by Cathy Lamb
When I was done with my article, I walked down to our pond, sat on the dock, and thought about the sun. About my personal sun.
I thought about what it would have been like to be married to Steve all these years.
How many kids would we have? Where would we be living? What would our career paths be like? Would I have a career or would I be at home with the kids full time?
I thought about sex with Steve.
I thought of all those photos I’d saved of him.
Yes, I think I could roll around naked with him, I do. He’s probably the only man on the planet I could roll naked with, the only one.
I smiled as the blue heron flew across the water, elegant, strong, independent.
What was Steve’s pond like?
26
My momma made the best of her time in jail.
This is not to say that she liked it but, as she told us, “I gathered my hellfire, don’t forget that line, Madeline and Annie, sometimes you gotta gather your hellfire, and I made the most of a difficult situation. Did you know they don’t allow high heels in prison?” She winked at us. “No pink, either! I broke my own cardinal rule: Don’t be frumpy! Let yourself shine!”
The warden of the women’s jail had a sister who was a customer of Momma’s, and she raved about Momma’s Marie Elise’s Excellent Cuts and Cuticles. The warden asked Momma to cut the inmates’ hair and do their nails. You had to earn the haircuts and the manicures, though. You couldn’t get one automatically, like a standing appointment on Thursday at four o’clock after mopping or laundry duty. So, using that bribery, the ruckus at the jail went way, way down. It’s amazing what a cut and style can do!
“Those girls,” my momma told us one day when we were visiting, “at least most of them, have been led astray by the men in their lives. They had terrible childhoods and they were led into drugs or alcohol and made messes of their lives. I tell them, when you get out of jail, practice the I Am Me, Stay Out Of My Way program. I tell them, you go to college and get a degree, you get training, you stay away from those gutter-minded idiots. Keep your hair and nails trimmed and styled all the time, proper and pretty. If you’re broke, buy one crisp white blouse and one pink blouse, one pair of beige pants, one pair of black pants, and never be without a black skirt and black heels. Put your chin up, your shoulders back, and walk like you’re worth it. That’s the Shake Your Confidence and Strut talk I give.”
She led hairdo and makeup classes at the jail, which she called “Being a Lady” classes. It was “how to look like a respectable lady and attract respectable people to you, not bad people, not slutty people, not criminals, but respectable people, because you ladies are respectable!”
She told me later, when she was out of jail, “Honey, I had to do something in there, had to help those other ladies, or I’d lose my mind. I missed you and Annie so much, my stomach almost ate me alive. Now let me give you an updo with those curls of yours, and we’ll play dress up with Annie. Go and get your sister.”
After the shooting, Grandma and Granddad moved permanently into our house. There were attorneys, advisors, and experts coming in and out all the time, like ants. My momma’s trial was coming up faster than any other trial because everyone knew Marie Elise was dying.
The enormous amount of publicity from my momma’s shooting lent a hand to speed, too. We were on the rocket docket.
Our grandparents gave us the attention they could, but their main goal in life, almost all they could think of, was getting their critically ill daughter, whose headaches were increasing, even with the medical attention the hospital was offering her, out of jail.
I watched my granddad order everyone around. He told the attorneys and everyone else what to do. He was in on every meeting, every plan, every thought, every idea. He yelled. He was intense, driven, focused.
He would save his daughter or die trying.
I watched my grandma handle every minute detail. She was the co-boss. She was the organizer; she was the one with the notebooks, the law books, the phone. She was the one calling on experts all over the nation. She hardly slept.
She would save her daughter or die trying.
Annie and I, we missed our momma so much, we felt like dying.
Nighttime was the worst. Annie and I slept together. We ached for our momma, for our dad. And the replay of the day in court when our momma blew three men away to hell hardly stopped.
My momma’s trial started on a clear, blue, nervous day, where even the clouds were skittish and wanted to get out of town. Again, I will only repeat the highlights of this particular trial, not the whole thing.
