Earthly Justice

A Short Story

by E.S. Goldman

AT FIRST THE WORDS WERE IN THE WRONG SEquence to be heard, for death is slight news unless it carries with it a familiar name. “Killed . . . Pittsburgh . . . Sherroder!”

Try it for yourself. How much do you really care about people starving in Africa or sleeping on the sidewalks of Boston or being shot in their garages in Pittsburgh? You care, yes. You’re human, and nothing is alien, et cetera. But as if they were your own flesh and blood? No aunt of yours is in any of those fixes—not that you know of. Nothing happens that you care all that much about until you hear a name.

This was 1951 and I was twelve, reading The Black Arrow and half listening to KDKA on my short wave. I didn’t hear anything until I heard the name of my father’s sister.

Killed . . . Pittsburgh . . . Sherroder! Aunt Leora!

I held on to the book as to a brother in a scary place, while the newscaster put the information in order again for late-arriving minds. (This is the way radio news was managed before jobs were filled by people with no memory of how things should be done. Now newscasters write for radio _ as if you were tuned from the first word, as if you had nothing to do but sit there and hear them tell the story from A to Z. If you miss the first sentence, with the name of the country where the airplane went down, they never tell you again.)

“The dead woman’s husband, Dr Myron Sherroder, a wellknown Pittsburgh physician, was at home at the time—”

The young don’t often play a part as large as being the first to know. I burst out of my room and went down the stairs shouting, “Aunt Leora’s been killed! She was shot!”

Leora was very close to us. Not only was she my father’s sister but she and my mother had been best friends since middle school. She often came down from Dedham to stay with us at the shore, and after she married and moved to Pittsburgh, the visiting went on as before. Uncle Myron was part of it. The only regret about Myron was that he was a golfer and not a fisherman, as we were in our family; but he was accommodating and could be jollied into wading in for smallmouth on a gray day.

Mother was choked and bewildered, and kept saying in an odd, groaning voice I had never heard before, “What do you mean? Leora? What do you mean? What do you mean? Leora?”

She seemed angry with me, which was unreasonable. I had interrupted her sewing—the kind that is done on a small linen drumhead. She thrust out the tambourine, her fingers extended as if to take me by the shoulder to shake out the nonsense, as she had when I was younger. I wasn’t sure she would remember the needle. I flinched and looked to Dad.

When my father clenches his jaw, the muscles become bone; his lips bulge as if they have under them the pads a dentist used to slip in to take up saliva. He has never been a slack man in mind or body and does not appreciate slackness in others. He assessed the possibility of error in a twelve-year-old boy.

He held a finger up toward Mother to ask her to hold back, and asked me to say again what I had heard. He went to the phone.

Instead of calling Uncle Myron, as I expected, he asked for Pittsburgh information, and then for the number of the police station nearest the Sherroder address.

The questions he asked the police desk and the way he hung up said enough. Separating the more or less known from the said to be known, the police were able to impart that they had received a report by telephone at 8:17 P.M. from a man who said he was the husband of the deceased. The witness at the scene stated that he had found Mrs. Sherroder on the floor of the garage, apparently dead, apparently as a consequence of multiple wounds, apparently from shotgun fire. The shooting had happened a little more than an hour ago and the investigation was just beginning. Dad made this report piecemeal in a halting voice while he held Mother.

“I’d better call Myron,” he said, gently letting her go.

Myron hadn’t realized that the news was already on the radio. Detectives were there, taking pictures and asking questions, and he had been waiting for an opportunity to break away and make the call. After they spoke awhile Dad said, “Life is long, Myron. Take every day one at a time. I’ll be there on an early plane,” and hung up.

Mother had her voice under control. “What did he say?”

“He doesn’t know much more than we do. Leora went to an evening meeting of the Handicapped Services Board. He was watching a wildlife documentary on television and didn’t hear a thing. When he realized that Leora was late getting home, he walked out and saw the garage door open. She was lying beside the car. She was shot. ‘They haven’t found a gun.”

