Frontier Justice

FRONTIER JUSTICE / Margaret Hermes SHE WAITED IN A LOBBY hardly bigger than a parking space for the trial to resume—with jurors, spectators, plaintiff, defendant all sharing the same thin air, the same thin conversation. That was one difference between this court and most in the lower forty-eight. The lobby and its occupants reminded her of the waiting area in a Greyhound bus station. The plaintiff looked uneasy in the setting, like a landlocked seaman, muscles distending his taut knit shirt, hair defying the law, at least, of gravity. The defendant was a daguerreotype of respectability, his pressed flannel shirt and his new denim coveralls as stiffly proper as any headwaiter's tuxedo. Jury and spectators were interchangeable, men and women alike dressed in jeans, hooded jackets, and rubber or leather boots. She looked down to her own feet outfitted three days earlier in thick black rubber as glossy as the patent leather of her Kansas City childhood, now dull and streaked with dun: the cold summer rains turned dust to mud. She veiled another glance at the angular young man whom she would replace as clerk of the court in only four days. Everyone seemed young. Even the judge had too many years to spend before he would reach forty. She had arrived in the town full of her own youthful expectation of attention and indulgence, but the town had seen too many such arrivals to take notice. Like an unclaimed mail order bride, she held herself tall amid the unseeing townfolk. The courthouse was new, one squat story, carpeted and almost comfortable, like a recently constructed college classroom and just that imposing—no marble floors across which the heels of justice could be heard, no vaulted ceiling drawing lofty ideas or high-flown oratory. The building lacked even a dimly lit basement—she recalled the first lesson imparted to those from Outside: there could be no excavations in permafrost—to house the records of human indiscretion. The teams of lawyers were easy to pick out—white, male, each with facial hair, totem of the northwestern white man. Three of the four wore corduroy above or below the belt. The fourth appeared in a suit punctuated by a string tie, the only tie in evidence during three days of proceedings. When not robed for the bench, the judge maneuvered through the throng in grey work pants and open-collared shirt. (Atop the raised platform angled into a comer of the windowless courtroom, the innocent blue of his oxford cloth peered out disarmingly from sombre, dusty black.) In the lobby the plaintiff, Jack Daniels—cursed from birth—talked too loudly, addressing remarks about the rain, a safely common enemy, to The Missouri Review · 25 anyone whose eye strayed in his direction, even to her. The defendant, the redundant Sven Svenson, sat with hands in his lap and eyes cast down upon the hands, sparing his neighbors. The others talked about their families or the fishing. It was best that the trial end that day: everyone was anxious to pick the ripened salmonberries. AU were known to each other, except for her and the lawyers for the defense. The lawyers had come from Anchorage, but that wasn't held against Svenson. Most everything was flown in from Anchorage— medicine, the two daily newspapers, bootleg liquor, lawyers for one side or the other. The town and the connecting river villages could support only one law firm. Both the principals in the trial were white. Of the jurors, eight were Eskimo—Inuit, she corrected herself—and one, the town's lone black. She looked first to see if judgment might fall along racial lines, looking for something she could understand. But while the Inuit spoke Yupik among themselves and the whites and the black seemed to find particular things to say to each other, the conversations did also spill over, trickling one into another. The white pediatric nurse and Inuit sanitation worker who collected "honey buckets" from the houses lacking toilets lived too much in common to stand on ceremony or to stand apart. The river alone was an inexhaustible subject that flowed into and informed all other speech. In the spring...