Time of the Locust
Page 2
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not going to stand here and deny the statistics. As we have heard repeatedly from the defense, there are numerous reports of the disproportionate number of black men in prison. Record numbers of persons are also being placed under probation or parole supervision. You heard the defense remind us that by 1989, the total inmate population in our nation’s prisons and jails is expected to pass the one-million mark. We’ve all heard about findings claiming that almost one in four—twenty-three percent—of black men in the age group twenty to twenty-nine is either in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole on any given day. And Horus Thompson is twenty-seven years old.
“In this year 1986 alone, three hundred forty-two out of every one hundred thousand blacks were admitted to state or federal prison. I’ve read that this is triple what it was in 1926. It’s reported so far this year that blacks make up forty-four percent of new prison admissions, though they are less than an eighth of the population. And as the defense has also pointed out, the black presence in the prison population has increased to nearly half this year so far. Citizens, I am not going to stand here and tell you that the Thompson family won’t suffer, that they haven’t suffered. The Thompson family will most likely struggle under the strain of Horus Thompson being yet another young black male under the control of the criminal justice system at a time when he should be starting a family, mastering critical life skills, and advancing in a career.
“The repercussions of this situation are undeniable. It is yet another assault on community stability that adds to an already debilitated state of affairs. As the defense has said, any potential contributions this man could have made to the community will be stunted. Some will be lost forever. Ladies and gentlemen, this, in a larger sense, impacts us all. But are any of these things crimes? Perhaps in a larger sense, these things may be crimes. What we’ve all read and heard about is certainly a shame.
“But is what Horus Thompson did a crime? Is murder a crime? The answer, we know, is absolutely yes. The stakes are high. Because, ladies and gentlemen, what we are dealing with now, who we are dealing with now, is a man who has chosen vengeance for his own misguided recrimination, as his sword. Knowing what we know, we can no longer presume this man here is innocent, no matter his reasons for doing what he did. We must call him what he is: a cold-blooded murderer, who lured the victim from his home and drove him miles away to kill him. Citizens, that is who we are dealing with.
“Let’s remember very clearly and without hesitation that a peace officer is any person who by virtue of his office or public employment is vested by law with a duty to maintain public order or to make arrests for offenses. This is who and what the victim was. A soldier of law and order, of justice. This is a fact. And at the very least, we must ask ourselves the most important questions we as citizens, as a nation, face. We must look ourselves in the eye and commit to the dire necessity of ensuring that we live in a society of law and order. I charge you all with committing to the great and important responsibility of guaranteeing that we enforce those statutes consistent with the intention of law and order. We must not labor in doubt, in questioning and quibbling over the determination of rules outside of those great intentions.
“Are we going to invent our own rules and then act accordingly? That’s really what we are talking about. We may be tempted to descend into thoughts about Mr. Thompson’s reasons for doing what he did. We may even be tempted to think that the alleged murder of Mr. Thompson’s father was in some way more significant than the victim’s murder. But even with this temptation, we must consider what we know as fact.
“And more important, the so-called slaying of Mr. Thompson’s political-activist father, some twenty years ago, is not the concern of the court today. Jack Thompson is not here today to defend his son’s actions in killing Officer Sam Teak. What is of concern today is what Mr. Thompson took from the victim. His life. His mortal connection to his family. His legacy. I don’t think you need me to stand here and give you a history lesson on racism. On bigotry. On the bitter fruits of this country of which we are all aware.
“I’m not going to lecture you on the litany of racially biased experiences of black people in America. I am sure that many of you are already aware of that. I can say that there has been group after group, legislation after legislation, in my lifetime—even before my lifetime—established to help black people in their own communities. To help black people in this country.
“And I won’t argue that by and large, history has shown us that the burden of promoting and protecting the interests of the black community has fallen to those who may only have an interest in the black community. Ladies and gentlemen, our quarrel is not with them. The civil rights movement has taught us much. And if it has taught us anything, especially now in 1986, it has taught us that peace for us all is most important. This is America, ladies and gentlemen. And if any individual can kill even a peace officer—be he retired or not, he has served his duty to all of us—then we make the dangerous trip to a troubling place, ladies and gentlemen. We enter a jungle from which I fear there is no escape . . .”
Brenda remembered how the voice thundered at the end and the outraged gasps of the jury. They were melted by the prosecuting attorney’s hot fire, forged and hardened into something impenetrable. As Horus was led away, she had to step back, as if from the edge of something, then step back farther still, as the drop and descent of things began. The things that she knew to fit into neat piles, with right and wrong organized in primary colors, easily distinguishable and unadulterated. Foundations collapsed around her, and the braces she had spent the four-month trial fortifying buckled and snapped. She looked on in horror and awe. The free fall of consciousness and the atrophy of doubt. The tumble of hope and the fall of dream. In a matter of seconds, Horus looked at her from across a great expanse and said, “I am dead to you.” She did not understand what that meant until much later, when the loudness of his absence filled her ears, and she could hear nothing else.
