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  A Covenant with Death

  A Novel

  Stephen Becker

  To Judge Jay Andrew Rabinowitz

  who does justly and loves mercy

  We have made a covenant with death,

  and with hell are we at agreement.

  –ISAIAH 28:15

  PART ONE

  1

  Louise Talbot chose to spend the last afternoon of her life lounging in the shade of a leafy sycamore at the split-rail fence before her home. She was surpassingly alive and exuberantly feminine, and did not know that she was to die. Her home was on Mescalero Road in a small southwestern town called Soledad City. The road was quiet and dusty, its houses on spacious plots—not because it was a rich road but because ours was a small and sluggish town. Here and there sycamores broke the open vistas. Now and then an automobile chugged in. Orioles sliced the hot blue sky. Languid cats strolled the road, and languid dogs ignored them. The iceman passed on his rickety wagon. His name was Henry Dugan and he was an old man, a former deputy sheriff, and he did not mind that his horse was ancient and dilatory, because greeting Mrs. Talbot, staring down at her placid opulence from his perch seven feet up, compensated him for his hot, weary round. He tipped his frayed, stained, wide-brimmed Stetson, revealing untamed white hair and a vestige of gallantry; he noted the careless flow of her long brown hair, the dark and lovely brows, the white flash of her smile. Henry too smiled, and nodded agreeably, and let his gaze wander briefly to her bosom, unbound and indubitable within a finespun blouse. She seemed to notice, and her smile warmed. Then Henry passed along, not looking back. Henry was an old man.

  Mrs. Talbot was twenty-seven and surely the most disturbing woman in Soledad City. She was wearing sandals, a short tan cotton skirt, and the white lawn blouse. Eastern fashions meant no more to us than Prohibition, and Mrs. Talbot declined to flatten, distort, or confine. She did not flaunt; she had no need to; she was merely casual, and that was enough. It was more than enough for Mrs. Orville Moody, the next to break our lady’s solitude. Mrs. Moody was a meddler and a harpy, in whom the Mrs. Talbots of this world (there would be none in the next, of course) provoked excruciating spasms of righteousness. In black, buttoned to the chin, bearing a reticule, Mrs. Moody ran the gauntlet. Mrs. Talbot spoke: “Hello, Mrs. Moody. Warm enough for you?” Mrs. Moody did not answer. It was incontestably warm enough for her, though by her dress she might have been judged impervious. Summer was not yet upon us—it was May 3, 1923—but the spring rains were over, and in our corner of the southwest heat was not just a blanket or a slow fire or any of the standard metaphors; it was a condition of nature, a liquid medium in which we did not so much walk as swim and shimmer.

  Mrs. Talbot stood alone for some time. Her next-door neighbor, Helen Donnelley, sewing camisoles for her mission society to inflict upon aborigines, glanced out at her occasionally. Mrs. Talbot paced slowly, smoothed her hair, examined her fence, stooped once to adjust her sandal; Mrs. Donnelley looked away, thinking again, as she had so often, that Mrs. Talbot, while a nice person really, sometimes showed too much. Across the road, at the Lucases’, no one seemed to be home. When Mrs. Donnelley looked up again she saw Colonel Oates approaching. Mrs. Talbot was smiling.

  Colonel Oates was sixty-two, high church, a Carolina Oates, retired some years before to come and live among us. His colonelcy, his pension, and the decoration for valor that he wore on July Fourth and November eleventh were his reward for thirty years of army life. His hair was white and thinning, his eyes were alert, his nose was high-bridged with nostrils like a horse’s. He was a snoop, and overlooked no public event or private scandal. He carried a silver-knobbed cane because on his patrician level gold was considered ostentatious. He did not walk: he marched. But he slowed as he approached Louise Talbot, and tipped his Stetson, and then halted. “Good afternoon,” he said.

  “Good afternoon, Colonel. Hot.”

  “Yes indeed. You look, ah, cool.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Bryan home?”

  “No. He’s out somewhere talking business.”

  “Ah, yes, business.” The Colonel approved. “He is an ambitious man.”

