By Humanity Possessed

A COVENANT WITH DEATH by Stephen Becker. 240 pages. Atheneum. $4.50.

The convicted murderer was dragged to the gibbet and eyes dipped for the last benediction. The sentenced man also lowered his head--and then suddenly drove it into the hangman's belly, sending him hurtling off the scaffold to his death on the cobblestones below During the 24 hours set aside for a second executioner to get to Soledad City near the Mexican border, new evidence surfaced, exonerating the "murderer" of his original charge. But what about the murder he now had committed?

Soledad City was part Old Mexico, part American frontier. Its ethic had elements of both--plus, at that time in the 1920s, the "shrill, maniacal lynch law" of the smugly righteous ladies in their long, black, chin-high dresses. These conflicts are embodied in the judge of the second murder trial, Benjamin Morales Lewis, 29. As he announces in his decision, "We have no precedents. We have only our own precarious humanity," no one's humanity seems more precarious than Ben Lewis'. The son of the town's Mexican grande dame and of its late county sheriff (whose memory had been honored with Ben's appointment to the bench), he just can't seem to cope in courtship or in the court. As a suitor, he wavers between the comely Lutheran schoolteacher, who, he fears, after their first kiss, "lay awake all night awaiting labor pains," or a Mexican cousin he "would have ravished, in Fielding's glorious words," only to be prevented by her "timely compliance." His confusion leads him to doubt his capacity to love at all. But his wrestlings with his fateful judgment on the innocent man who murdered the hangman lead him to self-discovery and belated decisiveness. He emerges no longer just his father's son, no longer the boy jurist his mother "called Judge, when she felt I had done something egregiously stupid, which was, come to think of it, often."

Behind the novel's smooth facade of Perry Masonry, there is a buttressing of convincing characterization and of uncommonly literate, witty and flavorful writing. Behind the suspense, there is an equally compelling exploration of the self-contradictions of two cultures, of justice and flawed men.

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