I’d saved Jackson’s life and now he had to do for me like I’d done for him. We hadn’t talked about it much. Maybe there wasn’t that much to say. What did Jesus say to Lazarus? Or to that little girl he raised from the dead? Jairus’ daughter? Not much. Take off his graveclothes. Give her something to eat. I don’t mean that Jackson was ever really dead, any more than Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter. But still, it was like Mawmaw Tucker praying someone back to life—her sister Hannah, who’d been bit by a big copperhead, and Jubilie Harris, who died of cancer right after my daddy was killed when Number 5 blew up. I didn’t know either of them very well, but everyone said they were different after they came back, said they were almost transparent. You could almost look through them. As if they hadn’t come all the way back. I felt that way about Jackson. As if he hadn’t come all the way back. Part of him was still in another world.
And of course there was more to it. Not only had I saved his life, I’d put my own life at risk, and he wanted to help in any way he could. And he did help. He gave me twenty thousand dollars to help pay for the lawyer, though it wasn’t necessary. And he sat up with me when I was too scared to go to sleep, and he did research on the necessity defense, and checked out the credentials of Peter Franklin, Stella’s local counsel. He searched the Web for stories about women who had killed their husbands. A woman in Tennessee, for example, had shot her husband in the back with a shotgun while he was sleeping, and she got only five months in jail and two months in a mental institution. A woman in California had stabbed her husband a hundred and ninety times and was acquitted because her lawyer established a long history of abuse.
He was always kind to me because he was a kind person. And he was kind to Cramer too, invited him to come out, got him interested in maybe using the woods as a field station for students to do research. And he was kind to Claire. He read the manuscript she was working on and encouraged her when she got discouraged.
At the end of September we drove down to Allensboro for a pretrial conference with Peter Franklin and his assistant, Julie. Peter was wearing a three-piece suit with his tie pulled down. He’d gone to law school with Stella at the University of Michigan and said his job was to open the mail and pass it on to Stella without reading it, but he handled a lot of complicated paperwork for us and went over the kinds of questions I’d be asked by the prosecutor, because I was determined to take the stand. Nobody wanted me to take the stand. Everybody said it was a mistake. But I wasn’t going through another trial without telling my story.
But what if it was a mistake?
And then all of a sudden it was fall. The temperature dropped. Fall melancholy hit. It’s more powerful up north than down in Egypt. The maples turned bright red and yellow. I brought a wheelbarrow full of logs from the woodpile to the deck and we built the first fire of the season, and then Jackson worked on transcribing Claude’s notes, which were stacked up on the library table. When he went to bed, I stayed up looking at the cartoons in old New Yorkers, and when I knew he was asleep, I closed the dampers on the wood stove and got in the truck and started out the driveway. The corn had been harvested and the fields along the drive were bare, nothing but stubble. My foot was unsteady on the clutch and the truck bucked all the way down the drive and kept bucking till I sped up on the highway. I couldn’t face forty-five years. I thought I’d turn right at the first crossroads and head for Oquawka, where the elephant was buried—get up to ninety miles per hour and drive through town right into the river. It was after midnight, there wouldn’t be anyone around. But I kept going straight. I opened the windows and cold air filled the cab. An orange rolled around on the floor on the passenger’s side. I kicked at it and almost went off the road. I went past Broadway and kept going till I came to the bar we’d gone to on the day I got out of prison. I stopped and had a Sam Adams and watched the twirling Schlitz globe. The bar was full of men, but no one offered to buy me a drink. I drank a second beer, paid up, and drove back to the cemetery. I wanted to have a chat with Warren. It had been a long time, and I hadn’t gotten the tombstone I’d promised him.
There were no lights in the cemetery, and the moon was hidden by clouds, but the lights from the prison parking lot provided some visibility once I’d shut my headlights off. I stepped up to the grave.
“Warren,” I said, “I’ve done it again. I shot Earl.”
Is that all?
“This time he’s dead.”
