A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [193]
Mrs. Sheridan was a good Catholic who had been bearing children since 1960 and had only recently, three years before, finished with the stillbirth of her eleventh baby. Her tailored maroon suit had been out-of-date for so long it had come back into fashion, and it still fit reasonably well. She wasn’t any taller than five feet and she had short, dull black hair. Robbie and his mother had lived next door to the Sheridans, in a rental house, for three months the previous spring. Mrs. Sheridan deplored the fact that Mr. Gillis, the landlord, always had undesirable people as tenants, and that he did not keep up with essential repairs. Rafferty did his best to hold her to the subject, but with a captive audience she couldn’t seem to help making asides about the ills of society.
There weren’t any boys in the neighborhood Robbie’s age and Mrs. Sheridan told us that for a while Robbie latched on to her eight-year-old son, Jack. After a few weeks, however, she had had to prohibit Jack from playing with Robbie because of the child’s foul language, the likes of which had never before reached her ears. “I’m not inclined to repeat any of those words,” she asserted, “even for the benefit of the court.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Rafferty assured her.
With Rafferty’s prodding Mrs. Sheridan related an incident that had taken place in May. She had gone looking for Jack at about 7:30 in the evening. She had called first, and then rung the dinner bell several times. He was ordinarily reliable, and she began to worry. Some of the older children had gone with Mr. Sheridan on a fishing trip and it was just going to be herself and Jack for dinner. It was a rare occasion to have one child at home, and she was going to take him out to Taco Bell for a treat. She walked down the block, down Main Street where they lived. She turned the corner and followed the path to the subdivision where he sometimes went to play with school friends. There was a group of boys skateboarding in a driveway but he wasn’t among them. They said he hadn’t been around for an hour or so, that they thought he had gone home. She became very anxious. “We all know what the world is coming to,” she said, looking at the jury for confirmation. Although Jack was her tenth child, she didn’t feel that she was overprotective, due to her long experience. There had been recent rumors of a man in a green pickup truck harassing young girls. The year before a Walworth County boy had disappeared, plucked off the street, no trace. Even a seasoned mother worried.
I don’t think there was any one in the room, not Rafferty, not Susan Dirks, not Judge Peterson himself, who wanted to endanger their reputations by interrupting Mrs. Sheridan, or objecting to her statements, or telling her to hurry along.
On the evening of May 23 she stopped in front of the Mackessys, having decided she’d check at their house before she walked all the way over to the playground. She had told her son not to play with Robbie, but Jack was a kindhearted boy who might have responded if Robbie had been in need. It was not impossible, she thought, that Jack had gone into the house to assist him in some way.
“Wouldn’t Carol Mackessy have been on the premises,” Rafferty asked, “to put a Band-Aid on his knee or pour a glass of milk?”
Nancy Sheridan shook her head and again wiped her face. She seemed not exactly to be crying, although there was a steady stream coming from her right eye. “She often left that poor boy at home by himself,” she said. “Jack would go over there and come back and tell me that Robbie was alone eating from a box of Froot Loops.” While Dirks was making a hearsay objection Mrs. Sheridan went right on talking. “It’s bad families that are spoiling it for everyone else. I found it impossible to believe