by R.J. Ellory
Even now I don't really know what happened.
Seemed like the world closed up some place and opened up somewhere else.
After that moment I would never see anything the same.
I had to go back. I knew that. I thought little of consequences, repercussions, of what people might say or do when I got there. My mother had died and the house was empty, and she was buried somewhere and I hadn't even said goodbye. In eighteen months she'd heard from me once. A single letter, full of lies. That was how she'd have remembered me. Her son, the liar. She died with that thought, with the wish to see me, to find out what had happened, and I hadn't been there. I believe now, perhaps, that that was the point I decided my own fate. Didn't have anything to do with God, just me and my own conscience.
And despite everything that happened, despite everything that happened, my conscience was the worst judge of all.
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
After the trial, after the move from Charleston to Sumter, I had time to think. Time was my greatest asset, the one thing I had no shortage of, and yet the weeks blurred into months and even the years seemed to lose their seams and divisions. I would find it hard to recall exactly when everything had happened.
During that time I seemed to lose myself in the events that transpired across America. It was a monumental handful of years, of events that would change the course of history, that would sour the minds and hearts of a nation irretrievably, and those events seemed to open up like gangrenous wounds one after the other.
In Charleston we had newspapers, a day late yes, but still we had newspapers. At Sumter we were not permitted them, they could be rolled tightly and jammed into someone's throat, you could smash their windpipe, even break their neck if you carried enough force behind it. But we did have a transistor radio, a small one that hung from a piece of string at the end of the walkway. Mr. Timmons would hang it there and put it on when Mr. West was off the Block. That happened frequently enough for us to follow everything that happened through the news flashes and daily bulletins.
We listened to a local station, CKKL, a small station with two reporters, a guy called Frank Wallace and a girl called Cindy Giddings.
Frank Wallace had the voice of someone who believed himself to be very important. He rolled his words out like carpets, unnecessarily lengthy and overly precise, but Cindy? Cindy was a different breed altogether. Cindy Giddings should not have been a reporter on CKKL, she should have been an NBC anchorwoman. I created her look, her age, her height, weight and hair color, personal interests and hobbies, the name of her cat, the kind of house she lived in, and after two years of listening to her almost daily I felt a closeness, a sensitivity and depth to our imagined relationship that was perhaps more meaningful than anything I could remember. When she transferred to some station in Georgia in 1973 I felt as if I had experienced a protracted and ugly divorce, a divorce based on nothing more substantial than a difference in location. I even asked Mr. Timmons if we could find the new station on the transistor, but Clarence Timmons - understanding as he was - could not get that little transistor to hear that far.
It was Cindy Giddings who kept me alive during those first years: the sound of her voice, her measured and rhythmic tone, the undercurrent of sensuality I perceived when she said Well thank you, Frank, and thank you to all our listeners today. It certainly has been a day of revelation, hasn't it?
One time I thought of writing to her.
I didn't know, wouldn't have known, what to say, but I did know from experience that at times like that it was better to say nothing at all.
Richard Milhous Nixon was the mainstay of my interest. Curiously, I felt a certain camaraderie with this bizarre character. There was no doubt in my mind that he was crazy as a loon. By that time I was cynical enough to believe that the only people who were ever installed at the White House had to be at least half gone.
Richard Nixon was an enigma, a walking contradiction.
Why I felt some sense of empathy with the man I didn't know. I believed he was caught, just as I had been, and though there were crimes and felonies perpetrated, though
I did not doubt he had in fact known everything that was going on, there were those behind him who wanted him to vanish any which way he could.
Like me.
We were different, so very different, but in some small way, some fraction of reality, we were just the same.
On one hand Nixon would spend much of his time working on political and economic relations with the Chinese and the Soviets, on the other he was bugging the Oval Office and listening to himself and his aides. He was trapped in the Vietnam fiasco, and while attempting to divert attention from the war by publicizing his overseas trips, the war was pulling America's attention ever back to the atrocities that had been perpetrated there.
In February of 1970 five U.S. Marines were arrested for murdering eleven women and children. April saw the antiwar protest at Kent State and the shooting of seven students. Racial violence erupted once more in Georgia and six blacks were killed. Through September and into Christmas there was the Kent State student body burning their Draft cards, Lieutenant William Calley began his court martial for the My Lai massacre, and members of his own unit came forward to testify that Calley had knowingly and wilfully shot civilians.
The quote that everyone remembered came from Henry Kissinger. Justifying the U.S. invasion of Cambodia he said We are all the President's men.
In the early part of 1971, William Calley, guilty of murder, pronounced I will be extremely proud if My Lai shows the world what war is.
This was a sentiment the Americans did not want to hear, least of all Nixon, and two days later Nixon ordered Calley's release while his conviction was reviewed.
