Hung Jury

At the end of a day of glare and heat – sand devils dancing on ditch banks, leaves still and hushed on oaks, man and animal creeping beneath a baked sky with the movements of hibernation, of clotted blood – at the end of such a day, with the evening star already hung like a distant lamp in the west, a six-year-old girl named Rosa Belle Miller was run over by a car in front of her home in the village of Tobacco Grove. After the first jolting grip of brakes, the car rolled on for several feet before the driver, not yet comprehending, perhaps, but horror already glazed upon his features, turned sharply off the street. The front bumper hit the trunk of an oak, not hard, gently, nuzzling. The engine died with a sound of choking. The driver's door was flung open. The driver, perhaps 20, whose unfinished face had suddenly aged, leaped out and ran back to Rosa Belle Miller. He knelt beside her. Already her blue dress was reddening at the collared yoke. Her long-lashed eyes were closed, but her lips were open. Her breathing stirred faintly the dust (continued on page 158) Hung Jury (continued from page 111) in which she lay.

"Oh, God," the driver whispered, "she ran out in front of me."

He looked up, already pleading innocence, though there was as yet nobody to hear. "I couldn't help it," he whispered. "It wa'n't my fault. She ran out in front of me." He stood and looked about him in horror and hopelessness, his body, like his face, now suddenly aged.

Rosa Belle Miller had just eaten supper with her parents, taken her plate and silverware to the kitchen sink and, after a word of permission from her mother and a kiss and an embrace from her father, run out to play with a neighbor's child, across the street and two doors east. Her parents had not heard the faint thud of chromium and steel upon flesh and bone. Her mother, Agnes (or Aggie) Miller, was gathering the rest of the dishes and taking them into the kitchen. Her father, Cletus (Clete) Miller, had looked after his daughter as she skipped from the room, his face lighted with love and joy. Now he flung his paper napkin aside with the faintly contemptuous air of a man who found eating a necessity, or even an annoyance, rather than a pleasure. He rose and walked from the dining room into the living room, where he picked up the evening paper from Wilmington. He was shaking it open and bending to sit down in his easy chair when his movements and gestures were interrupted by the ringing of his telephone. Walking into the hall, he answered it – an old-fashioned upright telephone on a marble-topped table, its receiver hanging by prongs at its side.

Clete listened. His head lowered suddenly and a light sprang into his eyes. After a moment he said, "It's tonight, is it? I'll be there. You don't think I'd miss this, do you?" He spoke low, his lips almost touching the black, flared mouthpiece. Another pause, then: "Listen, Brother, don't say that on the phone. We've got enemies. You never know who's listenin'."

By city standards, the Millers' house was plain. All houses in Tobacco Grove were so – small, modest, American frame with Victorian gingerbread and 20th Century television aerials. A few stood in oak groves, but most of them (their tin roofs glaring in sunlight, gleaming in moonlight or starlight, drumming in rain) stood bleakly exposed to whatever weather the seasons brought. The larger ones housed the county offices, the grocery stores, the drugstore and the Masonic Lodge. There were six filling stations (one for every 300 people) and two garages. The courthouse was Roman, Greek and Georgian, which made it, like the homes, thoroughly American. Only the new medical clinic, of all the structures in Tobacco Grove, seemed alien and new. It was long and low after the modern fashion, all squares and rectangles, precisely brick, with large picture windows in its waiting room and casement windows in its wards. Its rooms and corridors were air conditioned; they were muted and clinical, and they smelled of drugs and antiseptics – that typical hospital odor that always somehow becomes the odor of blood. The clinic was half a mile across town from the home of the Millers.

The village didn't end. Rather, it merged with or flowed into the ambient fields and forests where tobacco grew heavy and green, and the piny woods rose stunted and dusty from sandy soil. Out there, rutted roads sprouted from the highway and twisted and coiled to the shacks of tenant farmers, white and colored. In one of these shacks lived a woman named Clemmy (once Clementine) Suggs, a young widow with a hard, bony body and dirty, stringy blonde hair. It was said in the village and the county that she received men upon the disheveled quilted bed of her one room. That she even received Negro men. The keepers of the community's morals were said to be pondering her case.

