Defending Jacob

by William Landay

  Witness: This was my son. A father does not think, can’t even imagine his child in those terms.

  Mr. Logiudice: Really? Can’t even imagine it?

  Witness: That’s right.

  Mr. Logiudice: The boy had no history of violence? No juvenile criminal record?

  Witness: No. None.

  Mr. Logiudice: No behavioral problems? No psychological problems?

  Witness: No.

  Mr. Logiudice: He had never hurt a fly, is that fair to say?

  Witness: Something like that.

  Mr. Logiudice: And yet when you found the knife, you covered it up. You behaved exactly as if you thought he was guilty.

  Witness: That is not accurate.

  Mr. Logiudice: Well, you didn’t report it.

  Witness: I was slow to realize—in hindsight, I admit—

  Mr. Logiudice: Mr. Barber, how could you be slow to realize when, in fact, you’d been waiting for this moment for fourteen years, from the day your son was born?

  [The witness did not respond.]

  Mr. Logiudice: You’d been waiting for this moment. Fearing it, dreading it. But expecting it.

  Witness: That’s not true.

  Mr. Logiudice: Isn’t it? Mr. Barber, isn’t it fair to say that violence runs in your family?

  Witness: I object. That is a completely improper question.

  Mr. Logiudice: Your objection is noted for the record.

  Witness: You are trying to mislead this jury. You are suggesting that Jacob could inherit a tendency to violence, as if violence were the same as red hair or hairy ears. That’s wrong on the biology and wrong on the law. In a word, it’s bullshit. And you know it.

  Mr. Logiudice: But I’m not talking about biology at all. I’m talking about your state of mind, what you believed at the moment you found that knife. Now, if you choose to believe in bullshit, that’s your business. But what you believed is perfectly relevant and perfectly admissible as evidence. And you know it. But, out of respect, I’ll withdraw the question. We’ll approach it another way. Have you ever heard the phrase “the murder gene”?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Logiudice: You’ve heard it where?

  Witness: Just in conversation. I’ve used it in conversation with my wife. It’s a figure of speech, nothing more.

  Mr. Logiudice: A figure of speech.

  Witness: It is not a scientific term. I’m not a scientist.

  Mr. Logiudice: Of course. We’re all non-experts here. Now, when you used this, this figure of speech, “the murder gene,” what were you referring to?

  [The witness did not respond.]

  Mr. Logiudice: Oh, come on, Andy, there’s no reason to be shy about it. It’s all a matter of public record now. You’ve felt a lot of anxiety, haven’t you, in your life?

  Witness: A long time ago. When I was a kid. Not now.

  Mr. Logiudice: A long time ago, okay. You were worried—a long time ago, when you were a kid—about your own history, your own family, weren’t you?

  [The witness did not respond.]

  Mr. Logiudice: It’s fair to say you’re descended from a long line of violent men, aren’t you, Mr. Barber?

  [The witness did not respond.]

  Mr. Logiudice: It’s fair to say that, isn’t it?

  Witness: [Inaudible.]

  Mr. Logiudice: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. You’re descended from a long line of violent men, aren’t you? Mr. Barber?

