“I’m sorry,” I barely murmur. What is there to say?
Ignoring my sympathy, he says, “Anyway, I’ve got the Wallace case coming up, and I need somebody, if I don’t feel up to it, who can talk to a jury the way I heard you did in that case with the nigger psychologist.”
I feel my stomach muscles knot into a mass as if a tumor of my own is being formed. Bracken obviously has no idea I was married to a woman who was partly black. Rosa was a native of the northern coast of Colombia, and her bloodlines melded Indian, Spanish, and Negro ancestries. So, despite my eastern Arkansas up bringing, the word “nigger” is no longer in my vocabulary At the same time I’m elated by his reference to the Chapman case. Bracken sets the standard by which all criminal defense attorneys in Blackwell County are measured. I feel as I did when I was seven and brought my father a note from Mrs. Harrod that I was the best reader in her second-grade class at Mulberry Elementary
“When is the trial date?” I ask, trying to conceal the excitement I’m beginning to feel.
“It begins on the twenty-fourth,” he says, unfurling on his knees abnormally long fingers, which I realize now have been clenched.
“I asked a couple of other guys, but they had a conflict.”
My ego shrivels like the skin of a helium-filled balloon suddenly pierced by a needle.
“What’s the pay?” I ask, masking my disappointment with a question lawyers understand. Bracken commands fees the rest of us usually only dream about. Perversely, I think that with the money he is saving on medical bills he can afford to be doubly generous. My gall surprises even me. Here I am willing to haggle over money, and this guy’s life is boiling away faster than a pan of water being heated by a flamethrower. Still, it’s easier than talking about the pain he must be feeling.