Clete Miller still listened, the telephone receiver clamped to his big freckled left ear. Aggie Miller had poured white soap flakes from a red, white and blue box into a dappled gray dishpan and poured in hot water from a dappled blue kettle. With the patient movements of one whose blood runs sluggish, under low pressure, she turned this way and that, and bent her elbows and dipped her fingers into the soaped water. It had been less than two minutes since their daughter had left the table (it's always startling to learn how many movements can be made in a brief time). Aggie Miller began to hear cries from somewhere out front. She paid them no attention. Probably the children at play. She was a tall, dry, juiceless woman, humble, meek, though not likely to inherit the earth, just help populate it. She had borne 10 children altogether. Six of them died early. Of the three surviving sons, one was in the Army at Fort Jackson; one clerked in a shoe store in Wilmington; and one, the eldest, had argued with his father, suffered a blow in the face, and gone away; he had not been heard from for over a year. His absence Aggie Miller bore with humility and resignation. The Lord worked in mysterious ways. He gave and He took away. The boy, the Prodigal Son, humbled, praying forgiveness, would come home someday, and she would kill a fatted chicken.

Clete also heard the cries from outside. He frowned faintly. He was a large ruddy man, his sandy hair graying and thinning upon his freckled scalp. His face was fleshy, but deceptively so, perhaps. Beneath the rounded cheeks, the bulky nose and the surprisingly weak, loose mouth, one could see at times the power and the flash of the prophet of old; Elijah, perhaps, mocking the priests of Baal, or even a more recent prophet with muscle and lash driving the moneychangers from the temple; a dedication, a purpose, even a light that marked him for fine, elevated causes. He was a deacon, a giver to charities, a man of prayer. His wife knew that he was the best of men: a saint.

"Jake," Clete was saying, low and secret into the telephone, looking blindly through the front screen door to the outside, where the sounds of voices were rising now in pitch, "Brother Jake, you don't have to convert me. You know me. I'm as dedicated to this cause as you are. I got a little daughter I'm not ever goin' to let 'em get. I'm goin' to keep her safe as the rock, pure as the driven snow. Her and her children and their children. So help me God, I am. I'll do anything – –"

Their daughter Rosa Belle had been a surprise of their middle years. She could be their grandchild (as their neighbors always said). She was the apple of his eye (this too they always said). It was a joy that swelled the heart and misted the eye to see Clete Miller with that golden-haired little daughter of his. She rode his shoulders to the post office every morning. He filled her room with dolls, Never in all her life had he struck her, in reproof or in punishment or in anger. He wept sometimes, at night, in darkness, thinking about Rosa Belle. There couldn't be much bad in a man who could love a child so (this too they said).

But now – now Clete, though the receiver was still clamped to his ear, had stopped listening to his caller. He looked with growing interest out into the twilight. He was being called – no doubt about it, several voices were shouting his name. His wife stepped softly into the hall, her dry, pale lips parted in wondering. What could it be? The voices drew near. A man ran up on the front porch, dim, almost translucent, seen through the screen, in the haze of twilight. He shouted, "Clete, Clete, it's your little girl – it's Rosa Belle."

The man – neighbor, Emmett Jones, across the street, Rosa Belle playing with his daughter Florence – burst open the screen door and stood there shouting and flinging his arms. What? What? Aggie said behind Clete, "What? What?" He hung up and got to his feet. Rosa Belle? What? His wife brushed past him – he felt her sharp elbow strike his wrist – and past Emmett. On the porch she screamed and vanished. Clete now too ran past Emmett, but stopped at the edge of the porch.

"We've called the doctor. They're sendin' the ambulance. But Clete – Clete, it wasn't his fault. She ran out in front of him."

Clete turned on him. What could this stranger – this idiot – be babbling about? Impossibilities. Nothing had happened. Nothing could have happened. She had just left the house. He swung his stupefied eyes from the distraught neighbor to the crowd gathered on the other side of the street. Beyond it stood a cream-colored convertible that seemed to be rooting like a hog at the base of an oak. He ran again, shouting his daughter's name. His voice shattered and his throat split open upon the melody of her name. The crowd parted. His wife (gray dress, bent back) was kneeling beside a scrap of blue cloth. Clete fell to his knees.

