“If they didn’t intend any mischief,” said Cyl, “why did they go armed with spray paint? And as for what happens when boys add in a little beer: that’s precisely why the state of North Carolina prohibits the sale of alcohol to anyone under the age of twenty-one. They were breaking the law the minute they popped the top on the first can.”
Luther Parker looked from one boy to the other, then back to Cyl. “Previous convictions, Ms. DeGraffenried?”
“Level Two, Your Honor. Mr. Knott has had one previous conviction, Mr. Bagwell’s had three and this will make Mr. Starling’s fifth.”
She handed up their records. All were misdemeanors. I’d looked it up. And A.K. had finally had a bit of luck. His suspension on the marijuana charge had been up at the end of May so that wasn’t going to land on him.
“And what’s the State asking?”
“All three have had at least one suspended sentence, they’ve had fines, they’ve had community service, and they’re still breaking laws, Your Honor. The State feels maybe it’s going to take some jail time before they get the message. We’re asking the full forty-five days.”
In other words, the maximum sentence for a Level 2, Class I conviction.
Before Luther could rule, a soft, apologetic voice interrupted from one of the rear benches. “Your Honor, may I speak?”
“Mrs. Avery?”
Till that moment, I hadn’t noticed the small-boned white woman seated across the aisle from me at the back of the courtroom.
Luther motioned for her to come forward and, as always, Grace King Avery reminded me of the self-effacing little guinea hens that used to run around my Aunt Ida’s farmyard. She has the same tiny bones and the same dainty steps as one of those guineas picking its way across the grass. Instead of smoothly rounded gray feathers, she still wore her gray hair in a slightly bouffant French twist I remembered from twenty years ago, and her neat powder-blue shirtwaist could have been the same one she was wearing the first day I stepped into her sophomore English class.
She was never my favorite teacher. Passive-aggressive people have always irritated the hell out of me. After ten minutes I’m ready to run screaming in the opposite direction. Besides, what teenager wants to concentrate on gerunds and punctuation or split infinitives and diagrammed sentences when pheromones are swirling through the classrooms and your parents have finally agreed that you can get in a car with a boy if there’s another couple along and you’re still agonizing over who that boy should be?
But a single-minded and determined nagger was evidently what it took to give us a mastery of the mechanics of English by year’s end, something none of our more straightforward or sweet-tempered teachers had managed up till then.
Law briefs are a lot easier to read and write when you have a sound grasp of semicolons and understand the difference between subordinate and independent clauses. I have blessed Grace King Avery more than once over the years. (And it’s always Grace
“Your Honor, before you pass judgment on these young men, could I say a word on behalf of Raymond Bagwell?”
“Certainly, Mrs. Avery,” Luther Parker said. “Was he one of your students?”
“He was.” Her neat head bobbed in Bagwell’s direction and her bright eyes softened with indulgence. “And while he may not have applied himself and finished school, he’s smart with his hands and he’s not a bad boy. His grandfather farmed with my Grandfather King and so did his father. All good, hard-working, Christian people.”
She gestured to the weather-beaten man sitting behind my family. He gave a short nod as if embarrassed, and I almost expected to see him pull his forelock.
“And now that I’ve moved back to the King homeplace, Raymond’s helping me fix up my house and my yard. Mr. Stephenson is right when he says Raymond didn’t buy that paint to do bad. I gave him the money to get it for some lawn chairs he’s painting for me. He always arrives on time and he gives me a full hour’s work for a full hour’s pay. It’s just that on the weekends... well, he maybe drinks too much and he does tend to keep bad company, but if you could find it in your heart to give him another chance?”
It was that same wheedling tone of old. (
In all fairness though, the King homeplace has really begun to gleam since she retired from teaching this past May and moved back there. Her penny-pinching bachelor brother hadn’t spent a dime on it since their mother died fifteen or more years ago and people say he left Mrs. Avery quite a nest egg. From what I’d heard of the way she’s been spending this last month, that nest egg must have been laid by the golden goose.
Her husband left her nicely fixed, too, and the house they’d shared in Cotton Grove was bigger than this one even though they had only the one daughter, now married and living in D.C. But that house had been built in the fifties—“No history,” Mrs. Avery used to say with a sniff. (She was big on history, especially family history, and had done her genealogy back to England and the sixteenth century.) As soon as her brother was decently buried in the cemetery behind Sweetwater Baptist, she’d put the house in Cotton Grove up for sale and moved back to her childhood home like a hereditary princess reclaiming her birthright.
Every time I drive out to check on the progress of my own house, I see something new on the King homeplace. New roof for the house, new tin for the barn, new screening for the back porch, fresh paint everywhere, not just on those old wooden lawn chairs everybody used to own. It’s going to be a color spread out of
Luther thanked her for coming to speak on the young man’s account, then had the three stand.
From behind, A.K. was the most solidly built. The Starling boy was a little taller and bone skinny, with long yellow hair tied back in a ponytail. Young Bagwell, with his closely clipped brown hair, was shortest, but beneath his dark blue T-shirt there was a wiry strength in his shoulders as he and the others listened to Luther’s short lecture
