by R.J. Ellory
There was something about the day that was special.
I knew I would remember this day for a long time, perhaps for the rest of my life. My one disappointment was that Nathan was not there. Nathan should have been there, but he was out in Chicago dealing with the brutality of war and the dissolution of a family.
Mrs. Chantry sat down again.
'Our daughter was born in 1926. I was all of twenty-eight years old, Jack was twenty-two, but for reasons of social acceptance we always gave our ages the other way round. We weren't even married, never did get married, but everyone knew us as Mr. and Mrs. Chantry, and never had reason to suspect otherwise. And our daughter was an angel, bright and beautiful and the happiest child I've ever known. Her name was Jennifer, and Jack Chantry, fisherman's son, turned out to be the best father any child might ever wish for.'
Eve Chantry paused a little while and smoked her cigar. The smoke obscured her face, and for a moment she seemed to disappear completely. I glanced to my left, and there through the window I could see the multi-colored ghosts of lights from the verandah, reflected up against the glass from the snow beneath.
'We stayed there near Wilmington, just over the state line, for ten years, and then when my father died we decided to return to Charleston. My mother was of a similar mind to Jack's father, a lot of time had passed, and she understood that sometimes when you love someone it doesn't matter what people think or say. You know what you know, you know what's in your heart, and sometimes you just have to follow it.'
Eve paused again, her eyes softened with memories, and I watched her intently.
'Summer of 1938 we came down here. I got to know my mother all over again. Jack bought a small boat and he took it out across Lake Marion and he taught Jennifer to fish. She loved to be with her father, her world revolved around him, and if there was something he could do then she wanted to do it too. We stayed up here the whole summer in a house we rented, and every day they'd go out across the Lake and work on her fishing. Two weeks and she never caught a thing. Jack was patience itself, but Jennifer was frustrated. It didn't matter whether she could fish or not, she knew that really, but it was something that made her father happy so she wanted to master it. So she went out on her own, took that little boat out across the water one morning before either myself or Jack was awake…'
Eve Chantry looked at me, and in her eyes I could see what was coming.
'She caught something alright, found her rod floating in among the weeds, and on the end of that line was a fish. But she was gone, drowned…'
Eve's eyes were filling up, and from the small table beside her she took a silk handkerchief and held it to her face.
'Jack went running down there when he found her bed empty. He knew. He knew what had happened. He was shouting and crying before he even reached the edge of the Lake.'
Eve paused again. Her cigar had gone out. She lit it once more, needful of a brief hiatus in the telling of this tragedy.
'I remember looking from the window of the house…' She raised her hand and sort of indicated a direction out towards the Lake.
'I saw him standing there. And then he went down. He was holding her limp body, her long hair wet and trailing on the ground. He was on his knees, his head was thrown back, and never in my life have I heard anything like the sound that came from him. It sounded like his soul had been wrenched from his body…'
Eve raised the handkerchief again and wiped her eyes.
'She was twelve years old… 1938 it was, and for the few years between her death and his own he was a ghost of himself. He went to the war in '44, and apparently he saved some boys, nothing more than boys they were. Three boys from Boise, Idaho, who wouldn't have known him from
Adam. He gave his own life saving them. But he wasn't saving them, he was saving Jennifer…'
I leaned back in my chair.
I was overwhelmed, exhausted, and yet my head was clear despite the quantity of punch I'd drunk, the cigar I'd smoked, despite the warmth of the fire.
I looked at Eve Chantry and she seemed ageless and perfect, an island of calm amidst some raging torrential sea.
My heart, for what it was worth, went out to her, and losing Caroline Lanafeuille, even seeing Nathan disappear at the end of the road, even losing my father, meant nothing in that moment.
Jack Chantry had lost his world in Lake Marion, lived for a few years on borrowed time, and then committed himself to die because he couldn't bear the burden any more.
Eve Chantry had lost her daughter, then her husband, and since that time had lived alone here in Greenleaf.
'Too much,' I remember saying, my voice sounding thin and weak. I couldn't imagine saying anything that would have been fitting or relevant to the situation.
'Or not enough,' Mrs. Chantry said, 'depending on which way you look at it.'
During that month while Nathan was in Chicago I spent a great deal of time with Eve Chantry. I invited her down to Christmas at our house, but she didn't come. I remember standing there on the porch watching the road, my mother calling for me to close the door against the wind, and I did close it, but I stayed outside for nigh on an hour. Folks came and went, but none of them was Mrs. Chantry.
Later, after dinner, I walked down to the edge of Lake Marion and looked over the water.
