They talked about their work, about the mileage you put on the engine of the soul dealing with the dead and the caged, no matter which side of the courtroom you are on. Marianne said do you think the reason we all always talk about the past is because there’s no more future? Donny said there’s no question about it, but at least there’s a right now for us to live in, which he thought was pretty clever until he could see her slyly laughing, like a cat that prefers to play with its toys at the end of a string. So he changed gears, and talked about his hearing the next day, about the theory behind the case, and what it would be like if you could really build a new legal system in which trees and cats and every other living thing had rights on parity with our own. Marianne said that only gets you so far, that the only way you can really fix this mess is if everyone can find their own way back to the grove. Donny asked what she meant by that and she said why don’t you look it up. He said I would if I could get a signal on my damn phone. That’s when she laughed at him for the first time, grabbed his phone, said she had the same model, and showed him how to change the setting from the US standard to Open 7.

When she did that, his phone pinged with the sound of electric popcorn, alerting him that he had twenty-seven new messages. That’s when he finally looked at his watch.

It’s okay, said Marianne. Maybe we can talk some more tomorrow.

Donny started to say how there won’t be a tomorrow, but decided to leave it, even though he had lost the right-now.

And he definitely didn’t want to tell her that what he was about to do was go back to his room alone and call his grandma.

40

Percy had cut her teeth defending young black men in the criminal courts of Houston, helping juries see each of her clients as the embodiment of all the black men whose bodies were shackled and cut down or strung up over the dark centuries of American history. Donny saw her make a closing argument once in a felony murder case that somehow managed to get you to envision every one of those lives in your head, to briefly glimpse the quantum of feeling and dignity destroyed through a violence that you knew could never be sated unless you radically changed the whole architecture of the society. That morning before the Tributary, she did the same thing. But instead of black bodies, she talked about big trees. And she was really good at it. Because to her, it was all connected.

You could see it on the faces of the jurors. All 501 of them.