“But I told the truth!” Sweat dotted Frankie’s upper lip, and he had that adolescent boy smell, that peculiar acrid/sour body odor brought on by burgeoning hormones.
“Nobody never said telling the truth would lead to forgiveness.”
“Yeah? How about confessin’ bein’ good for the soul? How about that, huh?”
“Good for the soul ain’t forgiveness,” said Coach Bassett.
“Yeah? How about truth settin’ you free?”
“I’m gonna set you free. Soon’s I bust your butt.”
“But I give it back.”
“Shouldn’t a took it in the first place.”
“All right, then. But all it’s teachin me is I’d best keep my mouth shut next time.”
“A lesson learned is a lesson learned. Take whatever one you think’ll serve you best.”
“Awww, shoot. Go on, then.”
The child bent over some, leaned against the rough bark of the oak, fingered it like he might need a handhold.
Coach Bassett made him wait a good long time. He used the buck knife the boy had stolen to cut a stem of the slender new growth off the plum tree out in the back. He took his time stripping it of its buds and flowers, tested it in the air so the boy could hear it whoosh.
“How many licks I gotta get?” the boy asked when he heard it cut the air.
“Ten. Reckon you can handle ten?”
“I reckon I can.”
He almost didn’t. He howled and yelped. He swished his butt side to side. He clutched at the bark of the tree. Five was the worst. Only half-way. A whole nother half to go. Six made him buck up so he was standing straight. Seven’s when the tear faucet came on full. Eight brought his feet up off the ground. Nine meant only one more, and ten, he was done.
“You kick up a big enough fuss for such a scrawny thing.”
“It hurt,” the boy said, rubbing his backside, ashamed of bawling like a baby.
“It was meant to.”
He pawed with grubby hands at the tears pouring down his red cheeks, embarrassed about his face all screwed up like that. “Shoot,” he said, swiping his nose on the sleeve of his shirt.
“Go on, now. Get on.”
“You gonna tell my daddy?”
The man stood with his feet apart, his arms crossed over his chest. “You reckon you might lay your hands on my property again?”
“I don’t guess I will.”
“I guess I took care of it, then.”
Frankie cut through Mizz Webster’s truck patch then set out across the Claxtons’ bottomland there by the White River. His backside stung and burned, and when he’d gone far enough so nobody would see, he shoved his hand down the side of his overalls and felt of the furrows and hills that had been plowed upon his own little piece of bottomland. They crisscrossed in geometric patterns, and at some of the junctures, the switch had offended his tender skin enough that Frankie thought he felt blood. He brought his hand out to inspect it, and sure enough, there was some blood on his middle finger.
His face screwed up again, and now that he was alone, he let himself cry. He sat down on the furrow between two rows and recounted his misdeed and his punishment. He tried every which way to make it so he didn’t deserve it, but the tears that streamed from his eyes sprung, not from pain, but from self-condemnation.
He’d stolen the knife just three days after his twelfth birthday, as a secret present to himself. All he’d gotten from his parents was clothes: new overalls, two new T-shirts, and some new brown leather boots he hadn’t grown accustomed to yet. They extended an inch past his big toe so they’d leave him plenty of room to grow, but even being big like that, they raised blisters on his heels and one on the underside of his big toe. He felt clumsy and awkward in them.
That day, he’d gone to watch his older brother practice football, and Coach Bassett had cut a piece of tape then set the knife on the bench. Nobody had seen Frankie walk up. The coach was back out on the field, yelling at the players, and the knife was sitting on the bench yelling at Frankie, and before he’d given his conscience time to speak up, he put the knife in his pocket and lit out of there, around the corner of building B, and on down Kentucky to the highway, all the time fingering the prize in his pocket.
Frankie’s conscience still hadn’t mustered itself, not even after he ran nearly the whole way down the row of Mr. Dunn’s cotton, all the way to the woods on the far side. He only fell twice though the oversized boots caught on about a hundred dirt clods on the way. When he got to the woods, he fished the knife out of his pocket, turned it over in his hand, saw the D. B. rudely carved into the hilt, pulled out the fine long blade, tested its sharpness against his thumb, then flung it down so the blade would cut into the ground. The blade didn’t cut into the ground. Instead the knife tumbled over and over, but Frankie practiced, and within a week, he could make the tip stick into an elm tree. The first time he did it, he carved his initials, F T, into the tree, right over the scar where the knife had held fast. For every single day of the two weeks Coach Bassett’s knife remained in his possession, Frankie felt nothing but pleasure in having it.
