Luther Parker nodded and spoke to the boy. “Ten days suspended on condition that you pay costs, make restitution to Wal-Mart, do twenty-four hours of community service and meet with Reverend Freeman here for counseling once a week for the next six weeks.” He glanced at the preacher. “If that’s agreeable with you, sir?”
“His grandmother and I thank you for your compassion.” He put his broad hand on the boy’s shoulder. The youth straightened himself and said, “Thank you, Judge.”
“Don’t let us down, son,” said Luther, who really can be a softie at times.
As the charges were being laid out against my nephew and the other two boys, I took a seat on an empty back bench and hoped that some of Luther’s grandfatherly compassion would slop over onto A.K. and his two accomplices.
Raymond Bagwell was eighteen, Charles Starling was twenty, three years older than A.K. Both white. The three of them were charged with a Class I misdemeanor—desecrating gravesites.
“More specifically, Your Honor,” said Cyl DeGraffenried, “they knocked over gravestones and used spray paint to deface the walls of a small family cemetery near Cotton Grove.”
Several members of the offended Crocker family filled the first two rows of benches behind the prosecutor. Old Mrs. Martha Crocker Rhodes was purple with outrage. As Cyl read out the charges, Miss Martha nodded vehemently and filled in around the edges with low mutters about white-trash ne’er-do-wells who could commit such lowdown, snake-belly acts of vandalism on the graves of her forebears.
The mutters were mostly directed at A.K.’s cohorts since the Crockers were Cotton Grove neighbors and Andrew and Daddy had marched A.K. over there on Sunday afternoon so he could apologize for his part in the vandalism and promise to help put things right.
Now April, Andrew and Ruth, A.K.’s younger sister, sat in the front row behind the defense table, along with my brother Seth and his wife Minnie. Daddy sat straight as an iron poker between his two sons and kept his clear blue eyes fixed on the back of A.K.’s head. We’d tried to keep him from coming, but it was like trying to keep the wind from blowing. “I come for Andrew and I reckon I can come for Andrew’s boy, but I sure hope he ain’t gonna mess up as many times as Andrew did,” he said.
I recognized the Bagwell boy’s father and there was a faded woman about my age who might have been Starling’s mother. They had the same rabbity-looking features. Small noses in forward-pointing faces. Slightly buck teeth.
April had good cause to worry about the company A.K. was keeping these days. Both his friends had dropped out of school and both were working dead-end jobs for minimum wages.
When they worked.
I gathered that the Bagwell boy was steadier but that young Starling seemed to get fired a lot or walk off a job in a huff. Why he’d picked on the Crocker graveyard was anyone’s guess, but A.K. said it was Starling’s idea.
In his day, old Abraham Crocker had fathered a tribe at least as large as Daddy’s. Even if A.K. hadn’t been a defendant, I probably could have recused myself from hearing this case since my brother Haywood’s wife Isabel is Miss Martha’s niece and one of Daddy’s great-uncles had married a Crocker girl a hundred years ago. On the other hand, any judge whose family’s been in Colleton County this long would be just as likely to have some connection to the Crockers either by blood or by marriage, and for all I know, looking at Luther’s light brown skin, there could be a Crocker or two perched in his own family tree.
In fact, if we went looking hard enough, he and I both could probably even find a personal connection to the other two defendants as well. A pre-Revolution name doesn’t automatically guarantee an unsullied report card—my own family’s living proof of that. Bagwell and Starling might be old Colleton County names, but both these boys had stood before me since I came to the bench. Until today though, it had been for minor things: speeding, broken taillights, driving with open beer cans inside the car, barroom brawling, possession of marijuana—the usual et cetera young men keep getting hauled in for till they either settle down with a good woman or cross over the line between hurting themselves and hurting others.
This sort of destruction was pushing that line.
Reid might not have been able to separate the cases, but he was there solely to protect A.K.’s interests. Ed Whitbread was acting for the other two.
“How do your clients plead?” Luther Parker asked them.
“Not guilty,” said Ed Whitbread.
“Guilty with mitigating circumstances,” said Reid.
The arresting officer had color Polaroid pictures of the damage, a spray can of green paint abandoned at the scene, and a statement from the Home Depot clerk who’d sold five cans of it to Raymond Bagwell the afternoon the incident took place. (The police were unable to find who’d sold them the twelve-pack of Bud whose empty cans lay scattered among the gravestones.)
Cyl laid out the facts for Luther Parker as briskly as if she were prosecuting the Oklahoma bombing.
Overkill.
But she sure made a believer out of the defendants. A.K.’s sandy blond head was buried in his hands. When she rested her case, Luther turned to defense counsel. I could tell that Ed Whitbread was ready to throw in the towel then and there, but Reid was still defending A.K. against the spray painting. He introduced the shirts the three had been wearing that night. Bagwell’s and Starling’s shirts both had a fine mist of green paint across the front. A.K.’s didn’t.
“He was there, Your Honor,” Cyl said. “Who actually did what is irrelevant. He may not have held a paint can, but he acquiesced by his very presence.”
Luther agreed, and when defense rested he pronounced all three of them guilty.
Reid made a game plea for mercy.
“They did not go there that night intending any disrespect,” he said. “But you know how boys are, Your Honor, when they get out together and you add a little beer. They start egging each other on. Mr. Bagwell bought that paint for a job he was doing, not to deface private property, but one thing always leads to another, doesn’t it? These boys are sincerely sorry for what they did. My client has personally apologized to the Crocker family and he intends to do everything he can to restore their burying ground to its original state. His grandfather’s already hired a stone mason to see if the angel can be repaired and the cost will come out of my client’s pocket.”
