front of the family tree chart and find themselves down on the crowded bottom row, as if all those births and deaths and marriages took place all those long years ago just so the multiple branches could lead inexorably to their own names.
Every family had brought a hamper of favorite food, and every square inch of the communal table was filled with heaping platters: fried chicken and pork chops, chicken pastry, and country ham; hot rolls and biscuits; corn, butterbeans, and tender new garden peas; a dozen different cakes and desserts, including pecan pie and chocolate seven-layer cake. Two wooden tubs sat at the end of the long table. One held sweet iced tea, the other homemade lemonade.
I wanted some of everything.
“Now you’ve got to win,” Dwight Bryant teased when I went back for a helping of fresh strawberry shortcake smothered in heavy cream. “You keep on eating like that and a judge’s loose gray robe’s going to be the only thing’ll fit you.”
“Not that anybody’s counting or anything,” I said, “but didn’t I see four of Aunt Zell’s angel rolls on your plate? They may taste like air, but I’ve watched her make them. A whole pound of butter, my friend.”
“Yeah, but I’ve had help,” he said, smiling at a sandy-haired little kid who grinned back and snitched another roll from Dwight’s plate.
“That’s not Cal, is it?” I asked as the child darted off to watch the horseshoe pitching that had begun down by the barn. “Lord, Dwight! He was barely walking the last time I saw him.”
“Yeah. Every time Jonna lets me have him for the weekend, I notice how he’s grown up just a little bit more.”
There was such painful resignation on his big good-natured face that his brother Rob handed over his squirming redheaded stepson and said, “Here, wrestle with this one for a minute.”
Baby Jake grabbed the strawberry atop my dessert and, before anyone could stop him, squashed it in his chubby little hand. Red juices dribbled over Dwight’s chinos and Kate swooped in with a wet cloth.
“No, no, no!” she scolded, wiping pureed strawberry and whipped cream from her son’s tiny fingers. The baby merely laughed at her and patted her face.
“It’s okay,” said Dwight. “ Cal was just as bad at this age.” He placed Jake astride his broad knee and began to jiggle it up and down like a bucking horse while Kate and Rob watched with foolishly fond smiles.
Whenever the unabashed happiness and stability of couples like Rob and Kate make me start feeling maybe I’ve made bad choices somewhere along the way, the Dwights help put things in perspective.
Aunt Zell and I wound up the day at an evening sermon at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist Church, a mile or so from my family homeplace. It’s the church I joined when I was twelve years old, brought stumbling down that aisle of humility and repentance by adolescent guilt, a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, and the lovely yearning strains of the invitational hymn:
Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me.
And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee.
O Lamb of God, I come! I come!
The preacher knew I was expected that night, but he’d already used Judges 4:4 as a text when I was there back in February. (Since announcing my candidacy, I’d sat through at least six sermons inspired by “And Deborah judged Israel at that time.”) Tonight’s text was Proverbs 3:3, “Let not mercy and truth forsake thee; bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart.”
It was the first quiet time I’d had in days, and with the preacher’s words twisting in and out of my subconscious, I thought about truth and mercy and of actively judging another human being. As a professional. When it would affect, perhaps even alter forever, the course of their lives.
The practice of law-though never Justice itself-has always been something of a game for me, not unlike playing bridge for a penny a point-stakes high enough to be taken seriously, but not so high that the loss would seriously inconvenience me. Like bridge, it’s a partnership in which my client and I defend a bid of innocence against the DA and the state, who hold most of the trump cards. I’ve always been competitive-too damn competitive for a woman according to most of my brothers, some of whom will no longer play cards when I’m at the table because I hate to lose with a purple passion. (On the other hand, there are those who say I lose much more graciously than I win.)
How would it be, I wondered solemnly, if I were no longer in the battle but above it, face-to-face with pure Justice in all its awful majesty, with only the imperfect tools of Law to mitigate the whole force and weight of government upon the petitioner at my bar? Now comes the plaintiff, complaining of defendant, who alleges and says-
I thought back to the anger I’d felt over Perry Byrd’s blatant racism and how I’d filed for election on what might have looked like a whim. Yet, in the end, it really didn’t matter whether my decision to run was based on impulsive whim or reasoned judgment. Sitting that night in Sweetwater Church amid citizens of Colleton County that I’d known all my life, I made a solemn vow to myself then and there that I’d never misuse the office to indulge my personal biases. If I won, I’d be entrusted with the full power of the State of North Carolina to dissolve marriages, set child support payments, send malefactors to prison and-
“Right,” said the cynical pragmatist who sits jeering at the back of my brain when the preacher in the forefront starts acting too pious. “We’re not talking Supreme Court here, you know. More like Judge Wapner.”
True. Even if I won, district judges are only one step up from magistrates. I’d have original jurisdiction over misdemeanor cases and I could hold probable cause hearings for felony cases; but I’d be limited to judgments of under $10,000 and I couldn’t send anyone to jail for more than two years.
“Still,” whispered the pragmatist, “there’ll be power, power no less real for being minor. Just as a sandspur jabbing in your foot can make walking every bit as painful as a broken bone, you can make life difficult for criminals and mean-minded no-goods. And people will stand for you when you enter or leave the courtroom. Other attorneys will have to address you respectfully. DA’s will-”
At the piano to the left of the pulpit, the fifteen-year-old pianist rippled flawlessly through a handful of chords, and the youth choir stood and sang:
Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin;
Each vict’ry will help you some other to win…
Be thoughtful and earnest, kind-hearted and true.
Look ever to Jesus. He’ll carry you through.
Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor.
Abashed, I consciously subdued vainglorious thoughts and tried to put myself into a properly reverential mood.
No one else ever seems to have the same trouble concentrating in church that I do. Aunt Zell’s face was smoothly contemplative beside me. Beyond her, my brother Seth and his wife sat in stolid meditation. Across the aisle and two rows nearer the pulpit, the patrician profiles of Dr. and Mrs. Vickery were inclined attentively to the minister’s closing remarks. Even the teenagers in the choir seemed to be taking his words deeply to heart. Of course, I suppose a casual observer might say the same of me. I wasn’t actively fidgeting or coughing or turning my head. Only my eyes roamed the church.
They came to rest on the Vickerys again and I idly wondered what they were even doing here at Sweetwater. Evelyn Dancy Vickery’s personal wealth was well beyond “comfortable.” Dr. Charles Vickery had been our family GP, but he’d retired before routine lawsuits and astronomical insurance rates ate into a doctor’s income, so together they were probably even a few zeroes past “affluent.” I was under the impression that they usually worshipped at First Baptist of Cotton Grove where “Almost Persuaded” on a piano had been replaced by organ chorales.
Then I remembered that Dancys had helped found Sweetwater and many of Mrs. Vickery’s forebears were buried out there in the churchyard.
After Janie died, Jed moved in with his parents so Mrs. Whitehead could help with Gayle. Then he went into business with his father, married Dinah Jean Raynor, and bought the Higgins place on South Third. But when I first used to baby-sit with Gayle, Jed and Janie lived in a modest little house with a backyard that bumped up against the Vickery grounds.
I’d stand at Janie’s kitchen window and gaze across to the tall Palladian windows that overlooked a flower garden as exquisite as anything ever seen in a Burpee’s seed catalog. Camellias and thick oaks formed a partial
