by Deeanne Gist
But York is already scheduled for execution. She doesn’t have time to bring him along. Besides, he told her he wants to die. So she ignored this critical permission-gathering step. She realizes now that was a tactical mistake. She tells herself she needs his cooperation to do her job, if nothing else.
“I’m sorry I went behind your back,” she says.
“What did my aunt say?” His voice is naked.
“She said she still loves you, despite what you did.”
His hands drop from the cage bars. The dark eyes soften. “Auntie Beth.”
“She told me about the rabbit.”
He just looks at her. Now he is on firmer ground. Killing things is his specialty.
“Who was Troy?” she asks.
The hawk eyes get bewildered, and he pushes off the bars, and with a flash, she sees it, buried deep in his soul.
A familiar, small, sad bell of recognition rings inside her. It is only here, with men in the Dugdemona cage, that she gets to hear the bittersweet sound of that bell, ringing from her past into the present. She knows now what she needs to do.
The next visit with Auntie Beth comes on a Saturday.
The lady likes to travel on Saturdays. The roads are mostly clear, and the world feels like a weekend. Probably because it is, she teases herself.
The drive is even better than before. She thinks she could drink the blue-forested beauty forever, and when she gets to the chain of lakes, she holds her breath. She stops at the same lookout to see the glittering, gorgeous waters, the tall trees around her. She hears the small sounds of a forest alive: birds, the rush of wind in the tall branches, the sound of water chapping at the shore.
Now she understands what people mean when they say they fell in love with a place. She isn’t sure it is love, but it is peace. She breathes deep and lets the blue air cleanse her soul. She stops at a little bakery along the way, then a decent grocery store.
Auntie Beth is overjoyed to see her. She sees the lady has brought another bag of groceries—You shouldn’t have!—and a small brown paper bag dotted with grease stains and emitting the most heavenly aroma of fresh donuts.
Auntie Beth ducks her head as she eats the donuts, wiping the crumbs from her mouth. The two talk about a lot of things. They talk about baking; the old woman used to make all her own bread. They talk about kids. Beth says she never had any of her own. She was a spinster. “Maybe my sister turned me off of all that,” she says. They talk about shame and life and the deep orange color of a good farm egg.
The lady tells Auntie Beth a little about herself. It is odd how comfortable she is, telling these people—the families of her clients—details about her life that she would never tell her colleagues. But she knows Aunt Beth will understand. And she knows that with the channel opened between them, Aunt Beth will share.
When Auntie Beth is ready, they talk about York’s mother.
“Shirley was the sweetest little sister,” Auntie Beth says. “I was older, you know, but not by much. Those were the days! The log trucks burned up the roads back then, and one tree could fill a truck. Nowadays you got all the spotted owls and the tree huggers. I grant you, they were right, because there ain’t no woods left around here anymore. Just scrub and poison oak like you see now. But back then, the town was full.”
She ruminates for a while, looking at the distant clouds from her porch. “It was the horse kick. They didn’t know what to do back then. No extra rays or nothing. Just put some dressing on it. Like the vee-dees she got later. The town doctor didn’t do nothing for that,” Auntie Beth spits with some venom. “By the time she had my nephew, every man in the town had her. Things happened I won’t name. It was like the whole town, all the menfolk, went crazy on that girl. And the women just watched and smirked and let it happen. Even my own family.”
The lady watches as a tear floats down Auntie Beth’s wrinkled face. “You know why?” the old lady asks.
The lady shakes her head.
“She was beautiful, that’s why. I got a picture.”
Auntie Beth lumbers to her swollen boat feet and makes her painful way into the main room, where she opens a rickety wooden drawer and takes out an ancient photograph. She offers the photo as if it is worth more than a bar of gold.
The lady accepts it with the same reverence. It is a black-and-white photograph of a beautiful young woman with pale skin, wide eyes, and silky dark brown hair. There is something disconcerting about the blankness in her eyes. It is strange and yet an invitation. Take me, her eyes say. I am as blank and deep as the emerald lakes outside your door.
Sitting on the woman’s lap is a little boy. It is York, the lady realizes, looking too young and innocent to ever be a killer. The only known photograph of him as a child has been hiding here in his aunt’s shack for twenty years. Before, he was a demon without a past. Now he was once a child.
The lady can see now what Beth meant—how York was as sweet as sugar before he hardened. He had a hopeful, tremulous smile. Perhaps the photographer was promising candy when they were done.
“Just a baby back then,” Auntie Beth says, and reaches for the photograph. “Funny teeth.”
The lady broaches the subject carefully. “Maybe sometime, if you are okay with it, I can borrow that and make a copy.”
“Why, sure, I trust you,” Auntie Beth says, and goes to get a used envelope to tuck the precious photograph inside. “Anyone who knows her donuts gets my love.” And they both laugh.
She leaves Auntie Beth’s home early enough to get back in the town of Sawmill Falls before the dinner hour. She feels a little sick from all the donuts and the coffee Auntie Beth made, which was thin but bitter enough to cut rope. Only after she drank it did the old woman tell her, with some mischief in her eyes, that she reused the coffee grinds for weeks to save money. “I steeps them in hot water,” she said.
