Gravewriter by Mark Arsenault

date of the founding of Providence, 1636. The seal, as big as a manhole cover, had been fashioned from brass and polished like a mirror. The witness stand rode like a sidecar off the judge’s rostrum.
    The prosecutors and the defense team sat at heavy oaken tables, stained almost black, each with an antique desk lamp of brass and green glass.
    Four rows of unpadded mahogany benches—like church pews, but less comfortable—were available to any citizen with an iron ass who wanted to see justice at work.
    Billy’s attention went to the chandelier, a wagon wheel suspended on a chain at the midpoint above the floor. From the rim dangled six miniature wagon wheels, each holding six silver spotlights. The light they threw seemed as bright and natural as the sun.
    Back when he had been writing about trials for the newspaper, this courtroom, one of the most impressive public spaces in the state, had dazzled Billy. It was somehow more impressive from the back row of the jury box, the seat in the corner, farthest from the judge.
    Billy imagined himself facing justice in such a room; what was impressive to a juror was probably intimidating to a defendant, especially a guilty one.
    His fellow jurors fidgeted in their chairs, gazed around the courtroom, measuring their surroundings. The jury, including two alternates, was comprised of seven men and seven women. The youngest was a woman of barely eighteen; the oldest, a graybeard as ancient as Billy’s old man. The jurors dressed in tailored suits; they dressed in blue jeans. They shopped at Nieman Marcus; they shopped at Old Navy. Billy had always been struck by the randomness of a jury trial. The lawyers dueled over excluding a handful of potential jurors, butthose arguments generally took place in the margins, to eliminate extreme candidates who might have trouble being objective, such as former prosecutors and the people who could tell you exactly why the CIA killed Kennedy. For the most part, a jury came together by chance, names drawn by lot from a stovepipe hat.
    What the hell am I doing here?
    Billy’s recollections of that morning seemed like fragments of a dream. He had come to the courthouse as if on autopilot, answered some questions, stewed in his own cold sweat, rubbing the bruise on his rib cage where Walter had whacked him, until his name had been called and he was seated as juror number twelve.
    How could anyone think that Billy was qualified to sit in judgment?
    Capricorn: He’s a loving God, but beware His twisted sense of humor. Your choice today is to roll with it, or let it drive you drooling mad. The stars recommend the former.
    Billy felt self-conscious and transparent, as if everyone in the courthouse knew he had been fantasizing about murder and so they had concocted this elaborate trial to torture him.
    A jury trial is an impressive production, and since the jury is always last to come into the courtroom, all the other actors were already there.
    The production started with Judge Palumbo. Billy knew the judge by reputation. He was a sawed-off former jarhead, who had left the softer side of his nature on the Khe Sanh plateau in Vietnam. Neither law school nor two terms in the state senate had wiped away Palumbo’s tough-guy squint. The judge reminded Billy of an angry man who needed to pick a fight with the biggest guy in the bar.
    Seated at a table in front of the judge was his clerk, a nameless three-chinned political hack, who guided tons of paper—motions, briefs, and court files—over the judge’s desk.
    Next to the clerk, at her own portable station, was the court stenographer,a trim woman in her late forties, who transcribed every word of the proceedings onto a strip of paper tape, which would eventually become the official court transcript. Perhaps two thousand pages, it would look and read like the world’s longest and most tedious screenplay.
    Throughout the courtroom roamed the sheriffs—black pants,