Character of the Day

by Oliver Marshall, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Dawes Kinnaird brought the almanac himself. That was the first thing that told me he had read about Lincoln too.

He laid it on the clerk's table in the Breckett County courthouse the way a man lays down a pair of aces he has been waiting all night to show you, a paper-covered thing from the feed store with a picture of a bull on the front, and he opened it to September of 1951 and put his finger on the fourteenth. "Moon full, or as near as makes no difference," he said to Judge Rowe, but he was looking at me. "I thought I'd save counsel the trouble."

He had saved me a dime. I had the same almanac in my briefcase, bought in Louisville off a rack by the door of a drugstore on Walnut Street, and I had been carrying it for a week like a pistol I meant to draw in the last reel. Everybody who goes to law school hears the story. Duff Armstrong, a killing at a camp meeting, a witness who swore he saw the blow by the light of the moon, and young Abe Lincoln producing an almanac to show the moon had been low in the sky and nearly down. The jury laughed the witness out of the box. It is a fine story. It has been told so often that a Commonwealth's Attorney in a county with one stoplight had read it, and he had checked his moon before I could check mine, and his moon was full.

So that was the end of that. I was twenty-nine years old and I had driven sixty miles to lose.

---

The case was not much of a case, which is the kind they gave you. Somebody had pried the back window of Pettit's Feed and Seed in Cane Ford on the night of September fourteenth and taken a tin cash box with forty-one dollars and some cents in it. Nobody saw the window go. What somebody saw, or said she saw, was a man crossing the Durrett bottom field at about eleven o'clock, going toward the creek, away from town, with something under his arm. The somebody was Mrs. Opal Durrett, widow, who lived in the house on the rise above that field. The man, she said, was Amos Tolliver.

Amos was a colored man of about forty who did farm work and fence work and anything else with a shovel at the end of it, and he lived with his sister on the far side of that same creek. He said he had been at home asleep. His sister said so too, which in Breckett County was worth exactly what you would expect a colored woman's word about her own brother to be worth. They found no cash box and no forty-one dollars. They found Amos, which was apparently sufficient.

At the preliminary hearing Mrs. Durrett had been very sure. She knew his walk. She knew his hat, a brown felt with the crown pushed out, because he had worn it every day he worked her fence the spring before. She had watched him come out of the trees at the road and go the whole way across, down to the creek willows, and she could have reached out and touched him, she said, the moon was that bright.

The Commonwealth had her, and now it had the moon. I had a client who had been asleep.

---

My father was a porter on the L&N for thirty years, Louisville to New Orleans and back, and on his nights at home he argued with his sons over supper. You could not say a thing at that table without being made to prove it. If you said it had been a hot day he would ask how hot, and where you had stood when you decided so, and whether you had looked at a thermometer or only at your own shirt. My brother hated it. I didn't know enough to hate it. I thought that was what supper was.

I sat in my car on the courthouse square in Cane Ford with the almanac on the seat beside me, and I heard him ask it. You say the moon was out. Did you see it? Nobody in the case had seen the moon but Opal Durrett. The almanac didn't see it either. The almanac only said where the moon would be. It did not say what was standing between the moon and that field.

I drove back to Louisville that night, and in the morning I went to the Weather Bureau.

---

I will say for the federal government that it keeps things. A young man at a counter with his sleeves held up by garters listened to me, went away, and came back with a bound volume called Climatological Data, Kentucky Section, for September of 1951, and he turned the pages with a licked thumb until he found a station called Cane Ford 2 NE.

"Cooperative station," he said. "Volunteer. They read the instruments every day and mail us the form at the end of the month. That one's been reporting since before the first war."

The line for the fifteenth showed .62 inches of rain. I asked him what that meant, and he told me. The observer read the gauge at seven in the morning. Whatever was in it at seven on the fifteenth had fallen in the twenty-four hours before. It might have rained at noon on the fourteenth. It might have rained at four in the morning on the fifteenth. The book did not say, and Kinnaird would know enough to say so.

"Does the observer write down when it starts?"

"Some do. There's a remarks column." He shrugged. "Some of them write down every cow that calves. Some of them write nothing at all. We just get the numbers in here." He turned the volume around so I could read the station listing. Observer: E. P. Bewley.

"Mr. Bewley," I said, and wrote it down.

"Mrs.," said the young man. "E. P. died. She kept it on. Nobody ever changed the card."

