The Steadfast Heart/Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
The village of Rainbow was in a valley, as all villages should be, with a clean, rapidly-running river passing through its midst and cutting it into the East Side and the West Side for purposes of local rivalry. You lived on one Hill or the other—if you made any pretense to living in the right place, and had bleeding hearts growing in your flower beds. There is something significant about the bleeding heart, for it seems to flower only in villages like Rainbow, where it can be unhurried and away from smoke, and where it can thrive on odors of actual cooking which waft from actual kitchens. In Rainbow housewives bake batches of bread, batches of cookies—the thick, soft kind with sugar on the top—they concoct fried cakes, which other and uninstructed communities incorrectly term doughnuts. Picket fences persist, and, in spite of the municipal waterworks, the knowing still carry their pails to Jenkins’s well for the coolest, sweetest water which ever passed down a throat.
On the east side are three churches: the white Congregational church, the wealthy brick Baptist, and the yellow Universalist—and all these edifices of worship have spacious basements ordained to the uses of the church sociable and chicken pie supper. On the west side, at the very top of the hill, is the Catholic church, and at the very bottom the rather shabby and unpainted United Brethren. Nobody seems to know just who it is that makes up the membership of the United Brethren, yet it continues in spite of lack of bell and steeple…. Sabbath mornings in Rainbow, especially in late spring or early autumn are lovely, restful hours. Somehow the air seems sweeter for the quiet and one has time to be glad he is alive. Rainbow’s church bells mingle in a gracious sound to call all sects and creeds to old-fashioned worship.
One sees Rainbow emerge at the ringing of the “first bell,” father and mother walking ahead, dressed for the day. Father carries Bible and hymnal tightly under his right arm and walks with a manner which is not his on secular days. Nobody’s manner of a Sunday is his manner of a Tuesday….
There is a square at the eastern end of the Center Line Bridge where there is a town pump surrounded by an iron railing, and where, on a Saturday night, the band gives its weekly concert…. Main Street parallels the river, one row of stores standing with their hind legs in the water, as it were. Across the river is the grist mill, the planing mill, a sort of manufactory of odds and ends of woodenware, and the secondary hotel…. The depot and railroad are half a mile away, to be reached by travelers in Lafe Fitch’s bus, a huge yellow contraption which can be heard rattling half a dozen blocks away. Prospective travelers wait to put on hats and wraps until they hear its clamor. It is a sort of alarm clock.
The population of Rainbow is something like eighteen hundred human beings, who live pleasantly, deal kindly by one another, and are, for the most part, to be envied. They are folks, good folks, generous folks—as you would discover if trouble or illness came to you in their midst—yet they can be hard, narrow, unyielding when circumstances seem to threaten their preconceived ideas of the manner in which the world should be conducted. There is no caste, no social class, yet there are recognized certain children with whom your children must not be allowed to play…. Rainbow is very meticulous in the protection of its young, and that, in a measure, explains and justifies the story of Angus Burke.
Rainbow was upset, shaken to its foundations, yet, in a strange sort of way, it was proud. It was the possessor of a murder for the first time in its history, and that no common murder, but the killing of its duly elected sheriff in the prosecution of his duty. It gave the town a new standing, an eminence among its neighbors…. All day boys and men had been walking out to the scene of the killing, and returning, had passed the jail and stared at its barred windows in the vain hope of seeing the monster who had perpetrated the crime. There was no other topic of conversation; business was at a standstill, and, judging from the groups to be seen upon Main Street, it might have been mistaken for a holiday.
An early caller at the jail was Alvin Trueman, pastor of the Congregational church, a man well liked by congregation and by outsiders as well, a kindly, compassionate, deeply religious man, who regarded his office in the ancient patriarchal light, and who, withal, was a jovial, humor-loving man, a pleasant companion and a good neighbor…. He conceived it his duty to call and to minister to the boy upon whose brow was branded the mark of Cain.
Chief Deputy Pilkinton was dubious. “’Tain’t reg’lar,” he said. “I dunno if I kin let you see the pris’ner, Mr. Trueman. I’m bearin’ consid’able responsibility, d’ye see, and I got to do the right thing in the right place, havin’ due regard fer law and order and the statutes in sich case made and pervided.”