His conscience never did catch up with him, not until he sat crouched and dirty between the rows of cotton, his stinging bottom heaping upon him an almost unbearable condemnation and shame, Coach Bassett’s voice echoing in his ear, “You reckon you might lay your hands on my property again?”
Frankie would not, not ever, as long as he lived, lay his hands on another man’s property.
He thought of that day often as the years went by. He’d wanted mercy, and curiously, he got it. He came to understand that had he not been made to pay that terrible price for his crime, the mercy would have been too cheap. Mr. Bassett never mentioned the knife again, and sometimes Frankie wanted to believe he’d forgotten, though he knew better.
He wondered what he might have become had serendipity not caused Mr. Bassett to be driving down the highway as Frankie walked along the shoulder, tossing the knife into the ground, satisfied by his improvement, that the knife stuck almost every single time. He’d come to think of it as his by then, and had gotten too cavalier about bringing it out in plain sight. He rehearsed what he’d say if anybody ever told his daddy he had it, how he’d found it by the side of the road. It never occurred to him that the coach, himself, would be the one to catch him. His carefully rehearsed lie disintegrated in the face of that forbidding presence.
It also never occurred to him that getting caught would create such an impression in his young life, how it would change him in deep and fundamental ways, and it would set the course for his life. Coach Bassett became a god to him. Frankie hoisted him up on a pedestal of righteousness, for how could the man who breathed life into Frankie’s conscience, the man who woke it as from the dead, who beckoned it forth and gave it a form and a voice—how could that man be anything but righteous? Just the mention of Coach Bassett’s name would make Frankie’s ears turn red, his face flush, his shoulders slump over in shame.
Frankie never signed up for football. He couldn’t bear seeing Coach Bassett every day.
Coach Bassett said, “Aren’t you going to try out for the team?”
Frankie blushed, and couldn’t even look into the man’s eyes. “No, sir.”
“Your brother was a fine player. It’s likely you’ve got a similar talent.”
“No sir,” Frankie said. “I don’t believe I do.”
Coach Bassett rubbed his fingers across his lips thoughtfully, as if he might say more, as if he might say that he’d forgiven him, and
Frankie stiffened because he already understood the coach had forgiven him, but he couldn’t bear to hear it. Finally, the coach said, “Suit yourself.”
Frank should have excused himself from the case, but he didn’t. And Coach Bassett didn’t ask that he be removed. Frank didn’t look at him, couldn’t look at him that day when he’d sat at the prosecutor’s table and stared blankly at the evidence listed in his file. His hands shook, and his heart turned to jelly at the prospect of publicly accusing the man who’d been instrumental in putting him there, in that prosecutor’s chair.
Frank heard the judge read the charges of felony embezzlement of government funds, moneys that had been collected for the football program, moneys that Coach Bassett had skimmed in order to pad his retirement fund.
“How do you plead?”
Though he didn’t look, Frank formed the picture of the scene in his head. He saw Coach Bassett, still big and strong as he ever was, as huge and dominating, his large, calloused fingers lying flat against the edge of the table, his thick neck, brown and waffled with age, falling over the collar of his white starched shirt, his massive shoulders bound too tightly in the unaccustomed straits of the dark blue suit.
He cleared his throat, then said in a sharp, deep voice, “Guilty.”
Frank closed his eyes. The plea stunned the courtroom packed with Coach Bassett’s supporters, and a collective gasp rose, along with Frank’s silent prayer of thanks.
Frank recommended restitution and 180 days' probation. That’s what Mr. Bassett received for his crime.
Coach Bassett, it turned out, had clay feet, and learning of Mr. Bassett’s sin was as painful to Frank as learning of his own.
That night Frank lay on his back in the private darkness of his room, and he cried, just as he had cried that long ago day, there in the cotton field. When he’d finally summoned the courage to look at Coach Bassett that day, he was surprised to see Coach Bassett looking back at him. “I’m sorry, son,” the coach said, his lips tight and grim, his cheeks flushed and his ears red, those massive shoulders squared to accept the cost of his sin.
“I’m sorry, son,” he’d said, as if he knew, as if he saw reflected in Frank’s eyes the whole scope of the thing, how he’d become the fallen god, the shattered idol.
Frank wanted to say the same thing to Coach Bassett: “I’m sorry.” Never again would Frank exalt a man as he did Coach Bassett, because a fall can only happen to the man who has been lifted up.