"The doctor's comin'."

"Don't move her. You might hurt her."

"Don't even touch her."

He did touch her, fingertips upon soiled cheek, palm of hand upon golden curls. "What happened?" he whispered. "What happened?" he shouted.

In his hallway the telephone rang again. It rang five times before it silenced itself. Some of the crowd heard it. Clete did not. He stood. "Where are they? Why don't they come?" He was answered by the sound of a siren and his wife's sobs. She lay beside her daughter, an arm across her shoulders. "Where is he? The driver?"

Once more the crowd parted. Clete saw the youth, down an alley of faces and forms. He walked slowly forward. A hand grasped his left arm, a hand grasped his right arm.

"Take it easy, Clete."

"Sheriff's on his way."

The young man's eyes flashed. "She ran out in front of me," he cried. "I couldn't help it. It wa'n't my fault. She ran – –"

"I'll kill him."

"Take it easy, Clete. It wasn't his fault."

"Yes, I saw it too, Clete. It wasn't his fault."

"We'll see," Clete said, turning back to his daughter. Once more he fell to his knees at her side. He shoved his groaning wife away and took a small cupped hand in his. His tears fell upon it and he prayed until, lifted and gently pulled, he raised himself and let the doctor take his place. The neighbors lifted Aggie now, too, in afterthought. The doctor put down his black bag, got to his knees and pulled back an eyelid upon a dead staring blue eye. He felt a pulse, tested limbs and ribs, and with both hands ripped open the yoke of the blue dress. He exposed a bleeding cut. To this he applied a fluid, a compress and a quick bandage brought from his black bag. He stood. "Lift her carefully, boys," he said. An odor like acid cut through the hot heavy air of summer sundown.

They lifted her carefully – hands under head, shoulders, thighs and legs – to a stretcher and carried her to the open back door of a black vehicle that served as both ambulance and hearse, as occasion demanded. "Follow us," the doctor ordered, vanishing through the wide-open door which now closed and receded in the gloom of thickening night.

Once more hands rested upon Clete's arms. His neighbors clamored with offers to drive him and Aggie to the hospital. He flung them off. "No, I'll drive," he said. He ran to the back of his house and jumped into his Ford sedan. Roaring, it plunged backward and then forward and into the street. He saw Aggie standing at the edge of the crowd, gray and broken. His brakes screeched. "Come on, get in," he shouted. Two neighbor women took her arms and led her to the car and helped her in.

The ambulance was already out of sight. He tried to catch it. He mustn't let her leave him. The street lights burned suddenly into brightness upon the hot, dusty town.

"Pray, Clete, pray God," his wife said, gripping his arm.

"Yes, pray God, pray God," he whispered. He prayed, his shirt wet with sweat, his palms slick on the steering wheel.

The sheriff's black car, its red light flashing, roared past them. At any other time Clete Miller's eyes would have glared and his jaws clenched. Clete had once been a deputy sheriff. He had been fired. "They fired me because they're afraid of me," he'd told Aggie, "afraid of the right, afraid of a man that'll fight for the right." Aggie had said, "Yes, Clete, yes. You're too good for them." Tonight the two cars passed, and the two men, without a glance.

Half a mile – to Clete and Aggie it seemed a world away, a lifetime away. He prayed. At some time he could never know, the name he spoke became Rosa Belle.

A turn at a corner – and the Ford skidded to a stop before the odd low brick structure beside which now, the big black door gaping open again, stood the black ambulance. Clete jumped from his car, leaving Aggie to make her way alone, and ran across the dry, gray lawn and into the front door.

"Where is she?" he shouted. "Where'd they take her?"

A nurse (he saw a white dress and a gold pin, but no face) hurried to him. "Now, now, she's in emergency. They're doing all they can."

"But I've got to see her."

"No, please. Now you just sit down over here."

He felt himself sag. It's catchin' up with me, he said to himself. The thing's just beginnin' to hit me. He let the nurse lead him to a large square leather chair. He sank his body into it, and his face into his hands. After a moment he felt a hand upon his shoulder. He looked up, into Aggie's streaked gray face. She got to her knees before him. "Pray," she whispered, "pray God."

