Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke Page A

the train slowed we became a community of fear as each of us listened, motionless, to the decreasing metallic clack of the wheels. Once, while pulled off on a siding, we heard several guards crunching outside in the snow, then they stopped in front of our boxcar. They talked for a minute, laughed, and one of them slid back the iron bolt on the door. I looked dumbly into the black eyes of the Greek who had urinated on his feet, and the heart-racing fear and desperate question mark in his face seemed to join us together in a quick moment of recognition. Then another train roared by us a few feet away, its whistle screaming in our ears, and our boxcar jolted forward, knocking us backward into one another. We heard the bolt slam into place and the guards running toward the caboose.
    By morning the car was rancid with excrement and urine. We had no water, and several men broke ice from the floor with their boots and melted it in a helmet over a dozen cigarette lighters. It tasted like wheat chaff, sweat, and manure. The snow had stopped blowing and the sun shone through the cracks in the walls. The light broke in strips on our bodies, and the stench from the corner began to grow more intense. During the night I had been unable to stand up and urinate through a crack in the car wall, and I had to let it run warmly down my thighs. My own odor sickened me. I wondered if the Jews who had been freighted to extermination camps in eastern Europe ever felt the same self-hating, cynical disgust at their condition, lying in their own excretions, or if they tried to tear the boards out of the walls with their fingernails and catch one SS guard around the throat with probing thumbs. My feeling was that they went to their deaths like tired people lined up before a movie that no one wanted to see, revulsed by themselves and the human condition, their naked bodies already shining with the iridescence of the dead.
    I woke into the hot morning with a dark area of warm beer in my lap. Two Negro trusties from the jail, the white letter P Cloroxed on the backs of their denim shirts, were watering the courthouse lawn. The wet grass was shiny with light, and the shade of the oaks was like a deep bruise on the sidewalks. At the edge of the square there was an open-air fruit market, with canvas stretched on poles over the bins, and Mexican farmhands were unloading cantaloupes and rattlesnake melons from the bed of a stake truck. The sky was clear blue, and the shadows from a few pink clouds moved over the hills.
    I dressed in my linen suit with a blue silk shirt and walked down the main street to a café. I had a breakfast steak with two fried eggs on top, then smoked a cigar and drank coffee until the courthouse opened. Even though I could feel the July heat rising, it was still a beautiful day, the orchards at the foot of the hills were bursting with green and gold, I was free from the weekend’s whiskey, and I didn’t want to visit the jail. Most people think that the life of a criminal lawyer is a romantic venture, but it’s usually a sordid affair at best. I had never liked dealing with redneck cops, bailbondsmen, and county judges with high school educations, or talking with clients at two A.M. in a drunk tank.
    I crossed the street to the courthouse and went to the sheriff’s office in the back of the building. By the office door there was a glass memorial case filled with junk from the World Wars and Korea—German helmets, bayonets, a Mauser rifle without a bolt, an American Legion medal, canteens, a .30-caliber machine gun with an exploded barrel, and a Chinese bugle. A deputy in a khaki uniform sat behind an army surplus desk, filling out forms with a short pencil. He was lean all over, tall, and his crew-cut, glistening head was pale from wearing a hat in the sun. His fingers were crimped over the pencil as he worked out each sentence in printed and longhand letters. His shirt was damp around the shoulders, and his long arms were burned