TWO SKETCHES
At the second trial Flora was present again. She lay in the
courtroom, on one of those ambulance cots with her mother
sitting on a chair beside her.
Many of the McIvers' old neighbors and friends came to
the trial. It was about all they could do to show their sympathy
for they had not yet begun to work in the mill.
lt
is hard for anyone to this day to tell what that second
trial was about. Mrs. Bradley and all the old friends and
neighbors of the
l'vlcI
vers went to court thinking the case was
to be about Flora's broken leg, and whether she should be taken
back into the hospital.
lt
would seem that with a fourteen-year-old girl with a
broken leg right before them in court, they would talk about
her. But what the lawyers fo'r the insurance company and the
judge were concerned with was whether there had been an
imposition on the judge: in the previous trial.
"Was there an imposition on the judge?" the lawyers for
the insurance company asked. And each time Flor:J.' s lawyer
got up and began to say something about Flora's broken leg,
one of the other lawyers jumped up and said, "I object.
I
ob–
ject." And whenever they said this, as regularly as clock work,
the judge who was sitting on the case said, "Objection sustain–
ed."
It seemed the previous judge had the injury, not Flora.
The injury was an imposition. And the question was, did he
have it or didn't he.
lt
took a long time, long hours, for them to thrash it out.
Finally when all the lawyers had talked all they wanted
to about that imposition, the judge for Flora's case decided that
there had been no imposition on the previous judge.
The trial was over. The judge went home to his dinner,
and everybody else left court. And Flora was taken back to the
freight cars to lie on the bed.
11