Then he won’t be botherin’ you no more.
“That’s what I keep telling myself, but what am I going to do now? I didn’t mind it on the Hill. I really didn’t. I was free from Earl. Then I got free from God. But I can’t go back. I can’t do it again.”
You should marry Jackson.
“I couldn’t do that to him. Not after what I’ve done.”
Warren didn’t say anything.
“Warren, what’s it like being dead? I think I’d rather be dead, lying right here next to you, than go back to prison. Forty-five years. How’d they get that number? Forty-five? Probably some committee. Couldn’t settle on forty or fifty.”
I could see the prison from the cemetery, could see the window in the warden’s office where I’d watched Warren’s funeral. All the windows were dark, but there were lots of lights in the parking lot.
“The warden was a good man,” I said. “There were lots of good people on the Hill. But I can’t go back, I can’t go back, I can’t go back. Besides, they’ll probably send me somewhere else anyway, Joliet, or back to Little Muddy. It’d be like having another MRI scan, like that time Earl hurt my shoulder. It was like being in a coffin. I got through it once. I thought it’d take about two minutes, but it was more like twenty. I had to hang on to keep from losing it, to keep from screaming. The banging was driving me crazy, like someone pounding on my coffin. I suppose being dead’s like that too.”
It’s not like that, Warren said.
“What is it like?”
It’s not like anything.
“Jesus, Warren. You know what some of the girls used to do on the Hill. They used to make dominoes out of old bread and play dominoes. One of the girls kept a rat as a pet. They used to drink the cleaning fluid to make them hallucinate.
“At the second pretrial conference the State’s Attorney offered second-degree murder. I’d be out in ten years. I said I was tempted. I thought my lawyer, Stella, would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ That was when I talked to her on the phone. But she just said, ‘It’s your call.’ Like she didn’t think I was going to get off. This is my goddamn lawyer from Chicago. It’s going to take all the money you left me and then some just to pay her bill. I had to sign a legal contract for twenty-five thousand dollars, and Claire said that was cheap.
“Maybe I should have taken it. Maybe it’s not too late. Do you think I should have taken it? Ten years instead of forty-five? Or do you think I should drive to Oquawka. Get going about ninety and drive right through town and into the river? What do you think? Off a cliff would be better.
“And what does the State’s Attorney have against me? He’s my age, for Christ’s sake. Why is he so keen to put me in prison?
“I know, I know. He’s just doing his job. But why so passionate? I didn’t shoot him.
“I’ve got a thousand questions I should have asked. The State’s Attorney wants to use Earl’s sworn testimony from the first trial. Isn’t that double jeopardy? Stella says he can’t do it unless I take the stand. But if I take the stand, then he can ask me about it. But if I don’t take the stand, I won’t get to tell my story. That’s what got everything fucked up the first time. I didn’t get to tell my story.
“You think I should take the plea bargain?”
No. Of course not.
I wasn’t sure if that was Warren’s voice or my own.
“What’ll I do in prison?”
You’ll have to go back to cooking with a stinger.
“Fuck you, Warren. That’s not funny.”
Sorry. A bad joke. I was
trying to bring some humor to the situation. But Jackson’ll stick by you.
“I know he will, like he’s knocked me up and is doing the right thing. I should have married him when he asked me. I should call him.”
I looked around for a pay phone, I wanted to call him, but there were no pay phones in the cemetery. None in the prison parking lot across the road.
“What do you want on your tombstone, Warren?”
I want something that tells the truth. I was thinking of a line from the Langston Hughes poem that Jackson read at the funeral.
“What’s the truth, Warren?”
But then I thought of something else: “It don’t matter now that in a million years nothing we do now is going to matter.”
I had to think about this for a while. “So it doesn’t matter what I do? Nothing matters?”
That’s not what I said. Think about it.
