The Last Juror

The Last Juror Page 30

The second contractor I hired to transform the Hocutt House was Mr. Lester Klump from out in Shady Grove. He had been highly recommended by Baggy, who, of course, knew exactly how to restore a mansion. Stan Atcavage at the bank also recommended Mr. Klump, and since Stan held the mortgage for $100,000 I listened to him.

The first contractor had failed to show, and when I called after waiting for three days his phone had been disconnected. An ominous sign.

Mr. Klump and his son, Lester Junior, spent days going over the house. They were terrified of the project, and knew it would be a regular nightmare if anybody got in a hurry, especially me. They were slow and methodical, even talked slower than most folks in Ford County, and I soon realized that everything they did was in second gear. I probably didn't help matters by explaining that I was already living in very comfortable quarters on the premises; thus I wasn't going to be homeless if they didn't hurry up.

Their reputation was that they were sober and generally finished on time. This put them at the top of the heap in the world of remodeling.

After a few days of scratching our heads and kicking at the gravel, we agreed on a plan whereby they would bill me weekly for their labor and supplies, and I would add 10 percent for their "overhead," which I hoped meant profit. It took a week of cursing to get Harry Rex to draft a contract reflecting this. At first he refused and called me all sorts of colorful names.

The Klumps would begin with the cleanup and demolition, then do the roof and porches. When that was over, we'd sit down and plan the next phase. In April 1972 the project began.

At least one of the Klumps appeared every day with a crew. They spent the first month scattering all the varmints and wildlife that had made the property home for decades.

A carload of high school seniors was stopped by a state trooper a few hours after their graduation. The car was full of beer, and the trooper, a rookie fresh from school where they had alerted them to such things, smelled something odd. Drugs had finally made it to Ford County.

There was marijuana in the car. All six students were charged with felony possession and every other crime the cops could possibly throw at them. The town was shocked - how could our innocent little community get infiltrated with drugs? How could we stop it? I low-keyed the story in the paper; no sense beating up on six good kids who'd made a mistake. Sheriff Meredith was quoted as saying that his office would act decisively to "remove this scourge" from our community. "This ain't California," he said.

Typically, everybody in Clanton was suddenly on the lookout for drug dealers, though no one was quite sure what they looked like.

Because the cops were on high alert, and would love nothing more than another drug bust, poker the next Thursday was moved to a different location, one deep in the country. Bubba Crockett and Darrell Radke lived in a dilapidated old cabin with a nonpoker-playing veteran named Ollie Hinds. They called their place the Foxhole. It was hidden in a heavily wooded ravine at the end of a dirt road that you couldn't find in broad daylight.

Ollie Hinds was suffering from every manner of postwar trauma and probably several prewar ones as well. He was from Minnesota and had served with Bubba and survived their horrible nightmares. He had been shot, burned, captured briefly, escaped, and finally sent home when an Army shrink said he was in need of serious help. Apparently he never got it. When I met him he was shirtless, revealing scars and tattoos, and glassy-eyed, which, I would soon learn, was his usual condition.

I was grateful he was not playing poker. A couple of bad hands, and you got the impression he might pull an M-16 and even the score.

The drug bust, and the town's reaction to it, was the source of much humor and ridicule. Folks were acting as though the six teenagers were the very first drug users, and since they'd been caught then the county was on top of the crisis. With some vigilance and tough talk, the plague of illegal drugs could be diverted to another part of the country.

Nixon had mined the harbor at Haiphong and was bombing Hanoi with a fury. I brought this up to get a reaction, but there was little interest in the war that night.

Darrell had heard a rumor that some black kid from Clanton had been drafted and fled to Canada. I said nothing.

"Smart boy," Bubba said. "Smart boy."

The conversation soon returned to drugs. At one point Bubba admired his marijuana cigarette and said, "Man, this is really smooth. Didn't come from the Padgitts."

"Came from Memphis," Darrell said. "Mexican."

Since I knew zero about the local drug supply routes, I listened intently for a few seconds then, when it was evident no one would pursue the conversation, said, "I thought the Padgitts produced pretty good stuff."

"They should stick to moonshine," Bubba said.

"It's okay," Darrell said, "if you can't get anything else. They struck it rich a few years back. They started growin' long before anybody else around here. Now they got competition."

"I hear they're cuttin' back, goin' back to whiskey and stealin' cars," Bubba said.

"Why?" I asked.

"A lot more narcs now. State, federal, local. They got helicopters and surveillance stuff. Ain't like Mexico where nobody gives a shit what you grow."

Gunfire erupted outside, not too far away. The others were not fazed by it. "What might that be?" I asked.

"It's Ollie," Darrell said. "After a possum. He puts on night-vision goggles, takes his M-16, goes lookin' for varmints and such. Calls it gook huntin'."

I luckily lost three hands in a row and found the perfect moment to say good night.

After much delay, the Supreme Court of Mississippi finally affirmed the conviction of Danny Padgitt. Four months earlier it had ruled, by a majority of six to three, that the conviction would stand. Lucien Wilbanks filed a petition for rehearing, which was granted. Harry Rex thought that might signal trouble.

The appeal was reheard, and almost two years after his trial the court finally settled the matter. The vote to affirm the conviction was five to four.

The dissent bought into Lucien's rather vociferous argument that Ernie Gaddis had been given too much freedom in abusing Danny Padgitt on cross-examination. With his leading questions about the presence of Rhoda's children in the bedroom, watching the rape, Ernie had effectively been allowed to place before the jury highly prejudicial facts that simply were not in evidence.

Harry Rex had read all the briefs and monitored the appeal for me, and he was concerned that Wilbanks had a legitimate argument. If five justices believed it, then the case would be sent back to Clanton for another trial. On the one hand another trial would be good for the newspaper. On the other, I didn't want the Padgitts off their island and running around Clanton causing trouble.

In the end, though, only four justices dissented, and the case was over. I plastered the good news across the front of the Times and hoped I would never again hear the name of Danny Padgitt.