Chapter 12: The Hearing

The county courthouse had one courtroom, and by ten on Monday it was full.

I knew half the faces.

They were mill men in clean shirts, with their wives beside them, and the night shift sat in the back row with their caps in their laps.

Somebody had spread the word about the yard, and about Pine Ridge Supply, and nobody had stayed home.

I came down the center aisle on my cane.

Jonas walked on my left and Janet on my right.

Neither of them touched me.

It took me four minutes to cross forty feet of carpet, and nobody in that room looked away.

At the front table my brother rose, smooth in a gray suit, with a doctor and a lawyer on either side of him.

My father sat behind them, red-eyed.

My mother sat at the end of the second row in a navy dress, with her gloves in her lap, looking at nothing.

The judge was a woman in her sixties with half-glasses and a face that had heard everything.

"Miss Eckhart," she said. "You are the subject of this petition. Do you want counsel?"

"I'll speak for myself, Your Honor."

"That is your right. Mr. Eckhart's counsel will go first."

The lawyer rose and talked for ten minutes about my condition.

He said I had not left the ranch in seven years.

He said I could not stand without assistance and had shown signs of fixation, of delusion, of paranoid accusations against my family.

The doctor took the stand and testified that, in his opinion, I was incapable of managing a large inheritance.

He had examined me for twenty minutes on Saturday, in the Eckhart dining room, over tea.

I had not been asked.

"Cross, Miss Eckhart?" the judge said.

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