Chapter 20
The county courtroom was packed to the doors by nine, an hour before the judge came in.
Half of Cedar Bluffs had made the drive, and a good sowing of the county besides.
They filled the benches, then the aisles, then the window bays.
Farm families in Sunday cloth, townspeople, the minister, the blacksmith, Marion’s aunt in her black.
The morning was cold and bright. The big room smelled of stove iron, wet wool, horses.
Word had traveled all fall. Everyone understood what was to be decided, and everyone had, by now, chosen a seat.
The Hartleys sat at the front left with their lawyer, the dry man from above the bank.
Tilly was not in the room. By agreement between all parties, she had been left at Coates’s house in town with the doctor’s housekeeper.
It was the one mercy of the day’s arrangements.
Lydia wore the gray dress. Abel wore the church coat.
Neither had spoken much since the drive in.
There was nothing left to say that the day itself would not now say.
Across the aisle, the Harmons sat with their attorney, and their serenity was a study in itself.
Lydia studied it, having nothing better to do with her dread.
They wore their church best, sat straight, spoke quietly to their counsel, nodded to acquaintances.
People who own the law do not fidget. Eber’s face held the mild patience of a man attending the reading of a will already known to favor him.
Beside them, their attorney kept the placement paper in a leather folder and did not once look at the crowd. Crowds do not sign instruments.
At ten, the judge came in. The room stood and sat.
He was a spare, gray man of sixty-odd, spectacles low.
A judge of the plain Kansas kind, he had ridden circuit in worse rooms than this.
He read the cause aloud without ceremony.
In the matter of the minor child known as Tilly, a placed orphan, guardianship disputed.
Once, over his spectacles, he looked at the packed benches.
This was a hearing, he remarked, not a fair, and the first outburst would empty the gallery.
Then he nodded to the Harmons’ attorney, and the fight began.
Their case took less than an hour. It was, as the dry lawyer had promised, short and strong.
The attorney was competent and wasted nothing.
He put in the placement contract, certified, and read the signatures into the record, dwelling one clean beat on the third.
In went the county attorney’s opinion. In went the wire of dismissal, obtained from the depot’s copy book, and the dates told their own tale.
The placement, lawful. The removal, made days after the remover’s authority had ended, by her own Society’s hand.
He used the word abduction only once, mildly, like a man setting down a full pail, and let it stand.
“The law of this matter is one page long,” he finished.
“A valid instrument, never rescinded. Against it, the respondents offer sentiment, and the court is respectfully reminded that sentiment signs nothing. The child was placed with my clients. In law, she never left them. We ask the court to order her returned.”
He sat. And for one long hour of that morning, Lydia watched the paper do exactly what the dry lawyer had said it would do. It sat on the bench in its certified folds, and it looked unanswerable.
The room felt it. The benches had gone very quiet.
Twice, the judge read the contract through, unhurried, his face giving nothing.
The stove ticked. Somewhere behind her, a woman was already crying softly, on principle.
Beside her, Abel sat like a wall stands.
Under the table, his hand found hers, or hers his, neither could have said which. They held on in plain sight of nobody.
Then the dry lawyer rose, said, “We call Dr. Coates,” and the answer began.
Coates took the oath in his rumpled coat and sat.
His thirty-year ledger went onto the rail in front of him like a beam being laid.
What followed was not eloquence. It was worse for the Harmons than eloquence.
It was numbers, read slowly, in a blunt voice the whole room had trusted at its own bedsides.
The October entry first. Examined before placement, underweight, winter cough, lungs sound.
The pounds written down. Then, dates marching, the last week of November.
The night carriage into his kitchen. Pneumonia, left side.
The pounds were written down again and read aloud.
The arithmetic of the difference lay before the bench.
Six weeks in a prosperous house, and the child lighter coming out than going in.
“I have doctored this county thirty years,” Coates said.
“I have seen children starved by drought, by grasshoppers, by plain poverty, and I have buried some. This is the only case in my ledger where the pantry was full the whole time.” He said it without heat to the judge, over his spectacles.
“She did not sicken out of the placement, your honor. The placement is what she had. Warmth withheld, a doctor withheld two weeks past the turning, in a house with money at the bank. I attended what came out of that back room, and I will answer for every figure in this book.”
The cross-examination tried the dates, and the dates held.
It tried his friendship with the respondents, which he agreed to placidly.
He had been the Harmons’ doctor too, he added, when sent for, which had not been often.
