第19章 The Statement

The hearing sat in the county courthouse in the last week of February, and it was not a trial, because Ragna Sund had refused a trial and pleaded to everything, and it was not a sentencing, because the sentencing would come later, and what it was, in the end, was an inquiry into the death of Ivar Sund and the twenty years of paper that had hidden it. Vail sat in the witness box with the folder in front of him and the room full behind the rail, half the town in the seats and the rest in the corridor. He read his report first, the report he had written at twenty-six, the report that had said Ivar Sund went out alone and the river took him. He read it in a steady voice because he had rehearsed it for a month and because a steady voice was the only kind that would carry, and when he reached the end he did not stop. "Everything in that report is false," he said. "I knew it was false when I signed it. I knew there was a witness who saw four men come up the bank and no man with them. I knew Muir had been to the station to make sure I stayed away. I wrote it anyway, in my own hand, and I have been the fifth man on a list I could not see for twenty years, and the list is now closed, and I am the reason it opened so late." The room was silent. Somewhere in the back a woman was crying quietly, and Vail did not turn to see who it was. He told it all. The pipe. The samples in the shanty. The check that had cleared for the youth hockey team. The sergeant who had told him to let it lie. The four men who had walked up the bank. The stones in the net. The darkroom and the four prints on the wire and the fifth frame left empty. He told it in order, in his own hand, and he did not spare himself, and when the court officer asked him whether he wished to revise any part of his testimony he said no, and asked to revise the record instead. "There is one more thing," he said. "The four men who died were killed. They were not drowned. I ask that the court enter the recovery and the pathology, and I ask that the death certificates for Aksel Stur, Rueben Kask, Einar Holm, and Corwin Muir be corrected, and I ask that the certificate for Ivar Sund be corrected, and I ask that this inquiry record that a police officer falsified a death in the year two thousand and six, and that the officer was me." He sat down. They heard Ragna Sund next He listened as the court officer read his words back to him so that he could hear them in the room where they would live. It sounded exactly as it had sounded in his head for twenty years, except that now it was in a machine and a transcript and a file, and a thing in a file cannot be taken back, and that was the entire point., and she stood in the box in a plain coat and gave her account the way she read the gauge, line by line, without ornament, and when the prosecutor asked her why she had done it she did not say what the room had come to hear. "He was weighted and left under the pipe," she said. "For twenty years I asked the river for him and the river kept him, and I learned that a river gives back what you put in it. So I put them in at the same hole, one a winter, and I watched, and I waited, and I made a record, until someone would finally come and look into the water and find what was at the bottom of it." She looked at Vail. "I did not do it for revenge. I am not sure a word exists for it. I did it because the only way to make this town dig up my husband was to give it a reason, and the only reason this town ever understands is a body it cannot explain. So I explained them all. Four men, four explanations, all of them the same: the river took him, the way the river took Ivar. And when the town finally looked, it found Ivar too." The prosecutor asked her whether she had considered that four more men had families, and Ragna said yes, and said it plainly, and said she had thought about it every day of four winters and had gone ahead anyway, and that she did not ask the court to understand it and did not expect the town to. Then she said the one thing she had ever asked the river and never been given, which was the truth about her husband, and she sat down. The court reporter's keys went on, small and steady, the only sound in the room. Before the inquiry closed, Rolf Brekke made his statement from a chair because he could not stand, and gave the name of the man above the mill and the name of the check and his own part in it, and when he was done he asked to be charged, and the court officer said the charges would follow the inquiry, and Brekke nodded and sat back and closed his eyes, and Vail thought he looked like a man setting down a stone he had carried so long he had forgotten his hands were free. Brekke gave his statement from the chair and did not look at Vail once while he gave it, and when he was done he asked the court to charge him first and not last, because he was older and had been in it from the start, and the court officer said the order of charges was not for him to choose, and Brekke nodded and closed his eyes. Vail understood that the old man had come to the inquiry to lay down the only thing he had left, which was the truth, and that he had carried it so long the truth had become heavier than the crime. The Mayor did not come. The council sent a lawyer, and the lawyer said the council would cooperate fully, and the room did not believe him, and the paperwork that followed would prove the room right. The room did not believe the lawyer, and before the week was out the council would prove the room right, because a lawyer is paid to say that a town will cooperate and a town is not a client, and the town had already begun the long work of deciding which half of itself to blame for twenty years of a paper that everybody had signed by not reading it. Outside, on the courthouse steps, in the cold, the town stood around in small groups and did not look at each other, and the river ran north in the gray light under the ice, and the Keld stood open in the middle of the white, the way it had stood open since before any of them were born. Vail stood on the steps with Runa and did not say anything for a while. "They'll take your pension," she said. "Some of it." "They'll call you the officer who wrote the lie." "They already do." He looked out at the river. "That's the point. That's the only part of it I get to choose. For twenty years I was the officer who wrote the lie and did not say so. Now I'm the officer who wrote the lie and said so, and there's a difference in the ledger that counts, and it's the only difference I've been able to make." ---