Up Jumps the Devil

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSAs always, I am indebted to many for their technical advice or help, in particular District Court Judges Shelly S. Holt, John W. Smith, and Rebecca W. Blackmore of the 5th Judicial District (New Hanover County, NC and former Special Agent Henry Lee Poole of the State Bureau of Investigation. David Brown shared the memory of his one moonshine run, Linda Bryan Murphy gave me her father’s deer story, Ann R. Stephenson tries to keep me accurate, and Susan Dunlap and Joan Hess let me bounce ideas. Thanks, guys!All chapter captions have been taken from a pamphlet published anonymously in 1773 by “Scotus Americanus”: Informations Concerning the Province of North Carolina, Addressed to Emigrants from the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, by an Impartial Hand, courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, Wilson library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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^ » Surely if these people, artless and undesigning as they are, could mean to deceive, it must be reckoned a very uncommon and most unnatural deception...“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

Most of my brothers—

Most of my respectable brothers, that is—

(Which also includes the ones that’ve sowed all their wild oats and are now settling into gray-haired middle age and trying to pretend they’ve been respectable all along.)

(When you have eleven older brothers, it’s sometimes hard to keep straight which ones have walked the line their whole lives and which ones are newly whitened sepulchers.)

Anyhow, most of my brothers say I don’t think long enough before I go rushing off half-cocked.

Usually I’ll argue their definition of what’s half-cocked, but every once in a while I have to admit that they may have a point.

If I hadn’t rushed out to do the right thing when Dallas Stancil got himself shot and killed in his own backyard, I wouldn’t have been left looking like a fool.

(“Don’t bet on it,” says Dwight Bryant. He’s the deputy sheriff here in Colleton County and might as well be another brother the way he feels free to smart mouth everything I do, even though I’m a district court judge and higher up in the judicial pecking order, technically speaking, than he is.)

What happened was I’d been holding court in the mountains near Asheville for a colleague who got called out suddenly for a family emergency. His elderly mother had wandered off from her nursing home and stayed missing two nights before they found her in a homeless shelter more than a hundred miles away in Atlanta, Georgia, alive and well and not a single clue as to how she got there.

It was early October and there’d been enough cool nights up in the mountains to color all their leaves; but down here in Dobbs, our flatland trees were just beginning to get the message that summer really was over.

I stopped by the courthouse that Wednesday evening to see if I was still scheduled to hold a commitment hearing the next morning out at Mental Health. A couple of white bailiffs were standing by my car when I came down the sun-warmed marble steps and one of them who knew I’d been away asked if I’d heard about the shooting.

“Past Cotton Grove on Old Forty-Eight,” said the bailiff who also knew that some of my daddy’s land borders that hard road south of Cotton Grove.

“Two niggers out from Raleigh killed a man as wouldn’t let ’em hunt on his land,” his fat-faced colleague interjected with relish.

I put my briefcase in the car, then turned and read the name tag pinned to the man’s brown uniform shirt.

“Niggers, Mr. Parrish?” I asked pleasantly. I was born and raised here in Colleton County and will no doubt die here, too, but I swear to God I’m never going to get used to the casual slurs of some people.

The other bailiff, Stanley Overby, gave me a sheepish smile as I said, “Use that word again, Mr. Parrish, and I’ll have your job.”

A dull brick red crept up from his tight collar, but I’m a judge and he’s not and the hot ugly words he really wanted to say came out in a huffy “Y’all excuse me. I got to get on home.”

As we watched him cross the street to the parking lot, Overby hitched up his pants around his own ample girth and said, “Don’t pay him any mind, Judge. He really don’t mean anything by it.”

I liked Overby and I knew he could be right. Parrish was probably nothing more than an equal opportunity bigot. Most of our bailiffs are like Overby—good decent men, augmenting a retirement pension that’s sometimes nothing but a Social Security check. Every once in a while though, we’ll get a Parrish, who, after a lifetime of taking orders himself, will put on that brown uniform and act like he’s just been put in charge of the world.

Black or white, at least half the people who get summoned to court through speeding tickets, misdemeanor subpoenas, or show-cause orders are there for the first time. They come in worried and unsure of themselves, they alternate between nervousness and embarrassment, and they certainly don’t know the procedures. It doesn’t help when the first person they approach with their timid questions is a surly-tongued white bailiff who either won’t give them the time of day or else treats them like chicken droppings.

Happily, someone overly officious doesn’t last too long. Not if Sheriff Bo Poole catches them at it.

“So who was it got himself shot?” I asked, not really concerned. If it’d been blood kin or a close friend, somebody in the family would’ve called me long before now.

“A Stancil man. Drove one of them big tractor-trailer trucks and—”

“Dallas Stancil?”

“You know him?”