Old Miss Gracing by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Chapter 11
When Zeke got home his father suggested that after an early dinner, they would take advantage of the nice day to get in some more baseball practice. They drove to a place Zeke would come to know very well. At the end of a large park harboring swimming pools, wading pools, monkey bars, swings and much more, they drove over a steep drop off to an area containing four baseball fields, bordering the river. No one was playing this time of year, so they had their choice of fields, the only company, or so they thought, being a few picnickers.
After getting into the first routine of batting practice, while his father was running down the six balls he had hit to various places, Zeke noticed a 200 foot piece of land nobody had maintained in years. It started at the end of the baseball fields and seemed to go on forever. It contained discarded refrigerators, washers and the like. He saw the bent tin remainder of someone’s shed, once yellow and now faded to a peeling cream. She stepped out the door of it. Miss Gracing, wearing purple pants and blouse topped off with a gray jacket, was walking very slowly, trying her best to view the river while having to watch where she stepped with all the debris around.
She seemed to settle into a slow glide over the land, allowing her to stare at the polluted boatless water.
“Hey,” said Dad, “Ready?” He had retrieved the six balls and was ready to pitch them again. Zeke put the bat over his shoulder and stepped up to the plate. He was half trying to watch the pitcher and half trying to follow Miss Gracing’s movements. Dad noticed and stopped his pitch, looked in the direction Zeke seemed distracted to, saw nothing unusual and turned back to him and again said; “Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“You know, the most important thing to know about this game is that you have to pay attention to it.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Throw the ball.”
His father threw it, but Zeke couldn’t keep one corner of one eye’s attention off Miss Gracing. He started hitting some weak grounders, fouled some off and even completely missed one.
Dad said; “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I’m the player, not the analyst. Maybe you’re throwing it so slow it doesn’t keep my attention.”
His father shrugged at him as if to say; “Okay, you asked for it.” Zeke already had the general idea of Miss Gracing’s movements and focused back on his father and the ball. It came hard and inside and Zeke smacked a line drive of about 100 feet down the left field line. They both took a long look in that
direction, because it was the furthest Zeke had ever hit the ball up to that point.
The rest of the practice session went well, not however, equaling the first fast pitch. When his father was giving signs that he was getting ready to go, Zeke said; “How about letting me try some pitching. His father looked skeptically at him and said; “I don’t think you’re ready for that, yet.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Okay, just for a little while.” He threw one ball to Zeke and squatted down behind the plate.
Zeke walked out to the mound and eyed the slab in the middle of it. His father called out; “Hey, where are you going?”
He didn’t know where he was going, so he kept alternating his gaze between the slab and his father. Dad said; “Kids don’t throw from that far away.”
The distance did appear to Zeke as if it would take a gun to reach home plate. So, he started to walk closer to his father.
“Okay, stop there,” Dad said. “That’s about where the little league mound is. Give that a try.” He slapped his clenched right fist into his gloved hand.
Slightly unsettled that there was no slab for a starting place, he took a big windup and let it go. It bounced twice before getting to home plate and was about three feet to the
left of it. His father competently blocked the ball in front of him and threw it back. Zeke made some adjustments, improving that first throw, but after about twenty pitches, he had not yet thrown a strike. He had already made the conclusion that this was the harder part of the game when his father said; “Let’s call it quits. It’ll be dark soon.” Zeke took a long look in the direction where Miss Gracing was walking, but couldn’t find her again, so he hopped in the car and went home.
On foot, Miss Gracing got home a little later than Zeke, after sunset. Her kitchen window revealed a one quarter red orange moon in the cloudless sky. She was surprised she didn’t notice it when outside, as she reached for her collection of
“Boston” magazines which resided inside one of the built in cabinets. She remembered the early days of her marriage.
Though she thought that he was the greatest guy she ever met, before they were even married, a hint of caution started to pop up. She liked teaching and wanted to keep her job in Boston, while he wanted her to relocate to his rural hamlet twenty miles away.
She took the June 1923 issue to the kitchen table and sat.
The magazine was well maintained, some edges yellowing, its only defect. The three tone cover had a picture of Bonadea Courtney, handcuffed in a gray prison dress, being escorted to the courthouse by two armed cops. Seven other cameramen were
popping their light bulbs at her. She looked at the ground, appearing somewhat wild with her disheveled long black hair.
The headline was “Husband Killer on Trial.” She flipped through the magazine to find the six page cover story with more pictures, all taken inside the courthouse. She noticed the general pattern of the pictures. No matter what else may have been going on at the moment, all eyes, including that of an all-male jury, were on her. She returned no eye contact and stared at the wooden table she was seated behind. Her bruised skin and one swollen shut eye made their presence known on a hanging, lifeless face. The article said that Marshall Courtney’s wife pleaded guilty to his murder. There was an outburst in the courthouse by the victim’s 23 year old younger brother, Castor, who had to be removed by police when he left his seat and tried to get to Mrs. Courtney.