Momma wore a white, slim-fitting dress with maroon-pink trim that dropped to about an inch above her knees. She wore gold hoops in her ears and two bracelets, one from Annie and one from me, which we made with puca shells and pink and yellow plastic flowers. We made ourselves matching bracelets, too. She wore a yellow ribbon in her hair, for hope.
She was gorgeous, even though she was clearly, to us, worn out, pale, exhausted.
She’d been in jail for three months and she had a tumor in her head. That’ll take a bit of a toll.
Her attorneys’ defense?
That would be temporary insanity.
I got it. It meant that my momma temporarily lost her mind.
Here’s what I also got, as did Annie: Our momma had never lost her mind. Not one inch of it. Every bullet that came zipping out of that gun was premeditated. The only question on the Gunshot Day was if she should wear her darker pink dress that resembled smashed cranberries mixed with lemonade or the lighter one with the daisies. She liked daisies.
The prosecuting attorney’s name was Terrence Walters III. Fancy name. Not so fancy family. He’d been brought in from a whole other city. Truth was, there were other prosecuting attorneys who could have, and should have, handled the case against Momma. Why didn’t they? It was because of Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor. All the prosecuting attorneys in the area had wives, mothers, sisters or cousins, who were clients.
As I heard it later, one of the prosecuting attorneys said, “If I go after Marie Elise, my wife will never sleep with me again. I’m Catholic, I can’t divorce, so my life is looking pretty bleak without sex.”
“I can’t prosecute Marie Elise. Hell, she came to my sister’s house every four weeks for a cut and dye when she had mono. No way.”
“That is not gonna be my case,” Maggie Gee’s brother said. “I would have done the same thing that Marie Elise did if someone went after my daughters except I would have used my hunting rifle, because I’d be going hunting.”
So we had Terrence Walters III from Boston up against my momma. He had the slickness of a city attorney and the ferret face of a man with a pinched-up personality. His family line had been in and out of jail for generations and he was the first “break out,” so to speak. To be fair, his father, a convicted murderer of two whom he popped off in a drunken bar fight, was quoted as saying his son made a mistake in prosecuting “that sweet woman with the beauty parlor.”
The jury was seated, the courtroom jammed with everyone we knew, the news reporters and the cameras lined up like sardines along the wall. It was déjà vu all over again, times ten.
“This woman,” Terrence the Ferret said as he pointed at my momma at the defense table, as if the jury needed help in locating her, “in cold blood, shot three men who were seated right there, right there, folks, not three months ago. She took the law into her own hands.” He spread out his hands. “We’re not disputing the crime that Mr. Barnes and Mr. Gyrt and Mr. Samson committed. Not at all. What those boys did wasn’t good. It wasn’t good.”
Wasn’t good? I shrank in my seat. Grandma put her arm around me and Annie. No, what had happened to us “wasn’t good.” Grandma was dressed impeccably, jewelry, scarves, a designer dress. Beside her sat Granddad, also impeccably dressed in a suit and tie. I swear they’d both aged ten years in months. Annie and I wore pink dresses and pink sweaters.
The Ruben
steins were in the row behind me.
“It wasn’t good?” my momma called out, her back straight in her white dress with the maroon-pink trim. “It was criminal. It was a criminal act against two innocent, young girls.”
Terrence the Ferret’s mouth dropped. “Your honor!”
The news reporters scribbled.
My momma’s expensive attorneys put their hands on her arms to quiet her.
The judge glared at my momma. “It’s not your turn to talk, Mrs. O’Shea. You will wait your turn.”
I knew the judge, Victor Mangiotti, vaguely. He was the granddad of my girlfriend, Sally, at school. Sally always said he was the, “Awesomest Poppa ever. We go fishing all the time. He knew your dad, Madeline.”
“Since it is his turn to talk,” Momma went on, “it would be a good idea if he did not dismiss the heinous crimes committed against my girls as not good.”