---

The Bewley farm sat across the county road from the Durrett bottom field, which I knew because I had stood in that field with a tape measure the week before, and I had looked at the white farmhouse beyond the road without knowing it was anything but a white farmhouse. From her front gate you could see the Durrett place on its rise. Half a mile, I'd have said, and later I measured it, and I was a little short.

She was in the side yard when I drove up, standing at a white wooden box on four legs about the height of her chest, with slatted sides like a louvred cupboard door. It was a few minutes past seven in the morning. I had slept in the car to get there at that hour, because the young man in Louisville had said seven, and I wanted to see it done.

She was a small woman in a man's barn coat, sixty or more, and she watched me get out of a car she did not know and walk toward her, a colored man in a suit, and she did not move away from the box. She opened its little door, bent and read something inside, and wrote it in a notebook. Then she took the lid off a metal cylinder on a stand nearby, drew out a brass tube from inside it, and put a thin stick down into the tube like a man checking his oil. She read the stick, wrote that too, emptied the tube onto the grass, and put everything back the way it had been.

"You're the lawyer for Amos," she said.

I said I was.

"Opal told me there was a lawyer coming from Louisville." She closed the notebook on her pencil. "She didn't say you'd come to me."

I asked her about the night of the fourteenth. I did not ask her what she had seen. I asked her what she had written down.

She looked at me for a long moment, and then she took me into the kitchen and got down a ledger from on top of the safe, a long gray clothbound book, and beside it a stack of carbon copies held together with a bulldog clip. The carbons were the monthly forms, each the twin of one she had mailed to Louisville. Her husband had started the ledger in 1913. She showed me his hand, square and dark, and where it stopped, in February of 1946, and her own hand starting the next day, smaller, leaning the other way, the same columns.

September 14, 1951. Maximum 84. Minimum 63. In a column headed Character of Day, in her hand: Cloudy. In the remarks, small, all in a line: Clouded up fr SW abt 9p. Rain began 10.50p, hvy 11 to 11.40. Thunder. Lt rain till 2a.

"E. P. always put the time it started," she said. "If he was awake. He said the Bureau never asked for it but it was a poor way to keep a record, not to say when."

"Were you awake?"

"I was on the porch. I watched it come." She took the ledger back from me and closed it. "I know what you want, and I'm not going to do it. I report to the Bureau. I don't report to the court."

"Mrs. Bewley—"

"Opal Durrett was E. P.'s cousin. I sat up with her when Clarence passed. I sit two pews behind her every Sunday of my life." She put the ledger back on top of the safe and the carbons beside it. "You can get the numbers from Louisville. The numbers are the government's. That book is mine."

I didn't argue with her. Mr. Houston used to tell us not to shout too soon, and I could see that if I shouted at Hester Bewley in her own kitchen she would go to her grave thinking that was what a colored lawyer from Louisville did, and she would be right about this one. I thanked her for showing me. On the way out I looked at the white box in the yard again, and she saw me look.

"Cotton-region shelter," she said from the step. "Keeps the sun off the thermometers. You have to set it with the door to the north, so the sun doesn't strike in when you open it."

"Why the north?"

"Because the sun's in the south," she said, as if I were slow, and went in.

---

I subpoenaed her anyway. It is a thing I am not proud of and would do again. The sheriff served it, and I imagine he enjoyed that, and I imagine Opal Durrett knew about it before supper.

I filed my motion on the jury too, because there were forty-two names on the venire and not one of them was a colored man in a county that was one-fifth colored, and Judge Rowe denied it from the bench without looking up, and I took my exception and made sure the reporter had it word for word. Nobody in that room thought the motion was the case. It was for later, for some other courtroom, for some other lawyer who would need to find that it had been made. The record is where you live in this business. You furnish it a room at a time.

---

Opal Durrett wore a navy dress and a hat with a short veil, and she sat in the witness chair with her pocketbook in her lap. On direct Kinnaird walked her through it gently: the porch, the hour, the man coming out of the trees, the walk, the hat, the moon. She did it well. Then he held up the feed-store almanac for the jury, and read them the line about the full moon, and sat down.

I stood up and did not mention the moon.

"Mrs. Durrett, you were sitting out on your porch that night."

"I was."

"Is that your habit? Late?"

"In the summer it is. It was warm."

"Until what time?"

"Near midnight. It was such a fine night I hated to go in."

"A fine night." I let the jury hear it. "And this man you saw. How long did you watch him?"

"From the road to the willows."

"How far is that?"

Kinnaird objected that she was not a surveyor. Judge Rowe said she could estimate.

"A good long way," she said. "It's the whole bottom."

