Carver went at Decker with everything he had, his employment record, his wages from the Briggs property, his obvious motivation to shift blame away from himself by implicating Wade. Decker sat through all of it with the stolid endurance of a man who expected this and prepared himself for it. At the end of Carver's cross, he said, unprompted, with the flat certainty of a man making a final statement, "I tied those ropes. I did it. That's what I'm here to say.
Whoever else is responsible, I did that, and it was wrong, and I'm saying so." Carver sat down. Garrett called Reverend Holt. Holt took the stand with the careful, deliberate movements of a man who knows the weight of what he is about to do and has decided to do it fully. He described his eight years of knowing Martha Briggs.
He described Harold Briggs with a particular precision of a man who is not willing to slander the dead but is not willing to protect them, either. Harold was respected. Harold was influential. Harold was a man who constructed his standing in this community with great care and Holt had admired him and Holt had believed the account of Martha's instability because Harold had given him every reason to believe it and he had not looked closely enough. He said that last part looking at the judge and not at Martha because it was a statement of record, not an apology.
An apology could come later in private, where it belonged. Then he said, "I have known Martha Briggs for eight years. I have watched her manage an impossible household with grace and silence. I baptized her daughter and I have never, in eight years, seen one moment of the instability Harold described. What I saw was a woman surviving a situation that would have broken most people."
He paused. "What I should have done was ask why she looked like someone surviving instead of someone living. I didn't ask. I'm asking now in the only way I have left." Wade's lawyers called two character witnesses of their own, long-standing friends of Harold, men who testified warmly and confidently to Harold's character and Martha's supposed difficulties.
They were believable in the way that men who have known the public face of a private person are always believable. Completely sincere. Completely limited. Garrett did not demolish them. He simply asked each one quietly and pleasantly whether they had ever been inside the Briggs home, whether they had ever spoken to Martha directly about her experience of the marriage, whether their knowledge of Harold Briggs' character derived from what Harold had told them or from what they had witnessed themselves.
Each man, in his own words, admitted it was the former. Garrett sat down. Alderman called a recess of 30 minutes. Sam spent it standing in the yard outside the courthouse with his back against the wall and Lily beside him, her hand in his, both of them watching the street go about its business. Martha sat with Agnes on the courthouse steps, and they spoke in low voices, and Sam didn't try to hear what they said because it wasn't for him.
It was for them. Two women in a town that had been deciding for years whether to see what was in front of it, finding each other on the steps of the building where the decision was finally being made. After about twenty minutes, Martha looked up and found his eyes across the yard. He held her gaze. She nodded once, small, precise, the nod of someone who has done everything that could be done and is now in the only place a person can be after that, which is the plain, clean place of waiting.
He nodded back. They went inside for the verdict. Alderman came back to the bench and arranged his papers and set his glasses on the exact center of the document in front of him and looked at the room. The room looked back. Wade was very still at his table.