While Mother made the family phone calls, Dad went to the window and stood fully ten minutes with his hands behind his back, staring through the dark at the few stars of houses on the far side of the bay. Mother left Grandma Dewaine for him. He could have waited until morning and seen Grandma on his way to the airport, but he didn’t want her to hear the news first from a reporter calling to ask if she had a photograph of her daughter. He told her that Leora had died in an accident, without suffering, and that he would stop by in the morning. Being prepared in this way, she could be relied on to get through the night. Dewaines managed. She was a Dewaine by assimilation.

Mother was also that much a Dewaine, but only that much. She took the phone and asked Grandma if she would like somebody to spend the night with her. She would be glad to come up herself. Would she like Dad to be with her? Would she like her good friend Betty Morse to be called? Mother listened to the timbre of Grandma’s voice as she said no, that was unnecessary, she would be all right, and was satisfied. They agreed, as before, that her son would stop there early on his way to the airport.

Although Dad had decided to take the Pittsburgh flight in order to be with Myron on the first difficult day, our family assumed that burial would be in the Dewaine plot in Brewster, on the Cape. When he called to give Myron his flight number, he learned that the burial would be in Pittsburgh.

“I don’t understand such a decision,”Mother said. “Leora has no family in Pittsburgh. They have been married so few years. Myron’s family is out west. Your mother is only a twohour ride from Brewster. Burying Leora in Pittsburgh is inconsiderate. She ought to be in your family plot. Did you say that to him?”

“I made the case. But the decision is Myron’s. I can understand that he would want her nearby.”

“There are others to think about.”

“They have many friends in Pittsburgh.”

“Friends are not family. Friends do not come to visit your grave. The decision is a strange one.”

“It may be arbitrary, but it isn’t strange. It’s his decision to make. Arguing at a time like this isn’t easy.”

“When is a good time? After the burial?" I seldom heard Mother that sharp with Dad.

“He and Leora chose the site with care. In his view, he is accommodating her wishes.”

“In his view.”

We all went to Pittsburgh for the funeral.

When people have lived their years, it is possible to take satisfaction in memory, and even possible for levity to soften grief, and after long illness it is possible to speak of relief, but this was a day of harsh, unrelieved mourning, the most solemn day of my life. In the chapel Uncle Myron sat between his brother, Andrew, and my father, and beside Father was Grandma Dewaine. Then Uncle Tom Dewaine, then Mother. They sat by bloodline. Except aronnd a dinner table I had never before, at an occasion, seen Father not sit beside Mother. Because of the nature of the wound the casket was closed.

Very little was said among us. When Grandma shook with hidden sobs, Dad took her hand. I did the same to my sister, Marnie, at first awkwardly, and then, when she clutched it to show how glad she was to have it, with (I suppose the right word is) pride.

After the cemetery Mother took Marnie and me directly to the plane. She did not want to stay over. She said tomorrow was a school day and we should be back. My father spent the rest of the day in Pittsburgh with Myron, talking to the police and the district attorney. They posted a reward.

YOU MAY HAVE FORGOTTEN THE STORY BY now, or may have it confused with the celebrated case of the Cleveland doctor’s wife. The death of Leora Dewaine Sherroder was much less noteworthy than the Cleveland story, but it was closely followed in Pittsburgh and on Cape Cod, where the phone book includes three columns of Dewaines. You call a Dewaine to put on a roof, survey your land, pick up your rubbish, send you a nurse. To fish out of Rock Harbor you sign on the Cape Corsair, Cap’n Pres Dewaine. You bank with Len at Samoset 5¢ Savings. To cater a wedding you call Carolyn. Dewaines hidden by marriage under other names must fill many columns more. The only big rich Dewaines I know of are the Ananders, through Cousin Peg. Delbert Anander knew what land to buy and how long to hold it, and how to run a bank and when to sell it. My father was the fourth Dewaine with the hardware and heating store, the first with the oil trucks.

The story in the newspaper about the will gave me an uncomfortable feeling that others might not see Aunt Leora’s death as I did. It didn’t say anything that wasn’t already known in the family: except for named bequests, everything was left to Uncle Myron as remainderman. They had no children. Simply stating in the newspaper that Myron was Leora Dewaine’s heir seemed to imply something.

