subdivision across the county, the one who had once been fined by her own association and seated
anyway — in a voice that did not perform it. On the count of felony destruction of property: guilty.
No one in the courtroom made a sound for a moment, and then the sound that came was not
triumph, on any bench: it was the sound, distributed across three rows, of people setting down, at
last, a weight they had carried since a Saturday in May, and finding it heavier set down than held.
Gordon received it standing, as he had received the count in the clubhouse, with his hands flat —
this time on counsel's table — and he looked, not at the jury, and not at the Rowans, but at the
evidence cart, where the edger lay bagged by its blade beside the box of his neighbor's glass, and
something in his face arranged itself, finally, into the expression of a man reading a file in which
every document, for the first time in nine years, was his own.
The jury, as juries in that Commonwealth then did, fixed the punishment as well as the verdict,
and theirs was a sentence with the Ridge's own arithmetic in it: twelve months, and a fine of two
thousand, five hundred dollars — inside, and at neither end of, the range the court had given them.
Judge Osei polled them, thanked them, and set the formal sentencing for Tuesday the twenty-ninth
of July, pending the presentence report, and released the defendant on the recognizance he had
kept, unblemished, since June: no contact with the Rowans, no entry at number nine, compliance
with the injunction, which the court continued in force and which now protected, the judge noted
without emphasis, a driveway that no longer contained, in any operative sense, a dispute. The
presentence report was a document Gordon would have recognized from his own profession and
could not, for once, appeal: sixty-three years old, no record, a widower, a pension, a house, an
association that had removed him by the largest margin in its records — and, in the probation
officer's summary, Marcus Bell's sentence, unattributed, on the summary page: He was not a thief.
He was a watcher who ran out of things the watching was for.
At sentencing, Lasky asked for the whole twelve months suspended, on probation, with
restitution and service; Nolan asked the court to impose a portion, and said why, in the register the
case had earned: because the act had been public, and proud of its publicness, and because a
sentence served entirely on paper would be read, by every association officer in the county, as
paper. Judge Osei imposed the jury's term and suspended ten months of it. Sixty days remained, to
be served in the county jail on consecutive weekends, beginning the first Friday of August, so that a
man who had made his reputation on Saturday mornings would spend ten of them — the judge did
not say this; he did not have to; the gallery's silence said it, and the judge's clerk wrote the schedule
without looking up — atoning for one. Two years of supervised probation. Restitution to Caleb
Rowan, in full, seven thousand, eight hundred and forty dollars, payable through the court, in
advance of any other obligation, the judge directing that it be satisfied within ninety days from the
defendant's own funds, the association's assessment having been refused ratification and its
segregated account being, as the court put it, other people's money twice over. Two hundred hours
of community service, not to be performed, the court specified at Nolan's request and without
objection from the defense, for or through any homeowners association in the county. The fine as
fixed. Gordon heard it standing, with Lasky at his elbow, and when the court asked whether he
understood the terms he answered, clearly, that he did, and when it asked whether he wished to be
heard, he said the only words he spoke in his own defense that anyone, afterward, repeated with
approval — including, in the third row, his victim. "I kept a record of everybody on that street for
nine years," he said. "The record of me is now in better hands than mine were. I am sorry for the
mirror. I find I am sorrier than that, and I don't have the — I will pay for the mirror." He did not ask
for mercy. He turned out of the courtroom on his brother-in-law's arm, past Rosa, past Lois, past the
Rowans, whom the no-contact order already forbade him to address; and June, watching him go
with his ruler — the court reporter would confirm it nowhere and the clerk would swear to it
privately for years — nowhere on his person at all, said to her father, in the corridor, the sentence
with which the criminal matter of the Commonwealth against Gordon Pruitt properly closes: "He'll
do the weekends standing up, won't he." "Every one," Walter Hargrove said. "And he'll hate the
paperwork. Being filed, June. A man like that experiences being filed as the punishment. The rest is
weekends."
The money took longer than the verdict, as money does, and it was settled, fittingly, on paper, in
a season of meetings that Elaine Foster minuted and the whole Ridge was welcome to attend. Ruth
Abramson's accounting, built on Rosa's second copy and audited by an outside firm, divided the