Clay Hand by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

went to the window beside him and drew the curtain away. As the car stopped, Anna got out of the back seat with a little stool, and set it on the ground beneath the running board. The Widow O’Grady got out backside first. Anna held her cane for her. When the old lady got her footing, she put one hand on the girl’s shoulder and turned around. Her first look was at the window. It was a long look, her hand freezing Anna in a crouching position. Phil’s impulse was to draw away, but he resisted it, Margaret standing where she was. Other eyes followed the widow’s and it seemed that the whole of Winston was gaping up at them.
    Margaret turned away abruptly. “What terrible people, Phil! That old woman makes my blood run cold.”
    “Their manners may not be much,” he said. “But they’re perfectly normal people. We’re the strange ones to them.”
    “Chains wouldn’t hold me here another night,” she said. “I’d be afraid, Phil. I really would.”
    “We’d better go down now,” he said, taking a last drink of the thick black coffee.
    “It’s a wonder they didn’t hire the movie house,” Margaret said on the stairs. The parlor had been cleared of furniture, rugs and fernery, and was lined with folding chairs. Two young men wearing deputy-sheriff badges were stationed inside the front door. One of them opened it at that moment to help Mrs. O’Grady up the steps and in. A stream of people were following her.
    “The witnesses take the front seats, please,” the other deputy said. “The side seats are for the jurors. If you’ve just come to look, you got to stand in back.”
    Mrs. O’Grady made her entrance without looking up the stairs, already concerned with the seat that was provided for her. She complained of it immediately, and the deputy brought her a more comfortable one, and made the mistake of offering to help her into it. He fled from the abuse, red-faced. Fields and the coroner were at a large table in the back of the room, a clerk beside them.
    One by one, the witnesses were directed to their seats: Lavery, McNamara, starch-collared, his tavern closed tight, Father Joyce, the man following him leaving a chair of respect between himself and the priest, a boy Phil took to be the one who had found Dick. The curious and the volunteers of miscellaneous acquaintance soon filled the back rows.
    Margaret pulled at Phil’s sleeve. “Shouldn’t we go in?”
    He nodded and led the way to the two vacant chairs near the center of the room. The jurors were filing in from the back room at the same time. They sat down in flushed and quiet self-consciousness, three men and three women, the women tugging at their skirts, the men at their collars, and all given to sudden smiling and as sudden sobering. Their hands were red and swollen from the work they rested from this day, Phil noticed—the laundry tub or the baker’s oven.
    The murmur of hushed conversation stopped, the only sound in the room the crackle of the folding chairs as people turned to look. Three witnesses entered and withstood the stare of a hundred pairs of eyes as they found the seats reserved for them. A little noise of hissing came from the back of the room. Maurice Handy was on his feet immediately. “The sheriff will remove anybody who makes a disturbance.”
    The witnesses were Clauson, his daughter, and her husband. Margaret had turned with the others on their entrance. Phil was aware then that her whole body had gone tense at the sight of them. She paled first and then flushed.
    Rebecca Clauson Glasgow. She sat between the two men, as tall as the younger one and a head above her father. Her face was sallow, her lips, without lipstick, failing to break the long mask. Her eyes seemed the only living part of it.
    Under the pretense of speaking to Nichols, Phil moved away from Margaret and stood in the hallway a moment with the reporter. It gave him a better view of the witnesses.
    “There’s a mating of opposites if I ever saw one,”