My late uncle Duff once spent Christmas in jail for bigamy. It was a misunderstanding more than anything else, although from what my cousin Sam has been able to find out, Duff really did get a new wife before divorcing the first. He was a Korean war veteran, and his defense in the bigamy case was that he had a metal plate in his head so he forgot things, but the newspaper clippings and military files that Sam has been gathering since his father’s death say nothing about an injury. The townsfolk must have joked about how he got caught.
East Gary’s constables must have picked up a few drunks that night and driven them home instead of hauling them to the slammer, but Duff was already in, and in he stayed. During his two weeks of confinement before the trial, neither of the people who might have visited him showed up, not even to gloat. Both must have thought the other might be there.
“I’ve tried it and he’s right,” Hadwin said when I read the passage to him. “Give me that book,” he said, snatching it from my hands.
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“So-called tangible evidence is often useless and moreover can be EXTREMELY dangerous, if not downright misleading,” he wrote. Here he sounds just like the man we knew in peacetime–a warrior who would rather face extreme danger than be misled. Even so, it is “a known fact that every criminal leaves some loose end to his preparations which, in the end, betrays him,” Duff wrote, and he characterized this leaving behind of the telltale clue as “a conventional superstition of implacable avenging nemesis.” The phrase rings with poetry “scarce elsewhere in Duff’s work,” Hadwin said. After one afternoon with the binder, my crackpot scholar of a neighbor was referring to my dead uncle by his first name.
“Pick up all these goddamned toys!” he’d yell, waving his arms. We stared. The floor was clear of toys, uncluttered as it always was, amazingly in that household of six kids. Duff insisted on it.
He paused, as if to allow note takers to catch up. I thought about making a sandwich. “They manifest only then, you see–as if the invisible universe is thick with potential events that ripen and occur at the correct times. Until such moments, Bohm says, events are woven together with each other in hidden possibility,” Hadwin said.
“Come on,” Sam said that night, grabbing my arm. “Kip’s gonna get it again.” We stood in the backyard, watching through the screen door. Duff, in the kitchen, called for Kip, who appeared. He looked guilty. Kip always looked guilty. Before words could be exchanged, Duff tripped him and hurled him to the floor.
