Alex Cross's Trial

mosquito-ridden low place half a mile north of the center of Eudora.

    They gathered fallen logs from the woods and lumber from derelict barns to build their little houses. They laid boards across the swampy, pestilential ground to keep their children’s feet out of the mud. They stuffed rags and old newspapers in the chinks in the walls to keep out the wind in winter.

    They ate squirrel and possum, poke sallet and dandelion greens. They ate weeds from the field, horse corn, the leftover parts of a pig, and whatever else they could get their hands on.

    Walking along there now, as the neighborhood changed from poor white to poorer black, I saw a colored man sitting on the porch of a shack painted a gay shade of blue. He nodded at me.

    I returned his nod. “Pardon me, do you know a man by the name of Cross? Abraham Cross?”

    He never blinked. His eyes didn’t move from mine, but I had the feeling he was deciding whether or not I was worthy of the information I sought.

    “Yes, suh,” he finally said. “If you just keep walkin’, you will come on a house with a strong smell of onions. That will be Abraham’s house.”

    The sight of a white man walking on this street was not a welcome one for most of the people I came across. They kept their eyes down as they passed, which seemed to be customary now in Eudora but had not been the case when I was a boy.

    Within minutes I caught the sharp tang of onions on the air. I saw thick patches of the familiar blue-green stalks in the yard of a small red house.

    Suddenly, from the space between two houses, one little boy came running, followed by two more, and two more in pursuit.

    “He gonna snatch you and eat you,” the lead boy shouted.

    Then I saw what was chasing them—a wild pig, huge and hairy and grunting, bearing down on the boys with a pair of very bad-looking tusks.

    “That ain’t the most beautiful animal in the world,” said a colored man standing on the porch of the red house.

    I answered, “That is a face not even a mother could love.”

    I looked closer. The man was taller than me, by at least three inches, and older, by at least fifty years.

    “But she sure is beautiful when she’s angry,” he said.

    We both laughed.

    Then he said, “Begging your pardon, sir, but I get the idea you might be looking for someone.”

    “Well, as a matter of fact, I am looking for a man. His name is Abraham Cross.”

    “Yes, sir. You lookin’ at him.”

    I must have appeared surprised.

    “You was expectin’ some young fella, weren’t you, Mr. Corbett?”

    “No, I—I really had no idea who to expect…”

    “Well, sir, I confess I was expectin’ a young fella myself. So I guess at least one of us was right.”

Chapter 33

    MAYBE IT WAS because he looked like a picture of silver-haired wisdom. I just don’t know. But the truth is, I liked Abraham Cross from the moment I met him.

    When he shook my hand, he grasped my shoulder with his other hand, so that I felt well and truly gripped.

    “From this moment, Mr. Corbett—”

    “Call me Ben,” I said.

    “From this moment, Mr. Corbett,” he said pointedly, “I am happy to be of service to you as a guide and advisor. With luck, we may also become friends.”

    I told him that I felt luck would be on our side.

    He offered me a seat on his porch, which had a view of everyone passing along the boards from one end of the Quarters to the other. Abraham greeted everyone—man, woman, child—with a friendly wave and a personal word of greeting. I think if that hairy old boar had come back, Abraham would have waved and said howdy.

    Abraham Cross had the way of a man at ease with himself. He wore dark woolen trousers, a neatly ironed white shirt, and a navy blue bowtie. I don’t know if he’d dressed up because he was expecting me or if he dressed this way every day.

    On his head was a faded blue baseball cap with the initial P faded to near invisibility. I asked him what the P stood for.

    “Pythians,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

    “Weren’t they athletes in ancient Delphi?” I said.

    “Well, sir, I may be old but I ain’t as old as the Greeks in old Delphi,” he said, laughing.

    Then he explained.

    His greatest love in his young life, he told me, was baseball. After the War between the States he headed north, where a few Negro teams played.

    “Notice I said they ‘played.’ I didn’t say they ‘flourished.’ Anyways, I made the team in Philadelphia. We was porters and butlers, iron men, lawn mower men during the