He found himself praying: "Oh God of all, let her live, let her live. I'll do anything. I'll be better. I'll be a good man. I've been an evil man – –"

"No, Clete, no, you haven't," Aggie cried.

He started. Had he been praying aloud? He prayed silently: Oh God of all, let her live, let her live. His total awareness, all the flesh, blood and bones that God had given him, strove with the agony of his praying. All his immortal being labored to lift his little girl out of the valley of the shadow. He believed that he himself alone, by the power of his tissue and sinew and soul, could raise her from darkness to light; and frightened by his vanity, he prayed for humility. But still he fought, praying, She must, she must, she must live, she must, she can't die. His hands moved with the gestures of lifting. His flesh strove with his spirit for the salvation of a little girl.

"Clete," a voice said, "Clete, listen to me."

He looked up. Sheriff Emory Barnes stood before him, a tall fat man who needed a shave, hat in hand, his gray shirt and pants wet with his sweating. "Clete," he said, "Clete, I'm sorry."

"Yes, I know you're sorry, Emory, and I appreciate it."

"You want to speak to the boy that done it?"

Clete stood. Aggie, forgotten again, rose slowly to her feet. A few neighbors huddled in a corner stared at them. "Yes," Clete said, "bring him in."

"Now, Clete, it wa'n't his fault," the sheriff said, shifting on his feet. "I talked to two witnesses, and they say he wa'n't speedin', and your little girl ran out in front of him."

"I said bring him in."

"Clete, I tell you for your own good – –

"Bring him in!"

"Clete," Aggie said, taking his arm, "remember what the Bible says. Judge not."

The sheriff hesitated, but finally turned, motioned and called, "All right, George, come on in." The boy (George; Clete never did that night get his last name) walked slowly in, trembling and white. He stood before Clete as before judgment, but he repeated, "It wa'n't my fault, Mr. Miller, I swear it wa'n't." He waited in fear and forlorn hope. "I'm sorry," he whispered at last.

Clete nodded. "We got to be forgivin'," he said. "At a time like this, we got to be forgivin'."

Sheriff Barnes took a deep breath and blew it out between fluttering lips. "All right, George," he said, jerking his thumb, "you go on outside and wait. I don't reckon they want to talk to you anymore now."

The boy turned away, sloped to the door and went out.

Sheriff Barnes studied Clete for a moment. "Clete," he said, nodding, "you're a good man."

"You know he is, Emory Barnes," Aggie cried, with a spirit they had never before witnessed in her. "It's too bad you didn't know that a long time ago, before you betrayed him."

"Aggie," Clete said, with firmness but tenderness too, "now, Aggie, we must be forgivin'. God will not succor us in this moment if we don't forgive as we are forgiven."

"Clete," Aggie begged, "Clete, don't abuse me now."

"I won't, Aggie, I won't. We're all under a strain."

"Where's the doctor?" she asked. "He ought to tell us somethin'."

The sheriff nodded and walked away down a corridor. In a moment he returned and said they couldn't tell anything yet. A nurse approached and told Clete that somebody was calling him on the telephone. "I can't," he began, and hesitated. "I can't, not now," he said, but followed the nurse through a dark corridor and into a dim small office. He picked up the telephone and whispered Yes? He listened. "We don't know yet," he said, after a moment. "She's still in emergency ... But Brother, how can I? This is my daughter, Brother Jake ... Yes, but you don't have to convert me ... Yes, Brother Jake, I know I took the oath, but it's my own flesh and blood – can't you postpone the thing?" It seemed to be forever too late for post ponement. No way to reach the brothers now. They were already gatherin'. Was Brother Clete goin' to honor his oath?

He hung up and walked out into the darkened corridor. The doors at one end were labeled Emergency in large red letters. Beyond their ground glass he saw shadows moving across lights. At the other end waited the bright lobby. He hesitated, shivering suddenly in the air conditioning. He sighed, and walked out into the light. The sheriff was gone; the neighbors huddled in a corner. Clete swallowed and licked his lips. He walked to Aggie, who looked up at him, questioning. "Aggie," he said, "I've got to go. I've just got to. It won't take long. I'll be right back."