  Violence did run in my family. You could follow it like a red thread back through three generations. Probably there were more. Probably the red thread ran right the way back to Cain, but I never had any desire to trace it. A few stories, lurid, mostly unverifiable, and a few photographs had come down to me; that was affliction enough. When I was a kid, I wanted to forget these stories entirely. I used to wonder what it would be like if a magical amnesia descended and erased my mind completely, leaving only a body and some sort of blank self, all potential, all soft clay. But of course, no matter how I tried to forget, the story of my ancestors was always stored in deep memory, always ready to poke up into awareness. I learned to manage with it. Later, for Jacob’s sake, I learned to drink it down entirely, leaving nothing for anyone to see, nothing to “share.” Laurie was a great believer in sharing, in the talking cure, but I never meant to cure myself. I never believed such a thing was possible. That is what Laurie never understood. She knew that my father’s ghost troubled me, but not why. She presumed the issue was that I never knew him and there would forever be a daddy-shaped hole in my life. I never told her anything else, though she tried to pry me open like an oyster. Laurie’s own dad was a shrink, and before Jacob was born she was a teacher at the Gavin Middle School in South Boston, fifth- and sixth-grade English. She believed, based on these experiences, that she had some understanding of under-fathered young boys. “You’ll never be able to deal with it,” she would tell me, “if you won’t talk about it.” Oh, Laurie, you never got it! I never intended to “deal with it.” I intended to stop it cold. I meant to stop the whole sordid criminal line of descent by absorbing it all inside me. I would stand there and stop it like a bullet. I would simply refuse to pass it along to Jake. So I chose not to learn much. Not to research my history or analyze it for causes and effects. I purposely orphaned myself from the whole brawling lot of them. As far as I knew—as far as I chose to know—the red thread went back to my great-grandfather, a slit-eyed thug named James Burkett, who came east from North Dakota carrying in his bones some feral, wicked instinct for violence that would manifest itself over and over, in Burkett himself, in his son, and most spectacularly in his grandson, my father.

  James Burkett was born near Minot, North Dakota, sometime around 1890. The circumstances of his childhood, his parents, whether he had any education—I knew nothing about these things. Only that he grew up on the High Plains of Dakota in the years after Little Big Horn, at the closing of the frontier. The first real evidence I had of the man was a sepia photograph on thick card stock, taken in New York City at the H.W. Harrison Photographic Studio on Fulton Street on Wednesday, August 23, 1911. The day and date were carefully noted in pencil on the back of the photo along with his new name, “James Barber.” The story behind this journey was also murky. The way I heard it—from my mother, who got it from my father’s father—was that Burkett lit out of North Dakota to escape an armed robbery charge. He lay low awhile on the southern shore of Lake Superior, clamming and working on fishing boats, then made his way to New York under a new name. Why he changed his name—whether it was to avoid an arrest warrant or just to make a new start with a new identity out east, or for some other reason—no one knew for sure. Nor could anyone explain why my great-grandfather chose Barber as his new surname. The only solid evidence I had of this period was the photo itself. It was the only image of James Burkett-Barber I ever saw. He would have been about twenty or twenty-one when it was taken. He is shown full figure. Slim and taut, bandy-legged, in a borrowed coat, with a bowler held in the crook of his arm. He squints into the camera with a Bowery smirk, one corner of his mouth curling up like smoke.

  I surmised that the charge in North Dakota was probably more serious than armed robbery. Not only did Burkett-Barber go to great lengths to escape it—a low-rent stickup man on the lam did not have to travel so far or transform himself so completely—but upon arriving in New York he displayed an aptitude for violence almost immediately. There was no apprenticeship. He did not work his way up from petty assaults, as novice criminals do; he stepped onstage a hoodlum in full flower. His criminal record in New York included arrests for ABDW, assault with intent to rob, assault with intent to murder, mayhem, possession of an infernal device, possession of an unlicensed firearm, rape, and attempted murder. Between his first arrest in New York state in 1912 and his death in 1941, James Barber spent nearly half his days in prison or in custody awaiting trial. On two charges of rape and attempted murder alone, he served fourteen years combined.

  It was th
e record of a professional criminal, and the one description of him that surfaced in the casebooks bore that out. The case was an attempted murder in 1916. It generated a perfunctory appeal and was therefore written up in the New York case reports in 1918. The summary of the facts of the case, as reported by Judge Barton in his decision, is just a few sentences long:

  The defendant became embroiled in an argument with the victim, a man named Payton, at a Brooklyn bar. The argument had to do with a debt Payton owed either to the defendant himself (according to the defendant) or to another for whom the defendant worked as a “stalker,” or debt-collector (according to the State). In the course of this argument, the defendant, in a transport of rage, attacked the victim with a bottle. He persisted in the attack even after the bottle had broken, after the affray had spilled from the bar out onto the street, and after the victim’s left eye was badly damaged and his left ear shorn nearly off. The attack finally ended when several bystanders, to whom the victim was known, intervened to overwhelm the defendant and hold him forcibly, with great effort, until police arrived.

