A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  There was no word of Haynes Dearing, and he did not come to rescue me.

  The days drew forward, one after the other, and at night I was remanded to a cell beneath the courthouse, lightless and dank, its very walls impregnated with despair and degradation.

  Later I could recall little of the proceedings: the back-and-forth of questions, the awkward cross-examinations, the appearance on the witness stand of Aggie Boyle, her sister, of Joyce Spragg and Letitia Brock. Bridget’s parents came too. Her father spoke of his religious fervor, his commitment to the Lord, his vigilant adherence to the Ten Commandments, his hopes for his daughter, an only child; and behind me, three rows back and to the left, the hushed courtroom listened to the stifled sobbing of Bridget’s mother.

  The better part of six weeks dissolved without seam or juncture between one day and the next. During the weekend I was returned to Auburn and held alone in solitary confinement. A juror contracted influenza, and between April sixteenth and twenty-second, Judge Marvin Baxter initiated an adjournment. We returned on the twenty-third, and it was then that I began the first of four days of questioning on the stand.

  I believed my soul had been wrenched away to some other place. I believed in nothing but a pure will to survive, and beneath that the certainty of my own innocence. From the stand I could see Paul Hennessy, Ben Godfrey, other faces I knew from Brooklyn, and in the final week of the trial Reilly Hawkins appeared. It was then that I folded beneath the weight of what had happened. The past had come to find me in New York. A past I had lived to outlive, and yet now a past that would see me swallowed whole.

  I cried on that stand. I held my heart in my hands and showed it to Judge Marvin Baxter, to Albert Oswald from the District Attorney’s Office, but they did not believe me.

  On Tuesday, May twelfth, 1953, a jury of my peers—eight men and four women who knew nothing of truth but my name—returned from their deliberations.

  My heart, to that point nothing more than a small, dark stone in my chest, was a red fireball of tension.

  “The defendant will rise.”

  I gathered what was left of me together as best I could, and with the help of the orderlies I somehow gained my feet.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?”

  Blood thundered in the veins at my temples. A cold sense of inner emptiness was suddenly replaced with abject and hopeless terror.

  “Yes, Your Honor.” The foreman rose and stood silent.

  There were words, so many words I wanted to say. Those words clawed up from the base of my throat, but as I swallowed I lost them all. My eyes wide, my face drawn and bloodless, my shackled hands grasped the rail ahead of me as if it were a life raft.

  “Very good. On the charge of murder in the first degree, that the defendant, Joseph Calvin Vaughan, did willfully murder the person of Bridget Sarah McCormack on Thursday the twentieth of November, 1952, does the jury find the defendant guilty or not guilty?”

  Heart like a hammer, crashing against an anvil.

  The foreman, his face like a Halloween pumpkin, eyes incapable of looking at me even though he knew I was there, cleared his throat. The clerk of the court crossed the narrow walkway between the bench and the aisles, and took a folded slip of paper from the foreman.

  He returned, each step redolent of a funeral march.

  He did not look at me either. None of them could. I thought to turn back, to look over my shoulder at Hennessy, at Ben Godfrey, at Reilly Hawkins. My mind screamed for release, for forgiveness for whatever I had done to deserve such a thing, but the only sound was the thin crackle as the judge unfolded the paper and looked down at the verdict.

  “We, the jury, find the defendant, Joseph Calvin Vaughan . . . guilty.”

  I stopped breathing.

  I felt my knees collapse beneath me.

  I started to scream, to cry, to sob, holding onto the railing as the orderlies tried to pry me away. I remember shouting at the top of my voice. “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! It was him! The same one who killed the children. He killed Bridget! He killed Bridget!”

  “Clerk!” Judge Baxter shouted above the tumult of noise. “Clear the court at once!”

  I heard those words. Beyond that there was little else to hear but a rushing sound in my ears, a rushing sound that filled my body, my mind, my soul.