In follow-up stories Leora became the heiress of the Dewaine fortune, the Dewaines became Mayflower descendants. The family had oil interests. A reporter discovered that a brother of Leora’s great-grandfather had been a governor of Massachusetts; the family became politically influential. Myron was a kidney specialist, he had been consulted by a Mellon. He was a member of a country club; he became a socialite doctor. They had no children. The socialite doctor was the sole heir.

With such people, in such an environment, nil things are possible. You don’t have to go beyond your own mind.

Uncle Myron was my friend, who took me to the zoo. and to the museum to see the dinosaurus xylophony stretching down the hall (“From zonnnq on his nose” — Myron had impressive range—“to tinnnggg“), and to Forbes Field to see a big-league baseball game.

We sat in a box behind first base. A high foul went up, and I saw that if it did not go up forever, it would comedown sometime later that day right where I was. Everybody around me stood up. I thought if I could get my hands on that ball I could hold it.

The day was chilly, and the men wore gloves, but I was a boy and of course hadn’t thought I needed gloves. While my head followed the nearly vertical rise of the ball Uncle Myron grasped my left hand. “Here’s a glove to take the sting out.” He raised his voice to the crowd around us. “Give the kid a shot at it.”

They cleared a space. I don’t think any crowd today would stand back to give a kid a shot. I followed the ball higher than I had ever seen a ball go, while I worked the bunching out of the palm of Uncle Myron’s glove and displayed the floppy fingers as a target.

I was sure I was under it, but misjudged the angle of the fall, backed into the men, and finally fell backward into the seats. The ball, ignoring the chance to make a stylish landing in a gray suede glove, dropped beyond my farthest reach. My failure that day—despite the cooperation of the entire world to help me succeed—is not yet forgotten. It enhances the memory of Myron Sherroder, my friend, who the newspaper said, without saying it, might have been the one who killed Aunt Leora.

I began then to understand how words say things that aren’t in them. Words reach for meanings that are already inside the hearer. In a card trick the magician fans out the cards and says, “Pick one.” Psych the cards as hard as you want, you can’t psych a ten of diamonds out of a tarot deck. You have to take a card that’s there. I wanted it another way, but the statement that the husband of the murdered woman was the beneficiary of her will picked up the card from my standard human deck.

I began then to read about the case as others would. One day at school I took a question from a friend—“How is your uncle coming with that murder case?” It said to me that when they spoke of Leora Sherroder’s murder in their home, they assumed that her husband, the socialite doctor who had inherited her money, was probably involved in some way. And I could not help thinking it too.

I was troubled. I didn’t tell my father how I felt, but I put a question in a form that betrayed me. “What if—?”

Before responding, my father laid his narrow eyes on me. “That’s the way people are. In this house we do not think like that. My sister was a good judge of character. She chose your Uncle Myron. As far as we know they had a good marriage.”

Why “As far as we know . . . “?

I never heard my father say anything about innocence. What I understood him to say was that we had to wait respectfully, withholding judgment, as long as the process took—forever, if necessary. We had a stake in the values of organized society.

We were right to wait. In a few weeks the Pittsburgh police let it out that they were looking for a white man about forty years old, with a butch haircut, driving a latemodel Plymouth white two-door. He had been seen several times in the neighborhood in the week of the murder and nobody knew who he was. They found what they believed was the gun, in the Allegheny River about five miles from the house, and began to trace it. The gun was a Winchester twelve-gauge. A lot of them are around. We have one in our house.

That got the newspapers going again.

Dad went to Pittsburgh. He saw Uncle Myron. He talked to the district attorney and to Detective Gertner, who had had the case from the beginning. Gertner said privately that they weren’t getting anywhere looking for the man in the Plymouth. No fingerprints were found on the gun; they hadn’t been able to trace it.

The detective told my father something else. Dad did not look at Mother as he reported it.

“They are talking to a woman they say Myron had been seeing before—” It’s not easy to say Before my sister was murdered. “I have to say that bothers me.”

