Stephen Hunter - Pale Horse Coming

Pale Horse Coming

Stephen Hunter

*

In mid-1947, Jefferson Barnes, the prosecuting attorney of Polk County, Arkansas, finally died. Upon that tragedy the old man fell out of one of those new golf cart things on vacation in Hot Springs, rolled down a gully screaming damnation and hellfire all the way, and broke his neck on a culvert Sam Vincent, his loyal Number 2, moved up to the big job.

Then in '48, Sam was anointed by the Democratic party (there was no other in western Arkansas), which ran him on the same ticket with Harry S. Truman and Fred C. Becker. As did those worthies, he won handily. For Sam, it was the goal toward which he had been aiming for many years. He had always wanted to be a servant of the law, and now, much better, he was the law.

Sam was six foot one, forty-four, with a bushy head of hair and a brusque demeanor that would not be called "lovable" for many years. He stared immoderately and did not suffer fools, idiots, Yankees, carpetbaggers, the small of spirit or the breakers of the law gladly.

He wore baggy suits flecked with pipe ash, heavy glasses, and walked in a bounding swoop. He hunted in the fall, followed the St. Louis Browns during the summer, when he had time, which he hardly ever did, and tied flies, though he fished rarely enough. Otherwise, he just worked like hell. His was classic American career insanity, putting the professional so far above the personal there almost was no personal, in the process alienating wife and children with his indifference, burning out secretaries with his demands, annoying the sheriff's detectives with his directions. In what little time remained, he served on the draft board (he had won the Bronze Star during the Battle of the Bulge), traveled five states to interview promising high school seniors who had applied to his beloved Princeton, played a weekly round of golf with the county powers at the country club, and drank too much eight-year-old bourbon.

He knew everybody; he was respected by everybody. He was a great man, a great American. He had the highest conviction rate of any county prosecutor in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, or Tennessee for that matter.

He was not reelected. In fact, he lost in a landslide to a no' count lawyer named Febus Bookins, a genial hack who smelled of gin all the time and meant only to rob the county blind during his term of office.

He called himself a reformer, and his goal was to reform his bank account into something more respectable.

Sam had made one mistake, but it was a mistake which few in his home state, and in fact not many elsewhere, could ignore. In 1949, he prosecuted a man named Willis Beaudine for raping a young woman named Nadine Johnson. It was an unremarkable case, save for the fact that Willis was a white person and Nadine a Negro girl. It is true she was quite light, what some would call a "high yeller," and that she had comely ways, and was, perhaps, not normally so innocent as she looked when she appeared in court. But facts were facts, law was law. Certain evidence had been developed by Sam's former investigator, Earl Swagger, who was now a state police sergeant and was famous for the big medal he had won during the war. Earl, however, risked nothing by testifying against Willis, for Earl was known to be a prideful, bull-headed man who could not be controlled by anyone and was feared by some. Sam, on the other hand, risked everything, and lost everything, although Willis was convicted and spent six months at the Tucker Farm. As for Nadine, she moved from town because even in her own community she was considered what Negro women called a " '," and moved to St. Louis, where her appetites soon got her murdered in a case of no interest to anyone.

Sam had taken his defeat bitterly. If his family thought he would see them more often, they were mistaken. Instead, he rented a small office on the town square of Blue Eye, the county seat, and commenced to spend most of his days and many of his nights there. He worked such small cases as came his way, but mainly he plotted out ways to return to office. He still hunted with Earl. His other friend was Connie Longacre, the smart Eastern woman whom the county's richest, most worthless son had brought back from his education at Annapolis in '30 and his failed naval career thereafter. Connie had soon learned how appetite-driven a man her Ranee was, and while trying to raise her own hellion son, Stephen, fell to friendship with Sam, who alone in that part of Arkansas had been to a Broadway play, had met a gal under the clock at the Biltmore, and who didn't think Henry Wallace was a pawn of the Red Kremlin.

Sam was never stupid, not on a single day in his life. He understood that one thing he had to do was to regain the trust of the white people.

Therefore he utterly refused to take any cases involving Negroes, even if they only revolved around one dark person suing another. There was a Negro lawyer in town, a Mr. Theopolis Simmons, who could handle such things; meanwhile, Sam worked hard, politicked aggressively, kept tabs, sucked up to the gentry who had deposed him so gently, and tried to stay focused.

Then, one day in June of 1951, an unusual event occurred, though nothing in that day or the day or week before had suggested it would.

Sam, alone in his office, worked through probate papers for a farmer named Lewis who had died intestate and whose estate was now being sued for back taxes by the state, which would drive his widow and four children off the property to well, to nothing. Sam would not let this happen, if only he could figure out a way to He heard the door open. In the county's employ he had always had a secretary; now, on his own, he didn't. He stood, pushed his way through the fog of dense pipe smoke, and opened the door to peer into his anteroom. An elegant gentleman had seated himself on the sofa and was paging absently through an old copy of Look magazine.

"Sir, do you have an appointment?" Sam asked.

The man looked up at him.

He was tanned softly, as if from an expensive vacation at the beach, balding, and looked well tended, of an age that could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. He was certainly prosperous, in a smooth-fitting blue pinstripe suit, a creamy white shirt and the black tie of a serious man. A homburg, gray pearl, lay on the seat beside him; his shined shoes were cap-toed black bluchers, possibly bespoke, and little clocks or flowers marked his socks. The shoes were shined, Sam noticed, all the way down to the sole, which was an indication that sentence. Yes, do go on, Mr. Trugood. You have my attention, without distraction."

"Thank you, sir. I am charged with executing a will for a certain rather well-off late Chicagoan. He had for many years in his employ a Negro named Lincoln Tilson."

Sam wrote: "Negro Lincoln Tilson" on his big yellow pad.

"Lincoln was a loyal custodian of my client's properties, a handyman, a bodyguard, a gardener, a chauffeur, a man whose brightness of temperament always cheered my client, who was negotiating a business career of both great success and some notoriety."

"I follow, sir," said Sam.

"Five years ago, Lincoln at last slowed down. My employer settled a sum on him, a considerable sum, and bid him farewell. He even drove him to the Illinois Central terminal to catch the City of New Orleans and reverse the steps by which he arrived up North so many years ago, for Lincoln's pleasure was to return to the simpler life from which he had sprung in the South. Lincoln returned to his birthplace, a town called Thebes, in Thebes County, Mississippi."

Sam wrote it down, while saying, "That is the deepest part of the deepest South, I would imagine."

"It is, sir."

Thebes, as a word, rang ever so slightly in Sam's imagination. He recalled that the original was a Greek town, city even, much fought over in antiquity. For some reason the number seven occurred in concert with it.