In the Sanctuary of Outcasts

by Neil White

  “I don’t have the same disease that was in the Bible,” Smeltzer yelled. “Don’t ever call me that or I’ll report you to the guards.”

  I suddenly realized we should be reporting Smeltzer. He wasn’t supposed to be on the inmate side in the first place.

  Link asked him again, “So what the fuck you want us to call you?”

  Smeltzer hesitated. Even the patients couldn’t agree among themselves on an appropriate label. Some used “Hansen’s disease patient,” a mouthful. Others simply wanted to be called “residents.” “I don’t know,” he said after a while, “maybe Hansenite.”

  Sounded like luggage to me.

  Link leaned out of the window and dropped the quarters. Smeltzer tossed the Ziploc bags to Link, who struggled back into the room, food in hand. Link put a paper towel on my bed and spread out the chicken wings.

  Doc yelled out to Smeltzer, “Next time, bring some lemons!”

  CHAPTER 31

  As the leaves started to turn on the trees, Linda and the kids traveled to Oxford to stay with her family. I missed our family visit, but I was happy she and the kids could be away from the prison visiting room for a while.

  Doc thought my eagerness to help the leprosy patients was ludicrous, but I was growing closer to them. They were becoming a family away from home. Especially Ella.

  I walked the track and imagined what I would do if I were in charge of altering public opinion, if I were editor of The Star. The patients needed some good, old-fashioned public relations work. “Hansen’s disease” was never going to catch on. And the problem with the label “leprosy” was that people were blinded by their own preconceived notions before they had a chance to learn anything factual.

  In contrast, Lou Gehrig’s disease was named for a great ballplayer, a guy whom everyone admired. Maybe that was what leprosy needed. A more positive twist.

  As I walked in circles around the track, I started to brainstorm. Something like Crusaders’ disease or Lazarus syndrome sounded noble enough, but it might also bring up frightful images such as scenes from Ben-Hur. Damien’s disorder would have been a perfect name before The Omen movies came out, but now people would think about the Antichrist and that could adversely add to the stigma. Then I contemplated the possibility of names that acknowledged leprosy’s ancient roots, and its place as the oldest malady known to man. The Holy disease looked fine on paper but phonetically could be misconstrued. Assisi complex was not a bad possibility unless you had a lisp.

  Clearly, none of these was the answer, but solutions never came early in the creative process. I would continue to experiment with possibilities while I gathered stories for my exposé.

  One afternoon while Steve Read and I walked to Father Reynolds’s study, I ran into Janet Cedars, a woman with a remarkable story. In the 1950s, after she had just been elected head cheerleader at her high school in Texas, she was diagnosed with leprosy and sent to Carville. While here, she fell in love, married, and had children. But her children couldn’t stay with her. They were placed with a family member in Texas. A staff member told me that for the child’s christening, the foster parents brought the baby back to Carville so Janet could see the ceremony. But Janet wasn’t allowed to touch the child. Janet was one of the last to suffer from this kind of treatment. In 1962, free of the disease, she was reunited with her family. She completed college and lived a normal life outside of Carville. Then, in an extraordinary move, Janet was hired as a teacher, and later as the director of public affairs at Carville. She was held up as an example of how much things had changed. The Public Health Service made an effort to publicly promote Janet’s transition from patient to employee. The inmates had all heard her story, and her name appeared in the newspapers pretty regularly.

  No one would ever have guessed she had suffered from the disease. Her face was flawless, as beautiful now as it had been when she was a cheerleader, though a bit more round. I noticed a file folder clutched in her arms. It was labeled Centennial Celebration.

  “Mrs. Cedars,” I said, as I approached her.

  “Yes,” she said, a bit surprised I knew her name. “May I help you?”

  “I’ve been thinking about some of the public relations issues you face. I have some ideas I’d love to talk with you about.”

  She looked at me, standing in my prison uniform, not able to hold on to my own freedom. “I did this sort of thing on the outside. Are you familiar with Louisiana Life magazine?” I explained that my concepts for rebranding leprosy weren’t fully formulated, but I was sure they were headed in the right direction.