“But the prisoner is only a child,” argued the minister. “Of course you’ll let me see him. It isn’t your idea that I have a file or rope ladder hidden under my coat, is it?”
Pilkinton scratched his head, but, much as he desired to raise further objections, magnify his responsibility, and display his high sense of duty, he could think of no adequate reason for refusal.
“Wa-al,” he consented, “I guess you kin see him. I’ll stand cluss by the door in case he tries to do you an injury.”
“Thank you,” said Trueman gravely. One of the chief reasons for the affection in which Rainbow held him was that he saw, appreciated, and was considerate of the foibles of others.
“And say,” Pilkinton added, “that there woman, his mother, died las’ night. He hain’t been notified.”
The pastor stepped past the iron door into the little cell, smiling, and cheerily bade the small prisoner good morning. With shrewd eyes he scrutinized Angus Burke’s face; saw dirt, freckles, dullness, apathy—a sort of animal terror—but not depravity, and he sighed.
“Do you remember me, Angus?” he asked.
Angus lifted dull, expressionless eyes and looked briefly at the face of the minister. After a moment he dropped them again and shook his head. He did not speak.
“I drove past your house one day when you were chopping wood. I’m the minister. I asked you to come to Sunday school? Don’t you remember now?”
Angus nodded.
“My boy, when I was at your house I heard your mother groaning. She was sick…. Maybe you thought she was merely complaining, but she was sick.”
“She didn’t have her black pills,” Angus said apathetically.
“She will never want her black pills again,” Trueman said gently.
The boy looked up again, and a vague effort to understand passed shadow-like across his face, but he did not understand.
“Your mother died last night,” said Trueman baldly.
If the pastor expected or hoped to witness a change in the boy’s expression, he was disappointed. The tidings seemed not to affect Angus at all—it was as if the words had no meaning for him.
“She is dead,” repeated Trueman.
Again Angus nodded. After a fashion he understood death, but still he manifested no sorrow because he felt no sorrow. He had not loved his mother, there had been no mother to love, only a woman who was one of the hardships which made up the narrow circle of his life, a part of his day’s work. She had been there, and he accepted her as a fact. Now she would not be there, which was another fact to be accepted…. He had no imagination.
Alvin Trueman was shocked at the boy’s indifference, his seeming callousness, for he was accustomed to seeing people act in quite different fashion on the occasion of the death of a dear one…. He began to fear that in so abnormal a child there might smoulder the distorted soul of one born contrary to the intention of God and Nature for the uses of crime.
“Aren’t you sorry?” he demanded sharply.
The minister scrutinized the boy. The head, he saw, was well formed, with plenty of arch behind the ears; the eyes were gray and might be clear. They were level-set and not unhandsome. The two halves of the face balanced, that is to say, the right half looked as though it belonged to the left half and the whole did not seem to be made up of two halves which had strayed from their rightful mates and joined by accident. This sign of degeneracy was lacking. No, the face was normal. A twinkle in the apathetic eye would have made it pleasant and boyish, but there was no twinkle. Angus’s eyes were like basement windows—or better, the windows of a vacant house. Altogether, it was the face of a child whose life had been monotony, dullness, in whom apathy had erected itself as a protective armor against cruelty and hardship. Here was a boy who had developed physically because the labor of a family was exacted from him alone, but whose mental development had been arrested, made static because no stimulus had ever been given to it…. It was a face in the balance; a turn of the hand might move it upward or downward. The boy was ten years old. At eleven sinister marks might appear; at twenty the whole aspect might become that of a slug-witted criminal of the lowest order.
Trueman was concerned and curious, moved by his concern to question.
“Why aren’t you sorry your mother is dead?”
“I don’t know,” Angus answered. Then, “It don’t make no difference—not if anybody is dead.” You see he was struggling to express himself, to put into thought and word some dim, struggling idea, some shadow of an idea.
“Angus,” said Trueman, taking another tack, “this is a serious business, an awful business. You are locked in a jail. You understand that. Because you are accused of killing a man—the sheriff of this county…. Do you know what they’ll do with you?”
Angus shook his head and fright enlarged his eyes.
“Lick me,” he said.