  And then there was a feather, a single white feather that drifted across my line of vision and disappeared in a ray of light from the window.

  I was going to die. That much I knew.

  I prayed that Death would come soon, cold and unfeeling . . .

  I saw myself as a child, standing there in the yard amidst the scrubbed earth and dry topsoil, amidst the carpetweed and chickweed phlox and wintergreen, but this time He would be visiting with me.

  Soon now, soon enough, walking down . . . Death would come to take me.

  In my dreams I can walk all the way to Georgia.

  In my dreams the walls hold me no better than mist or smoke, and I pass through them without effort, and the land rises, and the trees bank away toward the horizon, and around my face is the orange haze of boxwood leafminer flies, and my spirit is adamantine and unyielding, and my thoughts are peaceful, and belong to a time before my father, before the ten little girls, before Elena and Gunther Kruger, before Alex and Bridget and Auburn, Cayuga County.

  In my dreams I am a free man.

  The sky grows. The perspective of telegraph wires, birds like clusters of semibreves on staves, eyes winking, cawing their music, and bunches of withered grass and earth swollen with rain, and the sound of a dog in the distance pleading for home.

  Wood cabins and ramshackle outhouses, and rusted signs reading Mobil and Chevron and Red Parrot Diesel; stooped men with heavy loads, yellow dirt, the smell of sowbelly pork; clothes paraded along ropes to dry, snapping in the wind like the colors of some ghost legion; and the sound of horses, of feet pressing down on mud ridges as I walk; and the sweep of some lone silence that echoes the past, the haunt of fine rain against my face like varnish for skin, and I am nearly home . . .

  And then I wake.

  I remember Auburn.

  A slow-motion descent into darkness, the sounds and smells of humanity divested of all value and identity. The stench of sweat and earth, the rolling interminable machine of men, the shackled lines of bowed shoulders and hunched backs, the changle of hoes and picks against unforgiving earth and stones and rocks; the sleepless nights, the hacking rasps of phlegmy chests, the swells and aches of dislocated joints and torn muscles; the creaks of cots and hammocks, the rush of rain against corrugated roof and thin wooden walls; the squeal of rats, the scritch of bugs, the hypnotic chant of cicadas. Trapped in the belly of the beast, and the beast was black and ravenous and never satiated.

  The whispers and moans of men amidst nightmares where guilt was never assuaged; the weals and welts of rawhide whips against exposed flesh, against sun-scorched skin, against broken spirits; the unforgiving thunder of summer, the waterlogged floors, the stench of rot, the fetid reek of undergrowth swollen with stagnant water; the filthy clothes, the absence of nourishment, the darkness, the pain, the longing, the despair.

  The box: standing out in the middle of the yard, too short for a man to sit straight, not wide enough to lie on his side, knees against his chest. Twenty-four hours. Hunched down tight, forehead to kneecaps, the spine arched painfully, the roof against the back of the head. No water. No words. No release.

  Twenty-four hours and a man cried until salt lined his eyelids and stung like acid. Thirty-six hours and he heaved and retched and screamed through some awkward madness. Drag him out and he’d lie there for three or four hours before he could straighten his body. Escape attempts. Bad-mouthing. An orderly who took a dislike to someone, and he’d say “In the box,” and someone would disappear to return a different man.

  The Scales of Justice, they called it. A man had wooden slats bound to his legs so he could not bend. Buried to his thighs in the ground, earth
packed hard, unforgiving, no hope of movement. Arms extended out from the shoulders, in each hand a billy can half-filled with a pint of water. He stayed like that, with arms outstretched for two, three, four hours at a time. Spill the water and the time would start over.

  “An hour on the Scales,” someone would say, and he’d be out there digging his own hole before the trustees bound his legs. Legend had it a man had stood for seven hours all told. Slept forever after with his arms outstretched, didn’t speak for nine weeks, and when he did he said, “Billy can, billy can, billy can” over and over until that became his name. Billy Can from Cayuga County. Billy Can from Hell.