  She stared at me while I held forth on how best to alter public opinion. Then she nodded and repositioned her file folder.

  As she walked away, I called out, “I look forward to the centennial celebration. And let me know if I can help.”

  Janet glanced back over her shoulder and scurried away.

  “You moron!” Steve said. “I bet she’ll run right out and call a press conference. Oh, yes, he’s a very insightful federal convict,” Steve said, channeling Janet, as if she were pitching my services to a group. “His company? Oh, I think it’s called ‘PR with Conviction.’ He doesn’t have a telephone, but he does have an inmate number. I think we should just turn the entire program over to him.” Then Steve went back to his own sarcastic voice. “Oh! I’ve got your slogan: ‘Captive audiences are our specialty!’”

  An inmate offering professional services might seem a bit odd, but Janet had been imprisoned, too. I thought she would understand. And I thought I had something to offer.

  CHAPTER 32

  Smeltzer’s efforts to profit from the inmates reached a fever pitch in October. His newest scheme involved an inmate muffuletta feast. Muffulettas—enormous, wheel-sized Italian sandwiches stuffed with meats, cheeses, and sauces and topped with an olive salad—were a New Orleans specialty. And the best place to get muffulettas in New Orleans was Central Grocery, an old-time store located in the French Quarter.

  Smeltzer had collected $4 from forty different inmates. He promised the prisoners a bounty like no captive men had ever seen. On the afternoon of the clandestine event, Smeltzer’s cousin, a New Orleans native, purchased ten muffulettas from Central Grocery. The sandwiches were cut into quarters and then wrapped in heavy-duty aluminum foil. Smeltzer’s cousin packed the muffulettas in a blanket and then stuffed them inside a black garbage bag. He drove from New Orleans to the edge of the colony where he dropped the bag at the hole in the fence. Smeltzer was waiting. He carried the bag of sandwiches to the rubbish collection station, where Dog Man, the inmate fond of howling, waited in his motorized garbage cart. Smeltzer placed the plastic bag in the back of the cart along with the other trash. Dog Man drove the cart, like he did every afternoon, toward the incinerator. But on this day, he stopped at a window at St. Amant, the inmate dorm closest to the leprosy side. Dog Man signaled the inmates inside with a series of predetermined yelps and barks. A window was opened. Dog Man pushed the bag through, and forty inmates feasted on still-warm muffulettas.

  I didn’t join in the bounty, but I loaned Link $4 so he could buy in. Frankly, I was afraid to be a part of the operation. If inmates could successfully smuggle a garbage bag full of food, albeit with the help of leprosy patients, I wondered what else could have made it through the gates. Drugs, tattoo guns, knives.

  Every inmate involved had pledged not to speak of the operation, but I knew all too well that inmates had a hard time keeping secrets, especially Link. I also knew if the guards found out, everyone involved would get additional time tacked onto their sentence. No amount of food or fun was worth keeping me from getting home as soon as possible.

  “Goddamn,” Link said, the morning after the feast. “That motherfucker made $160 off them muffulettas. What a leper gonna do with all that money.”

  “Seems reasonable,” I said, reminding Link that the muffulettas were delivered hot from New Orleans. “We just have a skewed perception of money right now.”

  “Scre
wed what!?”

  I tried explaining that the $20 limit—two rolls of quarters—imposed on inmates made things appear more valuable, but Link lost interest in my explanation.

  I had to admit, my perception of money had shifted, too. Now, I found it hard to believe that two years earlier, in the summer of 1991, I had finalized the $1.2 million purchase of Louisiana Life (the first step in my five-year plan) and moved my corporate offices into a $4,000-per-month penthouse suite in the old Markham Hotel building. My office was once a grand ballroom where Gulfport society danced on marble and men leaned against mahogany walls smoking cigars. It was the very place my grandmother and grandfather met at a spring ball in 1938.

  At that time, she was among the wealthiest single women in the United States. Her grandfather, an early industrialist who had financial interests in anything made of iron or steel, was one of the men who financed young Henry Ford’s automotive venture. Later, he built a company to supply parts to the burgeoning auto industry. It became the Borg-Warner Corporation.