“What did Myron say to that?” Mother asked.

“He’s where he was. He knows they’re looking into a lot of things.”

“Did he say he knew what they were looking into?”

“He mentioned the gun and the man who had been seen in the neighborhood.”

“That’s all been in the papers. He didn’t say anything about the woman?”

“He said, ‘And the usual gossip you can expect.’”

“Did he say what that was?”

“No, and I didn’t ask him. He is a smart man. He can guess what comes to me.”

That conversation reinforced my impression that Myron was guilts. I was not so persuaded that I would have been unable to be a fair juror; but I thought Myron was probably the killer, and I was sure I was not the only person in our house to think it—not since Father’s “As far as we know . . . ,” not since Mother’s refusal to stay in Pittsburgh after the funeral, and the clipped severity of her manner when Myron’s name came up.

UNCLE MYRON WAS INDICTED FOR FIRST-DEgree homicide. I didn’t know why the language needed another word for murder.

“That must mean he’s pretty guilty,” I said.

Expressing judgment in an important matter made me feel important. I didn’t know that before the law you are either guilty or not; “pretty” has nothing to do with it.

My father stiffened his lips. “I don’t want that said again in my hearing. A trial is to find that out. The adversarial system we have in this country is the best way to get at the truth. Each side puts up the best argument it knows how. You may think you know Uncle Myron’s defense, but you don’t till you hear it argued. I don’t want you to forget that.”

Dad went to the trial to hear the woman for himself, for the two days she was a witness. She testified that she had carried the gun from the garage when Fncle Myron told her to and had thrown it in the river. Uncle Myron’s lawyer suggested that she was seeking revenge because Myron had started to see other women. He brought out that she was an alcoholic. She and a former boyfriend were involved in a larceny, and the district attorney had made a deal to let her off a perjury charge in exchange for her testimony in the Sherroder case. She could even have been the one who committed the murder. Myron’s lawyer brought all that out.

“She didn’t make a very good witness,”my father said. “Myron’s lawyer doesn’t think she will be convincing to the jury.”

But no one doubted that Myron had something going with her—she knew too much about his life.

Myron said she knew only enough to make up the rest in order to get the reward. “I’m sorry all this comes out in this way, which must seem sordid to you,” he said to my father. “I can’t blame you for what you must think.”

“Of course he can’t blame you.” Mother said to my father. “What are you supposed to think? Leora. was your sister. Did he still pretend he hadn’t been going out with other women?”

“He said he had done what a lot of men do, and he apologized for it. He said Leora would have understood why he saw other women if she had known, even if she might not necessarily have condoned it.”

“’Not necessarily.’ I should think.”

Myron had said, “I am not asking you to tell me what you now think about this. I only want you to hear me when I say I had nothing to do with Leora’s murder. I am entirely innocent.”

“What do you think?” Mother asked.

My father’s jaw muscles became bone. “I wasn’t hired to be God,” he said.

The afternoon the case went to the jury, deliberations weren’t expected to start until the next day. I was in bed with the lights out and the radio to my ear when a bulletin came on that the jurors had decided to convene to test their sentiment. They found they had a verdict right away. The judge was coming in to hear it.

I got up and told Mother and Dad. We sat in the library and waited.

None of us made a guess what the verdict would be. It wasn’t a ballgame, or somebody else’s family, or anything that doesn’t count, where you can show how smart or howdumb you are. When something is close to you, you don’t look at it the way you do if you’re separated from it. In traffic the car ahead of you can be in the middle and won’t get out of the way and you get mad. When you’re in position to go around, you see the driver is somebody you know well and you cool off. You wave. Anything that is close to you is different.

The verdict was not guilty.

To tell the truth, I didn’t feel the relief I had expected from knowing that my uncle wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life in jail. I certainly wouldn’t have taken any joy in a guilty verdict, but it would have been more fitting and satisfying to human nature.

I suppose I am saying that my Aunt Leora, of my father’s blood and therefore of mine, had been murdered, and that the way we are made requires that somebody be accountable. Almost any somebody, rather than nobody. I’m the first to agree that for the sake of civilization we must respect the verdict of a court; still, that verdict isn’t necessarily satisfactory to our natural sense of what is just.