I thought about it on the way home till the truck started bucking again. I’d burned out the clutch. I couldn’t get it into fourth gear. I made it to the intersection by the grain elevator, then I couldn’t get it into third gear. I stopped at the end of the drive, before turning in, to wait for a truck to pass, and then I couldn’t get it into second gear, so I drove down the drive in first. I’d have to call someone in the morning and have it towed. Shit.
I didn’t think things could get any worse, but they did. I stayed in bed most of the time, didn’t keep track of what day it was. I was suffering, and the tapeworm was gnawing away inside me, and part of me wanted Jackson to suffer too, wanted everyone to suffer. But another part of me knew this was crazy and I was afraid of dragging him down into the hole with me. I couldn’t do it anyway because he held on to me, refused to be dragged down, and he was stronger than I was. It was easier to make Claire suffer. She’d sit on the edge of my bed and read parts of her novel, but I wouldn’t listen. Or she’d tell me about some of the student stories in her Beginning Fiction Writing class. She tried to get me to see a psychologist at the university, but I wouldn’t go. Couldn’t go.
Sometimes in the evening Jackson would build a fire in the wood stove, and sometimes I’d come down and lie on the sofa while he worked at his table.
Something he was transcribing would remind him of a story, something he’d done with Claude, or with his pygmy girlfriend, who was only thirty-three inches tall, and I wondered how they made love.
One time he was looking for antelope with Sibaku’s brother, and they went all the way to the center of the forest where the god Tore lived, a place that was guarded by a great snake. But he didn’t see the snake.
Listening to these stories, I felt safe in the big chair, a quilt pulled over me. But then it would get real quiet and you could hear the owls, and Jackson said that for the Mbuti the owl was the bird of death, just like it was back home, and that some of the hunters would throw burning logs in the direction of the owl to drive it away.
He kept coming back to the molimo. He wanted to wake up the Forest, and I think that’s why, in the middle of October, he dragged me to a performance of Carmina Burana—Latin popular songs—in Kresge Recital Hall. I didn’t want to go, but I went, and I found something I’d been looking for without even knowing it, something that put everything I was feeling into words for me, words and music. Especially the “In the Tavern” section. It was more than a little bit scary, this appetite for physical life. Eating and drinking and fucking. Not worrying about salvation, or about a homicide trial. I didn’t know a word of Latin, but I didn’t need the translations in the program to understand the songs: Estuans interius, ira vehementi … It was as if suddenly everything had a name, all the things that were gnawing away inside me. Like the singer, I was burning with violent anger; my heart was made of ashes; I was carried along like a ship without a helmsman; I looked for people as miserable as me; my heart was a heavy burden; but it was still fun to joke around, and fucking was sweeter than honey, better than salvation.
But there was love too, and beauty. A young girl stood in a red dress. If anyone touched it, it rustled. Eia. She stood like a little rose. Her face glowed. Her mouth was like a flower. The soprano sang it several times and every time it was more beautiful. I was that girl too.
But it was the big copper drums that woke up the Forest and broke my heart wide open. I’d never seen or heard anything like them before. Jackson called them kettle drums, because they looked like big kettles. Why so many? There were five of them. Were they all the same? Did you tune them? Why was the drummer, a distinguished silver-haired man, always bending over and tapping them? What were the knobs for? What wonderful sounds they made!
