by R.J. Ellory
And I realized something else. I realized that where we still thought of ourselves as big kids, the world now saw us as men.
Men who should be willing to die in some dark damp jungle on the other side of the world.
Sergeant Mike had violated our innocence and trust, and most of us never even knew.
Marty Hooper stood up first.
He just stood up.
There was nothing, and then he was there, and he stood out like a single flower in the middle of that football field.
Somebody clapped. A single pair of hands that sounded like gunfire.
And because Marty Hooper was on his feet Larry James stood up too.
And then another.
And another.
Someone else started clapping, faster, louder, and before I knew it the tent was filled with riotous applause, and fathers were standing and hugging their sons, and mothers were crying, and the small children were watching this with wide-eyed wonder, asking themselves what was happening, unable to appreciate its significance.
Nathan and I didn't move.
I think if he'd stood up I would have died right where I sat.
I felt my mother's hand gripping mine, and when I looked down I saw her knuckles were white with tension.
I knew she felt me looking at her but she did not turn.
Sergeant Mike was in his element. This was his moment, his own Kodak moment, and even as he was congratulating everyone there were other soldiers, men and women, moving among the crowd to corral the recruits, to guide them to a bank of tables where seated men held forms and pens and documents of release.
I was terrified.
I thought for one awful moment that I might involuntarily stand, that I would be whisked to the side, that I would be clapped on the shoulder, that I would feel strange hands shaking mine, that a man with stern eyes and a sterner voice would want to know my name, my age, my height, my weight.
But I didn't stand.
I sat like a statue.
I barely breathed.
The noise seemed to go on forever. An hour. A day. A week perhaps.
No-one looked at me. There were no accusatory glances. No-one leaned forward to ask me what my problem was, did I not care for my family's freedom, did I not care for the American way of life?
For that small mercy I was eternally grateful.
And when the noise was quelled and the crowds settled I looked up and saw Sergeant Mike had gone.
Serpent Mike, the little boy had said, and of all those who attended that night - the fathers and mothers, the brothers, sisters, cousins and neighbors, those from Myrtle Beach and Orangeburg who thought perhaps there was a circus in town, the little ones who would go home and find their brothers' beds empty - I believed that that little boy had spoken the real and only truth.
I never said a thing.
Like before, there are some things only to be known by yourself and God.
Later, the tent down, the ground scattered with paper plates, chicken bones, brochures trampled into the dirt beneath a thousand feet, Nathan and I stood and watched as soldiers folded the vast canvas and packed it into a truck. The boys who had become men that night had already left in buses.
Forty-six of them in all.
By Christmas all but twelve would be dead.
One of them would return, having left much of the lower half of his body in Da Nang or Ky Lam or some other godforsaken place.
His name was Luke Schaeffer. He was a football player before he went, a good one, a young man who would have walked a scholarship with the speed of that right arm.
He told me stories I cannot bear to recall, even now - older, hardened, a little cynical - there are images of which he spoke that threaten my sanity.
I did not ask why then, I do not ask it now.
There are some things that just are.
They are part of being human.
And that, if nothing else, was never a matter of choice.
* * *
Chapter Seven
The priest who visited me at Sumter possessed an honest enough face. I would later learn that this was a new gig for him, and I believed that perhaps some impropriety or breach of conduct had brought him this position. Counsel to the dead. I couldn't imagine anyone choosing to perform such a task.
His name was Father John Rousseau, he was perhaps in his early forties, and he smoked ceaselessly, one cigarette after the other. The Counselling Room, known as God's Lounge to those who still possessed sufficient humor to bother with such things, was a narrow room with a single plain deal table, two chairs, a one-way window through which interviews were video-taped, and a two-shelf bookcase. In the center of the upper shelf were two books. A copy of the New Testament & Psalms, and a Gideon's Bible.
John Rousseau brought his own Bible, a beaten-to-shit leather volume which he clutched as one would clutch the hand of a small child in a funfair crowd.
I liked Rousseau's face, and despite our brief weekly meetings being neither a matter of choice nor relevance, I appreciated the fact that I could spend an hour talking to someone who seemed more concerned with my religious and spiritual salvation than my lock-down time.
Our first meeting was in August of 1982. It was a Tuesday, I remember that much, and though I grew to like Father John Rousseau he began our first meeting on the wrong foot.
He greeted me, shook my hand, asked me to sit there at the plain deal table, and then he told me he cared for neither my innocence nor my guilt.