Trueman was amazed, but even in his amazement he was quick to see the terror his question had aroused.
“You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “No one will hurt you…. Did you kill Sheriff Bates, Angus?”
“Yes,” said the boy stolidly.
Trueman was shocked. The boy seemed brazen—to have no appreciation of the enormity of the act of depriving a human being of life.
“Why did you shoot him? How came you to do such a thing?”
“He was a robber,” Angus said, and as the memory of those terrifying hours returned to him his face became ghastly and color left his lips. “He was a robber and he come after Dad’s money, and Ma said shoot and I shot.”
“What?” exclaimed Trueman. “What’s that?”
Angus made an effort to explain, but his vagueness, the impossibility of his explanation only confused Trueman.
“Your mother told you to shoot?” he asked. “Why did she do that?”
“The robber come to the door and pounded like that.” Angus illustrated and trembled.
“What robber? What have robbers to do with it?”
“The robber I shot…. Mother heard him comin’. He was maybe Jesse James. He wa’n’t goin’ to leave nobody alive to tell the tale.”
“Didn’t you know it was Sheriff Bates?”
“It was a robber. He come after Dad’s money.”
Trueman was nonplussed. He could make nothing of it, yet he knew something lay beneath the surface which it was his duty to reach, and he determined to have it…. By dint of question and answer he drew from the boy the history of that evening—the arrival of his father with the black pills and the mysterious roll of money—the money which had sent Sheriff Bates to apprehend Titus Burke—the departure of Burke and the song of Mrs. Burke (Angus repeated verses of it)—the terrifying stories of hideous crimes, the terror, the woman’s gruesome reveling in fear. So Trueman saw the picture and understood…. Here was no crime, no occasion for the rigid hand of justice to descend in punishment. Here, rather, was a child upon whom the pity of the world might well be lavished—guiltless in thought and in act.
In his mind Trueman acquitted Angus. Death had come by the boy’s hand—as a sort of inevitable accident, an act of God working in His mysterious way…. Even the best of men make strange accusations against their God….
Presently Alvin Trueman emerged from Angus Burke’s cell and ascended to the corridor above. At the top of the stairs he nodded to a tall, thin, coatless individual, who slouched against the wall for support and puffed uninterestedly on a corncob pipe. From the mop of uncombable hair to the feet in Congress gaiters the man was a model of indolence. He exhaled an air of laziness. Yet, despite his carelessness of dress and of manner, and sometimes of the niceties of language, you gained a feeling that you were in the presence of a first-class man and a gentleman—of a first-class man, who through some crotchet of fate or some minor defect of character remained a first-class man in a tiny sphere and was more or less contented that it should be so.
His eyes were gray and very bright and interested—though there was also a weary look to them. His head was unusually fine…. Dress the man, comb him, eliminate the slouch from his shoulders so that his six feet and an inch of slender height became visible, and there were few assemblages he would not dominate.
“Waitin’ for you to come up, Mr. Trueman,” he said, letting his eyes droop as if they were about to pause in the midst of the conversation for a nap. “Pilk’ told me you were tinkerin’ with the miscreant’s soul.”
Trueman smiled—not an ordinary smile, but the sort one reserves for a highly regarded friend. “I was heading straight for the printing office,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
“Um…. Prayer, politics, or personalities?”
“About this child downstairs…. He tells a story that is beyond belief—and I believe it.”
“If you hadn’t a talent for believing,” said the tall, old-young man, “you couldn’t keep to your profession.”
Dave Wilkins, editor and proprietor of the Rainbow Weekly Observer, was the village’s one agnostic—a sort of curiosity of which the town was rather proud. It pointed him out unctuously to strangers as a man predestined to hell fire and brimstone, and small boys used to discuss him in whispers and wonder how a man could get along when he knew for certain he was condemned already to the pains and penalties of the hereafter…. Perhaps it was to prove the inconsistency of human nature that he was the most superstitious man in Rainbow. There was no sign, apparently, in which he did not believe, from thirteen at table to the evil luck of walking under a ladder….