The town of Sawmill Falls is dusty and dead. There is the solitary store, which she already knows has one mysterious aisle devoted to boxes of dream mix coated with dust, years past any expiration date—if such stuff expires. She wanders a bit with the roar of the creek in the background. There is only one street, so there is not far to wander.
After the economy collapsed following the mill closure, the townspeople apparently tried to find other ways to make money. The two-block main street has boarded-up signs for the Bead Store Emporium and Nature’s Gifts. She has come to recognize bead stores as indicators of economic doom. She peeks in the soaped window and sees empty shelves and the velvet antlers of a cheap necklace tree on the floor.
Farther down the street, she finds a single small brick building with boarded windows. A creaking sign outside has a board swinging. It advertises that the building was once the town law firm, post office, and doctor’s office.
It was a bigger town then. The lady imagines how the loggers would come in from the hills after working for weeks in the company longhouses in the woods, to spree on liquor, and the country folk coming in from afar looking for their mail, shy and uncertain in the big town. She could imagine the moms lining up at the post office to mail their holiday letters and the children hopping foot to foot, excited to see if the eagerly awaited Sears catalog had arrived, to be thumbed for months before Christmas. She could picture the young couples coming to town with their new babies, taking them to the doctor to be weighed and measured and inoculated.
And she could envision Shirley, traipsing the dusty street in a dirty dress, as fond as a flower, her vacant eyes turned happily to any face. The lady could imagine how the town women hated her. They saw her as different, thinking she chose to be the way she was. They didn’t see the damage behind the beautiful face.
The lady realizes she has stopped. She doesn’t know why she has stopped and turned around. She is staring at the creaking sign over the closed brick building. It takes her a time, listening to the raging creek off the main road. Sounds come from a distance to her in times like this, when life rages in a vacuum backward.
&
nbsp; The dust smell climbs in her nose, and the episode passes without her falling to her knees in a full-fledged déjà vu attack, which is always embarrassing.
It is the sign. For the town doctor: Dr. Hammond.
It is the thought that has been coalescing in the back of her mind for days. York’s mother was the town slut, she thinks, the brain-damaged girl who spread her knees for a nickel.
All those men and only one son?
The lady is close to the city when she realizes that hours have passed, and she didn’t even see the highways. Night fell long ago. She was in a reverie.
She was remembering sitting under the bushes in her backyard as a child. It was her secret place. The bushes were large, overgrown laurel hedges, and inside she had made a sort of cave. She took things into the cave sometimes—a piece of soft cloth to touch, a dirty plastic toy teakettle to pretend. Mostly, she just took herself.
What did she think about during those endless hours in the laurel hedge? As a child, she made an imaginary world so real that she could feel and taste it today. Sometimes she would imagine that she and her mom lived on a magical island where the trees dripped fruit. Other times they traveled all over the world, just the two of them, like the best of buddies. In all the stories, her mom was whole and she was safe. When she left the laurel hedge, she would bend the thick green leaves back, to hide where she had been. And when she came back the next day, crawling with a sandwich she had made of stale bread with the mold cut off and hardened peanut butter from the jar, the magic world would be waiting for her.
She wonders if York had a magic world, too. A magic world away from the pain and terror of his life. She wonders if he had a safe place he could take himself, a place to shelter the tender nugget of life within, or if he was naked and open all the way, to whatever walked through his mother’s door.
When I read a book now, I hold it under the light above my cot. The bulb is dim in its wire cage. But if I sit just right, I can catch a segment of gray light without the wire cage marks. My eyes are getting old. I have to squeeze them sometimes to see the words.
Long ago, in the library, I sat on the table under a cloud. The little dust motes would fly in the window and hang above me like a halo or God in the sunlight.
For a long time I thought maybe those little sparks were creatures. They could be creatures almost too tiny to see, just a little taste on the tip of your tongue. Maybe God sent them, like fire creatures, like the sparks before the beginning of life, or maybe the dust that rises from your hair after you’re dead. I would stop reading and crane my neck back to watch them swarm above me. The other inmates would jab each other and point, but I didn’t care.
Later I read that there are things inside us too tiny to see. Not even a microscope can capture them. This got me thinking—if there are things inside us too tiny to see, might there be things outside us too big to believe?
I was nine when I went into the hospital. The police showed up at the run-down hotel where my mom and I were staying. They took one step inside and saw. I remember one officer covering my naked body with his blue rain jacket before he took me to his car.
They took me to a foster home, but I kept running away—running to find my mom. Finally, the foster parents gave up. No one wanted a boy who didn’t talk, a boy who sat in the corner and growled, a boy caught trying to cut open his own belly with a razor.
STATE HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE said the script above the front door. Back then they had a children’s ward. The children’s ward was a tall concrete building painted a dismal pink, with rust stains running from the bars like long red tears. In the middle of the night, we would pull our mattresses out into the hallway so the lights from the windows at either end of the hall would illuminate what the guards otherwise would not see.
