Page 74 of Broken Country

“How you imagine, but ten times worse. Stoic. Broken.”

Tomorrow Frank is in the witness box. A gentle start with Robert leading the questioning, but even so, I can’t think of anything else. The days go past without my being able to talk to him, touch him, tell him I love him, reassure him that no matter what happens we will be all right. Is that even true? Neither Frank nor I wanted to dwell on the possibility of his being found guilty. If the jury settles upon murder, it could carry a life sentence of up to thirty years and he is unlikely to be allowed to apply for parole for at least ten years. Frank existing in a tiny prison cell for years, his only exercise a daily stroll around the yard. A man who has spent his whole life outside in vastness. What would it do to him? How would he cope? How would I?

“Even though the Crown is gunning for murder, the manslaughter option in the indictment makes their case look weak,” Eleanor tells me. “They are hedging their bets.

“Bottom line, they do not have enough to put Frank away.”

Every night she will tell me the same thing.

“Keep the faith. It’s going to be all right.”

Every night I try my hardest to believe her.

I’ve seen plenty of swearing-in over the past days but it’s a different thing when your husband is on the stand. I watch Frank place his hand on the Bible, listen to the timbre and pitch of his voice as he promises to tell the whole truth and nothing but. He sounds confident. Robert has been preparing him for the defense hearing for the past two weeks; Frank knows there will be no surprise questions. It is the cross-examination we need to worry about.

“Mr. Johnson, could you outline for the court the events that led up to the fatal shooting of your brother, Jimmy, on the night of September twenty-eighth?”

“My brother had a drink problem,” Frank begins, and for a second the room swims.

It is something I would never have expected him to say. This is the new Frank, the person he has become during his months of reflection.

“It wasn’t constant. He could stay on an even keel for ages and then something would trigger him. I sensed it had got bad again, but I ignored it. I think I was trying to kid myself Jimmy was all right. The night he found out my wife, Beth, was having an affair he’d been in the pub. He came raging back to the farmhouse and got Beth and me out of bed. Was it true? he wanted to know. I told him it was and Jimmy was shattered by it.”

No matter how many times I hear this, it never gets any easier to bear. Jimmy is dead and it is my fault and nothing will ever change that.

“Jimmy wanted to know what I was going to do about it. How was I going to get even with Gabriel? I told him I wasn’t going to do anything. As far as I was concerned, Beth and Gabriel could carry on. That was the thing that set him off.”

“Why did you feel like that, Mr. Johnson? Your wife was having an affair and you were content to let it continue?”

“If it made her happy, I wanted her to have it. Because I felt I’d ruined her life. I’d taken away the one person she loved more than anyone else. And, without him, her life had become too hard.”

Robert’s voice is low, gentle. “You are talking about your son, Bobby, aren’t you, Mr. Johnson? Who died in a tree-felling accident three years ago.”

Frank’s face is drawn with pain now. “Yes. Beth made me promise I’d watch Bobby and keep him safe when the oak came down.” His voice peters out, he is unable to carry on.

There’s not a breath of sound in the courtroom, not a cough or a crackle of paper, all eyes on the man fighting his emotion in the witness stand.

“I knew it was dangerous and I still didn’t watch him. I was too caught up in the work, you see. I told him to stay put in a safe spot, but he didn’t listen. Well, he was nine. And when the tree came down he—Bobby—got in the way.”

I see several of the female jurors surreptitiously wiping beneath their eyes. Perhaps they are mothers themselves. They can picture, all too clearly, the excruciating loss, the burden of Frank’s guilt. How it would destroy a marriage, a life. Our marriage, our life.

Robert allows a lengthy pause, time for Frank to recover, before he begins speaking again. “Mr. Johnson, if we could move now to the shooting. I must ask you this because my learned friend will make much of it in cross-examination. You contest the accident happened in a moment of self-defense. You were trying to protect yourself, and indeed your brother, from injury.”

“Yes. My brother was far too drunk to be handling the gun. I wanted to get it off him.”

“Initially, you told police both you and Jimmy were holding the gun in a sort of tussle and that’s when it went off. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And you thought it fired at very close range?”

“I thought so, yes. But the whole thing happened so quickly, I couldn’t be sure.”

“The pathology report determined Jimmy had been shot at from a distance. At this point, you told police both of you had staggered backwards as the gun went off. It might appear you changed your story to fit the new evidence.”

“It all happened in a split second. I was in total shock. My brother was bleeding on the floor and I was kneeling next to him, pressing my hand against his wound, trying to stop the blood… but I knew, even then…”

Frank is openly crying now. My heart breaks as I watch him. One time I asked him, in the depth of night when neither of us could sleep:Is it worth it?I didn’t need to say any more, he knew what I meant. Was there any point in the two of us carrying on? Why should we bother? We had lost all the people we loved the most.

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