The Snare

11. THE TRIAL CONTINUES

11. THE TRIAL CONTINUES Julia sat and looked at Jake Springland. The whole time, her eyes scarcely left his face. Sitting, in profile, he looked taller than she had remembered him, but that would be because he had lost weight in jail. His face looked quiet and reasonable. Something had got knocked out of him; something had matured, she thought. He might have just gone blank, as far as sensitivity was concerned, and all the edge in his fresh mind, that might be dull. Could it happen? Maybe it would have to happen, if he was going to last through it all. His head swung round; he looked out, but over and past her. The strain was apparent then, around the eyes, and she startled herself with a wave of desire to protect, feed, nurse him back to where he was that first day when the door of Dr. Pollard's office had swung wide on him alone. Then she began to hurt, inside herself, and the pain was real. Love made it, she guessed. Oh God, oh Dieu, she thought. His profile returned. They were the only two people in the courtroom. Mentally she tore her drab dress open wide and also the tissue, flesh and bone of the rib-caged and flesh-cushioned tenderness beneath; on that portion of her most deeply set and securely private the long profile minted itself like a head on molten gold. He had got into this mess, she thought, through not knowing his own value. Julia had known wild boys from high school on. But Southern boys, New Orleans boys with their pedigreed French names and their casual pursuit of excellence— 96 Elizabeth Spencer 97 the tops in living, sport, girls—were self-conscious; they were tied to a smaller statement of life than what she wanted made to her. Besides, something had happened which had crystallized them all for her, way too soon. When she was seventeen a sweet wild one she was dating had shot himself playing with an old dueling pistol. It had been during a house party on a fine plantation dating back to the eighteenth century. All week, through beautiful nights, pavilion dances, through layers of wit, rounds of eating, and almost perpetual drinking, it had seemed that they were all too much of something. Too beautiful, too soft-voiced, too brilliant, too casually enhanced with everything that tended toward a racial deserving, an eternity of a paradise of simply knowing they were the only ones in the world with those particular redolent names, the poise and repose of that singularly spared plantation house resting in neoclassical outline upon the banks of that one languid bayou. Beaurivard. "Garrett ," the boy had said. "It won't do for a name, Julia. If I had a name like Garrett, I'd shoot myself straight through the head." And he had spun the cylinder, and drawn back the hammer. It had clicked dull and empty, but the gesture remained, printed before her vision. All that afternoon (as well as other afternoons before that day) he had been initiating her sexually down in a boat house on a daybed covered with old chintz. In the breeze from time to time, a torn shade flapped and slapped like a sail in a hot calm. Nowhe was in the side gallery at Beaurivard , after dinner, alone with her, sitting carelessly, leaning back against a white-painted column, his leg cocked up as though he sat a horse he knew well. Julia felt like a wild orchid just come to bloom. Don't, she wanted to say, when he spun the chamber a second time, but her spirit overruled it. They both were free, that was the good thing. A word like "don't" on that long party and the house might catch fire, or a tornado come plowing in through the woods, or, more magically, all might turn to cobwebs and dust. A light breeze sprang up, fanning the 9 8 T H E S N A R E damp warmth of the flesh at her neck and armpits, moving along her bare shoulders. The moon had risen. A second time, the boy pulled the trigger. She did not hear the sound till later. The face regarding her own transferred itself from the support of his neck to that of the white pillar beside it. Julia screamed. He had been supposed...