It was there they said I had selective mutism and a bunch of other words like antisocial and conduct and disorder. I didn’t agree with those words and I still don’t. People try to make names for things they don’t understand. They want to contain people in jars like dead babies.
I was in that place for almost ten years. I got used to it—used to the sound of soda cans clunking down the machine in the staff room late at night when the custodians came, used to the constant light in the white rooms, used to the restraints and the smell of piss when you couldn’t hold it anymore, used to the lost months of Haldol and strange dreams of Thorazine, used to the terror of night, used to the parade of therapists and counselors and doctors who came through with rancid breath that smelled of coffee and anxiety, and sweaty fingers grasping my file, promising they would stay when always they would leave, until they merged into one long watery face.
And then one day I was eighteen and they said, “Okay, time to leave.”
It turned out I had been a ward of the state. Once I turned eighteen, no one was paying for my keep. They gave me a folder with my papers and showed me to the front door. I stepped under that carved mantel and walked outside down a long lane lined with trees. It was windy and cold that day. A gardener pointed the way to the city.
The wind came down and stole the papers from my hands, and I opened my palms and let them go.
I stopped at the first home I saw, a little ranch with a clothesline in the back and a window with a fluttering white curtain.
It takes a week for the lady to locate the retired Dr. Hammond of Sawmill Falls. She feels the clock ticking and York smiling as time passes with no progress. Every day that passes with no results, he has told her with his notched smile, is like a dime in the bank for his death.
His execution date is circled in red on her calendar. She picked up the case in May; already it is closing in on June.
Dr. Hammond of Sawmill Falls has retired to a nameless bedroom community on the outskirts of the city where she lives. The homes all look alike, perched in orderly formations on the hillsides, their dying yards spackled with forgotten shrubs.
He is not happy to see her. Fortunately, she doesn’t care.
She had worried the doctor was dead, but no, he is older than Aunt Beth and tottering. He totters into the dark living room with an impatient air. He totters to his liquor cabinet. He totters to get a clean glass, which is really spotted. He totters around his house, which is like a dollhouse for saints. He has a nativity scene on the mantel. The objects people put out for viewing in their homes fascinate her.
She has come to believe that the homes of sad or hateful people smell different. When people have sadness or hate inside them, it comes out in a miasma. Dr. Hammond’s house smells like a form of slow poison has been hanging in the air for years. She has a sudden conviction that if she lifted all the furniture in his house, she would find layers of squished black bugs underneath.
Right away he says he knows nothing. He remembers nothing. He could guest-star on Hogan’s Heroes as the bumbling know-nothing Sergeant Schultz.
“I don’t know that woman,” he says again.
She wonders if getting affidavits from Auntie Beth about her damaged sister and her little son will be enough to convince the judges to spare York’s life, especially when they know he wants to die. No. For a case like this, she needs the brass ring—something so irreversibly altering that it cannot be denied for post-conviction relief.
“Nope, never heard of her,” he says, and lifts his drink with a shaky hand.
You liar, she thinks. She wants to kick him in his skinny shanks. She wants to tear the nativity scene off the polished mantel and throw it in his lame fake fireplace. Instead, she turns on her empathy high beam. You are a water bug on the surface of life, Dr. Hammond, she thinks, and I am the fish coming to feed.
“It must have been hard to be the town doctor,” she says in a soft voice.
“Come again?”
“So many people coming to you with so many problems.” She makes her eyes soft. “I bet a lot of them were, you know, woods folk. Not too bright. And you were a doctor.”
His eyes are uncertain. “I don’t remember the lady you
talked about.”
“Of course not. I think I was wrong about her, wrong name, sorry, no big deal. I obviously got the wrong person.” She is stepping back in her tracks oh so carefully. “I know what it’s like to be the only qualified person in a place. The only one who understands.”
She thinks, What a lie. You barely graduated from high school and slogged through community college having no idea of what you would become, just knowing you had to find it. You fell into this work because you know what it is like to live like Shirley, to live like York, to live like all the others and not like this man.
And yet in the moment, it is always true. It is true because her own childhood taught her how to pretend to be like the others just to survive, all the while protecting her pure, untouched core.
He has met her eyes with his blood-mapped own. “It was hard,” he agrees. “I had degrees, you know. I was a doctor.”
She smiles and relaxes into her chair. She is going on a journey to the past. She will go with him and see what is there.
It takes hours, but Dr. Hammond finally gives her the information she needs without even knowing it. He tells her that when he retired—you would think Rome had to be notified—he sent his few remaining patients to a doctor in a nearby town. And along with them went all of Dr. Hammond’s medical records.
The lady waits her turn at the old metal detector, which the guards joke is there to give her cancer. To judge by the creaking high-pitched hum of the ancient machine, she is not sure they are joking. The windows inside the prison lobby are glossed white with foulness, the fake leather seats ripped and slashed. The fat trusty is there to fix the ailing Coke machine. He gives her a distrustful look, glancing at the lanyard on her chest.
