“Three times,” said Alice.
Coulton folded one leg over the other, smoothed out his trousers. He turned his hat in his hands. “It’s a medical condition, Your Honor. Nothing more. You’re an educated man, sir, if I may say so. You know how easily folk can be frightened by what they don’t understand.”
The judge inclined his head. “Not just folk. That boy frightens me too.” The light was going and now the shadows from the gaslights picked up his craggy face, the tired lines at his eyes. “And how do I square this with the problem of justice? Charles Ovid killed a man.”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
“A white man,” interjected Alice. “Isn’t that the real issue?”
“A white man, yes, ma’am. Now, I knew Hank Jessup some. He wasn’t a gentleman maybe, but he was honest and upright. Saw him in church every Sunday. And I have a town full of outraged citizens writing me angry letters about the direction this county is going in. Half of them are in the mood for a good old-fashioned lynching.”
“And the other half—？” Alice muttered acidly.
“Charlie Ovid was executed last week, in private,” said Coulton, cutting her short. “No one knows differently.”
“That ain’t exactly true. There’s Bill and Alwyn, for starters. Little Jimmy Mac was in the jail that night. And there’s the wives, Bill’s and Alwyn’s wives. I’d bet a blind man a dollar they know.”
“Don’t forget the men your deputy was letting in all week, to beat on the boy,” Alice added bitterly.
The judge paused. He looked at her.
“Your Honor,” Coulton said quickly. “If you’ll permit me. Who’s going to believe there’s a black kid who can’t be hurt chained up in the Natchez jail? It sounds like something out of the Bible. It sounds like a blooming miracle. It’s just not possible, never mind what your deputies’ wives say at their teas. Folk will gossip, it’s what they do. But if you speak out, and tell everyone the boy has been executed, who’ll question that?”
“That would be a lie,” said the judge.
“Would it?” Coulton grunted, smoothing out his trouser leg. “The only problem you have is a walking corpse you just can’t seem to dispose of. That boy died. He stopped breathing. It doesn’t matter that he came back to life. The sentence was carried out, justice was served. I don’t pretend it isn’t a strange affair. But in the matter of justice, I don’t see any problem. I know other folk might disagree, seeing him walking around still. But it just might be that we’re a kind of answer. The clinic we represent is in Scotland, and I can assure you, if you release him to us, this boy will never be returning to Natchez, Mississippi. His condition is still not well understood. But what has been observed is that, ultimately, it proves fatal. The boy has only a few years left to live.”
“A few years.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why wouldn’t I just commute the boy’s sentence to ten years’ hard labor?”
“Wouldn’t that seem a light punishment, to your constituents?”
Alice watched the judge absorb it all. All her life she’d known men like this man, men who knew what they knew with such satisfied certainty, who would rather look at a pretty thing and be admired by it than hear it speak, and it occurred to her, briefly, that perhaps that is what she should do, admire him, make pleasing sounds, coo and blink her eyes. But she would not do that.
The judge in the gloom was studying them over his steepled fingers. Then he sighed and turned and looked out the window. “My missus makes an apple pie like you never tasted in your life,” he said. “It’s won blue ribbons at the Confederate Daughters Picnic three years in a row. And right now there’s a piece of it sitting cold on a plate in my kitchen. I’m sorry you came all this way, I am.”
Coulton cleared his throat, stood. Alice stood too, the dress sweeping her ankles. Coulton was turning his hat in his fingers. “Would you take the night to think it over, sir? We could come back in the morning—”
“Mr. Coulton. I agreed to meet with you out of politeness, that’s all.”
“Your Honor—”
The judge held up a hand.
“Only way your boy’s leaving that cell,” he said quietly, “is in a pinewood box. And I don’t care if he’s still moving inside it or not.”
* * *
“Son of a bitch,” hissed Alice, as they descended the courthouse steps. She was pulling at her corset, reaching under her skirts in a most unladylike fashion to unhook a stay or two and in that way catch her breath. It was already dark, the day’s heat baking back up out of the streets, the cicadas loud in the warm night. “I put on a dress for that?”