In Corpusbury, Massachusetts, a still rural hamlet 20 miles from Boston, now 55 year old Castor Courtney was looking at the same magazine. This wasn’t unusual for him. He had been dwelling on the early loss of his big brother for thirty-three years. He lived alone in the white clapboard Cape Cod styled house, that he knew all his life and inherited from his parents five years ago, when his mother succumbed to a chronic kidney problem. The cape sat on two heavily wooded acres, contiguous to the cemetery, the oldest resident of Corpusbury. It was a
convenient location for him; as it facilitated solitary walks Castor would take to visit his brother’s remains. During these treks he always looked at the other gravestones, noticing how many women died early, in childbirth, during the nineteenth century. He wondered why it couldn’t have happened to Bonadea Carson. He always called her by her maiden name, denying her the status of having been married to a Courtney, with all its attendant honors. He hoped that she had died a long painful death.
When he wasn’t sharing his thoughts with the wall, he spent his isolated day investigating. It was a cumbersome process as he had no idea what name she might be using. Carson, Courtney, or something else. He had been spending his days writing letters to newspapers, operators of cemeteries, churches, schools, police departments and anything else that might have information about deaths throughout the United States and Western Europe. So far the process had not yielded any concrete results. On three occasions, he traveled to other areas to get more information when something piqued his interest. Up until now he could not confirm her death and it killed him to think that she might still be walking the same earth as he did and his brother didn’t.
He didn’t consider his lifelong obsession strange, even though he and his brother weren’t especially fond of each other.
Marshall often chided Castor about his name’s slimy relationship to oil and being a general creep. However, Castor knew that when a brother is slain, one is expected to seek revenge. What would the people he didn’t know, anyway, say if he were complacent?
It was a more than full time job, preventing him from doing much maintenance or cleaning of his solitary six room home. The peeling white paint complemented the dust covered “country”
versions of early American furniture his parents spent so much time acquiring, fixing up and cleaning. The only items getting any attention at all were the metal filing cabinets which overflowed with his letters and their replies. In an effort to enhance his efficiency, he had a filing system which took into consideration the date, location, school, cemetery, newspaper, other source, answered, unanswered, answered vaguely, on and on.
As a consequence, 95% of the time he went looking for something, he couldn’t find it. The cabinets stood six drawers high and four wide and were finished in a light green, so tepid a color, that the only place it existed in nature was in half dead plants.
He took out his copy of the July 1923 “Boston” magazine, his closet brush with lasting fame and his proudest moment.
There was a close up of him, with his contorted face screaming something and being grabbed by two cops in the court room, as he
attempted to reach the judge. The article’s headline said,
“Spouse Slaying Sister Sentenced to Psychiatric Sanctuary.”
The article explained that during the sentencing hearing the prosecution was allowed to flood the court with character witnesses, who described the deceased as one of the greatest guys ever to walk these parts of the earth and how much his family and community would miss his presence, often tearfully.
When the defense tried to introduce court records of three teenage violent crimes involving the dearly departed, it was ruled inadmissible due to his tender years at the time. When they tried to present character witnesses for Bonadea they were disallowed as they didn’t know her “long enough.” Despite having to go against the huge wave intent on punishing the wicked husband killer, the defense was successful in introducing the nude photographs of Bonadea’s severely bruised face and body taken by the male police officers on the night of her arrest.
The people in the court room couldn’t help but notice the shock on the judge’s face while viewing the photos. Not a young man by any means the only time the judge could remember seeing anything worse than this was when a doctor friend of his had shown him a book of war wounds.
The judge’s decision was given after an hour’s recess.
When he reconvened court, he basically said that considering Bonadea was not a likely menace to the public, the atrocity
evidenced in the photos which never became public and the fact that a person suffering this type of trauma needed special care, he sentenced her to life imprisonment in the state psychiatric facility for the criminally insane.
All hell broke loose. Castor led the angry death sentence devotees to the front of the room, breaking through the front line police guards, who chose to protect Bonadea, leading her out a side entrance to the safety of a jail cell, while two others stationed near the judge held onto the marauding brother, at the head of the group. The cops who led Bonadea out of harm’s way came back, used their bodies as shields for the judge and tried to calm the riot, guns drawn and threatening arrests.
The cops’ efforts were successful in preventing human injury, the only victims being tables, chairs, bannisters and American flags, but the angry demonstrators came from so many blood hungry directions that it was more like watching a wildfire burn itself out. Smiling cameramen had a field day and Castor loved it all.
His theatrics demonstrated to the world how much he supported the brother he never liked. Marshall had gotten all the family had to give in looks, charm and had a way with women.
Castor always thought that Marshall lorded it over him and every time he saw his face in the bathroom mirror his jealousy raged.
He was one of those people who looked forty by the age of
fifteen. His receding hairline, bulbous nose, thin lips and squinty eyes were unfixable tragedies, at least in his mind, which also didn’t work as well as his brother’s. He had often thought of killing Marshall, himself, but now could be sure that anyone who had previously detected his feelings would see that his “heart” was in the right place. He did what he thought was the right thing in a very public arena.