He had the fee book to show it. When he stood down, the courtroom had heard, entered, and sworn, what respectable on paper had been doing to a six-year-old for six fall weeks.
The paper on the bench had begun, very slightly, to change its look.
“We call Lydia Hartley,” said the dry lawyer.
She had testified before committees and legislatures once, and before hostile boards twice. Never once had she testified as the accused, the abductor, the third signature. She took the oath in the gray dress and sat, finding the room very still. Where the truth began, she began, with her own hand.
“I signed that placement,” she said. “No one in this room knows better what it binds. For eleven years, I trained the agents of the Children’s Aid Society in these instruments.
I will ask the court’s patience to hear what the Harmons signed.
It is printed above their names, and it has not yet been read aloud. ”
Then, clause by clause, the gamekeeper walked the court through the poaching.
Her lawyer handed up the certified standards, seal showing, and she read the undertakings one at a time, in the even voice of the lectern.
Sufficient food, suited to the child’s age and health.
Against it, Coates’s pounds, already sworn.
A warmed and proper sleeping room. Against it, her own November report, wired to New York the last day of her service.
The frost on the inside of the glass, the room, the chimney did not pass.
Medical attendance when illness required.
Against it, two weeks of a turning cough, a doctor five miles off, and the sworn word dear.
Schooling. None. Church. None. Kind usage throughout.
She paused there and did not embroider it.
Instead, she read, flatly, the physician’s November figures once more, letting kind usage stand beside them in the silence.
“The instrument they ask this court to enforce,” she finished, “is a contract. I wrote my name to it believing it protected the child, because the child is what the whole paper is for. Every clause written for her protection was broken, severally and continuously, from the first month. The Harmons do not come here holding a right. They come holding the signed, printed list of their own defaults, asking the court to reward the breach with the girl’s remaining childhood. ”
Cross-examination went at her hard, and at November harder.
Had she authority when she removed the child?
None, she said, plainly. Was she dismissed for it?
The same week. The attorney let that ring.
Then, with the pail-setting mildness, he asked his question.
Was the court to take instruction in contracts from a woman who tore them up at her own judgment?
“No, sir,” said Lydia. “It is to take the pounds from the doctor’s ledger. Those are nobody’s judgment. Those are what the child weighed.”
He left her alone after that, having nowhere good to go. She stood down with her knees uncertain, her voice never once so, and passed the Harmons’ table without looking at it. This time, Abel’s hand closed over hers in the plain sight of everybody.
The noon recess came and went. The Hartleys did not go out to the wagons like the rest. They sat where they were, sharing the bread and cold beef Lydia had packed at dawn.
A case is a siege, and they had wintered sieges before.
Across the aisle, the Harmons ate nothing, which their attorney should perhaps have noted. Thrift keeps its habits even at war.
Then, in the early afternoon, the Harmons’ attorney made his mistake. He called Nella Harmon.
It was not madness. The morning had bled them.
He needed the room to see a wronged, respectable churchwoman, and Nella in gray poplin, hands folded, was the best exhibit he had.
And she was good, at first, better than good.
Composed, soft-spoken, regretful. The girl had come to them sickly beyond what was disclosed.
They had fed her, warmed her, doctored her as their own mother had raised eight.
The removal had shamed them before a county that had known their name forty years.
The word onion syrup was said. On the benches, some heads had begun to nod slightly.
Lydia’s lawyer rose for one question. He was a dry man, but he had listened all fall, and he asked it gently, the way one opens a door for a lady.
“Mrs. Harmon. The child sickened in your keeping, you say, through no fault of yours, and was stolen from you dying, as you believed. That was a year ago.” He paused. “Why do you want her back now?”
“Because she is ours by right,” Nella said. “And because now the girl is strong enough at last to earn her keep.”
She said it the way she said everything, exactly, thriftily, the plain truth of her house in the plain words of her house. It was entirely honest. It was the first entirely honest sentence her family had put on the record all day. Into the packed courtroom it fell the way a stone falls down a well.
The silence went on, and on, and told her. Lydia watched the knowledge arrive in Nella Harmon’s face, one beat too late to take back. She had said the word aloud, the true word, the parlor word, in front of the judge, the county, and God.
Earn her keep.
Nobody gasped. Kansas does not gasp. The room simply went still, all of it at once, the particular stillness of five hundred people doing the same sum. At the bench, the gray judge looked at the witness a long moment over his spectacles. Then he wrote, unhurried, one line.