He decided to press on as if he’d been in this situation many times. “Any more discussion?”
There were some anxious glances around the table but no one seemed eager to join Tyus Sutton. “Very well,” Truitt continued. “All those in favor of indicting Pete Banning for the first-degree murder of the Reverend Dexter Bell raise your hands.”
With no enthusiasm, five hands slowly went up. Five more eventually joined them. All others remained under the table.
“You can’t abstain,” Truitt snapped at Milt Muncie.
“And you can’t make me vote,” Muncie shot back angrily, ready to either throw a punch or take one.
Truitt looked around the room, counted quickly, and announced, “I count ten. That’s two-thirds, enough for an indictment. Thank you, Sheriff. We are dismissed.”
* * *
—
As the days passed, Pete busied himself by improving conditions at the jail. The coffee was his first target and by the end of his third day the entire jail—prisoners, guards, and cops—were drinking Standard Coffee from New Orleans. Florry delivered it in five-pound bags, and during her second visit asked Nix what the colored prisoners were drinking. He replied that they were not served coffee, and this angered her. During the ensuing tirade, she threatened to withhold all coffee until it was offered to everyone.
At home, she snapped Marietta and Nineva into high gear and they began cooking and baking with a vengeance. Almost daily, Florry arrived at the jail with cakes, pies, cookies, brownies, and pots of beef stew, venison stew, collard greens, red beans and rice, and peas and corn bread. The quality of the jailhouse cuisine rose dramatically, for all inmates, with most of them eating far better than on the outside. When Amos gutted a fatted hog, the entire jail gorged on smoked spare ribs. Nix and his boys feasted as well, and saved a few bucks on lunch. He had never experienced the incarceration of a wealthy landowner who had plenty of acreage for growing food and the staff to prepare it.
After the first week, Pete convinced Nix to appoint him a jail trusty, which meant his cell was not locked during the day and he could roam as he pleased as long as he did not leave the building. Nix was somewhat sensitive to the potential rumors that Pete was getting special treatment, and at first didn’t like the idea of using him as a trusty. But, every respectable jail had at least one trusty, and at the moment Nix had none. The last one, Homer Galax, served the county faithfully for six years and had three to go on his aggravated assault conviction when he ran off with a widow who was rumored to have some money. They had not been seen since, and Nix had neither the time, the interest, nor the energy to look for them.
Another rule, one that was evidently nonbinding as well, was that a trusty had to first be convicted of his crime and sentenced to serve his time in the county jail rather than the state pen. Nix brushed this aside as well, and Pete became the trusty. As such, he served the much improved meals to the other four white prisoners, and to the six or seven black ones on the back side of the jail. Since all prisoners soon knew where the food was originating, Pete was a popular trusty. He organized work details to clean up the jail, and he paid for a plumber to modernize the equipment in both restrooms. For a few bucks, he devised a venting system to clear the smoke-clogged air, and everyone, even the smokers, breathed easier. He and a black prisoner overhauled the furnace and the cells were almost toasty at night. He slept hard, napped frequently, exercised on the hour, and encouraged his new pals to do likewise. When he was bored he read novels, almost as fast as Florry could deliver them. There were no shelves in his tiny cell so she hauled them back to his study, where his library numbered in the thousands. He also read stacks of newspapers and magazines that she brought him.
Pete offered his reading materials to the others, but there was little interest. He suspected they were either fully or partially illiterate. To pass the time, he played poker with Leon Colliver, the moonshiner across the hall. Leon was not particularly bright, but he was sharp as hell at cards and Pete, who had mastered all card games in the army, had his hands full. Cribbage was his favorite, and Florry brought his cribbage board. Leon had never heard of the game, but absorbed it with no effort and within an hour was up a nickel. They played for a penny a game. IOUs were acceptable and no one really expected to collect any money.
Late in the afternoon, after all chores were done and the jail was spiffier than ever, Pete would unlock Leon’s cell and they would move their rickety chairs into the hallway, completely blocking it. The cribbage board was placed on a small square of plywood Pete kept in his cell. It was balanced on a wooden barrel that once held nails. The games began. Leon managed to keep a flask full of corn whiskey, distilled, of course, by his family, and at first Pete showed no interest. However, as the days dragged on and he began to accept the reality that he would be either executed or sent to prison forever, he said what the hell. In the heat of a tense cribbage game, Leon would glance around, up and down the hall, remove the flask from his front pants pocket, unscrew the top, take a swig, and hand it over. Pete would look around, take a drink, and hand it back. They weren’t selfish; there simply wasn’t enough to go around. And besides, every jail had a snitch, and Sheriff Gridley would frown on the drinking.
The two were hunched over the game board, talking of nothing but the score, when the door opened and Nix entered the narrow hallway. He was holding some papers.
“Evenin’, fellas,” he said. They nodded politely. He handed the papers to Pete and said, “The grand jury met today and here’s your indictment. First degree.”
Pete sat straight and took the papers. “No real surprise, I guess.”
“It was pretty cut-and-dried. Trial’s set for January 6.”
“They can’t do it any sooner?”
“You’ll have to talk to your lawyer about that.” Nix turned around and left.
Chapter 9
A month after the death of her husband, Jackie Bell moved with her three children to her parents’ home in Rome, Georgia. She took the few meager pieces of furniture that didn’t belong to the parsonage. She took a flood of beautiful memories of the past five years in Clanton. She took the painful farewells of a congregation that had nurtured her and her family. And, she took her husband. In the chaos after his murder, she’d agreed to have him interred in Clanton because it was simpler. However, they were not from Mississippi, had no relatives there and no real roots, and she wanted to go home. Why leave him behind? Part of her day was a trip to the cemetery to lay flowers and have a good cry, a ritual she planned to continue forever, and she couldn’t do that from Georgia. Dexter was from Rome too, so she had him reburied in a small cemetery behind a Methodist church.
They had married when he was in seminary in Atlanta. Their nomadic journey began upon graduation, when he was assigned the position of associate pastor of a church in Florida. From there they zigzagged across the South, having three children with no two born in the same place, and finally got assigned to Clanton a few months before Pearl Harbor.