Ballad 08 The Devil Amongst the Lawyers by Sharyn McCrumb

Author:Sharyn McCrumb [McCrumb, Sharyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429921206
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ERMA

The trial was hours away. She could not sleep.

The jail was seldom quiet and never dark, so that even at the most monotonous times, she found it difficult to rest. There was always a murmur of voices through the wall or the sound of a deputy’s footsteps in the concrete passageway. Saturday nights were the worst. That’s when the drunks howled and sang, so that even when she put her head under the pillow the sound seeped through. This was Sunday, though, and a hush seemed to have settled over the place, as if the building and everyone in it were holding their breath in anticipation of the trial to come.

She sat on the edge of the bed in the semidarkness, wide awake, too keyed up to read and tired of pacing the cell. They wouldn’t let her take anything to make her sleep, and she didn’t feel like talking, even if one of the guards would come by and sit a spell. She couldn’t really talk to anybody anyhow. She always had to watch what she said, because people would pretend to be all friendly and sympathetic, and then they would go right out and sell her confidences to some newspaper. No. Talking would only make her feel worse.

She had laid out her clothes for the next day: a drab, ladylike outfit carefully chosen so that the court would see her as a demure and innocent young woman, facing this ordeal with quiet fortitude. She knew that there were stories going around about her late-night visit to the roadhouse, and about her staying out until all hours with one fellow or another. It was all innocent enough, but people were always ready to think the worst of a pretty woman, and the gossips would always tell those stories in such a way that she sounded like a tramp. Like forgetting to mention that the boy she was supposedly running around with was her own cousin. She knew that in court she must look and act as if those tales could not possibly be true.

She’d give anything for a cigarette, but that wasn’t allowed. “Do you think I’m going to set fire to my mattress, like some crazy drunk?” she’d asked the jailer. But he had set his face in a vinegary scowl and walked away. Rules are rules. The jailer didn’t think nice girls ought to smoke, either.

The jurors were all local men of middle age, which meant that they had thoroughly old-fashioned ideas about how a good girl should look and act. She should know—her daddy had been cut from the same cloth. If those twelve men could be persuaded to see her as a daughter, perhaps their protective instincts would arise and they would let her go.

Suddenly she was afraid.

To sit there in a courtroom with hundreds of strangers watching you while people accused you of terrible things. All those eyes boring into her. Why, that was like being stripped naked in public. She didn’t see how she would be able to stand it.

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