I imagined Jack Chantry stumbling up towards me, the limp body of his twelve-year-old daughter in his arms, a sound like a wrenched soul rushing from his lungs. I felt a tight fist of emotion in my chest, my throat, felt that fist turn back on itself and grip my heart. I could feel veins and arteries swelling between its relentless fingers.
I started to cry. I cried for someone I neither knew nor had ever seen, but in that release was perhaps the loss of Caroline, of Nathan, of my father.
Later I walked back and stood at the end of the road near Eve Chantry's house. The lights were still on, their multicolored reflections against the snow.
I didn't walk up there. I figured if she hadn't come out it was because she wanted to be alone.
Perhaps she wished to share Christmas with the memory of her daughter and her husband.
Perhaps she wished to share memories that were simply between herself and God.
Some things are like that.
I understand that now.
Understand that the best of all.
* * *
Chapter Nine
Two hours after Father John Rousseau's departure that day in August, Max Myers came up to see me. From his overalls he produced four packs of Lucky Strikes and pushed them through the bars. They were from John Rousseau.
I gave one pack to Max and asked him to give another pack to Lyman Greeve. Lyman Greeve didn't smoke, but he was saving trade-ins for a harmonica. He wanted to learn to play 'My Darling Clementine' before he died. He'd seen some guy do it in some old cowboy movie with Audie Murphy or Randolph Scott. It had become his life's purpose.
The other two packs I kept myself, and though I wanted to smoke them all I took four cigarettes, wrapped them in some paper, and pushed them into a gap between the wall and the edge of my sink. They would be safe there.
When I knew it was all over, when I had a time and a date that I knew wouldn't change, I would take them out and smoke them.
Two for me and two for Nathan, because we had always shared everything.
It had begun with a baked ham sandwich, the best in North Carolina, and it would end with a Lucky Strike and an inevitable promise of death.
Seemed to make sense to me.
Simple, like most things should be but, ironically, like most things never are.
My time was coming, crawling backwards towards me relentlessly. And Mr. West knew my time was coming too, and as it approached I seemed to see him more frequently. I watched him just as he would watch me. I tried to place myself behind his eyes and see the world from his viewpoint.
I believed Mr. West saw faces, more faces than those who inhabited D-Block.
And when he dreamt, he dr
eamt in monochrome, and the faces were there too.
Most often they were silent, but sometimes, only sometimes, they spoke, and when they spoke they said terrible things.
He listened, but he did not reply. If you talked back to your own memories you'd go crazy.
And Mr. West wasn't crazy.
He was just necessary.
He believed all men possessed a purpose. Some to father children. Some to build scrapers that towered over the earth. Some to plant trees and corn and pomegranates.
Some men were born to die, and then there were those born to kill them.
Such was his belief, and neither desire nor pleasure nor emotion entered into it. What he did was functional and precise.
Most of all it was necessary.
And so it was that he watched me, and other times he watched Max Myers as he wheeled his trolley away from my cell, and understood that for now he was here merely to see that all of us met our just end. It was neither his duty nor interest to question why, to ascertain innocence or guilt, for all men were guilty - if not of the thing with which they were charged, then of other sins.
Sins Mr. West knew all about.
For these last thirty years he had served other men, men with political and judicial ends, men without names and faces, and he had taken care to execute his duties with professionalism and pride.
Now, in these latter years, he had walked these corridors and gantries, listening to the guilty as they cried and prayed in the dark of night, and he had fulfilled his function: to take them down along those same corridors to their rightful and punctual deaths.
To Mr. West I was such a man, and though I did not cry or pray, he believed I would.
Time would come that I would.
I had walked where I shouldn't have, and though I seemed no more capable than a Girl Scout of America of killing a man, I had nevertheless crossed the line.
The law was the law, written or otherwise, and the Bible said what the Bible said, and people like Richard Goldbourne - a man Mr. West had never met, but knew a little of - would not have tolerated such a violation of his own sense of morals, however twisted those morals might have been.
And so the nightmare had to unfold - as slow as Sunday chess, as tragic as a child suicide.
The details of these events, I was certain, were unknown to Mr. West. He had not been involved, had not wished to be involved, but he knew of people who knew people who would have taken care of such a detail.
I would pay the price for my omission.
My sentence was served, and would be carried out, and come the day I twitched and jumped and smouldered, come the day my blood boiled beneath my skin, a natural imbalance would be rectified.
Such was life and death and justice in the motherland, the good ol' U.S. of A.
One time I watched Mr. West smile as Max Myers disappeared around the corner at the far end of the corridor.
He turned himself, turned quietly, for he believed that half the punishment served here was the stealth and swiftness with which he appeared and disappeared, the readiness to twist the nerve when it was bared, to turn the light of truth upon these sad victims and help them see the raw and bloody ugliness of their own dark and twisted hearts.
