me, and I would have understood. I would never have mentioned it to another soul. I would have kept your secret. But you should have told me.’
And he was overcome by the knowledge of his old friend’s suffering, now at an end – no,
Harman Truelove refused to confess to his crime. He declined to speak to the police or even to his own public defender, and did not answer when his lawyer asked him where the bruises on his face and body had come from, for the police had tried hard to make him talk. There was a trial, although few witnesses were called, for Harman Truelove’s guilt was never in doubt. Something of Harman Truelove’s past was revealed in the course of the police investigation, but more was kept hidden, and only a handful of people were privy to it: years of physical abuse, dating back even to his time in the womb when Harman’s father, an alcoholic itinerant laborer and serial despoiler of women, had tried to induce an abortion in Harman’s mother by kicking her repeatedly in the stomach; the subsequent death of his mother when Harman was two years old, ostensibly by her own hand in a bath of lukewarm water, although the coroner was heard to wonder why a woman who had been intent upon slitting her arm open with a straight razor might also have bathwater in her lungs; the years spent on the road with his father, beating following beating until Harman Truelove could not speak without stammering; and the death at last of that terrible man who choked on his own vomit while lying unconscious in a drunken stupor, his twelve-year-old son found beside him holding his father’s cold hand, gripping it so tightly that the rigor mortis had sealed the child’s hand in the father’s and the police had to break the dead man’s fingers to release his son. By mutual agreement, the prosecutor and defender decided that it was unnecessary to share such information with the jury, and only after Harman Truelove had left this earth did it become public knowledge.
Before sentencing, Lambton Everett requested a moment with the judge, a dour yet fair man named Clarence P. Douglas, who, despite being at least two decades from retirement, tended to inhabit his role in the manner of a man who was set to throw it all in the following day and claim his watch and pension, with subsequent plans for nothing more arduous than fishing, drinking, and reading. He didn’t seem to care whom he offended by manner or decision just as long as whatever he did was in accordance, insofar as was possible, with the requirements of both law and justice.
A record of their conversation found its way into the local newspapers following Douglas’s eventual retirement, since Lambton Everett had placed no stipulation of secrecy upon him, and Douglas clearly felt that it did not reflect badly on the man: quite the opposite. The article in question was one of the final entries in the album, although my grandfather felt that it had been placed there with a degree of reluctance, as it had not been as carefully cut and pasted as the others, and was separated from the previous cutting by two blank pages. My grandfather took the view that it had been added out of a desire for completeness, but Lambton Everett was somehow embarrassed by it.
In the oak-lined quiet of his chambers, the judge was requested by Lambton Everett to spare Harman Truelove from death by hanging at the state penitentiary in Fort Madison. He did not want ‘the boy’ to be executed, he said. The judge was surprised, and more. He asked Lambton why Harman Truelove should not be subject to the full vengeance of the law.
‘You don’t need me to tell you, sir,’ said Judge Douglas, ‘that what Harman Truelove did was evil, as bad a thing as I ever heard of.’
And Lambton, who knew some but not all of Harman Truelove’s past, replied, ‘Yes, your honor, what he did was as close to pure evil as makes no difference, but the boy himself isn’t evil. He never had the start in life that the rest of us had. What followed wasn’t much better, and I think it drove him crazy. Somebody took a child and twisted him until he wasn’t even human any longer. I looked at him in that courtroom, and I reckoned that he was in even more pain than I was. Don’t misunderstand me, your honor: I hate him for what he did, and I can’t ever forgive him for it, but I don’t want his blood on my conscience. Put him away somewhere that he can’t hurt anyone ever again, but don’t kill him, not in my name.’
Judge Douglas sat back in his leather chair, folded his hands across his belly, and thought that Lambton Everett might well be the most unusual individual who had ever set foot in his chambers. He was more used to hearing the hounds baying for blood, ready to tear apart the accused themselves if the law wasn’t prepared to sate them. Few lambs crossed the threshold of his courtroom, and fewer merciful men.
‘I hear you, Mr Everett,’ he said. ‘I even admire you for your sentiments, and it could be you’re right in some of what you say, but the law requires that the boy should die. I suggest otherwise, and they’d curse my name right along with his until the day they put me in the ground. If it helps you to sleep any easier, his blood isn’t on your hands, nor on mine. And maybe ruminate on this: if that boy is in as much pain as you think, then it could be that the kindest thing anyone could do for him is to put an end to it once and for all.’
Lambton Everett took in his surroundings, the leather furnishings and the book-lined walls, as Clarence Douglas marked the traces of grief upon his face. He had not met Lambton until the case came to trial, but he was well versed in trauma and loss. What kind of man, he wondered, pleads for the life of another who has cut apart his wife and child? Not merely a good one, he decided, but a man who carried something of Christ Himself within him, and Clarence Douglas felt humbled in the man’s presence.
‘Mr Everett, I can tell the boy that you asked for his life to be spared. Should you choose to do so, it could also be arranged for you to visit with him, and you could tell him yourself. If you had any questions, you could put them to him, and see how he responds.’
‘Questions?’ said Lambton, looking up at the judge. ‘What questions could I have for him?’
‘Well, you might want to ask him why he did what he did,’ said Clarence Douglas. ‘He never told anyone why he murdered your wife and son. He never said anything at all, barring the word “no” when they asked him if it was he who had taken the lives of your wife and boy, even though there’s no doubt that it was his hand that did for them. One word, that’s all they got out of him. I’ll tell you the truth, Mr Everett: there are doctors, psychiatrists and their kind, who are curious as all hell about that boy, but he’s as much an enigma to them now as he was when they put the cuffs on him. Even allowing for his history, there’s no explanation for what he did. There are folk who’ve had worse upbringings than him, worse by a country mile, but they never killed an innocent woman and her little boy because of it.’
He shuffled awkwardly in his seat, for there was a dreadful intensity to Lambton Everett’s gaze that made Clarence Douglas regret he had ever started talking about the murderer Harman Truelove, that he had ever even agreed to admit Lambton Everett into his chambers.
‘There is no “why”’, said Lambton, slowly and deliberately. ‘There can never be. Even if he came up with some answer for me, it would have no meaning, no weight in this world or the next, so I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t even want to look at him again after this day. I just didn’t want to add to his suffering, or to mine. I didn’t want to add to the suffering of the world itself. I figure it has enough to be getting along with. It’s never going to run out.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Everett,’ said Clarence Douglas. ‘I wish there was something more that I could do for you.’
So Lambton Everett returned to the courtroom, and the jury read their verdict, and Judge Clarence Douglas passed sentence, and some time later Harman Truelove took the long drop.
And Lambton Everett eventually traveled northeast, making for the sea, and he came to rest at last in Wells. Although he said nothing of his past, still he brought it with him in his heart, and in his mind, and in an album of old photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings.
My grandfather turned back to the picture of Lambton with his family. Yes, he was still recognizably a younger version of the man that my grandfather had known, but the years had exacerbated his awkwardness, and the flawed dimensions of his limbs. It struck my grandfather that people sometimes spoke of men and women being broken by grief and loss, and they meant by that a psychological or emotional fracturing, but Lambton Everett resembled a man who had been physically broken, one who had been torn apart and then imperfectly reassembled, and he had spent the remainder of his life struggling with the physical legacy of what had been visited upon him.
My grandfather closed the album, and he shut his eyes, and he registered Lambton Everett’s presence nearby, could almost smell the scent of pipe tobacco and Old Spice that had been so much a part of him.
‘Go on, now,’ said my grandfather. ‘Go to them. They’ve waited for you long enough.’
He thought that he heard the drapes flutter once more behind him, and there was a sound that might have