  Billick came one time, looking pleased with himself. “No death sentence,” he said. “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Vaughan. Your jury voted for life imprisonment. Count your blessings, eh?”

  “Life means life,” they told me, over and over again.

  “Life means life, boy,” they said, until it echoed in my ears, reverberated through my mind like the memory of the man I’d once been.

  Images of Bridget, of Alexandra, of Elena, of my mother.

  Images of some other pale existence that faded even as my thoughts touched them. I had to stop myself from thinking of them again or they would disappear forever.

  I remember Auburn.

  The first month folded like a blanket around me, cocooned within. The second month was like a straitjacket, arms tied tight around my waist, buckled at the back. Third and fourth like a shroud so heavy I could barely breathe. After that the months blended seamlessly one into another, claustrophobic, unforgiving.

  “Can’t break a man’s spirit,” Jack Randall told me. “There’s something inside a man you can never snap. You can break every single bone in his body and you’ll still find something in there fighting back.”

  So believed Jack Randall until he and his brother attempted to escape.

  Late November, 1959. There was a gentle breeze from the south that crept between the cots and seemed refreshing.

  Jack and William Randall, their faces blacked with dirt, crawled out through a hole in the floor and made it fifteen yards along the edge of the compound and they were seen.

  All hell broke loose. Dogs. Orderlies. Searchlights.

  They built them new boxes side by side. A week inside for each man.

  Whatever they might have possessed, whatever Jack Randall held inside of him, it was broken in half and stamped into nothing.

  William slit his wrists in January of 1960.

  Jack died of loneliness in the spring.

  I remember Auburn, and most of all the thought that followed me every moment of every day: that I knew who killed Bridget, and that I knew why. I had no name, no face, no awareness of his identity, but he was there—in my dreams and when I woke, pressing his dark soul against me as a reminder of my betrayal.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I AM HERE FOR LIFE. UNTIL MY BODY YIELDS UP ITS FULL AND FINAL breath.

  Four walls, a stone floor, an iron bunk, a changeless day folding into yet another of the same color and rhythm.

  Here for the rest of my natural life.

  Joseph Calvin Vaughan, the murderer.

  Through all those years I never heard from Thomas Billick again. I waited patiently through June, July, August, September. I followed the lines, the rules and regulations; I bided my time, but by Christmas I seemed to forget what I was waiting for.

  In the New Year of 1954 I did hear word of the outside world, and it was Hennessy who came, and he sat with his face in his hands in the narrow visitation room, and for a long while he could not look at me without choking back his tears.

  Ironic, but I spent much of our time together consoling him. I asked him of Brooklyn, of where he lived, of the work he was doing, of his new friends, his plans.

  “You must write, Joseph,” he told me. “Write down everything that happened and give it to me. I will make sure someone sees it. I will take it out there and make people understand the terrible thing that has happened to you. You must do this, Joseph. If not for yourself, then you must do it for me. I cannot stand knowing that nothing is being done to help you.”

  “Nothing can be done,” I told him. “What do you think will happen? According to everyone it was a fair and just trial. I could not defend myself. I could not prove where I was in those two hours that morning. They saw what they wanted to see, they believed what they were told to believe, and now I am here for the rest of my life.”

  “No,” Hennessy insisted. “I can’t leave it this way. It’s taken me six months to summon the courage to come and see you. I have spoken to the police. I wrote a letter to the governor of New York. I’ve done everything I can. No one wants to listen. No one cares what happens to you, Joseph. No one but me. I need you to write it down. I need you to give me something I can use to help you.”

  I told him once again that I could do nothing. I told him the same thing every month until the end of the year. Finally I gave in, and I began to write. Late at night I scribbled words on the coarse paper that was used to wrap produce in the kitchens, and each month Hennessy would come, each month he would smuggle out a handful of folded sheets and would laboriously type them.

  I began at the beginning. I started with the death of my father, and I detailed the events of my life.

