The Silent Witness
Summary
A lone Denver streetcar clangs through midnight snow while Janet Rigsby—eyes like frost-rimmed lanterns—presses her lover’s letter to her belly, already sensing the ember of Bud. Months later, Richard Morgan, the ink still damp on his philosophy mid-term, is swallowed by a warehouse blaze whose orange tongues lick his name off enrollment ledgers. Believing herself widowed before wedlock, Janet slips away from genteel boardinghouses, trades her engagement ring for a second-hand sewing machine, and stitches together a life in a tar-paper shack that smells of lye soap and simmering beans. She rears Bud on lullabies hummed over the thrum of a treadle; each dawn she knots her hair like a suffragette banner and walks to the shirt factory where lint clings to her lashes like unpaid wages. The boy grows long-boned and book-hungry, his only inheritance a thirst for syllables and the odor of carbon paper Janet drags home from night-school offices. At college, the quad’s elms whisper pedigree; Bud’s shoes—cardboard-soled, painted black—broadcast bastardy. He falls for the gardener’s daughter, a girl who knows the Latin names of every lilac and hides novels beneath seed catalogues. Scoffs ricochet off ivied porticoes: ‘hayseed,’ ‘mama’s disgrace.’ One jeer too many—an epithet about Janet’s virtue—snaps the filament of Bud’s restraint; a scuffle, a cracked skull, a body crumpled like a dropped marionette. Arrest, headlines, death-row glare. Then, in the hush of the courtroom, the prosecutor rises: Richard Morgan, scarred but alive, his voice the very timbre Bud used to hear through bedroom walls when his mother whispered to a photograph. Expert testimony—ballistics, soil chemistry, a misread fingerprint—rewrites the night; the fatal bullet was a ricochet from a rent-a-cop’s negligent sidearm. Father, mother, son step into winter sunlight, their linked silhouettes a palimpsest of everything fire, poverty, and time tried to erase.
Synopsis
Janet Rigsby loves Richard Morgan, a Denver college student, but loses him when he is caught in a fire. Shortly after Richard's presumed demise, Janet leaves her home and bears a son out of wedlock. Over the years, she struggles to make ends meet while raising Bud, her son, on her own. Although her savings are small, Janet manages to send Bud to college. Chastised for his poverty and illegitimate birth, Bud, who is in love with the college gardener's daughter, suffers the ridicule of his peers and eventually comes to blows with and threatens one particular boy for insulting his mother. In the ensuing confrontation, the boy is killed and Bud is arrested for the crime. During the course of the trial, Bud discovers that the district attorney is Richard Morgan, his father. The testimony of one expert witness reveals how the murder in truth was committed, and a liberated Bud happily reunites with his mother and new-found father.