  One other detail from that court decision stood out. The judge noted, “The defendant’s reputation for violence was well known to Payton, as indeed it was well known generally.”

  James Barber left at least one son, my grandfather Russell, who was called Rusty. Rusty Barber lived until 1971. I knew him only briefly, when I was a very little kid. Most of what I know about him comes from stories he told my mother, who later passed them on to me.

  Rusty never met his father and therefore never missed him. Didn’t waste a hell of a lot of thought on him. Rusty was raised in Meriden, Connecticut, where his mother had people and where she returned from New York City, pregnant, to raise him up. She told the boy about his father, including his crimes. She did not mince words, but neither she nor the boy made a big deal about it or felt especially burdened. Lots of folks had it worse in those days. It did not occur to anyone that Rusty’s father might affect the boy’s future in any way. On the contrary, Rusty was raised with essentially the same expectations his neighbors were. He was a mediocre student and a little wild, but he did graduate from Meriden High School. He entered West Point in 1933 but left after his plebe year, much of which he spent in special confinement and walking disciplinary tours. He came back to Meriden, worked odd jobs, drifted. He married a local girl, my grandmother, and seven months later had a son, whom he called William. Once, Rusty was involved in a minor scuffle and wound up getting arrested for assaulting a police officer, though he had not done any such thing, really. Just did not like the way the man laid hands on him.

  It was the war that turned things around for Rusty Barber. He joined the Army as a private and took part in the D-day invasion with the First Infantry Division. By the time the war was over, he was a lieutenant in the Third Army, a winner of the Medal of Honor and two Silver Stars, and a certified hero. During the battle for Nuremberg in April 1945, he single-handedly stormed a German machine-gun emplacement, killing six Germans, the last two using his bayonet. There was a parade for him back in Meriden. He rode on the back of an open convertible and waved to the girls.

  After the war, he had two more kids, bought his own little wood-frame house in Meriden. But he was not nearly as well suited to peacetime. He flopped in a series of businesses—insurance, real estate, a restaurant. He did finally find a place as a traveling salesman. He repped a number of clothing and shoe lines, and he spent most of his working life driving around southern New England with boxes of samples in his car trunk, which he displayed to storekeepers in one cramped office after another. Looking back on this period in my grandfather’s life, he must have been laboring mightily to stay straight. Rusty Barber had his father’s genius for violence, which the war encouraged and rewarded, but he was not exceptionally talented in any other respect. Still, he might have made it. He might have got through life peacefully, in a left-handed way. But it was a precarious thing, and events conspired against him.

  On May 11, 1950, he was in Lowell, Massachusetts, calling on Birke’s clothing store to show the new line of Mighty Mac parkas for the fall. He stopped for lunch at a hot dog place he liked called Elliot’s. As he left Elliot’s, there was an accident. A car swiped the front of Rusty’s Buick Special as he crept out of the parking lot. There was an argument. A shove. The other man produced a knife. When it was over, the man lay on the street, and Rusty walked away as if nothing had happened. The man stood up with his hands pressed to his belly. Blood seeped through his fingers. He opened his shirt but held his hands over his stomach a moment, as if he had a bellyache. When the man finally pulled his hands away, a slick coiled snake of intestines drooped out of him. A vertical incision split his stomach from the pelvis to the bottom of the chestbone. With his own hands, the man lifted his intestines back into his own body, held them there, and walked inside to call the police.

  They threw the book at Rusty: assault with intent to murder, mayhem, ABDW. At trial, he argued self-defense but he confessed, fatally, that he did not recall any of the things he was accused of, including taking the man’s knife and gutting him with it. His memory failed at the moment the man came at him with the knife. He was sentenced to seven to ten years; he served three. By the time he got back to Meriden, his eldest son, William—my father, Billy Barber—was eighteen and already too wild for any father to control, even one as formidable as Rusty.

