by Deeanne Gist
Even as she crests the hills from blackness into brightness, she knows a door in her heart has been opened. She wonders if she can will it closed again.
Back in her apartment, the lady sits at her desk, staring at a thick folder—memos, expert reports, old child welfare records, interviews she has done with others who lived in Sawmill Falls. There is even an interview with the psychiatrist who treated York’s mom before she died in the mental hospital. There are birth certificates, death certificates, reports signed and notarized. Everything she needs for a new trial.
At the top is a lab test report where she has circled a finding in red ink. Twice.
She is done. She can feel it.
Her feelings can’t tell her whether she will win. Sometimes she doesn’t. Three times she has failed. And in those cases, she had found just as much or more evidence than she has for York. The decision is left to the judges. And a judge, she always reminds herself, is just a lawyer in a black robe.
Each time she failed, her client was executed. She waited each time to feel grief, but it never came. She felt sadness, and that was all. She knows too well how much pain these men caused others to feel true grief herself at their passing. The sadness she feels is more about a failed life.
She realizes she has kept the attorneys in the dark on this case. They do not know about Auntie Beth or Dr. Hammond or Troy Harney or the rabbit or the abuse, and they especially do not know that she ordered a blood test. They hired and paid her to tell them something, and all they have heard is nothing. For all they know, the last attorneys were right: There is nothing that can save York.
It wouldn’t be hard to say she found nothing. There are some in her work who make a living doing as little as possible: investigators who work for attorneys like Grim and Reaper. There is no way of knowing the unknown—if she doesn’t do her job, no one will know the difference.
She tells herself, You will do what you always do; you will take this folder to the attorneys. You will let them set the court date. You will let them argue your work in court as if they invented it themselves. You will sit in the shadows, unknown and unnamed in the papers, and when the news says your man walked off the row, you will nod and move on to the next case.
The calendar on the wall says July 22. She has time, if she acts soon.
Instead, she sits there. Her dark head bends forward, absorbed. She can see York, a little boy, running to his mom, seraphim limbs and a dark joyous smile. She can see his mother, daft but reaching for him. What would his mother think? she asks herself. And what of York? Born of one mistake, erased by others.
She thinks of her own mother. How often she heard that people like her mother should be sterilized. That it is better for people like her—and York—not to have been born than to be born and suffer.
She has a distinct memory of her mother sitting on their torn, buckled couch, trying to find a number in the phone book. “I keep trying,” her mother would say, thumbing through the pages while chewing her lip. “Even if it takes a long time.”
The lady feels a sharp pain. It is there, in her narrow chest. In the place we call a heart, in the place York wants to stop beating.
Lately, the warden has been coming to the row with his face pouched and the lower rims of his eyes red. He has the sourness of exhaustion on him, the glimmer of grief as he prepares for it to arrive.
He cleans up after his wife before he comes to work—the vomiting from the medicine, the hairs in the toilet bowl. He has fallen quiet with his wife, knowing that the quiet comforts her. He no longer brings up his day or asks about hers. She lies in their marriage bed, tubes at her side, and he can’t help thinking how tubes end so many lives.
He still comes to work. He knows he could take time off, and there are men—Conroy in particular—who would eagerly take over. He also knows that his wife wouldn’t like that. She wants to be alone in her pain. She is preparing to leave.
He hired hospice workers to come while he is at work. They change her bedding, wipe her face, empty and wash her bedpans. They are quiet with her, too. Margaret, the hospice workers call her, though he always called her his Madge, or Maggie. When they were young, she used to love being called Maggie—it sounded gay and Irish to her, as though she were a laughing lass. And she was, a bit. Now she is silent and waiting in a death row of her own making.
He wonders why so many easily accept death when it’s caused by old age or cancer or even suicide, yet refuse to endorse death by execution. It seems wrong to him. No one deserves death more than someone like York or Striker or especially Arden. And yet those are the deaths that others will say are unnatural, not that of his dear sweet wife, a woman who raised three kids and never did anyone a wrong pass.
He knows when she passes, a grief will rip through him unlike anything he has ever known. Preparing for it doesn’t help. He just knows it will come. It is like realizing you are sailing a boat across an ocean and soon you will find the other shore—it will be just you and acres of dry, blinding white sand. There may be trees on that island, and sun, and food, but none of it will feel or taste right, because you will stand there and realize: I am alone.
The lady comes down the stone stairs and hears the priest. He is in the cell of the inmate called Jeffries.
The priest is so absorbed in what he is doing he doesn’t hear her approach. She stands outside the bars, watching. The priest is sitting beside Jeffries on the cot as if they are in an apartment and not a filthy, flea-ridden cell where the bed bugs crunch under each mattress.
The priest is reading a letter to Jeffries—a letter from his mother. Like most of the men on the row, she figures, Jeffries is illiterate. The priest reads the words slowly, letting Jeffries savor them, letting him nod as he goes.
Jeffries sits quietly next to the priest, his hands unchained. The guards don’t care if the priest gets attacked; that is not their concern. Jeffries’s eyes are large in his emaciated face. He looks like the photos you see of African children in starvation, wasted away to nothing in years of waiting.
