Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot ...
He had been twelve—anyway it was soon after Mother died—when he discovered Whitman. One of the volumes chastely silent behind glass, in the parlor over the store, undoubtedly a book of Mother's. Carried off to his room and secretly saved from disaster when his stepmother dismissed all the books in the parlor that didn't have pretty red or brown bindings. The fury of that ancient wound stirred. At sixty-eight, Cecil Warner smiled slightly, unknowingly, and shifted in the disagreeable courtroom chair to ease a discomfort in his defective left arm.
So much, so many million other images, reflections, happenings, accidents, in the forty-nine years of the river's journey before Callista Blake was born, the nineteen years since then! None of it (said the doctors) totally forgotten. "I, Cecil, take thee, Ellen...."
He remembered making the necessary uproar about his bad arm's disqualifying him for military service; most of it sincere enough too, in spite of a deep private happiness with his young wife. He remembered damning the Kaiser. The murky spooks of Stalin and Hitler bulked so much larger in the years between, in front of them the mushroom cloud—hard to reconstruct true images of 1917. Then 1918, and influenza, and Ellen dead. She couldn't be—not abruptly, incomprehensibly gone like that; but she was. He returned half willingly to a winter day of 1959.
At sixty-eight it is possible to look ahead—some; to form a purpose, with caution, remembering that if you don't make it, they'll say charitably: "Think of that! Sort of getting on, wasn't he?"
He would not drink tonight. Well—dinner with Edith, maybe (and flowers), so maybe a glass or two of wine, nothing more—
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there aroused—the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me....
T. J. Hunter dropped the folder of notes he had been studying, possibly for effect, and turned back to the jury.
"In May of this year—the State will prove it—an illicit relation developed between Callista Blake and James Doherty, the husband of that Ann Doherty whose death, as you know, is the reason for this trial. Not to mince matters, the word is adultery, and I must remind you now, members of the jury, that Callista Blake is not here on trial for adultery. She is on trial for murder, nothing else. The State will prove the fact of adultery to establish motive—which, as you may also know, is not legally required, yet I think a rational mind is bound to demand it. How can we reasonably condemn anyone without at least some understanding of what made him act as the factual evidence says he did?
"I want to make one thing clear. In a case of this sort the husband is automatically suspect, the chance of conspiracy so obvious that the police would be derelict in duty if they didn't examine it to the last scrap of a clue. That's been done. If anything at all had been uncovered involving James Doherty in this crime, you know he would not be at liberty. Nothing of the sort has been found; everything points the other way. He decisively broke off the affair more than a month before the murder. He tried to make amends for his folly. The State is convinced that in the death of Ann Doherty, Callista Blake, consumed by hatred and jealousy—and by a certain fear for herself, since she was pregnant—acted entirely alone.