I sensed that my mother felt the same way, and for a moment that my father did too, but he said abruptly. “That’s the verdict. The reward stands. We are going to look that much harder.”

He called Uncle Myron and told him that he knew the experience had been hard but he hoped Myron could get on with his life. He invited him down to do some fishing. They arranged a weekend. Mother said, “You invited him here? I would just as soon you hadn’t.”

I don’t want to lose touch.”

“I will never be comfortable with Myron. But it’s up to you. I suppose men understand these things better.” I supposed that wasn’t what she thought.

UNCLE MYRON WAS GRATEFUL THAT WE MADE him one of us. The truth is that without Leora he was a foreign substance. He could not attach himself by shaking my hand and telling me I had grown an inch a week; by swinging my sister in the air; by trying to find a place to kiss on Mother’s averted cheek. Dad hurried him through the greetings and got him to the stairs leading to the tower room overlooking the bay. He and Leora had always had that room.

Next day was raw and drizzly, an ordinary April day. A good breeze came across from the northeast, and the tide went out all morning. It wouldn’t be very comfortable on the open bay. I thought they would fish Drum Pond, but Dad said, “Myron, have you ever fished Shelf Lake with me?” Uncle Myron couldn’t remember that he had.

I don’t think Myron ever fished before he married Leora. As often as not when they visited, he would go over and play the Great Dune course while the rest of us went to a bass pond. Dad certainly wasn’t going to play golf and he didn’t offer any choices.

“We’ll go over there. We’ll get some shelter from the wind. I have a new suit of Red Ball waders you can break in for me. I’ll wear my old one.”

They loaded rods, boots, waders, parkas, slickers, boxes of lures, leaders, spare lines, and tools, and a lunch. They were ready for bass or trout all day in any weather. They dropped me at Everbloom Nursery, where I had a Saturday-morning job.

Bob Everbloom and I were moving azaleas from the back field to front beds, beginning in a drizzle we knew would get heavier. When it did, Bob decided we had had enough of outside work. I could have worked under glass, but I didn’t come to do that. I liked to be outside on weekends. I said I would skip it, they didn’t need me in the greenhouse. I borrowed Bob’s bike and headed for Shelf Lake. My father and Myron were carrying enough extra tackle to outfit me.

All this country around here, all of Cape Cod, consists of the tailings left after the great glacier thawed and backed off to Canada. It’s all rock brought down by the ice and melted out, sand, and a skin of topsoil from decay. Those big stands of trees are in sand not too far down. The only clay is wherever you happen to dig your foundation; you can’t get drainage.

After the margin sand Shelf Lake is a basin of underwater boulders fed by the runoff from Sparks’ Hill. The surrounding land is in conservation. What falls they let lie. The bones of old downed trees lie around the rim. Those spines of big fish stuck in the ground are dead cedars. A couple of paths lead in through heavy woods.

It was too raw a day for people to come for wilderness walks, and most of the fishermen around here either are commercial and need the quantities they get in salt water or want the fast action of bay fishing. Our Jeep was the only vehicle parked at NO VEHICLES PERMITTED BEYOND THIS SIGN. On a busy day as many as two might be there. I locked the bike to the Jeep’s bumper and went down the woods path.

Nearing the bottom, I heard my father call, “Left, farther left, toward the cove.”

Through the trees I saw that they were both in hipdeep, Uncle Myron a hundred or so yards west and working farther. Rain dimpled the water. Away from the lee of the hill, fans of wind patterned the surface like shoaling fish. I was troubled by something but didn’t concentrate on what it might be, because I was busy picking through catbrier that snatched into the path.

“Another ten yards. They’re in there,” my father called out.

Then I realized what troubled me. Myron was on the edge of the shelf that gave the lake its name. It fell off without any warning into a deep hole. I took a running step and opened my mouth to shout, but before I could, he let out a bellow and pitched down.