Brenda couldn’t wrap her mind around her new title: prison wife. At the behest of friends in those first few weeks after the thunderclap, who quickly retreated to their own lives, Brenda began reading the essays in a newsletter for family members of the incarcerated. Bound by Love arrived in her mailbox. She began and ended reading the essays across her cold marital bed in one day, unable to stomach the carnage of words, the cry of phrases. One essay seeped into her soul, so that she could not bear to look upon the newsletter again, for fear she might come across an especially bleak voice that haunted her, which read:
“He did not die. But he is not alive. How can I grieve for him? How can I let him go? What is there to hold of him? His shirts? His razor and deodorant? The shoes still at the bottom of the closet? The belief that he will one day be home when I arrive? No. There is nothing to let go; there is nothing to hold. There are only tears in the dark. There is only the wolf in the wilderness, and I don’t know if the wolf is him or me. We call to each other in the blackness, but our lonely howls cannot penetrate the thickness of time. There is only his face in my dreams, his voice in my thoughts. His mannerisms in my children, two boys and a girl who do not know him anymore. They know him only as a word among the many others in the lexicon of their speech, a word that will fade into the Latin of the past. He is only among the shadows of the setting sun. One year anesthetizes the next. One decade lays to rest the one preceding it. He is exhumed only in memory. He did not die. But he is not alive . . .”
Brenda had been unable to read any further. In the beginning, she didn’t want to believe that such a thing could be true. How could she have lost Horus to the past without realizing it? She hated herself for believing what he had told her before he left town that day. Before he left town to end their lives without her permission. He was going to work things out with his brother, Manden, he said. Work what out? What was left to work out? Deep inside, she knew that something was wrong. He’ll handle it, she told herself. It took years to admit
that she should have asked more questions, that she knew the morning he left that there was something else.
In all the time Brenda knew him, Horus spoke of his family only a few times and with great difficulty. He talked in that odd way of one carefully reciting a collection of facts, as if saying anything more might conjure the living or the dead. His father was murdered in front of him. There was no justice done for his death. After this, his mother became mentally ill and passed away. He and his brother were raised by an uncle they didn’t know and would never come to like.
She listened to Horus each time and allowed herself to be led. She went willingly down a path of simplifications, of illusions. And it still made her face hot when she thought of it: that there had been another man beneath the man she married. But it was this man who took over that night, that weekend, her life, and Sephiri’s future. He had his reasons, Horus said when the police came to their front door. There are reasons for everything. This she knew. But where had she been in his reasoning, in his ruminations? What about her life, their life together? The man whose tenor she used to listen to under the sheets at night, the one who held her and called her Baby, so that it meant a million things at once, was now an echo, a resonance left after something larger was gone. Horus Thompson had been reduced to a thought, a concept. A living, breathing man said that he was dead. And it was true.
Brenda struggled to breathe, lumbering through the stale air of the government building. The walk from the elevator to the office suite at the end of the mile-long corridor seemed to take an eternity, and her swollen ankles felt as if they were on the verge of bursting. The 258 pounds she carried made themselves known loudly, tiring her with every step. Midway to the office, she was drenched in sweat, the deodorant under her arms and between her thighs already melting.
She’d had a time getting Sephiri ready for the special van that came to pick him up every day. Dressing him this morning had been like trying to hold on to a slippery fish. He screamed and ran around the house. He urinated on the carpet and threw popcorn all over the floor. She finally cornered and tackled him in the coat closet. She held him in her arms in a straitjacket embrace while he kicked and flailed. After a time, he settled down, and they panted there together in the darkness, listening to their hearts beat through their chests. A mother should not resent her child, Brenda thought, rebuking herself. She should not feel apprehension when she puts her hand on her baby’s forehead after he has already fallen asleep, when he is quiet and has passed out from jumping and shrieking or filling a house with silence. Shame grew once more in the pit of her stomach as she clutched her son in the dark, and she began the ritual of smothering her disgrace.
Brenda felt her blood pressure worsening as she walked down the hallway to her office. She had forgotten to fill her prescription again. The white slip was still crumpled at the bottom of her purse. She hated those water pills. They seemed to make her gain even more weight. Pounds atop the heap she had constructed to insulate her from the past. She sighed and focused on getting to the office. Her beacon was the water fountain, the last five meters.
She arrived at her desk and collapsed into the chair. The date on the calendar glared at her from the wall. Seven years today, she thought. She looked at the peanut butter candy bars in the open desk drawer. The need to cover it all over and put a gravestone on the memory of things always seemed to make her want to eat. Food was there for her with open arms and offered itself to the great pit at the core of her soul. And every time she bit into peach cobbler, shoveled seasoned pork roast into her mouth, or spooned a gallon of ice cream, she was able to bury just a little more of the memories that kept resurfacing, of Horus rising from the past.
Closing the desk drawer, Brenda thought of how Horus looked when he came home the night that ended their lives. He arrived in their bedroom like an ominous sky just before a storm, his hands shaking but with nothing to say. Quiet. Struck. Waiting. His face was stone. “Jack Thompson” was what he said when he did speak, then sat down on the bed. He said it so calmly, sinking into the mattress, staring at the curtains billowing in the window. Brenda waited for him to say something—anything else—but he did not.
