Read Online A Covenant with Death by Stephen Becker - Free Book Online

forty-five minutes. Edgar said it was easy because most of them were uncontested. One was interesting, granted to a woman who had been dragged out of her house in Goose Creek the previous January and flogged by five men in disguise. “Damned cowards,” Edgar said. “The Klan, I bet. Like those Chinese bandits. Know what they did last week?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThey held up a train and took three prisoners, and then threw them off a cliff as a warning, because they think the government’s stalling on the ransom for those captives. Damned cowards. There was an earthquake in Quito. Lot of people killed. I didn’t know Talbot wore a wrist watch.”
    â€œYes,” I said. “And a straw hat.”
    â€œHe could appeal if he had to,” Edgar said. “Can’t get a fair trial in Soledad City if you wear a wrist watch and a straw hat. Smokes cigarettes too. Prejudiced jury. Damned cowards.”
    â€œYou’re behind the times,” I said. “Wrist watches are all right now. Since the war. Hardly the place for those old turnips. And a lot of people smoke cigarettes. Anyway an appeal is mandatory if he’s convicted.”
    â€œCoffin nails,” he said. “You know the best story this week?”
    â€œWhat?” The courtroom was almost full.
    â€œHarding appointed a colored man to be collector of customs in New Orleans, and the Louisiana authorities wouldn’t stand for it and made him quit. So Harding reappointed him. That’s pretty good for the old boy, hey? And the best part of it is the man’s name.” I waited. Edgar grinned. “Walter Cohen. Isn’t that something?”
    â€œI don’t believe it.”
    â€œGod’s truth,” he said. “Walter Cohen. Those Louisiana people have no poetry, that’s all. If they throw him out again, let’s give him a job here.”
    â€œOr send them Geronimo,” I said, and Edgar whooped gleefully as Harvey Bump stood up.
    Now this trial, and my account of it, need some gloss. A good trial is, as you know, consummate drama. It helps a drama if there is a triangle (Agamemnon, Achilles, Briseis) or if the crime is Everyman’s secret dream (Oedipus) or if there is a radical involved, a free mind in Brownian motion against the walls of the tin box called society (Socrates). But only one trial in a thousand is even interesting, unless you care for arcana, the priesthood of lawyers performing before the hallowed symbols (flag, Bible, robes, water pitcher) and chanting ferociously in a dead language. Otherwise the usual trial is a contest in chicanery, but at least it is a contest, and chicanery is often less inconvenient than unchecked crime. And even the dullest trial pits man against man, mind (however shallow) against mind, and is therefore a diversion, not as exciting as a good cockfight but superior to whist. The presumption of innocence, politely maintained even in the face of absolutely Euclidian demonstration, makes the contest.
    But in its undercurrents Bryan Talbot’s trial was not so much a diversion as a community bloodletting. Parmelee could not have foreseen how sharply the town would react. For the space of three or four days all the normal hostilities of an American town were translated into the language of Bryan Talbot’s alleged crime. And those hostilities were not merely the platitudinous frictions of a mongrel population; they were, suddenly and astonishingly, open passion. Or so it seemed to me. An outsider might have seen the gloating and gossiping and horrified repugnance as the normal reactions of placid burghers to a crime that repelled and attracted them equally. But watching the watchers I sensed more. A deep pleasure, for example, among the Mexicans because this monster was a gringo and a Protestant, and the Mexicans had lived through generations here knowing that to Talbot’s kind a Mexican was not simply a Mexican but the embodiment of