Acre Under a Green Sky

The Courthouse in Lincoln was built for giants. Stone steps as wide as some streets are long rose up to two massive doors many times taller than any man I'd ever seen. A short passage inside the Courthouse opened onto a vast circular marble floor like a pool; cold, still, and shiny wet, surrounded by thick, highly polished trunks of dark wood supporting a domed painted sky with history book figures walking on heavenly air.

I always stopped before stepping into that marble pool and looked up to those staring down on me. I liked the Indians best. My father never stopped but proceeded on to one of the five or six doors facing the marble pool in a semicircle. The room he went to most often was what I called 'the big book room'. Books of records so big; so heavy they could not stand erect but had to be laid face down on wheeled shelves. He once showed me my own name in one of those books. They were stacked endlessly under countertops in rows across the room and on up all the walls to the ceiling. I believed then that they contained every name in the world.

The other doors led to courtrooms of various sizes. They were always empty when my father brought me with him to the Courthouse. Probably week-ends and evenings. I would leave him in the big book room and go off to explore the courtrooms. I would sit in the judge's seat high above all the others. I felt it was wrong to sit there, but I did it anyway. I did it every time. Once, I remember, my father came looking for me and found me in the judge's seat. I was frightened; but my position there empowered me, and I didn't budge. I was sure he would scold me, but instead he smiled a strange smile and walked slowly down the aisle, through the gate, and up to the bench. Now, the power was frightening me. I was too far over my father's head. He raised his arms to me, and I crawled up over the bench and jumped down into his arms. He never said a word, but I knew something had happened.

There was much to keep my father busy in those early days at the Courthouse. There was a grand jury hearing, and an arraignment, and visits to Luka in the jail behind the Courthouse, and somewhere nearby were the offices of D.A. Matt Bradley. In spite of having an inside track, much of what we learned, we learned from the newspapers and town gossip with just random tongue-in-cheek comments from my father. The process seemed to be having a sardonic, disillusioning affect on him.

The grand jury hearing might have been laughable, if it weren't so insulting to the notions of truth and justice. It is the State's gift to the prosecution. The defense is handcuffed and muted throughout. Matt Bradley took the bare facts of murder and embroidered a theory around them using whatever lies came to mind knowing full well that most of them would have to be jettisoned later when solid proof would be required. He seemed to feel that a lie in close proximity to a fact would take on the aura of truth. And all the lies were either disposable or interchangeable. He was especially intent on establishing Luka's sanity.

He said that Luka spent the evening at the Royal Grill drinking with his teenage lover, Patty McIntyre. That witnesses would swear that he left the Royal Grill at 1:30AM, and that another witness would swear she heard his family screaming for their lives at 2AM. He said that Luka then got into his car and drove into the wilderness and disposed of the bloody knife. He then returned home and lay next to his butchered wife so that he could claim alcoholic psychosis or some such thing. The D.A. said that Luka took a carving knife from his kitchen and went up to his sleeping wife and stabbed her. Then he killed his daughter. His son fled into the bathroom where Luka stabbed him. Then he caught his mother-in-law trying to escape through the kitchen, and he killed her there. He said it was cold-blooded, premeditated murder, and that Luka did it to escape a family that was a millstone around his neck keeping him from the arms of a girl barely out of high school. Patty McIntyre was the love of Luka's life. It was ridiculous and slanderous.

My father agreed with me, but said it didn't matter. He told me that the D.A.'s job with the grand jury was to create suspicion regardless of the truth, and that it would be my father's job during the trial to create doubt regardless of the truth. He said all this wearily shaking his head as if he didn't approve of what he was saying. My father believed that justice is man's feeble attempt to do in his time what God will surely do in his. It was his job, he felt, to push innocent people out of the way of man's justice before it crushed them.

"It's corruptible" my father said, "but it's all we've got. And the ideals are sound –– even noble."

He said this last part with the faraway look of a man remembering a lost love. It seemed to me then that there must be two kinds of justice in the world –– man's and my father's –– one was alive and kicking and the other was an ideal, a dream, a heartache. Then my father said that Matt Bradley was a arrogant asshole who thinks the truth is whatever you can get people to believe.

One newspaper said that Matt Bradley succeeded only in proving that four murders were committed. My father loved that one. The same newspaper asked if it was true that Chief Will Mosko refused to testify before the grand jury. The D.A. was much offended, and said that Chief Mosko was busy with other official duties, and that there was ample testimony from other officers on the force. In an effort to somehow redeem himself, Matt Bradley then told the press with some bravado that tests were being conducted in Washington, D.C. on physical evidence that would prove beyond a doubt that Luka killed his family. My father had no idea what the D.A. was talking about, but he would soon find out. That evidence would later necessitate my testifying at the trial. Garry, too.