He waited for her to speak but she only gazed up at him.

"I can't help her by just waitin' here." Still she gazed at him. The faith, humility and grief in her homely face almost broke him in two. But he said, "I've got to do my duty, Aggie."

"I know you'll do your duty, Clete," she whispered.

He hurried outside. The heat struck him like a wall. He threw himself into his car.

A few minutes later he stood in darkness with half-a-dozen other men, beneath the impoverished limbs of the piny woods, and above them, the stars. "Brothers," Brother Jake said, as they crowded into a tight dark little group in the big darkness of forest and night, "Brothers, I want you all to know what our good Brother Clete here has done. His little daughter was hit by a car not an hour ago. She's in the clinic. She may be bad off."

Clete was choked by a sob rising in his throat. He put his hands there, pressing with his fingertips. He would choke to death if he didn't sob. His grief was like a vast bubble rising in his throat. Somehow he swallowed it. Brother Jake's voice went on in the stillness and the darkness of the pines, "But he come when duty called, Brothers, he come to shield that little golden-haired daughter of his, and all our daughters, from a fate truly worse than death."

Clete turned his back. This time he did sob, in a choking sound. A brother put a hand on his shoulder.

"We pray for you, Brother Clete,' Brother Jake said. "We pray for that beautiful little child. We pray God. Lord God," he began, and prayed with fervor and clenched fists. Clete felt his cheeks wet, and raising his head saw the stars glitter through his tears.

Brother Jake's "Amen" sounded rather curt and hurried. "Now, Brothers," he said, "you all know what to do. Just remember one thing, don't call each other by name after we get there."

They hurried to their cars. They returned and gathered together again. With the others, Clete slipped a white habit upon his body and put on a white peaked cap that made a mask over his face. They inspected each other, looking close in the darkness. The round cutout eyes made small black empty sockets in their flattened white faces. "Now, let's go, Brothers," Brother Jake ordered.

They returned to their cars and drove through the woods in a deep-rutted road of white sand. They stopped before a shack and got out. Yellow lamplight shone through the windows. The brothers whispered, clustered together as if for warmth. Brothers Jake and Clete went forward and jerked the door open. They stepped in. A woman, perfectly still, slightly stooped over a table in the middle of the floor, stared at them. Her lips were parted but she did not cry out. Her eyes were muddy gray.

She didn't struggle much. Just enough, just as a token, perhaps. She was a woman accustomed to blows. Perhaps she had been expecting guests, even guests in white robes. A man at each side, she walked in silence to one of the cars. Her bare feet dragged in the sand. She was hard and spare, soiled and sullen.

"Brother, you tell her," Brother Jake ordered, pointing to Clete.

The woman drew back as Clete stepped before her. Brother Jake and another hooded figure clutched her arms and held her upright, on her tiptoes.

"Clemmy Suggs," Clete said, "you are an evil creature, a Jezebel, a profligate, wanton woman. You are stained by the filth and the slime and the poison of your own choosing. You are a shame and a disgrace upon pure white Southern womanhood. You will be punished. We are the instruments of your punishment. You receive men." He drew a deep breath, for the horror and the startling, secret, guilty, quickly rejected fascination of what he next had to say. "You receive nigger men in that shack of yours. For that you shall be lashed with the lash of a righteous, avenging God."

"No," the woman cried, speaking for the first time. She struggled but her captors held her firm. "You got no right. You're lyin'. I never – I never took no nigger man, never."

"We know, Clemmy Suggs, we know," Brother Jake said. "White men's bad enough. But niggers! You know we don't allow nothin' like that in this county. We're good God-fearin' people in this county. Now, let us pray. You pray," he said, again pointing to Clete, "pray in honor of the sacrifice you're makin' this night of God's vengeance."