Together the pair, representing religion and anti-religion, left the courthouse together, and it is not without its significance that when religion asked help in the prosecuting of a project of mercy it did not apply to religion, but to one whose Bible was a combination of Bob Ingersoll and Buechner’s Force and Matter. They proceeded down the hill and across the bridge to Main Street, at the extremity of which, in a rickety, unpainted frame building, were the printing shop and editorial rooms of the Weekly Observer. As they walked, Trueman repeated the story he had heard from Angus Burke’s lips.
“And there you have it,” he ended as they sat down at a table littered with proof sheets, in a room odorous with printers’ ink and glue and the myriad allied and alluring scents of the craft. “It must be true, because only an extraordinary imagination could have invented it.”
“A new test of credibility. If a thing passes imagination it is, therefore, true. If a man who tells you a story has the brains to invent it, it is a lie; if it’s a stretch above his capacity, it’s the truth.”
“Don’t you believe it, Dave?”
“Yes.”
“Then, of course, the boy isn’t guilty of anything.”
“He’s guilty of the worst crime in the list—a sight of bad luck and a heap of misfortune and sufferin’. A Rainbow jury would send him to prison for life on those counts.”
“You’re too hard on Rainbow, Dave…. But there really is no need for him to be tried. Can’t we see the prosecutor and judge and have him released?”
“Um…. Crane’s prosecutor. He’s bellwether of your flock, isn’t he?”
“I doubt if that would influence him,” said the pastor.
“There,” said Dave with a touch of dry malice, “I agree with you. Knowin’ him as you do, and his habits of character, would you say offhand he would nolle pros the first murder case he’s ever sunk his teeth into?”
“If the boy is innocent, why shouldn’t he?”
“Wa-al, Trueman, there’s advertisin’ and kudos in a murder trial—with elements like this one. For a week Crane’ll be as conspicuous as a silk hat on a saddle horse.”
“Do you intimate he would force the thing through for his own selfish ends?”
“I’ll be mighty int’rested to see. Folks are mighty fascinatin’ to me at a time like this. It’ll be entertainin’ to watch Crane run slap up against an alternative, so to speak…. Let’s go watch it.”
Prosecutor Crane arose as his visitors entered his office and stepped forward with an air that verged on hearty welcome—but fell just short of it. Crane always verged upon but never quite attained. As Wilkins said of him, he was a mite short at one end. He was somewhat older than Wilkins but appeared younger. He verged upon stoutness; the cast of his face verged upon good humor; his eyes verged upon frankness; he verged upon baldness. Now he was wondering what could have brought this pair of callers.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, and insisted upon shaking hands with each of them. “It is seldom the law is visited by both pulpit and press at once. I hope I can be of service to you.”
Wilkins smiled his dry, spectator’s smile. It was characteristic of him—of a man who has been pushed aside or has chosen to step aside from the actual jostle of life to occupy a little grandstand of his own and watch the parade pass by. Crane did not fail to detect the smile out of the corner of his eye, and for an instant his expression verged upon a frown.
“We came,” said Trueman, “to see you about that poor child in the jail.”
“Of course. Of course. I might have expected that of your warm heart, Mr. Trueman. You’ve been to see him? Quite right. Quite right.”
“I've seen him,” said Trueman, “and—in his pitiful way—he told me all about it—about the shooting. He isn’t very bright—not imbecile, you understand, but dull, deadened….”
“He admits the shooting, I am informed.”
“Of course. He pulled the trigger. But that alone doesn’t make him a murderer…. Let me tell you his story just as he told it to me—and you can judge for yourself…. When I come to think of it—from the way things appeared to him at that dreadful hour—he did a brave thing for a boy.”
“It takes a special kind of bravery to murder a sheriff,” said Crane, verging upon the ironical.
Trueman plunged into Angus’s story, and told it well. Crane listened calculatingly. When the pastor finished nobody spoke for a moment. Crane’s face was ruddier than usual, and his eyes, which had shifted to the window, were veiled…. They waited for him to speak.
“There are no witnesses to support this?”
“None. The boy’s mother, as you know, is dead.”
Wilkins was certain Crane found relief in this corroboration of his understanding of the facts. He was giving his best consideration to the narration; weighing it, estimating its possible effect on a jury of twelve good and true men selected from the vicinage of Rainbow.
