Who Named the Knife

by Linda Spalding

  I wonder if Bert’s new son met his father the way I met mine, by locking myself in the upstairs bathroom the day he came home from the war. “I found a strange thing had happened to me,” Bert writes. “I couldn’t make a decision. Having all my thinking done for me by the navy for three years had impeded the process of thinking things through and reaching a decision,” Bert went back to work as a salesman for McKesson, working the streets of Phoenix. In his letter, he calls himself an honest con man. “I have tried many times to explain my fascination with selling and the only explanation I could verbalize is it is great sport to get an intelligent man to spend his money for my products. It is a one on one contest usually played on his turf.” Gladys was working three days a week and they managed to pay off the bills that had resulted from Butch’s accident and death.

  Penne was born in 1950, the same year William Acker was born in Illinois. Brother Mike, the second son, had developed asthma when he was two or three years old, but by the time he was twelve, he was playing shortstop on a baseball team while Bert coached. Consummate father, he had been active in the Mormon Church since his marriage to Gladys, but it was Mike’s death, at the age of fourteen, that made him decide to be baptized.

  The daughters Bert writes his letter to actually number three. He says: “I need to include a paragraph about two other members of our family I have not touched on. About two or three months after Mikes passing Gladys came home with a two month baby girl. This came about through a friend Mary Sorsenson. She was a court clerk and heard of this baby girl being put up for adoption and decided we needed a baby to replace our sons. She sure put our minds to thinking in a different direction and helped us over the hard spots. Penne was missing Mike a lot and found some solace in coping with a new baby sister. She like Mike before her thought we were replacing her in our affections with the baby. She came to know better and helped Gladys cope with the new child in our lives. The other member I mentioned was Polly, a Navajo girl we received in our home on the Indian placement program of the Church. We had her three years and learned to love her a great deal. We still hear from her once in a while. I want my daughters to know I am proud to be known as their father and I love them very much. I admire their spirit and the way they strive to cope with life and its blessings and problems. I am going to leave the telling of their life story to them and explain I realize I have wrote more about the boys than the girls not because I found their lives less interesting or compelling but they are still here to write of their own. I encourage them to keep a journal which will make writing their history much easier and more complete. I would doubly encourage my Grand Children start now and keep a journal all their lives. I want Brandy, Jess, and Shannon to know I love them and am proud of them. I would ask them always to remember they are Heavenly Fathers children and He wants them to develop the talents he has given them and live clean lives that they may return to his kingdom and dwell there with Him and their Grandparents and parents forever.”

  At the time of Bert’s letter, Maryann had been in prison for twenty years.

  36

  Yuma was a town of 25,000 souls in the southwest corner of Arizona when Maryann was living there. The Mormon Church had divided it into stakes, as it divides every town and city into stakes. It had divided the stakes into wards, as it always does. Yuma, on the east bank of the Colorado River near the confluence of the Gila, was deep in Mormon country, Mormon mentality. Regulation, regulation, discipline. Prayers and authority and long, weird underwear. Growing up in a family in which the notion of Mormons as the chosen people permeated every minute of life. Maryann’s hold on identity must have been tenuous. Maybe biology is destiny, she must have thought. Her mother had abandoned her. Her father had given her away. Maybe all her attempts to be worthy were fraudulent. But her new parents kept insisting that she had been sent to earth to choose between right and wrong, that she had the earthly treasure of free will. If she could manage to live according to God’s law, all of them, including the two dead brothers she had never met, would be together in the Millennium. It was up to her.

  Of course she wanted to help her family live together eternally.

  If she could only hold things together.

  “I felt huge pressure,” she says now. “I had to make up for everything – my brothers’ dying and my sister ruining everything for our family.” In Yuma, there was something – a meeting of the youth group, a stake dance or a ward dance or a society meeting – every night of the week. But in Yuma, there were also kids who hung out at the river. “I started ditching school quite a bit. My parents tried to set limits for me, but I ignored them and did what I wanted and when Mother gave me her Volkswagen, it got worse. Once, I was driving away from school on my way to the river and I passed my dad. I had to make up a story, but I was getting good at that.”

  Living in preparation for the second coming of Christ, one doesn’t question the bishop, or the elders in the church, but Maryann began to question those closer to hand. Why did she have to believe everything she was told? Why not ask a few questions? Such as who was Joseph Smith? What made him so special? Why shouldn’t he be considered a lunatic? Are we born the way we are or is there a chance to change?

  Bert and Gladys prayed for their child. They argued with her, but there was a side to her they couldn’t reach. Why tell her about the wild mother who gave her away, if not as a warning? And how to discipline her? “I was spoiled,” Maryann admits.

  She got her first job as a cashier, then a second job as a salesperson at the new JCPenney. When she got laid off there, she went to work at Kmart and one night, when she was coming home from work, she got rear-ended at a stoplight. Because of a whiplash injury, her parents’ insurance agent wrote her a cheque and she decided to take a vacation and visit an aunt and uncle in San Jose. “I actually contemplated moving up there. Probably should have. Instead, I went back.”