A man on Death Row thinks of little else but his own innocence or guilt.
He then told me that he knew I was going to die, that he had spoken with Penitentiary Warden Hadfield and there was little hope of any further effective action being taken to either stay my execution or gain a reprieve. He said he understood some of the details of my case and trial, that the issues raised had cast it into the arena of politics, and once it had reached that point there was little anyone would do to reverse the decisions made. It had become a matter of losing face.
I remember feeling the first stirrings of violence within. I was not a violent man - never had been - but the almost complacent nonchalance with which he seemed to pronounce my forthcoming death angered me. I clenched my fists beneath the table, white balls of tense knuckles, and had I believed it would serve any purpose I might have lashed out. If not physically, at least verbally.
I held my hands and my tongue. I was in no position to endanger the sole source of human contact I might have.
And then Father John Rousseau asked me about my faith.
'Faith?' I asked back.
Father John nodded. He gripped that Bible like a lifeline to the shore.
I remember looking towards the one-way window; I smiled for the video camera, and then I shrugged my shoulders.
'I have faith, Father,' I said. 'But I don't know that I have faith in the same things as you.'
Father John smiled. I imagined he'd heard it all.
'And what do you think I have faith in, Daniel?' he said.
I shrugged, half-smiled. I was thinking more about if he would give me a cigarette.
'God,' I said. 'Jesus Christ, the crucifixion, the Virgin birth, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus and turning water into wine. The loaves and fishes, and the parting of the Red Sea, Moses coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, eternal damnation for me and eternal Paradise for yourself. I imagine those things are what you believe in.'
Father John smiled.
He did exactly what I wanted him to do: he offered me a cigarette.
I took one gratefully. I could not remember the last time I had smoked a whole cigarette to myself.
'I believe in some of those things,' Father John said. 'Though I don't actually believe in eternal damnation for anyone.'
I frowned.
'I think Hell is allegorical,' he went on. 'I think Hell has been marketed as a concept to obtain compliance from the people -'
'Marketed?' I asked.
Father John smiled sardonically. 'The Church has to market a product like anyone else, Daniel.'
I smiled, a little sarcastically perhaps.
'Anyway, I don't think there's such a thing as Hell,' he repeated.
'And Heaven?' I asked.
Father John shook his head. 'I don't think Heaven is a location, I think it's a spiritual state.'
I didn't reply.
'So what do you believe, Daniel?' he eventually asked. He lit another cigarette, his fifth or sixth since he'd sat down.
'Believe?' I asked. 'I believe a lot of things.'
Father John did not say anything; he merely looked at me inquisitively.
'You want to know what I believe?'
Father John nodded affirmatively.
I leaned back and thought for a moment. 'I believe there are still Cheyenne Dog Soldiers in the Oxbow. I believe that The Rolling Stones killed Brian Jones. I believe that Elvis is alive and well, maybe a hundred and seventy-five or two hundred pounds in weight, and lives somewhere out west on a ranch. I believe that they never really went to the moon, and all the pictures they sent back were manufactured in a studio at NASA. I believe Gus Grissom was gonna blow the whistle and they whacked him…'
I looked across at Father John. His expression was intent.
'You want me to go on?' I asked.
He nodded.
'I believe Kennedy was killed by some super-elite political and financial fraternity like the Bilderberg Group because he was too popular, because he was interested in white- black integration, because he was a wild card. I believe Joe Kennedy made a deal with the Mafia, people like Sam Giancana and his crew, to help get his son the presidency and in exchange promised that JFK would go easy on organized crime, but when it got to the real deal JFK reneged and upset everyone in Vegas and L.A. and Florida and New York. I believe Marilyn Monroe was murdered because she slept with JFK. I believe Sirhan Sirhan was part of Operation Artichoke or the CIA's MK Ultra Project, and he was brainwashed into killing Robert Kennedy because it looked like Kennedy might make it to the White House. I think Ted Kennedy was set up for Chappaquiddick so he wouldn't even think of going that way. And I think Martin Luther King and Che Guevara were murdered because they represented too much change and rebellion and running against the grain.'
I reached for another cigarette without asking. Father John made no comment.
