Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [116]
The defendant was very daring. He seemed to be imitating him. To be staring at him and in a way so that others wouldn’t notice, with tiny movements of his eyebrows and lips, to be constructing a caricature. He blinked and the defendant did the same. He winked and the defendant repeated the gesture.
‘Stop doing that!’
‘I can’t, your honour. I’ve got something in my eye.’
‘You should have thought about that.’
‘You don’t think about something in your eye, your honour,’ reasoned the defendant, surprised at having to explain such a basic law of nature to a judge.
He really was the spitting image.
While a female witness gave evidence, the defendant pulled out a book he had hidden under his shirt and started reading.
‘Behave!’ said the judge. ‘This isn’t a reading-room.’
The defendant was about to put the book away when the judge ordered it to be handed over. ‘My word, this looks interesting! The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu. I’ll have to read it. It’s been confiscated . . . By the way, what were you before you turned up here?’
‘I was a judge, but I meted out justice.’
The outsider’s reply caused a wave of consternation to spread through the courtroom.
‘I sentence you to life in exile,’ pronounced the judge. ‘I don’t want to see you in Oklahoma again.’
From The Mysterious Outsider by John Black Eye, Far Off West series.
The Yoke Collector
The director, publicist, only editor and typographer of the newspaper Maritime Awakening, Ernest Botana, walked in a daze, having received the order to close issued by the Judge of Oklahoma and carried out by the sheriff, Trigger Happy, and his not very bright sidekick, Light Weight.
‘Why?’ he asked the judge in the short interview he was allowed with the door ajar.
‘In the law, there are no whys,’ replied the somewhat oblique voice of Large White, the Judge of Oklahoma. Adding from a dark room, ‘The point of the law is to be the law, not to be just.’
He’d heard this before and had felt a mixture of fear and disgust, something akin to what a goldfinch must feel when it lands on a limy twig.
‘And don’t lodge any more appeals. I’ve ordered the building to be razed to the ground. I already told you there’s no sea in Oklahoma.’
Suddenly, on the main street, he bumped into a poorly paved shadow. He rolled his newspaper into the shape in his passionate columns he called ‘the Winchester of freedom’ and looked up to find the flinty profile of the supremo. His heart told him to express contempt. That the lives of people in Oklahoma should be in the hands of individuals like the judge at this stage of civilisation made him feel a fatigue he defined as ‘reticulate drowning’. There was a time his optimism knew no bounds and grew on top of itself, step by step, like a cabbage. It was then he’d written a brave and memorable denunciation of State abuse and corruption: The Yoke Collector.
Memorable especially for the judge. The day, no doubt, he swore to get his revenge. And summoned him. He was really annoyed.
‘You’ll feel all the weight of the law . . . and a little something extra from me.’
What was published in Maritime Awakening was true. The judge did collect yokes, which he hung in the hallway. He had three particularly interesting specimens: a Texas yoke, a Kansas yoke and a yoke from Oklahoma.
From The Yoke Collector by John Black Eye, Far Off West series.
Sulfe looked around. Between the stag’s antlers was a crucifix. The vision of St Eustace, patron saint of hunters. Three yokes hung in the hallway like coat-racks. One of each of the local kinds, called Galician, Portuguese and Castilian. Why had the judge summoned them? Did he suspect one of them of feeding information to a writer of western novels? What was his name? Black Eye.
‘There are the three yokes, but it’s not a collection. One good yoke is enough,’ said the judge with studied humour that made the others laugh. ‘As you well know, what I collect are Bibles. Tell me if