"Damned if I know. I guess at trial. What're y'all thinkin'?"
"We're not sure, but the Klan most likely will get involved. We need to flex our muscle a bit, and this could be a good opportunity."
"Can I help?" Cobb asked eagerly.
"Sure, but you need to be a member."
"We ain't got no Klan up there. It folded a long time ago. My granddaddy used to be a member."
"You mean the grandfather of the victim was a Klansman?"
"Yep," Cobb answered proudly.
"Well, then, we must get involved." The Klansmen shook their heads in disbelief and vowed revenge. They explained to Cobb that if he could get five or six friends of similar thinking and motivation to agree to join, they would have a big, secret ceremony deep in the woods of Ford County with a huge burning cross and all sorts of rituals.-They would be inducted as members, full-fledged members, of the Ku Klux Klan. Ford County Klavern. And they would all join in and make a spectacle of the trial of Carl Lee Hailey. They would raise so much hell in Ford County this summer that no juror with any common sense would consider voting to acquit the nigger. Just recruit half a dozen more, and they would make him the leader of the Ford County Klavern.
Cobb said he had enough cousins to start a klavern. He left the meeting drunk with excitement of being a Klansman, just like his grandfather.
Buckley's timing was a little off. His 4:00 P.M. press show was ignored by the evening news. Jake flipped the channels on a small black and white in his office, and laughed out loud when the networks and then Memphis, then Jackson, then Tupelo signed off with no news of the indictments. He could see the Buckley family in their den glued to the set, turning knobs and searching desperately for their hero while he yelled at them all to be quiet. And then at seven, after the Tupelo weather, the last weather, they backed away and left him alone in his recliner. Maybe at ten, he probably said.
At ten, Jake and Carla laid cross-legged and tangled in the dark on the sofa, waiting on the news. Finally, there he was, on trie iront steps, waving papcis anu u street preacher while the Channel 4 man on the scene explained that this was Rufus Buckley, the D.A. who would prosecute Carl Lee Hailey now that he had been indicted. After an awful glimpse of Buckley, the report panned around the square for a wonderful view of downtown Clanton, and then finally back to the reporter for two sentences about a trial in late summer.
"He's offensive," Carla said. "Why would he call a press conference to announce the indictments?"
"He's a prosecutor. We defense lawyers hate the press."
"I've noticed. My scrapbook is rapidly filling up."
"Be sure and make copies for Mom."
"Will you autograph it for her?"
"Only for a fee. Yours, I will autograph for free."
"Fine. And if you lose, I'll send you a bill for clipping and pasting."
"I remind you, dear, that I have never lost a murder case. Three and oh, as a matter of fact."
Carla punched the remote control and the weatherman remained but his volume disappeared. "You know what I dislike most about your murder trials?" She kicked the cushions from her thin, bronze, almost perfect legs.
"The blood, the carnage, the gruesomeness?"
"No." She unfolded her shoulder-length hair and let it fall around her on the arm of the sofa.
"The loss of life, regardless of how insignificant?"
"No." She was wearing one of his old, starched-out, sixteen-by-thirty-four, pinpoint Oxford button-downs, and she began to play with the buttons.
"The horrible specter of an innocent man facing the gas chamber?"
"No." She was unbuttoning it. The bluish gray rays from the television flashed like a strobe in the dark room as the artchorperson smiled and mouthed good night.
"The fear of a young family as the father walks into the courtroom and faces a jury of his peers?"
"No." It was unbuttoned, and under it a thin, fluorescent band of white silk glittered against the brown skin.
"The latent unfairness of our judicial system?"
"No." She slid an almost perfect bronze leg up, up, up to the back of the sofa where it gently came to rest.
"The unethical and unscrupulous tactics employed by cops and prosecutors to nail innocent defendants?"
"No." She unsnapped the band of silk between the two almost perfect breasts.
"The fervor, the fury, the intensity, the uncontrolled emotions, the struggle of the human spirit, the unbridled passion?"