In May, 30,000 anti-war protesters demonstrated on the banks of the Potomac in Washington. The presidency had the Supreme Court clear Muhammad Ali of draft-dodging.
Captain Ernest Medina, also present at My Lai, was cleared of all charges, and Nixon promised that 45,000 troops would be out of Vietnam by the early part of '72. He gave five and a half billion dollars to space shuttle research and announced he would stand for re-election, simultaneously intensifying the U.S. bombing campaign. A seven hundred- plane B-52 Strato-Fortress fleet pounded Hanoi and Haiphong. Nixon went to China, then to the Soviet Union. He hoped, he prayed, and his words fell on deaf ears.
In June of 1972 five men were arrested at the Democratic National Committee Offices in the Watergate Complex. Former CIA operative James McCord, Security Co-ordinator for the Republican Committee to Re-Elect the President, and two others, both CIA, both with histories of serving anti-Castro groups in Florida, were among them.
Richard Milhous Nixon's nightmare had begun.
John Mitchell resigned as Presidential Campaign Manager just as the last U.S. Ground Combat Unit, the 3rd Battalion 21st Infantry, left Da Nang. Newspapers told America and the world that the Vietnam War had cost a hundred billion dollars.
The air war continued however, with those same B-52 Strato-Fortresses bombing the communist supply routes that fed the invasion of the south.
Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were indicted for Watergate. A spokesman for the White House stated categorically that there was 'absolutely no evidence that anyone else was involved'.
Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Adviser, said peace with Vietnam was at hand, and in November of 1972 Nixon won a landslide re-election victory. He ordered the suspension of the Hanoi bombing after twelve days of the heaviest raids the war had seen. Three days after Nixon was sworn in, a ceasefire was declared in Vietnam. The U.S. Army Court upheld the death sentence for William Calley, prisoner exchanges between the Americans and the Vietnamese began, and eleven reporters from three major newspapers were subpoenaed to testify on Watergate. Liddy refused to answer questions and was jailed for eighteen months. Bob Haldeman, Nixon's Chief of Staff, his Chief Domestic Affairs Adviser, John Ehrlichman, Attorney General of the United Stat
es Richard Kleindienst and John Dean, Nixon's Legal Counsel, all resigned. Presidential aides John Mitchell and Maurice Stans were indicted for perjury.
Nixon admitted that there had been a White House cover-up of the Watergate scandal, and the Senate began its hearings. In July 1973, Nixon refused to hand over the Watergate tapes to Senate investigators, and John Dean was heard again. He said that Nixon knew of the Watergate burglary and was actively involved in the cover-up. Dean also said that from Nixon's own lips had come a promise: We could find in the region of a million dollars in hush money.
The President was served with Court orders to hand over the tapes of White House conversations. He refused. The Appeal Court stepped in and reiterated the order. Nixon refused once more.
Four days later he consented. He ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to dismiss Archibald Cox, the Watergate Special Prosecutor. Richardson refused and resigned. Richardson's deputy, William Ruckelshaus, got the same order. He refused. Cox was finally dismissed by the Solicitor General Robert Bork, and with this action came the first mention of impeachment.
The New Year of 1974, the first year in fifteen that America was not reporting weekly deaths in Vietnam, saw Nixon rejecting the Court order to hand over more than five hundred tapes. He finally conceded defeat. The Court received them, but there were five gaps.
Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski spoke with Nixon. Nixon said he would not hand over the key Watergate tapes, and found himself named as an unindicted co-conspirator. The Congressional Committee warned Nixon he would be impeached. The Supreme Court ordered him once again. Again, the President refused on the grounds of executive privilege. The House Judiciary voted 27-11 in favor of impeachment.
On August 8th 1974 Richard Milhous Nixon resigned the Office of the President of the United States. Spiro Agnew, his Vice-President, had already gone after pleading guilty to tax evasion, and the former Republican Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Gerald Ford, the newly assigned Vice-President, became Nixon's successor.
There was an interesting turn. Nelson Rockefeller, a man whose grandfather owned Standard Oil, a man with a major involvement in the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Federal Reserve, became Vice-President. He was sworn in on December 19th, a full five months after his selection, and - coincident with the official assumption of his new duties - John Dean, John Ehrlichman, Bob Haldeman, John Mitchell, and Robert Mardian, Assistant Attorney General, were jailed.
The Nixon empire had fallen.
The Vietnam War was over.
A new era had begun.
Such was America during the first years of my imprisonment. I listened to these events transpire from a small wireless, and beneath those thoughts was the memory of what had happened that Christmas of 1969, the few weeks, the few days even, when all we had believed to be a freedom had become its dark and complex opposite.
In some small way my own life had begun to mirror the life of the nation. As I believed nothing could get worse, so it worsened. As I believed there could be no darker shadows, so a deeper darkness was revealed.
