A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [99]
At the hearing I had waited with my head down while Robbie poked his doll. While he displayed his adult knowledge of sexual matters. I couldn’t concern myself with the impression I was making on the judge. A child couldn’t look the way Robbie had unless someone had taken advantage of him. You couldn’t act traumatized at age six. He’d looked scared at first, and pained at the remembrance, and then when it came to him perhaps more vividly his eyes had widened, as if he couldn’t pull away from the scene. “Four score and seven years ago,” I had said to myself, my head between my knees, “our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure.” Was it worth killing forty thousand men at Gettysburg for that one flawless speech? Sometimes it almost seemed that it was. I used to say the Address to myself when I was doing chores. It felt like a mantra from my short TM days, only fuller, something that was in my veins as well as my head. “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” With my head down I wondered what good would come out of the summer. I wondered what hope we could possibly take home that would endure beyond the present horror of sitting quietly in Branch Six while Robbie Mackessy tortured his doll.
“What did he do?” Theresa was asking in her gentle, insistent way. “What did he do to the doll, Howard?”
I hadn’t looked up during the rest of Mrs. Dirks’s questions. I had said the Gettysburg Address over and over to myself. I also remembered how it was that I’d wanted to farm since I was a boy. I’d wanted to farm ever since the time I planted a wheat field with my Uncle Erwin, sitting on his lap, on the tractor. Later in the summer I visited his farm again, in Zombrota, Minnesota. I got to see the wheat, the sea of green wheat we’d planted. I never forgot how beautiful that field was, the wheat moving in the wind like waves. Years later, in college, I read that in one hundred years there was going to be no topsoil left, that we have been going through topsoil faster than we are squandering any other natural resource. That was as much information as I needed, to follow the path Uncle Erwin had begun for me.
“I don’t know exactly what Robbie did to the doll,” I said to Theresa.
“He didn’t perform?” she asked, in all seriousness.
I hadn’t sat up until Mrs. Dirks was saying, “Okay, Robbie. Thank you. You are a real trooper. You are a very brave six-year-old and we thank you.” I had hoped that Alice would turn her head to look again. She would see that I was unaffected. She would see that nothing Robbie had done had made an impression.
With the kind of acumen that even Alice does not have, Theresa said, “I wouldn’t have been able to watch the whole thing, if I’d been you, Howard. With Alice sitting right there, I would have just shut my eyes and blocked my ears.”
She made my head swim. I had to put my hands to my jaw before I could speak. “Rafferty got up for the cross-examination then,” I said hoarsely. “He was wearing a battered plaid suit coat that made me think of a great old cheap store in Chicago. Goldblatt’s. My Aunt Penny used to send me toys that lasted for about ten minutes from Goldblatt’s. To work there you had to wear suit coats that matched the sofas in the furniture department.”
We both knew I hadn’t answered the question. “God,” she heaved. “And he earns more than a decent salary. He could afford to go to Saks, or Brooks Brothers.”
Rafferty had leaned against the railing which fenced off the empty jury box. “Hi, Robbie,” he said, as if they had never previously met. “My name is Paul, by the way. There’s not