  One thing I chose not to write. One event, one memory. One thing that will stay with me until the moment of my death, and then when He comes perhaps I will tell Him, and He can exact His judgment.

  Three or four pages a month, year after year, Hennessy pleading with me to write faster, to detail only those things that pertained to Bridget’s death. But I could not. I had decided to tell the world who I was, and from this they could choose what they wished to believe.

  I remember the words of my mother, a day in Augusta Falls a thousand years before.

  “Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t ever stop writing. This is the way the world will find out who you are.”

  Three days after the killing of John F. Kennedy, a cold November in 1963, I wrote my final words. The Randalls were dead. I believed I was also.

  I was spent, empty, exhausted.

  I believed my fate would pass into hands other than my own.

  I had been in Auburn for ten and a half years. I was thirty-six years old, only a year younger than my father when the rheumatic fever stopped his heart.

  Perhaps I was nothing more than an echo of him, and that echo would fade quietly into silence, and through the silence I would walk to meet the end of myself.

  It would seem fitting.

  Encapsulated within those pages was a life. Perhaps the worth of such a life was measured by the weight of paper, the quantity of ink, the depth of imprint on each individual page.

  Perhaps it was represented by the significance of those words, the emotions they evoked and engendered.

  Perhaps there was no worth at all save what I myself believed— and I believed there would have been no other way to convey the loss and despair.

  My life began, it continued, and now it seemed resolved to close.

  If those words were all that remained, then so be it.

  Perhaps some of us will have learned enough to make a difference, to influence things for the better, to wait until the moment is right, and then act.

  And despite appearances, despite all indications to the contrary, despite reticence for fear of what others might think, I still felt we all possessed this quiet belief.

  A quiet belief in angels.

  Later, much later, Paul Hennessy told me of the events that followed.

  He worked furiously, and filled page after page, neglecting his friends, watching his own life dissolve around him, and then in January of 1965 he traveled out to Manhattan to see Arthur Morrison.

  Morrison, it seemed, received the book he had always asked of me, a book of spirit and passion.

  Hennessy chose the title, and in June of the same year A Quiet Belief in Angels was published.

/>   He came to see me in May of ’66. The world beyond the walls of Auburn State was a different world. Men strove to touch the moon; a war raged in some South East Asian jungle country called Vietnam; civil rights marches led by a man called King, resulted in that same man being jailed for speaking the truth; Kennedy was dead, a nation still mourned.

  Hennessy sat facing me in the narrow confines of a visitation booth. Through the wire mesh he seemed distant, almost unreachable, but the words he spoke came through clear and succinct.

  “An appeal has been lodged with the United States Supreme Court,” he said. As he spoke, he suppressed his tears, but I did not know if they were of anticipated vindication, or tears for the seeming hopelessness of his task. “Your book has sold and sold and sold,” he went on. His face was blurred. Everything was made from shadows and highlights, insubstantial, almost without definition. “They can’t print copies fast enough, Joseph. Morrison had to close his presses down and send the platens to a company in Rochester. People are up in arms. They are asking whether this book is fiction. They can’t believe that such a travesty of justice could occur in America. Something will happen, Joseph, something will definitely happen.”

  “I am disappearing,” I said. “I don’t know what day it is . . . I cannot remember how long I have been here.” I felt my face crease with an awkward smile—the tension in the muscles told me this was an unfamiliar expression.

  “You can’t give up hope,” Hennessy whispered. His voice was urgent, insistent, and as I watched his face I remembered Cecily Bryan, the nights we spent at the St. Joseph’s Writers’ Forum, nights walking through Manhattan singing “Days of ’49” and drinking Calvert.

  “I have done a terrible thing,” I said, and I closed my eyes weakly.

  “You have done nothing,” he replied. “That’s the whole point, Joseph. All the work we have done to get the truth out there, and we have succeeded against all odds. People know, Joseph, they know what happened. They can see how this thing was a terrible, terrible mistake—”