breasts as she pushed the package back in her pocket.

  “You’re pretty sure I’ve got a loser, aren’t you?” I said.

  “I just don’t think you know very much about the county you’re working in.”

  “So you’re up against some cotton growers who don’t want to pay union scale, and a few part-time Klansmen. And you’ve met a redneck deputy sheriff who probably rents his brains by the week. That doesn’t change the law or trial procedure.”

  “Wow. You must walk into court with a copy of the National Review between your teeth.”

  “I’ve had eight years of law practice, babe, and I haven’t lost many cases.”

  “I don’t believe you’ve dealt very much with union farmworkers, either.”

  “I’ve spent all my life in Texas. I don’t expect to find out anything very new about it in this case.”

  “Don’t you realize the rules in your court don’t apply to us? Art’s jury brought in a guilty verdict in fifteen minutes, and later the foreman said it took them that long because they sent out for some cold drinks.”

  “All right, I can use things just like that in the appeal.”

  “I’m not kidding you, man; lose some of those comic-book attitudes if you want to do anything for him,” she said.

  “You really know how to turn on the burner, don’t you?”

  “I’m just telling you about the bag you’re trying to pick up.”

  “You’re a hard girl.”

  “Do I get that free with the ride home?” The sunlight through the window was bright on the burned ends of her hair. She had her arm back on the seat while she smoked, and I could see the whiteness at the top of her breasts.

  “You’re not from Texas. What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Would you like to flip through the celluloid windows in my wallet?”

  “It’s just a question.”

  “It seems like an expensive trip home.”

  “Maybe I should put on my chauffeur’s cap, and you can sit in the backseat and I’ll close the glass behind me.”

  “I was a graduate student in social work at Berkeley. I got tired of writing abstract papers about hungry people so I joined the Third World and came out to your lovely state.”

  I hit a chuckhole in the road and felt the car slam down on its springs. The dust was so heavy that it had started to filter through the air-conditioning system. Two Negro children were running along the edge of a ditch, throwing stones at an emaciated dog scabbed over with mange. The road reached a dead end in front of a converted general store with a sign above the door that read UNITED FARM WORKERS LOCAL 476. The glass display windows were yellow and pocked with BB holes, and filmed with dirt on the inside and outside. Strips of Montgomery Ward brick had been nailed over the rotted boards in the walls, the steps had collapsed, cinder blocks were propped under one side of the building to keep it from sagging, and I could almost hear the flies humming around the outhouse in back. A boy of about nineteen, barefoot and without a shirt, sat on the front porch playing a twelve-string Gibson guitar.

  “Don’t wrinkle your eyes at it, man,” she said. “We’re lucky we could rent anything in this town.”

  “I didn’t say a thing.”

  “I could hear the tumblers click over in your head. You’ve got the middle-class hygiene thing. Anything except green lawns and red brick sends you running up the street.”

  “That’s a lot of shit.”

  “Okay. Thanks for the ride.”

  She closed the door and walked down the dusty path to the building. I watched the motion of her hips and her full thighs as she stepped up on the porch, then I turned the Cadillac in a circle and headed back toward town.

  I went to Mr. Cecil Wayne Posey’s office and was told by his junior partner that I could find him at home. His ranch was all blackland, lined with rows of cotton and corn and orange trees. A dozen Mexicans and Negroes were hoeing in the cotton, and horses stood in the groves of live oak trees on the low hills. The large, one-story house had new white paint and a wide screened-in porch, and poplar trees were planted along the front lane. There were two great red barns in back with lightning rods and weather vanes on the peaks, a windmill pumping water into a trough, and rolls of barbed wire and cords of cedar posts stacked against a tractor shed.

  As I walked up the lane I heard a woodpecker rattling against a dead limb in the heat. Mr. Posey rose from his round-backed wicker chair on the porch and shook hands. The lower portion of his stomach was swollen all the way across the front of his pants. His skin was soft, pudgy to the touch, and his head was almost completely bald except for a few short gray hairs. His eyes were colorless, and his voice had the bland quality of oatmeal. He reminded me of a miniature, upended white whale. When he sat down the watch in his pocket bulged against the cloth like a hard biscuit.

  A Negro maid in a lace-trimmed apron served us iced tea with mint leaves and slices of lemon on a silver service, then I began quietly to press Mr. Posey for his reasons in not filing an appeal for Art. Actually, my questions, or even my presence there, would probably be considered a violation of professionalism among attorneys, since I was indirectly implying that he had been negligent in the case; but the flicker of insult never showed in his eyes, and if his tone or the pale expression around his mouth indicated anything, it was simply that I was an idealistic young lawyer who had embarked on a fool’s errand. He lowered his face into the tea glass when he drank, and momentarily the moisture gave his lips a streak of color.

  “I didn’t feel there was basis for appeal, Mr. Holland,” he said. “I originally advised Art to plead guilty in hopes of a reduced charge, but he refused, and I doubt if the Court of Criminal Appeals will consider the case of a man who was convicted on the testimony of four Texas Rangers and two bystanders. He did hit the officer twice before he was restrained, and that’s the essential and inalterable fact of the case.”

  “Who were these bystanders?”

  “Two county workmen who were operating a grading machine on the road when the arrests were made.”

  I looked at him incredulously.

  “Did you feel these men were objective witnesses?” I said.

  “They had no interest in the issue. They merely stated what they saw.”

  “I understand that most of the people on the picket line testified, also.”

  “Unfortunately, most of them have been in local court before, and I’m afraid that their statements were overly familiar to the ju
ry. One young man admitted to the district attorney that he’d been three hundred yards away from the arrest, but he was sure that Art hadn’t struck the officer. It’s difficult to contest a conviction on evidence of that sort, Mr. Holland.”

  His face bent into the iced tea glass again, and a drop of perspiration rolled off his temple down his fat cheek. He shifted his buttocks in the wicker chair and crossed his legs. His massive, soft thighs stretched the crease in his slacks flat.

  “Art’s been organizing a farmworkers’ union in this county for the past year. Do you believe any members of the jury had preconceived feelings toward him?”

  “None that would affect the indictment against him. He was tried for assaulting a Texas Ranger, not for his involvement in a Mexican union.”

  I borrowed a match from Mr. Posey and lit a cigar. I looked at him through the curl of flame and smoke and wondered if he had any conception of his irresponsibility in allowing his client to be sentenced to five years in a case that would be considered laughable by a law school moot court.

  He put his empty pipe in the center of his teeth, drew in with a wet rattling sound, and farted softly in the back of the chair. I finished my tea, shook hands and thanked him for his help, and walked down the gravel path to my automobile under the trees. Behind me I heard him snap the metal latch into place on the screen door.

  I drove back to town and had lunch and two beers at the café, then spent an hour in the clerk of records office while an aged secretary made a Xerox copy of the trial transcript for me. There was no breeze through the windows, my sunglasses filmed with moisture in the humidity, and the electric fans did nothing but blow drafts of hot air across the room. The deputy sheriff came in once to drop a pile of his penciled reports on the clerk’s desk, and as he walked past me he stared into my face without speaking.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel, with my feet propped in the window, reading the transcript and sipping whiskey poured over ice. The flies droned dully in the stillness, and occasionally I would hear the hillbilly music from the beer tavern. Across the square the sun slanted on the rows of watermelons and cantaloupes in the open-air fruit market.