My mind churned with what could be done and what I had to do. I could get around to the shoreline nearer to him, and dive in and help him out of his gear. I could—

But I didn’t move, because, more dumbfounding to me than the accident itself, my father acted as though it weren’t happening. He heard Myron and saw him flail to stay afloat and go under in seconds. He knew as I did that Myron, under the roiled water, would be fighting to get out of his parka and sweater, then out of the waders that were filling and turning into anchors; but my father turned away and cast.

I couldn’t stop staring at him. Dad began to reel in. His rod bent. He had a bass fighting and flopping like a sandfilled stocking. Working light tackle, he had to give and take carefully not to lose it. The ripples settled out of the water where Myron had been, and mv father was unslipping the net with his free hand and playing the bass with the other.

I was terrified—not frightened, terrified—as much for my father as for myself. He had deliberately led my uncle to be drowned. I tried to make the events happen differently in my mind, but I could not doubt what I had seen and heard.

When at last I found the will to move, I moved not toward him but back up the trail, to be away and alone long enough to get my bearings before I had to face him.

I rode the bike in the rain to the nursery and put it in the tool shed. Nobody was around. I didn’t have to talk to anybody.

Behind the mall, down the road from Everbloom’s, the receiving platforms stood on iron legs, backed against the cement block, the cheap side of the stores. Weather swept over the blacktop, pooling where the graders hadn’t got it right. On raw bulldozed ground beyond the blacktop, weeds and a fewstringy locusts tried to start a forest again. A tree line the bulldozers wouldn’t get to for a few years drifted into the mist at the end of this world. Nobody ever came back there unless a truck was unloading. I hunched under a dock.

As THE Evidence against Uncle Myron had become stronger and weaker and stronger again in the year that had passed since Aunt Leora’s death, I had felt in myself many times a certainty that he had killed her sufficient to imagine myself doing to him as my father had.

I had imagined aiming the gun—the same gun, the twelve-gauge, to make the justice more shapely—and firing. I could do that, I had told myself.

Under the shelter of the platform I knew I had only been telling myself a story. I could have put my finger on the trigger but not pulled. I might have led him to step off the shelf, but duty as I understood it, as I had learned it from my father, would have compelled me to save a drowning man even if I had been the one who put him in peril.

I had had the chance and not used it. I had not burst out of the trees shouting. I had not waded in. I had watched, and then run to get the bike.

My father had pulled the trigger and turned away as if it were nothing.

I drowned in questions. Why had I done nothing? Was it because I was young and not much was expected of me? Was it because it had happened in the presence of my father, and it was not my place to put myself forward where he did not? Was I bound to silence forever? What would happen if he were suspected? And stories were in the paper?

And he went on trial? Would I come forward to witness for him, to give an account of the event that matched whatever his was? Would I be able to stick with a lie like that —for my father, who had made lying a hard thing for me to do?

What if somebody in one of the cars that had passed on the road recognized me? What if I was reported, and taken to the police station and asked what I knew and why I had not volunteered it before?

What was expected of me? I had nobody to ask.

The rain drew off. I would have to go home. I took with me the simplest of stories to account for myself. I had biked to Nickerson Park, in the direction of Shelf Lake, and when the rain began had got under the cover of a firewood shed.

A diver found Uncle Myron bundled at the foot of the shelf in forty feet of water. My father explained that Myron had been warned, that he must have lost track of where he was while my father had been inattentive. Anybody who knew that water and how you could become engrossed working a five-pound bass on a three-pound line understood how easily it could happen.

Myron’s brother came to the Cape to make arrangements to ship the body to Pittsburgh for burial alongside Aunt Leora. He was Uncle Andrew to me, although we never knew that family very well. They were westerners, we were easterners; we met only at anniversary parties, weddings, funerals.

He said Myron had been a good brother and he would miss him. I suppose in some way he felt that my father had a degree of responsibility, since the accident had happened in our territory, so to speak, but he didn’t indicate it.

The circumstances were such that the card of suspicion never turned over in anybody’s head. Nobody who knew Ben Dewaine would have thought it for an instant.