"Would it surprise you if I told you it measures six hundred and forty yards?"

"I wouldn't know."

"A man walking steady, would that take him a while? Two minutes? More?"

"I suppose."

"And you watched him the whole of that time."

"I did. I said so."

"You didn't look away. You didn't lose him and pick him up again."

"No."

"You saw him steady, the whole way across, by a steady light."

"I saw him as plain as I see you."

"Plainer, I hope," I said, and two of the jurors smiled, and I was sorry, because it was cheap and I needed her more than I needed them. "When you went in, near midnight, did you need anything to cover your head?"

She looked at me. "Cover it from what?"

"I have no more questions."

Kinnaird looked at me too, and for the first time I thought he was not quite sure what I had done.

---

Hester Bewley came up the aisle carrying the ledger and the carbons in a clean flour sack, and the whole room watched her pass Opal Durrett in the second row. She did not look at her. She put the sack on the rail and took the oath and sat down.

I took her through the instruments. I took her through the morning reading at seven, and the form, and the Bureau, and the thirty-eight years of the ledger, and her husband's hand and her own. I had her tell the jury where the shelter stood and which way the door faced and why. She told them about the sun being in the south as if they were slow too, and three of them were farmers and grinned at their knees. Then I had her open the ledger to the fourteenth of September and read the line aloud.

She read it in the same voice she had read the thermometer in, with the abbreviations spelled out. Clouded up from the southwest about nine p.m. Rain began ten-fifty p.m., heavy eleven to eleven-forty. Thunder. Light rain till two a.m.

"Mrs. Bewley, did you write that the same night?"

"I wrote the time when it started. I wrote the rest in the morning when I read the gauge."

"How do you know when it started?"

"I was on the porch. I looked at the kitchen clock when the first drops came on the roof. I always look."

"Where did the storm come from?"

"Southwest. Over the Durretts' ridge first. It was over their place a good five minutes before it reached mine."

"Could you see the moon at eleven o'clock that night, Mrs. Bewley?"

"I couldn't see my own barn," she said.

---

Kinnaird was a good lawyer, and he did not do the foolish thing, which would have been to call her a liar. He did the next thing.

"Mrs. Bewley, your gauge is in your side yard."

"It is."

"Half a mile from Mrs. Durrett's porch."

"A little more."

"Isn't it a fact that a summer storm can rain on one farm and not the next? I've seen it rain on one side of the Cane Ford road and not the other."

"I've seen it too," she said. "That wasn't that kind. That was a line come up from the southwest and it took the whole valley. It took her side before it took mine. I watched it go over."

"You watched it go over in the dark."

"There was lightning," said Hester Bewley.

Kinnaird stopped there, and I saw him see it. He turned the idea over for the space of a breath, and then he let her go without another question, and when I rested he called Opal Durrett back in rebuttal to the chair and asked her whether there might have been lightning that night.

She looked at the flour sack on the rail, and at the woman who sat two pews behind her every Sunday, and at me.

"There might have been," she said. "Later."

"Could you have seen the defendant by the light of it?"

And Opal Durrett, who was not a liar, I think, only a woman who had made up her mind on the fifteenth of September and had been telling it ever since, until it had become the thing she remembered, sat with her pocketbook in her lap and tried to find a way to fit a man walking six hundred and forty yards, steady, under a steady light, without her once losing him, into the space between flashes. I watched her try. The jury watched her try. It does not go. You cannot know a man's walk by lightning. You can only know he was somewhere.

"I saw him," she said at last. "I saw him plain."

"Thank you, Mrs. Durrett," said Kinnaird, and went back to his table and sat down, and did not look at the almanac again.

---

The jury was out for an hour and ten minutes, which in Breckett County in 1951 was a long time for anybody to think about Amos Tolliver. They came back not guilty. Amos shook my hand and asked me whether it truly had rained, and I told him Mrs. Bewley said so, and he nodded as if that settled a question he had been wanting settled for some time. I never asked him where he was that night. It was not my question. The Constitution doesn't ask it either; it asks what the Commonwealth can prove.

When I came out onto the courthouse steps, Hester Bewley was standing on the walk in the sun with the ledger under her arm. She had emptied the carbons back into her pocketbook, and she held the flour sack by two corners and shook it out, once, hard, and folded it in half and in half again, and put it in on top of them. Then she went down the walk to the road without looking back to see who was watching, because it was getting on toward evening, and there was a reading in the morning at seven.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Oliverō Marshallō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Oliver Marshall, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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