Clete shut his eyes and clasped his hands. The woman screamed, "Hypocrites. Prayin' before you beat a woman. Hypocrites!" Clete prayed, "Oh Lord God of hosts, God of vengeance, we ask your blessin' upon this righteous act that we are about to perform in Thy name, and upon this foul woman that she may be cleansed and made pure. And dear God remember that little girl – that little girl lyin' broke and bleedin' yonder in the hospital. Keep the good doctor's eye steady and his hand sure, Lord God, upon her bruised and violated flesh, and bring her back to us." He sobbed again, choked and gripped his throat. "Amen," he gasped.

"Now," Brother Jake cried, in fury, joy and glee.

The brothers tied her hand and foot, face down, over the hood of the car. Her flesh trembled. She whimpered and whispered "No, no." Brother Jake raised his white habit and removed his belt – thick black leather two-and-a-half inches wide, a square brass buckle stitched at one end. "Brother, you," he said, handing it to Clete.

He took it. Two brothers jerked the woman's sleazy dress over her head.

"Why, she ain't even wearin' pants," one of the brothers exclaimed.

"None of that, Brother," Brother Jake shouted. "We ain't here to lust after her flesh."

The woman moaned and twisted upon the hood of the car. Her thighs and legs were wasted and stained, her buttocks thin, pinched and pimpled. It occurred to Clete, just as he swung the belt for the first blow, that they looked like Aggie's. The woman howled. In the dim light from her windows he saw the scarlet welts he had accomplished upon the backs of her thighs. He swung again. Again. Blood that time, a thin grudging beaded line of red at the lower curve of her buttocks. The woman screamed with the long despairing anguish and agony of violated innocence. Clete struck her again. The blood ran. He struck her again. "Please. No. Please. No." The flesh darkened and swelled; blood trickled about the curve of her legs. "Please. No!" she groaned, like a whipped child, in pure brute agony, the breath rushing from her gaped mouth and dragged in again. "Oh, please. No." He struck her flesh again, and again.

"Enough," Brother Jake said, quietly.

Clete swung again, and then again. The flesh of her ankles and wrists tore against the ropes binding it. Clete hit her again.

"Enough. Enough. Goddamnit, I said enough. I'm sorry, Brother, but we don't want to kill her. Brothers, untie her."

Her flesh was like sausage meat.

Clete dropped the belt and staggered to his car, tearing his white habit from his soaked body.

Now, a few minutes later (how was it possible that there was so close to here? he couldn't remember driving), he stood before Aggie again and told her, "I said it wouldn't take long. I promised, didn't I? And kept my promise?"

"You kept it, Clete," she said. "I knew you would."

"You heard anything yet?"

"No news is good news."

He sat down on a leather sofa and trembled in the cool air of the room. He was profoundly sleepy. He felt his eyelids sliding closed, and his limbs and body sinking into drugged sleep. He shook himself. It wouldn't be decent to sleep now. Aggie joined him and took his hand. He squeezed her fingers; the effort exhausted him.

He was suspended, at rest, at peace. There was nothing, nothing, and the doctor stood before him. Clete got to his feet, patient and sweetly weary. He showed no surprise – no thanksgiving, no hallelujah – when he heard the doctor say, "She's going to be all right." Clete remembered TV shows. It always happened this way on TV too: The man in white (sainted, speaking in a sanctified voice) saying, "She's going to be all right." But Clete was unable to play his role. He stood there nodding. He had known for some minutes that she was going to be all right. He was a man of faith. He had prayed.

"She's sleeping now, under sedation. She'll wake up in the morning. Perhaps you can see her then."

The doctor waited. Anxious parents always asked many questions. They always wanted the bloodiest of details. These two walked silently away from him and out the door. The doctor was new in the town, and from far away. He would never understand these people.

Clete drove slowly, turning corners in wide arcs, almost coasting along. At home Aggie sank into her sewing chair in the living room, her long, bony legs spread before her. He remembered Clemmy's legs, long, wasted, and naked and bleeding. He walked into the kitchen and went to the sink, where for the first time in her life Aggie had left the dishes unwashed. He found a clean glass and drew it full of water and drank it down. Sweat stood on his brow. His shirt was wet with it. He took it off and dropped it on the floor. He walked out on the back porch. The night chilled his body. The scrub pines behind his house pierced the dark horizon. "Thank God," he whispered. The stars glittered. They danced, grew and pulsed beyond his tears.