The lady sees how confident the priest is in this moment—how relaxed he is, just reading a letter to a needful man. His shoulders are square, his face smiling. He stops to smile at Jeffries, and in looking at him, he sees her.
Their eyes connect, and she lets her breath go and smiles back.
The priest doesn’t know the lady thinks about him all the time now. She thinks of him when she awakens, alone in her bed, the sun coming through the curtains. She thinks of him when she sees York in the cage. She thinks of him when she drives into the blue country and sees the cabins at the side of the road. She wouldn’t want him to know she has looked up his address and even driven by his place, smoked with loneliness and yet warmth, one light burning in the window. She wonders what it would be like to knock on his door. To be welcomed inside, have her coat taken, feel his hands on her shoulders.
The lady doesn’t know that the priest thinks of her, too. He dreams of one touch that turns into a thousand. He expects he will be afraid, and he is, but something bigger is being born inside him. He has been looking for a calling all his life, he thinks, when maybe the calling was simpler than he ever thought.
Chapter 7
My food comes three times a day, pushed through the slot of my door. It comes on a tarnished metal tray that is scratched and dull with graffiti. The prison tried plastic trays for a time until they realized the inmates were breaking them apart to make shanks out of the shards. The metal is safer.
I look forward to the trays more than the food. The food has grown more and more awful over time. When I first came here, at least it was real food. Even if the meat was full of gristle and the bread stale, it was recognizable as food. Now it is hard to say what it is. Breakfast is usually a wet dish of powdered eggs sitting in a puddle of stale water that tastes like powdered soap. Lunch might be a pile of chopped old melons, slippery with rot, with a paper cup of watered-down Tang. Dinner is usually a slab of mystery meat, pink-gray and
strangely soft. They used to call this meat loaf until an inmate sued and actually won: The jury tasted the strange conglomeration of ingredients and refused to call it meat.
Dinner often comes with a pile of gray-green stuff cooked to mush. It is hard to figure out what it is. The prison takes recalls and throwaways that even soup kitchens won’t accept. When a store has a Dumpster of rotten squash or past-due meat or vegetable trimmings gone yellow with age, they go down the list of charities to call, from homeless shelters to African food agencies to church soup kitchens. It is only when none of these charities wants the food that they call the prisons. They unload the garbage for pennies a pound. There is even a huge black market of selling recalled food to prisons. Black-market criminals buy truckloads of recalled meat or peanut butter or other tainted foods, scrape them into new containers, and sell the stuff dirt-cheap to prisons. For months at a time, food poisoning sweeps our prison, and the oven is busy.
I get so hungry, I eat anyhow.
I get through it by watching the scratched tray appear under the disappearing food. Then I see the secret codes the inmates write to each other, like cave paintings. If the prison intelligence officers wanted to know about inmate communication, they would stop having the little men with hammers plant bugs in our cells, and read the trays instead.
An arrow pointing north. This means the Norteños.
Days later, another message comes underneath: a triangle, the signifier for a command table, and then a question mark.
Another question mark follows, and the answer comes again. This time there is a sound around the prison, like the bracing of steel inside the walls.
A crude drawing of a duck with a circle around it.
This means downing a duck. A duck is a guard.
A sharp intake of breath so hard that the dust rises from our walls.
Is there a taker?
The Aryans respond first with a circle and a slash. They are out. Too hot.
A few meals later, comes an answer. The Norteños will take care of it. They owe someone a favor.
It is a business that will require silence from everyone inside these walls, a business so important that the walls cannot talk.
A guard needs to die.
The female guard who knits booties for her friend’s baby walks the yard to the oven. It will be a night like any other—she is thinking she will be glad when her probation is over and she can take a regular shift away from the oven. Despite the black humor and horror of working the oven, she likes this place. She likes moving among men who do not see her as a woman despite being deprived of women for so long. She likes being respected.
She thinks about an odd conversation she had recently with the intelligence officer Conroy. She’d heard information that the leader of the Norteños was dealing drugs through a corrupt guard in the visiting room. Following procedure, she promptly reported it to Conroy. “I took the precaution of putting the inmate into administrative segregation,” she had said, her back rigid as she reported. She was proud of her deportment. She sounded almost like a cop instead of what she was, a single mom whose last job was at a Ross Dress for Less.
Conroy had seemed surprised—surprised and then pleased. He lavishly complimented her diligence. He asked her if she had made a report and seemed impressed that she had. “Is this the only copy?” he asked, taking it, and without thinking, she had said yes. And then as she was leaving, she turned to see his measured blue eyes on her, his hand on the phone.
The entire conversation felt wrong, she thinks. She wonders what has happened with the investigation. She will ask the warden about it.
A man darts from the shadows of Cellblock H. He is carrying a shank made out of a sharpened piece of metal bracket broken off a metal table. The handle is wrapped in torn sheets. He falls on the female guard and stabs her, not once but many times. He stabs her in the throat and the side of the belly and the back and wherever else his hands can reach. She makes little noise besides a sad grunting. The blood leaves her body and pours onto the ground. When she is good and dead, the man gets up and trots off. He buries the shank in one of the garbage cans lining the yard, not caring if anyone finds it, knowing that it won’t matter if they do.
