Bingham was a one-armed man. He could have been the man with the hook who preyed on lovers’ lane, but he wasn’t. He never wore a hook.

You can’t say he lost his arm. You’d have to say he sold it, or tried to. He put his arm on the railroad track when the train was coming and got it cut off. He did it so he could collect the insurance or sue the railroad. Whichever, he didn’t get paid for it, as word got out what he did, largely because he bragged about it.

What did him in, though, was he killed his own mother for the insurance money and then his wife so she wouldn’t tell. His best friend, the coroner down in Pocataligo, saw him shoot his wife and testified against him. Bingham, naturally, was furious at the betrayal.

There was no shortage of people to testify against Bingham. Anyone he hadn’t killed he had roundly pissed off. For that Arrowsmith, the county solicitor, was grateful. It made his job easier. The trial was very high profile, so it made Arrowsmith’s name and put Hampton County on the map. Reporters came down from Columbia and Charlotte and as far away as Atlanta. AP even sent a grizzled stringer. Everybody loved the story about a man everyone hated, who was evil through and through and killed his own mother and wife and put his own arm on a train track to get it cut off.

The trial was everything you could have hoped for: a parade of gory details and unremitting veniality. No one could scrape up a shred of evidence in Bingham’s defense, had such a thing existed. The reliable source of unconditional love, in this case, had nearly decomposed.

No lawyer would represent Bingham for any amount of money he could have raised selling his fishing boat or the house his mother left him. His court appointed lawyer was hampered by a lack of material, a lack of imagination, and a lack of motivation.

He did let Bingham speak in his own defense, figuring that was the least he could do. When the lawyer called him to the stand, Bingham didn’t sit. He stood there, his empty sleeve tucked into his belt, and jabbed his big bony finger first at Arrowsmith and then at his former friend the coroner from Pocataligo and then at his own lawyer, the judge, the jury, and all the spectators, damning them all at the top of this lungs while the judge banged his gavel.

“Goddam you all. Goddam you everyone to hell. I’ll outlive every goddam person in this goddam courtroom. I swear I will.”

Then he sat down. Of course the judge had him taken away for contempt and called a recess.

The scene at the luncheonette was tense. Everyone was shaken by the curse Bingham had put on them, down to the AP stringer, who sat off by himself at the end of the counter nursing an orange Nehi.

Later in his summing up Arrowsmith pulled his punches, you could tell. The fire had gone out of him. Still, what really was required of him? The jury deliberated about twenty minutes before returning a verdict of guilty. It’s as if they wanted to get the job done and high-tail it.

Back then white men didn’t get put to death, so Bingham went to the pen in Columbia, for life.

That night Arrowsmith had to drive with his partner, Timms, to Pawley’s Island, where their families were staying for the summer. A lot of the roads were just asphalt over sand and the woods and swamp came right up to the shoulder. Just after they left, a bad storm came up, and by the time they were in deep woods it was raining so hard Timms begged Arrowsmith to pull over, but Arrowsmith wouldn’t. He said, “I have this feeling that Bingham is after me.”

Then lightning crashed and a big tree came down in the road just ahead of them. Arrowsmith braked so hard the Buick skidded sideways before coming to a stop nearly caught in the branches. Lightning flashed again and Timms could see Arrowsmith’s face was as white as old bone.

Arrowsmith managed to turn the car around, but they’d been headed back only about a half mile before another tree blocked the road. Timms saw it wasn’t a big one, so he got out in the rain and moved it. They went on to Pawley’s Island the back way.

They didn’t get there till about 4 o’clock in the morning, and the wives were frantic. Arrowsmith sat up till nearly the next day drinking coffee and staring out at the breakers.

He got over that eventually, but not before the story got around that he’d thought Bingham had escaped somehow and come after him. He never was entirely comfortable driving in the rain and did die a few years later when he ran off the road in a storm. Shortly thereafter the coroner from Pocataligo died of a flesh-eating bacteria he’d picked up as an occupational hazard. Timms died about 20 years later, of lung cancer. The judge had had a heart attack and passed away about two months after the trial, but nobody thought much of it because he was already an old man.

Bingham spent 50 years in the pen. They let him out when he was 82, directly into an old folks home in Irmo. His curse had come true but nobody still alive could appreciate that fact. He was just another old man, sitting on the porch, rocking and reading his paper, folded so he could hold it in one hand.