Home > Sycamore Row (Jake Brigance #2)(5)

Sycamore Row (Jake Brigance #2)(5)
Author: John Grisham

He passed the offices of The Ford County Times, the Tea Shoppe, which was only now coming to life, a haberdashery where he bought his suits on sale, a black-owned café called Claude’s where he ate every Friday with the other white liberals in town, an antiques store owned by a crook Jake had sued twice, a bank still holding the second mortgage on his home and tied up in the same lawsuit, and a county office building where the new district attorney worked when he was in town. The old one, Rufus Buckley, was gone, banished last year by the voters and permanently retired from elective office, or at least Jake and many others hoped so. He and Buckley had almost choked each other during the Hailey trial, and the hatred was still intense. Now the ex-DA was back in his hometown of Smithfield, in Polk County, where he was licking his wounds and scrambling to make a living on a Main Street crammed with other law offices.

The loop was over, and Jake unlocked the front door to his own office, which was generally considered to be the finest in town. The building, along with many others on the square, had been built by the Wilbanks family a hundred years earlier, and for almost that long a Wilbanks had practiced law there. The streak ended when Lucien, the last remaining Wilbanks and no doubt the craziest, had been disbarred. He had just hired Jake, fresh out of law school and full of ideals. Lucien wanted to corrupt him, but before he had the chance the State Bar Association yanked his license for the last time. With Lucien gone and no other Wilbanks around, Jake inherited a magnificent suite of offices. He used only five of the ten rooms available. There was a large reception area downstairs where the current secretary did her work and greeted clients. Above it, in a splendid room thirty feet by thirty, Jake spent his days behind a massive oak desk that had been used by Lucien, his father, and grandfather. When he was bored, a common occurrence, he walked to the double French doors, opened them and stepped onto the terrace, where he had a fine view of the courthouse and the square.

At 7:00 a.m., on schedule, he sat behind his desk and took a sip of coffee. He looked at his calendar for the day and admitted to himself that it did not look promising or profitable.

 

 

3


The current secretary was a thirty-one-year-old mother of four who’d been hired by Jake only because he could find no one more suitable. When she began five months earlier he had been desperate, and she had been available. She went by Roxy, and on the plus side Roxy showed up for work each morning around 8:30, or a few minutes thereafter, and did a somewhat passable job of answering the phone, greeting the clients, chasing away the riffraff, typing, filing, and keeping her turf somewhat organized. On the negative, and heavier, side of the ledger, Roxy had little interest in the job, viewed it as only temporary until something better came along, smoked on the back porch and smelled like it, nagged about the low salary, made vague but loaded comments as to how she thought all lawyers were rich, and in general was an unpleasant person to be around. She was from Indiana, had been dragged south in an Army marriage, and like many from the North had little patience with the culture around her. She’d had a superior upbringing and was now living in a backward place. Though Jake did not inquire, he strongly suspected her marriage was less than fulfilling. Her husband had lost his job due to dereliction. She wanted Jake to sue on his behalf but Jake declined, and this was still festering. Plus, there was about $50 missing from petty cash, and Jake suspected the worst.

He would have to fire her, something he hated to think about. Each morning during his quiet time, he said his daily prayer and asked God to give him the patience to coexist with this latest woman in his life.

There had been so many. He had hired young ones because they were more plentiful and worked cheaper. The better of those got married and pregnant and wanted six months off. The bad ones flirted, wore tight miniskirts, and made suggestive comments. One threatened a bogus action for sexual harassment when Jake fired her, but she was arrested for bad checks and went away.

He had hired more mature women to negate any physical temptation, but, as a rule, they had been bossy, maternal, menopausal, and they had more doctors’ appointments, as well as aches and pains to talk about and funerals to attend.

For decades the place had been ruled by Ethel Twitty, a legendary presence who ran the Wilbanks firm in its heyday. For over forty years Ethel had kept the lawyers in line, terrified the other secretaries, and fought with the younger associates, none of whom lasted more than a year or two. But Ethel was now retired, forced out by Jake during the Hailey circus. Her husband had been beaten by thugs, probably Klansmen, though the case was unsolved and its investigation going nowhere. Jake had been thrilled when she left; now, though, he almost missed her.

At precisely 8:30 he was downstairs in the kitchen, pouring more coffee, then puttering around a storage room as if searching for an old file. When Roxy eased through the rear door at 8:39, Jake was standing by her desk, flipping through the pages of a document, waiting, establishing the fact that she was, once again, late for work. That she had four young children, an unemployed and unhappy husband, a job she didn’t like with a salary she deemed meager, and a host of other problems—all this mattered little to Jake. If he liked her he could find some sympathy. But, as the weeks passed, he liked her less and less. He was building a file, handing out silent demerits, piling on the points so that when he sat her down for the dreaded talk he would have his facts. Jake despised being in the position of plotting to unload an undesirable secretary.

“Good morning, Roxy,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch.

“Hello, sorry I’m late, had to take the kids to school.” He was sick of the lying too, however small it was. Her unemployed husband hauled the kids to school and back. Carla had verified this.

“Uh-huh,” Jake mumbled as he picked up a stack of envelopes she had just placed on her desk. He grabbed the mail before she could open it and shuffled through it in search of something interesting. It was the usual pile of junk mail and lawyerly crap—letters from other firms, one from a judge’s office, thick envelopes with copies of briefs, motions, pleadings, and so on. He did not open these—that job belonged to the secretary.

“Looking for something?” she asked as she dropped her purse and bag and began settling in.

“No.”

Typically, she looked pretty rough—no makeup and a mess of hair. She hurried off to the restroom to put on her face and improve her looks, a project that often took fifteen minutes. More silent demerits.

At the bottom of the stack, on the very last regular-sized envelope of the day, Jake glanced at his name written in blue ink, cursive. The return address stunned him, and he almost dropped everything. He tossed the other mail into the middle of her desk, then hurried up the stairs to his office. He locked his door. He sat down at a rolltop in one corner, under a portrait of William Faulkner that had been purchased by Mr. John Wilbanks, Lucien’s father, and inspected the envelope. Generic, plain, white, letter-sized, cheap paper, probably purchased in a box of a hundred for five bucks, adorned with a twenty-five-cent stamp honoring an astronaut, and thick enough to contain several sheets of paper. It was addressed to him: “The Hon. Jake Brigance, Attorney at Law, 146 Washington Street, Clanton, Mississippi.” No zip code.

The return address was “Seth Hubbard, P.O. Box 277, Palmyra, Mississippi, 38664.”

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