  “Yes,” she said, and nodded reflectively. He noticed, for the first time, a fine down at her temples. They stood silently, sheltered from the unrelenting sunlight; perfume rose from the flower beds, and perhaps from Mrs. Talbot. The Colonel fanned himself with his hat, and felt younger. “Not much doing on a day like this.”

  “There’s never much doing on this road,” she said. “I like to come out and say hello to people. I wish Helen would come out.”

  “Mrs. Donnelley.”

  “Mmmm. She’s always busy.”

  “The devil has work,” the Colonel said archly.

  “I suppose,” she said, and leaned forward, elbows on the fence, a hand at either side of her throat; her bosom rested comfortably on the upper rail. The Colonel harrumphed and inspected the sky.

  “Not a cloud,” he said. She looked up; he glanced down.

  “The glare is awful,” she said.

  “Yes. How can you stay out here in the heat?”

  She did not answer for a moment; and then said, “It’s shady under the tree. I’m lonely, Colonel, and I like company.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You should have children.” He never forgot the remark.

  “Maybe,” she said, her voice neutral, her expression bland. “I think I’ll do some gardening.”

  “Then I won’t keep you,” the Colonel said. “Watch out for sunstroke, now. It’s been a pleasure.”

  “Drop by again,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said, and waved his hat, and put it back on his head, and marched off. He was on his way to the corner of town where the rich people lived, the Randalls and the Frisbees, the Cathcarts and the Owenses and the Chillingworths; he was to take tea with the Widow Bogan, who had fought Indians as a bride and had once owned great stretches of land. These were the “nice people” of the town. Each Christmas they laced themselves into black cloaks or string ties and delivered poultry to the less fortunate, mainly Mexicans and Negroes, and then returned to their mission-style parlors to make reassuring small talk about the deserving and undeserving poor. The Colonel liked them.

  Louise Talbot did no gardening that day. She watched him retreat, waved when he turned for a last gesture, and stood thoughtfully at the fence, one foot up on the lower rail. Shortly Juano Menéndez came along in his car, slowing to offer a deep nod that was almost a bow. Again Mrs. Talbot smiled, and Juano saw, in a brief sensual flash, the comfortable bosom and the shadows below, unrevealing yet distracting. He swore to himself ruefully, but did not stop. He was, after all, Mexican; successful, in that he was half the Soledad Laundry and owned an automobile, and sat at ease in the town’s masculine haunts and councils; but still Mexican. Nor did he have need of Mrs. Talbot. He was called the alcalde, and in the Mexican quarter he enjoyed the dominion and bliss of an eighteenth-century squire: he was in his early fifties, had seven living children and nineteen grandchildren, and was the unofficial mayor of the Mexican population. He chuffed away, and Mrs. Talbot was once more alone.

  Soon Helen Donnelley emerged from the house next door and came, stately and prim, to stand beside her. “Oh, what a day!” Mrs. Donnelley said. “I’ve been sewing until my fingers are cramped.”

  “I haven’t seen the boys,” Mrs. Talbot said.

  “Oh, they’re building something. Some sort of radio. I don’t understand it myself but they have drawings. From a magazine. Bruce says it’s something they
should learn about. Where’s Bryan?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere talking, probably. Business.” Mrs. Talbot smiled wanly.

  “Men think they’re so important,” Mrs. Donnelley said complacently.

  “Aren’t they?” Mrs. Talbot was amused.

  “Well, of course. But they’re so proud of themselves. They little know what women go through.”

  Mrs. Talbot showed her amusement, and the women chatted as women chat, passing the time, Mrs. Donnelley taller, ample, older, ordinary, Mrs. Talbot placid yet restless, her brown eyes in motion, her hands roving to her hair, her throat, her skirt. When Bruce Donnelley appeared, far down the road, Mrs. Donnelley waved, and Mrs. Talbot seized the moment to primp briefly.

  Donnelley approached, advancing slowly in his heavy, solemn stride. He was the town’s ranking lumber dealer, God-fearing and hard-working; member of three luncheon clubs and president of one. Success, success. And an elder in the First Presbyterian Church, and he worked at that job too. He spoke seldom. He was hulking and had hard, flat blue eyes, blondish hair, and a sharp nose. He seemed powerful and mysterious: he was armored in principle, and it was not easy to laugh in his presence. The blue eyes were direct and unwavering, and discomfited most men. He was a prominent citizen and no one really knew him. We knew what he stood for. He was the sort of man who would not understand why you might want to know more than that.