What about his father, Jack Thompson? As Brenda stood staring from the frame of their bathroom door that night, she couldn’t understand if he was talking to her or to himself, and it wasn’t until the next moment that she realized Horus had said his father’s name but meant something more.
Then came the sirens and lights that she expected to be on the way to someone else’s house but had stopped in front of theirs.
“Horus?” said Brenda.
The sound of footfalls approached like the headless horseman, louder and louder.
“Horus?”
A knock. Then silence.
“Horus?”
Another knock.
Brenda had blacked out the rest. The things she felt between her husband looking at her and opening the front door to let the police in, between the handcuffs flashing under the living-room lamplight and the pregnancy test in the bathroom trash can. Until that day in their bedroom, with the walls washed in red and blue, she had thought of vengeance only as an abstraction. Years later, she would tell herself that vengeance had somehow become a living being to Horus and that it possessed him in some way. That it was a thing that had been growing inside of him since the beginning. A lethal thing that would claim them both.
Brenda snatched a tissue from the box on her desk and wiped her wet forehead. She had tried to get Horus to talk more about his childhood, but it was like a forbidden room in a house. She later came to respect his silence about his deceased parents and ignored his evasions about his boyhood. She dismissed the oddness of him having a brother in the same city whom she met only once before they married. And she made the ancient mistake with Horus that women make with men: belief that she could renovate him. She believed that her love could make whatever it was Horus chose not to talk about go away. She thought that a new life could be painted over the old one. He was tender and quietly devoted, and he loved her. She would love him and fill in the rest.
Brenda opened the desk drawer, looked at the candy, and closed it again. In the end, she had not been able to compete with the past. Her love for Horus had not been enough to stop him from pulling the trigger. It had not had the reach of justice and retribution. How could she judge him—as society had—for his need to bring his father’s killer to justice by his own hand? And she wondered what it all had gotten him and if a ruined life was the reward. She still wasn’t sure, and it troubled her that she could not see past the great wall of despair that hid the answer from view. Sundays became anathema to her. Going to church as a means of coping did not soothe her eternal distemper, and in her mind, that place was a graveyard of women banking a river of tears. Each woman’s misery sloshed and overflowed and spilled out over the ruined mess of the others, commingling in grief, in wretchedness. She didn’t want to see all of that every week.
The telephone on Brenda’s desk rang, drilling through her thoughts. Sighing, she picked up the receiver. “Hello?” she said.
“Mrs. Thompson?”
“Speaking.”
“Good morning. This is Dr. Susan Watson at the Autism Center.”
Brenda tensed when she heard that springtime bounce in the young doctor’s voice, so full of things that were nearly weightless, light and airy problems like what color to have her study painted and whether to plant tulips when a thaw breaks. She remembered Dr. Watson telling her just a few weeks ago, apologetically, that she had once put in for a transfer to a different facility in Virginia. That she thought she could handle the unbreakable silence of these children at the Autism Center and the stillness that was interrupted only by their sudden outbursts. After three years, she hadn’t understood them any more than on her first day at the center. The children ignored her still, and she had grown tired of the feeling of always talking to herself. But she couldn’t let these children down, she’d said.
“Yes, Mrs. Thompson. He’s fine. I’m not calling about a problem. It’s just that . . . your son did something today, something we’ve never seen happen before here at the center. I really don’t know how to explain it.” There was a long pause. “As you know,” she continued, breathless, “we’ve had Sephiri since he was three years old, and we have been able to monitor him steadily. We feel we know him and understand the spectrum of his condition quite well. But today he has been different in some really rather remarkable ways. We think at this point, we should all sit down and talk about it. You and me. And his father.”
There was a pause for reasons neither woman spoke of aloud. Because there was no living father for Sephiri in the sense of the word. Because Sephiri’s father was underground, among the Paleolithic mineral deposits embedded in the earth. There was only the shadowy figure of Manden Thompson, the boy’s uncle and reluctant stepfather, who appeared occasionally. Manden held the role only in title. Only in an envelope with a check in it that he volunteered every month. Only in situations like this, when a child’s “father” had to be summoned. Time and again, Brenda penciled in Manden’s name on forms and registrations. She could not bear to leave that line next to her name blank and be newly reminded of what was gone forever.
Brenda knew that there was a file somewhere in the young doctor’s desk with the details of Horus Thompson’s incarceration. She continued to use her married name, even though the title no longer held any meaning. It remained with her like the feeling of a limb still there after amputation. So when the young doctor spoke of Sephiri’s father, Brenda felt a twinge as she thought of the scope of what was there and what was not, a half-truth, with the other half capable of devouring both pieces if brought to the fore. She could almost believe when on occasion she spoke of it in the presence of those who did not know that Manden was really Sephiri’s uncle. The lie sparkled boldly in the half-light of the pause with the young doctor.