  I tell Maryann there are a hundred things I would rewrite in my life, almost from the beginning. And there are things I would give myself, including an ounce of her confidence in fate. “My first job was at JCPenney too,” I announced one night when she called. “Isn’t that strange? There are so many similar things in our lives.”

  “Did you get laid off?”

  “I did. I only lasted a week. And I never shopped there after that. I went to work in my father’s office from then on, every vacation. He said we might as well keep the money in the family, even though I never understood what he meant exactly. Unless it meant I couldn’t contribute from the outside.”

  “Did you want to be a lawyer?”

  “I wanted to be an architect, like my brother. But I was a girl. My parents thought I should learn stenography, in case I didn’t get married or my husband died in some tragedy. You know, psychologists say kids who feel abandoned are excessively dependent. On boyfriends. Husbands. Did you know that?” Sometimes I spent entire phone conversations doing this, looking for things that made sense of her life or offered some sense of connection between us. JCPenney. Fathers. Yuma. “My great-grandfather went out there and tried to settle a land claim.” With each discovery it was as if I had come upon some proof. We have a unique bond, Maryann had said, that last afternoon in the prison visiting room, but I could tell that she was not really interested in the little links I forged. Again and again, I asked Maryann to tell me about the house where she lived in Phoenix, “growing up, when you were still happy. I know you don’t want to go back, but I think something must have happened there that made William the next part of your life.” I didn’t say that the freedom of a girl who leaves home at seventeen is not really freedom, not for a while, not while she is running away. A woman who is desired feels powerful, but a girl who leaves home at seventeen is bound to carry everything she’s fled: authority, control.

  The weight of it.

  In that girlish white suitcase!

  And what she finds is not independence but another authority. What she finds will challenge everything she was taught to be
lieve.

  I was a nice woman in a foreign country who was taking an interest in her. It seemed to suffice, but then sufficiency is relative and Maryann had her own secrets.

  It was at Kmart, in her senior year of high school, that Maryann met the man she abandoned for William. “Six foot two, with sandy brown hair. But what attracted me was how gentle he was, taking pictures of kids.” Doug went from store to store, town to town. He worked in Kmart and other places. He lived in a suburb of Phoenix and that settled it. Maryann told her parents she would not be going to Arizona Western, the junior college in Yuma, although they had offered to pay her tuition there. Instead, at the age of seventeen, she drove off in a car that had been her mother’s. “I was hell-bent on getting back to Phoenix.”

  Which was easy for me to understand. I remember kissing my high-school boyfriend goodbye when I left for college. We promised each other all kinds of things but I was hell-bent too. Away from Home. That’s where I wanted to be. I went away to school and fell in with a group of strangers. I was free of my mother. I was free of my father. I didn’t know I would never go back.

  And there she is out in her driveway on an evening when she is still seventeen. There is a warm breeze. She’s sitting in the little Volkswagen. There is a six-pack in the trunk and a pack of cigarettes in her purse and the breeze is a song coming through the trees. She’s turning on the radio, waving to her mother, who stands at the window. Goodbye! Her mother partly hidden by the fluffy curtain. She’s looking furtive.

  Maryann was president of the Young Adult Group at church, where she took Doug to dances. “Were you in love?”

  “Not enough.”

  “But you thought you were.”

  “Not enough. Not enough.”

  “But …”

  “I thought we’d get married eventually.”

  Doug had spent two years in South America on his mission, but he was living with his parents again. When Maryann moved to Phoenix, they saw each other whenever he was in town. He was twenty-five. A nice man. Good to her. When he was gone, she went out with other men. She also went out with Mariann and Lisa and someone named Lori. She had an apartment, a job. Father, mother. Church. Support from all sides.

  37

  I spent the summer of 2002 sitting at the table where I’d first written to Maryann two years before, watching three new robin hatchlings squeeze each other against the edges of their nest. I had just come back from another visit to New York, where it had seemed important to stand at the brink of Ground Zero and stare into the massive hole where the Twin Towers had once stood. I wanted to grapple with it for myself and for Maryann, who could not visit the pit with its trucks and cranes. It was an ugly pit except for the sheets of weathered paper covered in plastic and hung on a surrounding chain-link fence. Remember Me … name, age, photograph. The flowers and mementoes were pretty well abused by a long winter and a great many tears. And there was no particular order to anything. A man in a hard hat spoke Polish to a group of listeners. A man sweeping a marble stairway told me that yes, I was in part of the original building … where there were still signs pointing to elevators and restaurants that no longer exist.

  While I was away Maryann had been trying to call. There were messages left in both English and Spanish. You have a call from an inmate in a California State Prison … quien es un preso de una facilidad … If you do not want to receive this call, press 7 … If you never want to receive a call from this institution again, press 6 … If you accept the charges for this call, press 5 … What she wanted was to tell me about seeing an old video of her parents.