  My grandmother’s father died in the 1918 flu pandemic when she was a baby. She had no memory of him. The only reminder was the fortune she inherited.

  In 1938, my grandmother, Martha Johnson, was a short, muscular, athletic nineteen-year-old college girl and she was painfully shy. Despite all she could buy, beauty was unattainable for her. But she was generous and kind.

  On a Friday evening that May, on a break from Vassar, she went to the spring dance at the top of the glamorous Markham Hotel building. She sat alone in a chair next to the mahogany walls until a handsome young man, on a dare from a friend, asked her to dance. They spent the evening together dancing on the marble floor and drinking from the boy’s silver flask. Martha was enamored with his charm and wit. In the early morning hours, in a fog of alcohol and euphoria, Martha and the boy drove across the state line and married.

  The next morning, this young man—my grandfather—not yet nineteen, awoke hungover, next to Martha. And suddenly, nothing was out of reach.

  They threw lavish parties and bought a mansion with a huge swimming pool. They spent their summers at a home on Walloon Lake, Michigan, and never missed a party at the country club. Their live-in servants, Wash and Esther, traveled wherever they ventured to care for their growing family.

  To an outsider, my grandparents’ life must have been something to envy. Money was not an issue, and my grandfather did not need to work. Instead, he went on a thirty-year odyssey in search of adventure. It started with excessive parties, reckless investments, and extravagant purchases, like his fifty-foot yacht, The Weekender. As the years passed, adventure became more elusive. He turned to alcohol, gambling, and women.

  The family money had survived the Depression, but the wealth couldn’t bear the strain of my grandfather. When the money ran out in the 1960s, he divorced Martha and married a woman almost twenty years younger.

  Martha’s life unraveled. She spent her remaining funds on a reconditioned riverboat that drove her to the verge of bankruptcy. She was committed to the state mental hospital in Whitfield. During her holiday stay with us, she told me how much she liked the people at the institution.

  “They’re nice to me,” she said.

  In the last decade of my grandmother’s life, she waited in line at free medical clinics; she received a small welfare check; she worked part-time at Goodwill Industries as a clerk; and she rented a government-subsidized apartment that smelled like cats. Old photo albums lined her cheap bookcase. Reminders of a privileged time.

  Fifty-three years after the spring dance of 1938, I worked each day in an office not more than a few feet away from where my grandfather first saw my grandmother. I liked the symmetry. As I planned my rise in the world of publishing, I vowed to bring our family back to its rightful spot. And I was determined to do it fast.

  CHAPTER 33

  Because the leprosy patients liked my menu board illustrations, the guards gave me another job: garnish man. They also gave me a Better Homes and Gardens garnish book that illustrated the most up-to-date garnishes being used by the finest caterers in America. I took the book back to my room and read it at night in preparation for my new duties.

  My first day on the job, I ran into a problem. I had spent hours studying the garnish book , and I felt ready to prepare a centerpiece like Carville had never seen. But I was missing the most important tool. A knife. Inmates weren’t allowed to have knives. I tried carving into some fruit with a plastic knife from the cafeteria, but it was useless.

  I asked the guard on duty how I was supposed to prepare garnish without cutlery.

  “You can check out a knife,” he said. He led me to a closet locked with a dead bolt. Inside, there was a small cage welded to the wall. The cage was secured with a padlock. Inside, two large magnetic strips held a dozen sharp knives with black plastic handles. Each knife was marked with a number, a slapdash, hand-drawn digit that looked like it had been written with Liquid Paper.

  “I could rewrite those numbers, if you like,” I told the guard. “I could make them neater.” He ignored my offer, opened the cage, and handed me knife number 6, a small paring knife. He wrote my name and inmate number on a clipboard, said the knife was my responsibility, and added that if it turned up missing, I’d be put in the hole for thirty days. I made a mental note not to leave the knife lying around the kitchen.