Jackson knew the kettle drum player, who had retired from the Detroit Symphony and come back to his hometown to teach part-time and play in the Colesville Symphony, and for my birthday, Tuesday, October 26, about three weeks before the trial, he gave me a kettle drum lesson, except they aren’t called kettle drums. They’re called “timpani.” And Professor De Vries, Paul, was not a kettle drum player but a “timpanist.” But this I learned later. Jackson blindfolded me and drove me into town. I knew every turn on the way into town, to campus. I could visualize: Farm King Road to Western Avenue; past Burger King, McDonald’s, Hy-Vee, the Hawthorne Garage, the Amoco station; then left on Broadway. West on Broadway to Cole Circle, past the Circle and into the campus; but I got turned around as Jackson searched for a parking place. Jackson walked me into a building, but I didn’t know which one. I was still blindfolded when Professor De Vries, the timpanist, who’d been waiting for us, played a drum roll that sounded like thunder. I tore the blindfold off and Professor De Vries, Paul—a man in his sixties, trim, distinguished, silver hair, glasses with dark frames and round lenses that looked too small for his face—gave me a lesson right then and there in the rehearsal hall in the Fine Arts Center. I wanted to start banging away, but Paul treated me as if I were a serious student, and I didn’t get to make a sound till he’d shown me how to stand, and how to hold the mallets. He recommended the French grip, with the thumb on top of the mallet. “Relax relax relax,” he kept saying. “Now: palms facing each other, thumbs up, mallet shafts parallel to each other about six to eight inches apart. Ready? Strokes straight up and down. Don’t slice the head. You want the mallet to rebound back to your starting position.”
I held my breath and brought the left mallet down on the beat spot, about a third of the way into the drum. The mallet jumped back at me with a life of its own. Then the right mallet. The same thing happened. The mallets had lives of their own. All you had to do was hang on and apply a little pressure now and then. It was like sex when it’s really good. The room was filled with a big sound that kept getting bigger and bigger. I don’t know how big it would have gotten if Paul hadn’t physically stopped me, standing behind me and putting his hands on my arms.
“How much does a timpani cost?” I asked.
“ ‘Timpanum,’ ” Jackson said.
Paul laughed. “ ‘Timpanum’ is grammatically correct, but no one says ‘timpanum.’ It’s always ‘timpani.’ And a good set will run you seven or eight thousand, minimum.”
“Oh,” I said. “You don’t need just one?”
He laughed again. “You could start with just one, but it wouldn’t be very satisfactory. You could play only five notes.”
ShoppingKart.com had closed its doors in June. I had lost twenty thousand dollars, and I’d had to pay Stella’s big retainer, and that was just for starters. Plus I had three more years of school to pay for. On the other hand, if I went to prison … But there was no orchestra on the Hill. No Carmina Burana.
Paul showed me a sheet of music. I didn’t know how to read music, but I could see that the lowest notes were played on the thirty-two-inch timpani, the middle notes on the twenty-six-inch, and the highest on the twenty-four-inch. You could play five different notes on each timpani by pressing on a pedal. I thought it might be a way to stay strong, a way to beat back the emotions that were battering me.
We had co
ntinued to monitor the snakes till they’d gone into hibernation after the cold snap at the end of September. They hadn’t run away, or crawled away, which is what Cramer had been afraid of, and everyone on the team was glad that they were safely snugged away in their new hibernaculum, which is a fancy word for “den.” I was still working for Cramer, entering the data we’d collected onto the computer. Frank had gone back to his fruit flies, and Laura had decided to stick with the mitochondrial DNA of rat snakes.
At home Jackson and I continued to work in the living room, in front of the wood stove. It was a big room, but it was crowded because the table took up a lot of space, and because I had rented a pair of fiberglass timpani at Thompson’s Music for a hundred dollars a month. Paul De Vries went with me to pick them out. He showed me how to check to make sure the bowls were round and the bearing edge flat. Copper bowls would have been better, but they cost twice as much. I rented a thirty-two-inch, for the bass, and a twenty-three-inch for the higher notes. That meant leaving out some notes in the middle, but I didn’t want to spend another fifty bucks a month for a third timpani. I would have given Mr. Thompson’s men a bottle of scotch, but there was no scotch in the house when they came, so I gave them a bottle of crème de cassis. I wanted to put the timpani out on the deck, but they looked at me as if I were crazy. A thirty-two-inch timpani won’t fit through a standard doorway unless you remove the leg assembly and turn it on its side. They’re very awkward. You need a professional instrument mover. Besides, you couldn’t possibly keep them outside.
Snakewoman of Little Egypt Page 26