  The video had been made the year after Maryann’s Hawaii trial. She was told about it by another prisoner who worked for In Service Training, where they had been going through the old video files. This one had been made by a television station for a program about California prisons. Maryann and her parents were in a segment on the Family Visiting Program. “I had never seen it,” she told me when we finally connected. “And I didn’t see the whole thing, but of the people I saw in the video, there are only three of us still in this facility. There was one gal named Goldie, who had probably been here for a couple of years when this was done. They asked her how long she would be here and she said 1985, which is exactly what I thought too, because at that time, we still believed we’d get out at our minimum eligible parole date.” Maryann’s voice sounded dry. No wonder. In 1983 she was sure she had only another two years in prison. “She’s still here for killing a man who was molesting her infant daughter,” Maryann whispered. “We’re both still here.”

  The video was hard to watch. “I don’t even know that I can put into words how it affected me. The first flash of Mom actually took me by surprise. I almost didn’t recognize her. Her voice, when she began to speak, sounded so foreign. Was that because I only remember the last time I spoke with her before she died, when she was so sick? Dad was just Dad – his voice and mannerisms. Maybe I haven’t really grieved my loss. Maybe I just put it away.”

  I thought about those pictures hanging around the pit, and the pit itself, which was like one of the circles of Hell. While I walked the circumference, I had been looking for a picture of Kristin’s friend Heather Ho, although the last time I’d seen her, in Hawaii, she was a thirteen-year-old girl wearing braces and a baseball cap. Heather had worked all her life to be a baker and she had a prestigious job at Windows on the World up at the top of Tower #1. But why was I thinking of her while Maryann told me about seeing the old video? Part of me didn’t want to find Heather Ho. Part of me wanted to think she wasn’t there among the other victims and weather-scarred photographs. In Mexico, there is a simple handmade cross to mark every highway death. Driving, you see the crosses at hairpin turns or steep drops. But there are other, unmarked spots on this earth. The tarmac where my brother crashed his plane, the highway, on the cloverleaf outside L.A., where Cesario was shot, and a place high above the waves at Hanauma Bay.

  I was standing by that table I use as a desk at the cottage. Through the window, I could see the fledglings and, behind them, unlimited green, although there was the dusty road winding up between trees. I said, “But you don’t even mention your own young self, Maryann. Locked away for so much longer than you expected … didn’t you feel any pity looking at that twenty-three-year-old girl?”

  She said she hated the way she looked. She had a shoulder-length perm.

  I said, “None of us likes to look at our old perms … but it’s possible to feel some nostalgia for our innocence.”

  Maybe it was the wrong word to use. Maryann was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I find myself stuffing the emotions I feel.”

  “I know you do. The parole boards always say you show no remorse. No insight. Could you let go of that control?”

  “I can’t. Not in here.”

  “Because you might say something or get in trouble?” People listen. People report on each other.

  “I guess I’ve learned to hold myself in check.” Voice flat.

  I was looking out at the road. It was empty. From the kitchen, there was the smell of chicken cooking on the stove. Garlic and soy sauce. Maryann was talking and I was remembering a dream. I’d been involved in two murders. Not committing them, but watching. Am I guilty? I wrestle with this, regretting my own paralysis – although it wasn’t exactly that. It was an interested passivity. I had stood aside, aware of enormous space all around me.

  38

  One night in August the voice was flat again. Something was wrong, but it took a while to get there and then, because of the minutes ticking on our call, she had to do it fast. “She needed a small bit of surgery,” Maryann told me, speaking about a woman she didn’t name. “Went in last week. I think it was a prolapsed uterus thing or bladder. Nothing much. And she came back three days ago. We’ve been friends for a long time. She was here when I came in. But yesterday morning when she got out of bed she complained of chest pains. That was it. She’d been given a release date in 1983, but they ke
pt putting it off. They gave her seven to life, not a death sentence, but that’s what it was. And she was a person who was always good to everyone in here. There’s such a cloud over us now – inmates and staff – everyone loved her. And she died in here.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “And today Dateline came in to do some interviews. What a time for it. We told them what happened. Then they interviewed a woman with leukemia. She had one leg amputated already and now she’s had another one off. She should be gone. She’s been here twenty years.”

  When the call came, I had just peeled my first ear of corn. All through August, we enjoy them soaked in ice water and then grilled in their husks. We’d been in the river and we were drinking a bottle of cold wine. The house was hot, but there was a little breeze coming in through the screens and the sounds of the river and birds getting settled for the night. When I answered the phone, I mentioned the corn. Then I bit my lip.

  Sherrie Chapman, the inmate with cancer, had died a few months before, after being denied a compassionate release. And death must be impersonal in prison, where someone simply disappears in the night and where, by 8:30, the women were stuck inside. The brick buildings held the heat long after the sun had set. But there was a short reprieve. At 8:40, six rows of electronic buttons began to open the cell doors in rotation so the women could sign up for phone calls. At 9:00, they were locked in again – no more chance to catch a little breeze, phone conversations finished. Maryann usually relished our phone calls as a few minutes of relief.