He smiled again.
My time would come, and Mr. West - in his whiter-than- angels shirt and his black glass shoes - would be there to see me home.
In some small way I wished to speak with him, to tell him of how these things had occurred. He would not have listened. I knew that. But nevertheless some part of me wished to be understood, by anyone I think. I wanted to let him know that within these walls resided a human being, a real person, not just a name, a face, a number. I wanted him to know that behind these eyes were memories, each of them a thread, and in pulling that thread an entire world would unravel behind it. I wanted him to know of Jack and Eve Chantry, of the events of that Christmas, of things I had said and done that would perhaps redress the balance of my humanity in his eyes. But the difficulty was never my humanity, it was his. He possessed none, and would not have understood anyway.
I watched him come and go, his quiet movements, his darker thoughts, and saw the cloud of hatred that ever settled over him like a mantle. I would turn my eyes away, close them perhaps, and in closing them begin the process of opening yet another verse, another chapter of my thoughts.
These were all that remained, and as such they were the most precious thoughts of all.
I thought of Nathan, and how he did not return from Chicago until the second week of the New Year.
It was 1966, I would be twenty soon, and adulthood, its threat and promise, was arriving with greater vigor and tenacity as each new day unfolded.
The third cousin was dead. They had heard on January 2nd, and the Verneys had stayed the extra week to see the boy's body flown home and buried.
Nathan had changed. That was obvious from the first moment I saw him standing there at the end of my drive, his hands in his pockets, his head down, his manner subdued.
As children we would have shouted and screamed and run towards each other. We would have chattered back and forth, each interrupting the other until we were exhausted from laughing.
That day in January the mood was that of a funeral. And no black Methodist gospel affair, but a silent white suburban melodrama, tempered with Excedrin and single malt.
We spent a little time at the Lake but it was cold, and much of the time we did not speak. I remember asking him if he had thought about the war, about receiving his Draft Notice, and he just shrugged. He didn't say anything. He'd had enough of the war already.
When we left, Nathan walked with me to the top of my drive, and before he turned he hugged me like the brother that I was, and when he let me go he looked right at me and said: 'We'll see this thing through together, Danny.'
The same words I had uttered after our escape from Benny's when Nathan had floored Marty Hooper.
Marty Hooper was dead, as was Larry James and the other boys from Myrtle Beach. Their bodies were probably still out there, buried beneath mud or scorched foliage, or scattered in a hundred parts across a waterlogged field beneath tall trees and clear cerulean skies.
And we were here - Nathan Verney and I - and the threat of that other world was growing closer with each heartbeat.
I thought then of Jack Chantry, his belief that after the death of his daughter he was living on borrowed time. He had believed he should have died instead of her.
Was it the same for us?
Should we have stood up in front of Sergeant Mike and pledged our allegiance to the flag, the Constitution, the American way of life?
Should we have walked out there carrying things called heat tabs, Kool Aid and C-Rations, carrying steel helmets with liners and camouflage covers, carrying compress bandages, steel brushes, gun oil and fragmentation grenades, carrying our own chewing gum and lucky dice? Should we have walked out there carrying the weight of our broken hearts and our fear?
Should we have done those things?
And should we now be dead in Da Nang or Ky Lam or Saigon?
The war, though a million miles away, seemed right there across the state line. But it was the borders within that counted, and with each revolution of the earth I felt the invasion coming.
For the first time in my life I felt real fear.
And that, along with everything else since that day at Lake Marion, Nathan Verney shared with me too.
In March of '66 I took a part-time job at Karl Winterson's Radio Store. It wasn't so much that we needed the money - the Carolina Railroad Company pension was still coming in month after month - but more because I wanted something to do with my time. It didn't seem to matter what it was, anything would have done, and I had a chance to listen to all the music I would have missed at home.
Nathan would come down when Mr. Winterson was out, and together we'd find small back-porch radio stations out of Memphis and New Orleans. The reception was awful but still we heard thin
gs like Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. There was a world of great music out there, and just because we lived in some small town in North Carolina didn't mean we had to miss it.
Those hours we spent together were some of the closest we ever shared, for hours would go by when not a soul would come down there to disturb the atmosphere within the store. Made me wonder sometimes how Mr. Winterson made a living. With the windows wide and the front door open, the sun beating on the sidewalk like a tyrannical stepfather, Nathan and I would simply sit back and share the silences between the songs. Sometimes we'd talk - of where we were going, a few dreams, some other things - but mostly we just talked of nothing consequential at all. Nathan would make up stories, and his imagination would grow out beyond the confines of the walls, and I would marvel at the sheer quantity of ideas that could be carried inside a single head.