'I think Nixon was the golden boy, and then he went crazy, started talking to his dead mother and thinking everyone was following him, and whoever it was that controlled the government knew they couldn't whack the guy in broad daylight like JFK, so they set him up with the whole Watergate fiasco. Bernstein and Woodward were given all the help they needed by someone inside Nixon's administration, and Haldeman and Mitchell and Porter and the others were just the fall guys who happened to be around at the time. And I think that the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs and what happened in Dallas were reminders to all Americans that their lives really meant nothing at all. They could go up with an atomic bomb, or they could rise to the greatest position in the country, and it didn't matter a fuck because they could kill you anyway. After the early '60s it all went to hell, and with Vietnam and 35,000 men a month flying into someone else's war, everyone kind of gave up and resigned themselves to a life of TV and Prozac and calorie-counting and aluminum sidings.'
I paused.
'That's what I believe, Father John.'
Father John was quiet for a time, and then he said: 'You didn't go to Vietnam, did you?'
It was a question I had not expected, a question I never liked.
I shook my head.
'What happened?' Father John asked.
'It's a long story,' I said, in a weak attempt at dissuading him from pursuing his line of questioning. My sense of anger had passed, and in its place came a neatly folded package of fatigue and frustration. I did not understand the point of the questions. I could not see what purpose they might serve.
'I've got time,' Father John said.
I smiled. 'But I haven't.'
'You have something better to do?'
I shook my head.
'You have today,' Father John said, 'and one today is better than two tomorrows.'
I looked at him. 'Who said that?'
Father John smiled. 'Benjamin Franklin.'
'One today is better than two tomorrows,' I repeated.
Father John nodded. 'That's right.'
I smiled a little sarcastically. 'Wasn't on Death Row when he said that, was he?'
'I appreciate your bitterness, Daniel.'
I nodded. 'Thank you, Father.'
Father John smiled understandingly. 'And your sarcasm.'
'You think I'm not entitled to a little of both?'
'I think you're entitled to a great deal more than you're getting, but there's little I can do to change that. I'm here to talk to you, to listen, to try and assist you to reconcile yourself to dying.'
'I've been doing that for more than ten years, Father,' I said.
'And to try and foster some sense of hope that there might be something better afterwards.'
He paused then and looked at me. I was unnerved in that moment, for the expression in his face was one I had seen before. The expression of a man with a secret. Was there something happening here he wasn't telling me?
'You believe that?' I asked. 'That there might be something better after this?'
Father John nodded. 'I do.'
I leaned back and closed my eyes. I didn't feel like talking any more. I could see colors behind my eyelids. I felt a little dizzy from the nicotine. There was a bitter coppery taste in my mouth, not unpleasant, just unusual. I could sense Father John was there opposite me, but I felt little requirement to humor him. He was here for me, not the other way round.
'You talk when you feel like talking, Daniel,' Father John said.
I opened one eye fractionally and squinted at him. He seemed as relaxed and settled as I.
'Don't feel much like anything,' I said.
Father John shrugged. 'Okay,' he said.
There was silence for another minute or so.
'Figured you might tell me a little about Nathan,' he eventually said.
I opened my eyes and sat forward. 'Nathan?' I asked.
Father John nodded. 'Nathan.'
'What about Nathan?'
He shrugged again. 'Anything you like.'
'Nathan was like my brother,' I said.
'I know.'
I frowned. 'How do you know?'
'Because when I mentioned his name you looked more like a human being than at any other time.'
'Profound,' I replied. 'What the hell is that s'posed to mean?'
'What it says,' he replied. 'The tone in your voice is less bitter and cynical and frustrated. We could be sat next to one another in a bar just shooting the breeze.'
'Nathan used to say that,' I said.
Father John frowned. 'Used to say what?'
'That expression - shooting the breeze.'
He nodded and smiled. 'So you want to tell me a little about him?'
I didn't speak for a moment. I was tired. My head had started to ache. I don't think I had talked so much in the last year.
'You want to?' Father John reiterated.
'I suppose… if you want.'
'I want,' the priest said, and his expression was genuine and sincere.
And so I did.
It was like walking backwards and underwater at the same time.
I was surprised at the clarity of my memory, the images I recalled as I spoke. There were things I could remember in
crystal detail, things I hadn't thought of for more than fifteen years.
And those things came back, willingly almost, like they wanted to come back, like they'd missed the attention, missed the sound of my voice, because they were part of me just as much as they had been a part of Nathan.
And I let them, not because I felt the need to tell John Rousseau, prie
st or otherwise, but because it had been so long since I had spoken of Nathan Verney I had started to forget how all of this had happened.