  “Good afternoon,” he said.

  “Hello,” Louise said.

  “Did you have a good day, dear?” Helen asked.

  “Yes. Hot.”

  “It was. I finished another camisole.”

  “Good.” To Louise: “Bryan home?”

  “Not yet.”

  Donnelley was wearing a white linen suit with a white shirt and a dark necktie knotted very small. He stood outside the fence, monolithic, turning slowly to watch another car go by. People came up the road in knots, twos and threes: the day help on its way home, Negroes and Mexicans, raising dust, murmuring, nodding deferentially as they passed, proceeding up this quiet, comfortable road toward the bridge, where they would cross to the east side of the river and scatter, north if they were Mexican, south if Negro. Slowly they passed, ten or a dozen, in groups and yet one group. They passed. Soon they were out of sight.

  The three at the fence were silent for a time. We never knew if Donnelley had simply stood there, a neighbor and an elder, or if he had flashed covert glances at the lush stranger beside him; we never knew if he had resented or desired, denied or admitted the heat of temptation; if his hand, like Henry Dugan’s, like the Colonel’s, like Juano’s, like so many men’s, had received and rejected in one instant the heart’s command to rise and touch. Shortly the Donnelleys drifted home; and after a few minutes more Louise Talbot too turned from the fence, the road, the town, and walked away, erect and lovely, proud and careless of her warm flesh, statuesque and voluptuous in the soft wash of late sunlight. She went into the house, and the road was empty and quiet.

  Four hours later she was dead. She had talked and laughed, a lonely sentinel at the roadside, yearning perhaps for some unknowable adventure; four hours later the voice was stilled and the yearning finally appeased. We knew how. In time we knew who, but by then three of us were dead. And when the town knew who, it was satisfied, and turned away, and left me alone to ponder the last and best question: why?

  And where was I when Louise Talbot died? At home, a mile from her, wondering whether to spend my life in Soledad City, not yet aware that I could never escape myself. Now, more than forty years later, I am still in Soledad City, in the same home, in the study that was my father’s before me. Now my calendar warns me, shrieking 1964; now they call me Old Judge Lewis. In 1923 it was Young Judge Lewis, and a confused young judge at that. I had never met Louise Talbot formally, and had—or thought I had—a sufficiency of problems without her. I was a judge, at the embarrassing age of twenty-nine, because the Governor of our state had called my father friend, a word that meant much to both men; by a kind of nepotism once removed, there I was, one of two judges in our district of the state criminal court, and this account is of my first capital trial. It is also of myself and of Bryan Talbot and for that matter of Soledad City, because geography is more than points and lines, and civilization is more than concourse. Soledad City was the scene of the crime; it was also the scene of much life, funny and tragic, plain and fancy. And for those of us who troubled to look, the glow of that primitive and provincial life, a glow now pale, now brazen, now ruddy, illuminated the death of Louise Talbot.

  Back east she might have been less noticed and not murdered. In Chicago, for example, where I had frozen to death and learned the law, floozies abounded. But a dozen years before, we had been still a territory, not yet a state, and law and order had got ranged on the side of long black dresses buttoned up to the chin, like Mrs. Moody’s. The ladies inside those dresses were vigilantes of the soul, dedicated to a shrill, maniacal lynch law. They were mainly Protestant, and relied upon the support of elders and such; Bruce Donnelley, for one. The town, Soledad City, was about a third Mexican, and the relatively unembarrassed Latins (of whom I had the honor to be almost one), to whom the flesh and the senses were life itself and not enemies to be smote h-p and th-gh, stood for Sodom and Gomorrah to the ladies in black. Gringo Roman Catholics were suspect even when they bore names like O’Brien and Sienkiewicz; Sunday mornings people like Mrs. Moody would spy on them, reconnoitering for just one red skirt, just one rose behind the ear, just one deep neckline. We were a queer sort of town, part frontier, part plantation, part pleasure, part cruelty, part old Mexico, part clanking modernity, and, as noted, part murder. Some of the men had been Indian fighters, and some were back from Paris and Belleau Wood (where I too, shavetail, had cringed from shot and shell and not killed anybody, or not noticeably) and trying to get the roads improved for their Marmons and Stutzes, Reos and Mercers. A social stew, in short, and the heat kept it at a simmer; a foretaste of fire and brimstone. The righteous moved in pools of sticky resentment, concealing perspiration; the damned peeled off their shirts and sweated in the sight of their elect brethren. Nights, thank God, were merely warm; but perhaps three times a year the desert air flowed in on a south wind and clung to the streets like hot tar, and then there were fights and knifings and the tomcatting came out in the open and we all grew slower and surlier.

