A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [161]
“Would you mind telling her that I have not and will not voodoo her,” I said.
She leaned over and whispered, “I tell her I ain’t sure about you. I tell her you laying in here whispering to yourself, seems like you saying your spells and mumbo jumbo. That girl, she jus’ about eatin’ outta my hand these days.”
I prepared for Rafferty’s occasional visits by taking a shower, pinching my cheeks, and putting on clean socks. I remember once, as I was getting ready, Sherry, in her capacities as doorman, minister, nurse, and gang leader called out, “Where you going?”
“My man is here,” I said.
“Your man?”
“My man.”
“What he look like?”
“He has a chronic sinus condition,” I said dreamily. “He wears terrible suits of the cheapest magnitude. His hair is slick, like Elvis’s, only it’s speckled with gray, and his goatee has tobacco stains.”
“You sick?” she asked, coming closer with a look of motherly concern on her face.
What I loved about Rafferty, what I felt I surely must have loved about him for all of my life, was the fact that he never once doubted me. When I was taken down to the conference room to meet with him the first time after my arrest, he looked at me and then he shut his eyes, as if for some reason he hadn’t expected to see me in my orange togs, as if they were indecent and offended his sensibility. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“No,” was all I could say, laughing a little at his surprise.
He spit, “I despise these cases,” as if the words themselves were venomous and he wanted them out of his mouth. He was agitated enough to have trouble snapping open his vinyl briefcase. I knew right away that he had the anger Howard wished for me. “I thought these cases were over, a thing of the eighties, but they keep coming on. They keep coming.” Of course, he never looked me in the eye and asked me to say if I’d done it, but I felt that his capacity to know and identify was exact, that he could look at a rare coin and right off say its worth, just as he could quickly size me up and understand that I would never have hurt Robbie or the other boys as I stood accused. “I hate to see you in here,” Rafferty said, as if we were old friends and my condition pained him.
I never asked him if he was going to win my case, or what he thought my chances were. He was an eccentric man, whose personal effects looked to have been frozen about 1957. It was illogical, I knew, but I also felt that he was someone who never passed judgment. I realize now that I always sense that quality in people about whom I feel rapturous. In our meetings I tried to look clearly back over the last year, to tell him everything in proportion. I had hit Robbie, and in my mind both he and I had grown monstrous. Although he was a thin, undernourished child, in my dreams he often had the constitution of a punching bag, something you can knock down all you want and it will always pop right up again. Mrs. Mackessy, in my mind’s eye, was golden, all flickers and dazzle, slithering down the hall to get her son. For Rafferty I tried to draw them as I had first seen them, nothing more nor less than the sick, neglected boy and his preoccupied mother.
Although Rafferty felt that Robbie Mackessy’s case was relatively simple, there were three other boys who had come forward: Norman Frazer, Anthony Jenkins, and Tommy Giddings. There were also several other children who were being evaluated by the child welfare agency, although Rafferty did not tell me just how many until later. My records showed that I had seen the three boys once or twice during the school year, but I didn’t remember them without some prompting. There were seven hundred children at Blackwell Elementary, and I had never thought that I might have to keep them straight.
“Is there any procedure you do that could be misconstrued?” Rafferty asked, his hands folded, his Bic pen at rest on his empty legal pad. In all those months he worked on my case I only remember him writing something down once. I may have misjudged