I LIVED DIFFICULT YEARS WITH MY FATHER AFTER that, although all the difficulties were within me. On the surface our close relationship was undisturbed. We fished and hunted together as before, and I took many problems to him for a viewpoint.

Since I had declared against going into the family business, my parents thought that I might become a lawyer. I have an orderly mind and some ability to express myself, and therefore I thought so too. I was well along in college before I decided to do other work. In those early years, the years in which we allow ourselves to think abstractly, I often reflected about justice, but I never allowed myself to discuss it with my father, fearing that one word would take me to another until I reached one that I would regret.

I came to have considerable respect for Pilate. I thought how much more difficult Pilate’s problem may have been than the press reported. I would want to knowmore about what kind of man Pilate was before I concluded that he had a worn-out conscience or that he had settled for an epigram.

Nine years later the man with the brush haircut turned himself in.

He couldn’t live with it. It happens all the time. They see the victim’s face at night and think of what a life is and what it is to destroy one, and they get disgusted with themselves. They begin to think there may be eternal judgment after all, and they will be accountable. They show up at police stations and have to convince desk officers that they aren’t nuts. They call up reporters and meet them in diners. They ask priests to be go-betweens. They hire lawyers to get them the best deal.

The man’s name was Rome Hurdicke.

Again it was a story in the papers. He had parked, looking for opportunity as he had on other nights, and this night a dark place beside the lane beyond the Sherroder house had been the cover that attracted him. He had followed Aunt Leora into the garage intending to bluff her with the gun. She had been slow to respond. He thought she was about to call for help. He panicked and shot her and then thought only about getting away. The most singular event in two lives, and it was from beginning to end so ordinary that it could have been set in type like a slogan to be called up with a keystroke.

The newspapers rehashed it and noted the strange fate that had befallen so many people associated with the crime. Four of the jurors were dead. The judge had been killed in a private-plane accident. The woman who had claimed to be the well-known socialite doctor’s mistress had committed suicide. The husband of the murdered heiress had drowned in a fishing accident on Cape Cod.

Hurdicke was undoubtedly the man. He told the police where and when he had bought the gun, and thev verified the numbers. They found the Plymouth still in service, three owners forward and a coat of white paint two coats down. It was an old case, and because he had turned himself in, he got twenty years and was eligible for parole in twelve.

And so Uncle Myron’s life had been taken without cause.

I think somebody—perhaps his brother, Andrew— may care for Myron as we cared for Aunt Leora, and if he knew the circumstances of his death would yearn for human justice as my father did. I don’t know. I can’t deal with how Uncle Andrew might feel. My father is my flesh and blood, and he is a good man.

I can’t deal with my own guilt. If I had responded on the instant that I saw Uncle Myron pitch into the water, could I have saved him?

I don’t know. I will never get over not making the attempt, but confession offers me no way out, for it would be to witness against my father. I am tribal enough to say that my duty is to him, to keep the secret. In some matters what is not known does not exist.

After Hurdicke confessed, I watched my father closely. I trembled that he might turn himself in or even take his own life in remorse. I didn’t know if he would be more likely to do it if he knew that I knew his secret. Did he think that he alone knew what had happened at Shelf Lake? As a son who had become also a father, I knew that some parts of his life he intended to be an object lesson for me, but I couldn’t be certain which.

His manner, naturally reserved, became wintry. He gave up his places on church and hospital boards, and reduced his responsibilities at the company. Time passing without incident did not lull me into supposing that he had made his peace with Uncle Myron’s ghost, any more than Hurdicke had made his with Aunt Leora’s. Nevertheless, he went on with his life in a normal, though increasingly subdued, way, into his retirement years.

He entered then a remission in which he seems to have regained his appetite for a more active life. Mother said the other day, “He had a new garden turned over. He is talking about going west in the fall to hunt ram. He rejoined his skeet club. I think he is coming into good years.”

That may be, but I have marked my calendar.

I don’t know how Father accepts that the man who shot his sister in the face with a twelve-gauge Winchester has been paroled. Hurdicke will be released next week. I can only hope that my father has had enough of dealing out justice on earth.