  My garnish station was just outside the produce cooler on the leprosy patient side. Two large stainless steel tables were dedicated for garnish. I was the only inmate allowed to enter, though I could hear the conversations of Chase and Lonnie, the two inmates in charge of the food warehouse. They had been at Carville since the day the prison opened. If the federal prisons had had a trusty system in place, Chase and Lonnie would have held the distinction of being trusties. The two of them ordered the food for the cafeteria. They drove trucks. They held shrimp boils on holidays. They had the run of the place. As I carved into the fruit and built the foundations for my first set of garnishes, I listened to Chase and Lonnie discuss flaws in the plotline of Gilligan’s Island, explore the dangers of spitting on a guard’s food, and engage in a debate about whether a horse will fall in love with a human who urinates on its feed.

  The garnish business was messy. I had always hated to get my hands dirty. As a husband charged with changing a flat tire or hollowing a pumpkin or potting a plant, I would get agitated. I performed the tasks hurriedly, with trepidation, tight-lipped, nostrils flared. I worked fast so I could get to soap and water quickly. But it was more than the dirt that bothered me. I liked the way my hands smelled after I had applied cologne. Each morning, I dabbed the backs of my hands so they would smell nice whenever my hands passed anywhere near my nose, or that of another. Washing my hands to rid them of dirt also rid them of the scent I so loved.

  I wasn’t able to cut into the fruit without getting my hands covered in sugary, sticky juice. If I stopped to wash after every cut, I would never finish. So I decided to be outrageous. I lost myself in the carving of cantaloupes, strawberries, peaches, and watermelon. I felt like a child again, making mud pies or building a sandcastle. The garnish book’s step-by-step instructions were brilliant. And simple. On my first attempt, I made a rather elegant swan from a honeydew melon. Its long, curved neck looked as if it could reach around to clean the tall feathers that stretched upward from its wings. As a companion for the swan, I carved a duck from lemons. The duck’s webbed feet were made from intricately notched carrot slices. Then I made a series of islands. For sand, I halved a baking potato. I made shallow cuts into a carrot stick, transforming it into the trunk of a palm tree. I added long, curved slivers of green peppers to make perfect palm branches. Then, from an oddly shaped watermelon, I pieced together the head of an alligator with an open mouth and sharp teeth. I thought it would make a great centerpiece to adorn the salad bar.

  I was starting to like the garnish business. I understood why the guards would prepare a garnish for the leprosy patient cafeteria, but it
seemed odd they would bother to decorate a salad bar for prisoners. Then again, it seemed pretty odd that prisoners had a salad bar.

  As I became more familiar with the traits of certain fruits and vegetables, I experimented with combinations of color and texture. Purple-headed lettuce, cut with a certain precision, opened like an exotic flower. When accented with maraschino cherries, it took on the traits of a rare, insect-eating blossom. Soon, using cantaloupes and oddly shaped gourds, I learned to sculpt the likenesses of certain inmates, and even guards, complete with bad hair, bulging eyes, and badges.

  Ella and the other patients said the cafeteria line looked like a formal buffet. It gave them something new to look forward to each day. My creations got lots of compliments on the patient side. Harry stopped to take a look and stuck his thumb, his only fully intact digit, in the air to show his approval.

  As I carried the last of the trays out of the kitchen, an inmate stopped to admire my work.

  “That’s gorgeous,” he said in a Cajun accent. “Did you do that on the outside?”

  “Yes,” I told him, “I’m in here for garnishing with reckless abandon.” In a way, it was true. I was good at the job. Polish, shine, attention to detail, and the appearance of perfection were my forte. It came quite naturally. I’d had plenty of practice on the outside.

  My financial statement for Coast Magazine was a thing of beauty. I used advanced publishing software to design it. I selected an old-fashioned font—Baskerville—and adjusted the tracking so the numbers aligned in a way no accounting software could match. My software didn’t actually add numbers, but it enabled me to produce a specimen the likes of which the banks had never seen. I printed the financials on custom-made, cotton-fiber stationery for the bankers and investors who requested the statement. It looked and smelled and felt like affluence, almost too good to be true.