  And here we reach the part of the story where the fabric frays and runs out. For I have no real memories of my own father back then, just fragments—

  an unfocused blue-green tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, in the shape of a cross or a dagger, which he picked up in prison somewhere—

  his hands, pale red-knuckled bony talons, quite credible as instruments of murder—

  his mouth full of long yellow teeth—

  a curved pearl-handled knife, which he always carried in his belt at the small of his back, tucked there every morning automatically, the way other men slipped a wallet into a back pocket.

  Beyond these glimpses, though, I just cannot remember him. And even these scraps I don’t really trust; I have had years to embellish them. It was 1961 when I last saw my father. I was five, he was twenty-six. For a long time, as a little kid, I tried to preserve my memories of him to keep him from disappearing. That was before I really understood what he was. Over the years, he dematerialized anyway. By the time I was ten or so, I had no real memory of him except these few stray puzzle pieces. A little while after that I quit thinking of him altogether. For convenience, I lived as if I had no father, as if I had come into the world unfathered, and this attitude I never questioned because nothing any good could ever come of it.

  One memory did stick, if imperfectly. Sometime in that last summer, 1961, my mom took me to visit him in the Whalley Avenue jail in New Haven. We sat at one of the pitted wood tables in the crowded visiting room. The prisoners in their boxy prison dungarees and pajama tops all looked like the crayon drawings of flat, square-shaped men that my friends and I used to draw. I must have been shy that day—you had to be careful around him—because my father had to coax me. “Come here, let me look at you.” He clamped his fist around my tiny upper arm and drew me forward. “Come here. You come all this way to visit, get over here.” Years later, I can still feel his grip on my arm, twisting it slightly, the way you would twist a chicken leg to tear it away.

  He had done a terrible thing. I knew that. No adult would tell me what it was exactly. It involved a girl and one of the empty boarded-up row houses on Congress Avenue. And the pearl-handled knife. That was the part that made grown-ups go quiet.

  My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that. You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to pace around and around it, see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you. You have to hold it inside yourself in secret for years, like the h
ideous stone inside a peach.

  How much of this did Laurie know? None of it. I knew the moment I laid eyes on her that she was a Nice Jewish Girl from a Nice Jewish Family and she would not consider me if she knew the truth. So I told her in vague and romantic terms that my father had a raffish reputation but I had never known him. I was the product of a short, unhappy love affair. For the next thirty-five years that was how things stood. To Laurie, I was essentially fatherless. I never told her any different because in my own mind I was essentially fatherless. Certainly I was not Bloody Billy Barber’s son. There was nothing very dramatic in all this. When I told my girlfriend, who became my wife, that I did not know who my father was, I was simply saying out loud what I had been repeating to myself for years. I was not misleading her at all. If I had once been Billy Barber’s son, by the time I met Laurie I had long ceased to be, except in strict biological terms. What I told Laurie was nearer the truth than the actual facts were. You will say, Okay, but surely in all those years there must have come a time when you could have told her. But the truth is, as time went by, what I had told Laurie became more and more true. As a grown man, I was even less Billy’s boy. It was all just a story, some old myth that had nothing to do with who I actually was. I did not even think about it much, honestly. At some point as adults we cease to be our parents’ children and we become our children’s parents instead. What was more, I had the girl. I had Laurie, and we were happy. Our marriage settled into a rhythm, we believed we knew each other, and we were each happy with our conception of our partner. Why spoil that? Why risk the rare happy marriage—rarer still, a love marriage that endures—for something as common and as toxic as complete, unthinking, transparent honesty? Who would be helped by my telling? Me? Not at all. I was made of steel, I promise you. There is a more mundane explanation too: it just never came up. It turns out there is no good time in the average day to announce to your wife that you are the son of a murderer.

  7 | Denial