And it 'was into that darkness I fell: boom, down like a stone.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
'How did you feel when you realized that you'd never been drafted?'
I looked across the narrow table at Father John Rousseau.
'How did I feel? I felt cheated… I don't know, confused perhaps. I don't suppose I took time to think how I felt. My mother was dead. Backermann was there. Nathan came back with me but no-one knew. I moved into my mother's house and Nathan stayed inside, didn't go out. If anyone visited he hid down in the basement.'
Rousseau smiled. 'He hid in the basement?'
I nodded. 'Right, he hid in the basement. He had been drafted, he'd jumped the State. If anyone had known he was there the authorities would have been told and he'd have been arrested.'
'Why did he come back with you?'
I shrugged my shoulders. 'I asked him to. I didn't want to go back alone.'
'And he was willing to go back despite the fact that he might be discovered and arrested?'
'We were friends, had been friends nearly our whole lives. Despite anything that had happened we were still as close as brothers.'
'You think he came back with you because you had left with him in the first place?'
'Like he owed me?' I asked.
Rousseau nodded. 'Perhaps.'
I shook my head. 'I didn't ask him why he came. I asked him to go back to Greenleaf with me and he said yes, it was as simple as that.'
Rousseau didn't ask anything else.
He lit a cigarette, handed it to me, lit one for himself.
We sat silently for some time. There seemed to be little restriction on the number of times Rousseau could come, the amount of time I could spend in God's Lounge when he was there, and I took advantage of it.
I had thirty-one days left. Thirty-one days and I'd be dead. It was a disquieting, sobering, unreal thought.
'So tell me about going back,' Rousseau said. 'Tell me everything that happened.'
I leaned back slightly in the chair. I wanted to stand, to walk around, but such movement was not possible in the narrow confines of the room.
I was restless and agitated. I wanted it to finish now, be done with. It was a simple request, but it would be dragged out, all the way to November 11th.
I was getting medical checks, they were ensuring I ate properly, maintained my personal hygiene. They were not willing to be cheated of their moment of retribution. My watch had increased, my exercise time was constantly supervised, and whereas I would ordinarily walk in the yard with one or two other inmates, there was now simply myself and a warder. Ordinarily Mr. Timmons would come, sometimes one of the others.
It was on my walk two days before that I'd found a small piece of wood. Almost flat, perhaps three inches wide and two inches long, somewhere around quarter of an inch thick. It was like a slice of wood from a tree trunk, something like that, and across it was the most striking grain, three or four shades of brown. Mr. Timmons was with me, I asked if I could keep it, and he said yes. He said I could because he trusted me. He said that if I was asked I was to say I'd found it somewhere else, that he would deny ever speaking with me of such a thing. I agreed.
Later that evening, I took a spoon and rubbed the end of the handle against the wall until it possessed somewhat of an edge. With the sharpened end I carefully drew the shape I wanted, and then fraction by fraction, millimeter by millimeter, I started the endlessly laborious process of chipping away tiny fragments of wood. After more than two hours I had the shape I wanted, vaguely symmetrical, a little square perhaps but nevertheless identifiable. A moth. Its body and wings, the grain of wood across it following the outer curve of the wings on each side. I held it up towards the light, and its silhouette was unmistakable.
I remembered the last time I saw such a shape, hanging right there over the bed I'd slept in, the bedroom I'd grown up in a million lifetimes ago.
Backermann stood behind me.
His greeting had been almost avuncular. I think he was pleased to see me standing there on the front steps of my mother's house, standing there alone, standing there without the negro boy.
We had entered the house together, and as I walked through the rooms one after the other, dampness and emptiness hovering around us like ghosts, Backermann was there, a step behind me all the way. I walked upstairs, he came with me, and as I slowly opened the door to what had been my bedroom, still was my bedroom, he seemed finely tuned to everything that was happening, waiting for the emotion to come, waiting for whatever words of comfort he may have been able to afford.
But there was nothing. I really felt nothing. Until I saw that little wooden frame hanging back of my headboard: the candlemoth.
It all came back to me. Eve Chantry, her husband Jack, their daughter Jennifer.
A man staggering from the banks of Lake Marion bearing his only child, her hair hanging wet an
d limp, her body like a rag doll, the man's face a tortured mask of utter devastation.
I felt myself exhale.
I thought it would never stop, that I would empty out into that room, fold up like origami and be carried away by some errant breeze.
Dr. Backermann's hand closed over my shoulder. I could smell him. His cologne. The vague taint of pipe tobacco. Something beneath that. Perhaps red wine. Perhaps sherry.
He sort of pulled me closer. I didn't resist. He stood there, solid like a tree, and I just sort of leaned into him, appreciated the sense of stability and support.