The next day no one can figure how it happened. We all know that the investigation, run by Conroy, will draw a blank. Every few years something like this happens here, and the unsolved murders are shuffled into reports that are soon forgotten in the backs of metal drawers.
The warden sends out a notice to the guards that he knows this is a very old prison. He says he’s aware it’s almost impossible to count all the inmates at lockdown unless the guards look inside each cell and confirm live heads. He knows with all the budget cuts, they are understaffed, and the idea they can count three thousand every night feels impossible. In the newer prisons, the super-maxes, there are electronic locks and motion sensors. In those horrible places, a man spends his entire life in a metal pod inside one pod inside another, and he never sees the outdoors, smells the sky or dirt, or touches real rock or soil. But our enchanted place is very old. It was built more as a small town of ancient buildings with wood doors and hinged windows and cell door locks easily filled with a wad of chewed paper. The warden writes that having inmates out of their cells after dark is an old problem in our enchanted place, but now a guard has died for it, and it must change.
At least the female guard has the solace of knowing that her body will not go to the oven. They lift it on a real stretcher and take her out to find her family. They empty her locker and take the knitting needles and balls of yarn, and the battered purse that has seen better days, and the wallet stuffed with coupons and pictures of her kids.
Then she vanishes the same way we all do, so I suppose it is not much different.
I hear the soft clop of the lady as she walks past my cell, and I can feel the hot storms that rage inside her. The closer she comes to the priest, the more her insides rebel. She wants this and cannot have it: the peace of being known.
She is afraid if she shares her soul with him, he will reject it. Then she will be lost forever. Then she will be like the men she works with—alone.
I wish I could go to my cell door and call to her. “Lady,” I would tell her, “it will be okay. Go to the priest and ask him. Ask him, Will you know me? See what he says.”
I can’t say anything to the lady. Even if I could talk, I don’t know how to have those conversations. I heard one only once, during that visit with my grandparents. I remember the warm pajamas after the bath and the rich feeling of the cocoa in my belly. I remember curling up in their guest bed under a thick scratchy wool blanket and listening to them talking softly in the room next to me. The talking sounds that came through that wall were not hurting sounds or sad sounds. They were peaceful sounds. That night I got up and touched the walls and put my head on them and listened. Is that what love sounds like? The sound of peace in their voices?
I know that when I read books about love, they are telling the truth. The truth of it winds around my heart and tightens in pain. I try and see it through my eyes, raised to my stone ceiling, and I wonder, What is it like to feel love? What is it like to be known?
The lady is like me in many ways. Serpents crawl inside her. She is deathly afraid that others will see them. She is afraid, and yet she wants the priest to see inside her and accept the monsters that wrap around the secret, pure part of her—the part she managed to save, miraculously, that so many of us have lost. She knows the monsters are there and yet wants to be seen.
Her courage frightens and amazes me. It makes me hopeful for her. It makes me crave happiness for her. Is that what you call love? Is that what you call hope?
The night silk skies, they fail to exist. The dark road is like a ribbon under your car. Gone. The wife waiting for you, even the tiny dimple at the corner of her mouth. Gone. The stars outside—oh, to see them with her once more—and the faint smell of barbecue for the birthday you missed again because you were working
late again. Gone.
The warden stands in his backyard. What soon will not be his backyard anymore. He smells the overpowering smell of fir and cedar and the river from afar, of the smoldering ashes of the barbecue of his neighbors—the lazy assholes don’t wait for the fire to burn down, they just keep soaking it with fluid, so the burgers must taste like lighter fluid—and the damp loam of the beds his wife once turned over for the fall onions that she grew not so many years ago, and the distant hills, and the faint remembrance of shampoo wafting from the open bathroom window where she once showered.
He knew this grief was coming, and here it is, no different or better or anything. He doesn’t want to lie to himself. He doesn’t want to tell himself that his wife wanted to leave. He doesn’t want to pretend she lived in pain and regret and longed for a place of peace. All of that is bullshit. She didn’t want to die. He didn’t want her to die. Fuck heaven, he thinks—bring her back.
Bring her back.
The lady visits the home she grew up in. She doesn’t know why she came, but here she is, standing out front.
She could never bring anyone here. The yard is pitted with dog turds, and the ancient white siding is stained green-black with mold. The sole window out front is spotted, as if someone inside were spitting on it. Not much has changed, she sees. Probably the same landlord, fleecing the poor of their welfare checks. The limp curtain twitches, and she sees a face—a child’s face. It is small and scared but could be her own, back in time.
She decides to move before an angry parent comes out, wondering why there is a lady in a suit standing on the sidewalk, staring at their home. They might assume she is a social worker, come to wreak havoc on their lives.
She walks around the corner, seeing into the backyard. The same laurel hedges are there, capped with the same sliver of sky. She remembers how she used to think that if she prayed hard enough, her dream worlds would come true. She and her mom would wake up one day on the magical island and eat the dripping fruit. Or the best one of all: Her mom would turn around one day with her eyes wide awake, and she would be all there, and she would rush to her and say, Oh, baby.
