The Nobody People Bob Proehl (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📖

“Sam was sixteen. Jeb was thirteen. Melody, eleven. Paige, ten. We know from the sworn testimony of Scott Lipscombe, one of the members of the lynch mob, that Sam and Paige were shot before they died. We know that all of the Guthridges were stabbed and bludgeoned. Spit on and kicked. We can’t be sure who was alive when the lynch mob barred the doors and set the Guthridge house on fire, standing on the lawn to watch as it burned to nothing. We can’t be sure how each of the children died. Only that they died. They were lynched for being different. With their deaths at the hands of these men, Lucy and Sam and Paige and Jeb and Melody Guthridge enter the ledger of names this country must never forget. Emmett Till. Sam Hose.

“Many men and women who died in a frenzy of racial violence never received justice. We were not far enough along in our moral development to condemn their killers. I like to think we are now. Finding this lynch mob guilty for the lives they’ve taken, holding them to account, will not settle our debts with the past. But we owe it to the Guthridges, and Emmett Till, and Sam Hose to find these killers guilty. We owe it to ourselves to say we have gotten better. We recoil in proper horror from what these men have done, and we cast them out of our society, which will no longer stand for this kind of blind violence. It falls to you to speak for the dead and for the living. To administer justice needed, if too late in coming. If men and women before you had been brave enough to do so, the Guthridge family would be alive. If you are brave enough, the next Guthridge family, the next Emmett Till or Sam Hose, won’t have to die at the craven hands of a lynch mob.”

She goes back to her seat, and the defense attorney rises. He begins with a small chuckle to himself. He looks like every upperclassman who used to beat the shit out of Owen in high school.

“My colleague Miss Washington,” he says, “who’s come to us all the way from New York to lend her expertise to the prosecution, is a lovely speech maker. It’s easy to get a jury riled up by invoking the injustices of the past. If these men were part of the loathsome tradition she cites, I would step across the aisle and join her in condemning them. Lynching is a horrific crime with no place in this country, in this century. It’s a relic of a past we’d do well to put far behind us.

“The trouble is, Miss Washington has scant evidence that these men are guilty of the crime she claims they’ve committed. Or that there was a crime at all. The prosecution’s case rests on the testimony of a man on trial for the murder of his own son. In a fit of paranoia, he kills his son while the boy sleeps rather than allow the possibility his son might be a Resonant. The next day, broken by shame and guilt, his mind in fragments, he concocts the story of a crime whose horror outshines the one he’s confessed to. He makes a movie in his head and casts it with these men, the only friends he has. He groups them in with him, makes them culpable. You see, he says, I’m not the only one who thinks the only way to deal with these new beings is to kill them. Everyone I know is as guilty as me.

“Miss Washington would like you to take him at his word.

“Not the word of the police chief who investigated the deaths of the Guthridge family and declared it an accident. Or the medical examiner who autopsied the family and found nothing to indicate foul play. Or the community members who, one after another, have lined up to speak to the character of these men. And not the men themselves, who Miss Washington has already decided are monsters of the lowest order.

“She would like you to listen to Scott Lipscombe. A child killer. She would like you to weigh his word heavier than that of the entire town of Powder Basin, to see unbridled hatred where there is only an accident, a crime where there is only tragedy. She would like you to believe Scott Lipscombe beyond any reasonable doubt and label these men monsters.

“A fire destroyed the lives of the Guthridge family. Do not compound that tragedy by destroying the lives of these innocent men.”

The jury retires to deliberate. A wing of the Arrowhead’s third floor is reserved for them. Owen sees bailiffs taking trays full of fast food up to their sequester. The next day, his name doesn’t come up and he can’t get into the courtroom, where the audience waits to see if the jury returns a verdict. He goes back to his motel, then across the parking lot to a bar called the Chariot Lounge, where he finds a seat by the window. He nurses a Sprite, writes in his notebook, and watches the front of the motel. At four o’clock, two vans pick up the jury and take them to the courtroom.

Owen walks up to the bartender, who’s been watching him warily, and orders a vodka soda. He worries the bartender will ask for ID, but it’s dead and the man shoves him his drink, a browning wedge of lime perched on its rim. Owen finishes it and another. As he orders a third, the prosecution lawyer, Miss Washington, comes into the bar, looking defeated. He watches her order a glass of white wine, which the bartender pours from a single-serve plastic bottle. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a book, one of those little paperbacks. Something science fiction-y. Cautiously, aware of the sound of his footsteps in the empty bar, he