  The town had once been a minor accretion at the bend of a clear river; possibly the first settler was a ferryman. The town grew, and prospered, because of pasture to the northwest and mineral flats to the northeast Being a judge, and the sole heir of a local idol, I knew the town well, and had friends in high place and low. Up where the Colonel took his afternoon tea lived George Chillingworth, for example. George was about my age, and made rude jokes about his good family; he had sung, danced, made a speech in Spanish, and got roaring drunk at the wedding of Juano Menéndez’s youngest daughter two years before. If I had a best friend it was George, but we were not really close. Through high school, yes, but he had gone east to Harvard and I to our state college, and we had quarreled about the war, he saying it was all for the money. That was a minor quarrel and we always had a good time together but we were both loners by nature. His own class, all those nice people, called him a socialist.

  George owned the other half of Juano’s laundry, which did all the commercial lavage for the town, including my own robes and the napery at the Territorial Hotel. Menéndez was my friend, too, and the most popular figure in Soledad City (accepted by even the nice people, and little he cared!). He loved children and was a sort of year-round Father Christmas, burdened eternally with gumdrops and jelly beans; he told funny stories in the lobby of the Territorial; and he stood drinks on any pretext—seven nights running to celebrate the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, and seven nights again at the passage of the Volstead Act, and even a few days after the murder, when President Harding’s trip to Alaska was announced. “We have finally driven the son of a bitch
out of the country,” he shouted. “Drinks all around.”

  The Mexicans lived up in the northeast corner of town, and slightly to the south of them stood the abattoir, where meat was dressed for local consumption and some shipped fifty or a hundred miles to smaller towns. Beyond the slaughterhouse, in the true southeast corner and basking in the hot, moist attar of bos and ovis, lay the Negro quarter, and I had a friend there too, William Carter, but of course “friend” is the wrong word. We had competed in high school, both excellent in mathematics, each graded always within a point or two of the other and no hard feelings; and we were both good at basketball, forwards on the same team, intramural, as Bill was not permitted to play for the varsity. I had last seen him perhaps a year before. He had been summoned to jury duty; he was a registered Republican and his name was on the rolls. He was dismissed just before the noon recess, a peremptory challenge he said, and we met on the courthouse steps and we chatted and he went home. I wish I could say that I was a good fellow in those days and lived with truth and took Bill’s sister to the church dance or something on that order. No. I didn’t even know if he had a sister, and didn’t care. When I read a month after the murder that a man in Detroit named Charles C. Brown, twenty-nine, my age and Bill’s, had been sentenced to five-to-fifteen for stealing twelve cents and three hundred marks (the marks were worth .001-.275 of a cent), I assumed that Brown was colored and realized suddenly that Bill was no safer than he, but I did not trot off to look him up and have a drink.

  The scene of the crime. My town. I have omitted the business center, the stores and municipal buildings, livery stables and later auto agencies, the hotels and restaurants and saloons (and ex-saloons), the telephone building and the cable office, the lumberyard and the depot, the barbershops and beauty parlors. I have omitted the electric company and the Chinese restaurant and the brokerage office, the banks and the dry cleaners, the town hall and the calaboose, the dingy Mescalero Museum and the movie houses. (I have not even told you what state we were part of, because it does not matter; think of a small and sunny state between New Mexico and Arizona.) Or the dozen churches and the dozen gas stations, or the former fancy house now occupied by the state’s local representatives: National Guard (first floor; parlor; beer and music) and State Police (second floor; bedrooms) and Veterans’ Adviser (attic; towels and sheets). I have omitted much more, mainly people, but some of them will be along soon.