“You see,” Trueman said eagerly, “the child is guiltless. He thought he was protecting his mother and his own life. I—it seems to me there’s something worth saving in a boy who could do as Angus Burke did…. As I understand it, the law doesn’t punish acts so much as intentions. Criminal intent is indispensable, is it not, to guilt?”
“Perfectly right. Perfectly right. But—” Crane paused impressively—“the jury alone are permitted to pass on a question of fact. It is not for me, not for the judge.”
“But isn’t it within your province to investigate and to find that the facts do not justify prosecution?”
“It is,” said Crane. “But in a matter of this importance I should not take that responsibility. Here is the murder of a high official—”
“Not murder…. Surely you don’t believe a jury would convict the boy?”
“That,” said Wilkins with an increase of dryness in his voice, “is what Crane’s prayin’ over this minute.”
Crane shot the editor a swift glance in which was no little malice. “Duty,” said he in a tone which verged upon resignation, “is not always pleasant…. I fancy the people would insist upon a trial of this boy…. Besides, if I let him go, what would become of him? He’d be a charge on the town.”
“How economics do clog the paths of virtue!” said Wilkins.
“You mean,” said Trueman sharply, “that, knowing the facts as you do—knowing this child’s innocence, you will, nevertheless, send him to trial?”
“I do not know he is innocent. It is for the jury to say.”
“Then,” said Wilkins, and his question was a pointed thorn, “as an expert in such matters, you believe there’s a chance to get a conviction?”
Once more Crane’s eyes blazed as he glanced at the tall, thin form lopping straddle-legged across the office chair. “I hope,” he said, “that justice will be done…. I shall see that it is done.”
“Have you no consideration of the element of mercy?” Trueman demanded. He got to his feet and his face was severe. In the door he paused. “You have disappointed me, Mr. Crane, as a man, a public officer, but mostly as a Christian, you have disappointed me.”
Crane was a picture of resignation under the strokes of unjust misunderstanding. He spread his hands and shook his head slowly. Trueman and Wilkins left the office in silence.
“Wa-al?” said Dave when they were outside.
“What’s to do now?” asked the minister. Then his face became determined. “Wilkins, I’m not through. That boy must be saved and I’m going to save him—” he paused as if searching for some expression to denote the firmness of his intention. Dave supplied it. “Hell or high water,” he said.
Trueman smiled. “Thank you,” he said.
“I calc’late we better get us a lawyer,” said Dave. “There’s young Craig Browning—just moved here…. Kind of sweet on your daughter, ain’t he? Don’t appear to be so busy he’s turnin’ away work…. My guess is he’ll take this one free gratis to keep him from bein’ homesick.”
“I will pay what is necessary,” said Trueman with a little access of dignity. He knew the offer was generous beyond his means; that it was rather a splendid thing. It gave him a certain pleasurable satisfaction…. Wilkins saw and understood and appreciated the simplicity of the man; liked him better for a touch of human weakness.
“We’ll pay,” he said, “but payin’ won't be necessary. Browning can do with the advertising.”
“Always imputing unworthy motives,” said Trueman.
“Motives,” said Dave, “make the world go ’round.”
As they passed the post office an elderly gentleman emerged, accompanied by a little girl. He was a scholarly, aristocratic old gentleman, of a dignity to be won by a lifetime of fine living. The little girl was a beauty, with that most compelling beauty of vivacity. Already she had personality; already she was spoiled as one of her exalted station in Rainbow was bound to be. She spied Wilkins.
“Oh, Uncle Dave,” she cried. “I want you to come with me. Grandpa won’t come….”
“Lydia Canfield,” said Dave severely, “you leave me be. I’m single, and I’m going to stay so. If you don’t stop setting your cap for me.”
“I want you to come with me.”
“Madam, I jest naturally can’t, on account of being busy with something, that, thank heaven, can never touch your life…. I wonder if you’ll ever know how fortunate you are.”
Busy with something which could never touch Lydia Canfield’s life! How little one human being can know as to what life or what incident will touch and mould, will ennoble or crush, the life of another. How could Dave Wilkins guess that the business upon which he was engaged was, in the end, to be of more importance to Lydia Canfield than any other event in her history?… How could he guess that the squalid, the unspeakable past of Angus Burke could be meshed with the glowing future of this child of good fortune?…