“Mrs. O’Shea,” the judge warned.
My momma waved a hand like, Fine, I’ll be quiet, but my momma was livid. Livid.
And when my momma got livid, she got smart. She always outsmarted my dad when she was mad at him. When he was late for dinner for the third time, she served him chicken. The chicken was still alive. He was never late again. When he was grumpy with her one night, she packed his cooler for lunch the next day and a live toad popped out. No food.
I was miserable, but a tiny part of me wanted to see what my momma would do.
Terrence the Ferret humphed and babbled on imperiously, facing the jury, and told them what happened when my momma had a ladies’ gun in her hand and bang, bang, banged it. “People, we don’t have the right to administer justice ourselves. That’s not what our judicial system is about. It’s not what our Constitution is about. It’s not what this country is about! We leave the law to the law. In fact,” he shouted, “the law worked in Marie Elise’s favor. Sherwinn, Pauly, and Gavin were going to jail! There was justice here. The system worked. We can’t have women”—it sounded like he was spitting the word women out—“parading about who shoot others in a courtroom with hundreds of people present. We can’t have women murdering other people because they’re uptight about a verdict. We can’t have women wielding guns and shooting men who make them mad. We can’t have it. We need safety and truth in our justice system. Truth! Safety! Not women taking control!”
The women on the jury were not happy.
“She thought it out. She planned it. She executed the plan. She’s not sorry for it. You, the jury, have to tell everyone, in this state, this nation, that taking revenge, not following the law, murdering people is not the answer. If you don’t convict this . . . this woman”—he sneered at my momma—“we’ll have people shooting each other right and left, with impunity, with a reckless, anti-American disrespect of the law. Don’t do it, folks, don’t turn America into an anarchist country!” Terrence the Ferret pointed a finger at my momma. I cringed. Annie whimpered.
“Mrs. O’Shea is claiming she temporarily lost her mind.” He scoffed. “Temporary insanity. Marie Elise O’Shea had not lost her mind. She was not temporarily insane. She had not lost it to grief. She wanted to kill those men in cold blood. And—!”
And there it was. My momma was quite clever. She wasn’t an O’Shea for nothin’. She gazed right back at Terrence the Ferret and . . . smiled. She smiled. She knew her beauty. She knew it would throw him.
Terrence stared at my smiling momma, the words stilling in his mouth. His mouth opened. It stayed opened, shocked. He could not move or speak; it was as if someone had stuck him with a spear. I saw him visibly relax, basking in that smile, that peace and warmth, that sexiness.
“And—” he said, but he couldn’t gather his thoughts.
I saw my momma wiggle her shoulders in her chair.
“And—”
I heard her attorneys snicker.
Terrence’s face flushed more. “She—”
My momma, I saw it, she stuck her chest out—she was heartily endowed—and wound a curl around her finger.
“Mr. Walters,” the judge rapped out. “You were saying?”
Terrence the Ferret ripped his eyes from my momma’s smile and that heartily endowed chest. He pulled on the neck of his white shirt, cleared his throat. He stole a peek back at my momma and I saw his Adam’s apple bob. “And this . . . this pink woman shot the men with her sex pistol and she—”
He stopped, mortified. A sex pistol?
“This woman, Marie Elise,” he backed up, as my momma continued to smile at him and wiggle, wiggle. “She whipped up her breasts . . .”
People in that courtroom gasped and tittered.
“I m-m-m-mean,” Terrence the Ferret stuttered, “she whipped out her gun from her cleavage and she shot the honkers.”
The honkers?
Terrence the Ferret wiped his forehead as my momma ran a finger over her lower lip.
One of our expensive attorneys had a hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t laugh with the rest of the people in court.
“She didn’t shoot the honkers,” Terrence the Ferret argued with himself, “she shot my clients with her . . . with her . . . with her soft guns. I mean, she shot them with a gun from her breasts.” He slapped a hand to his face. “With a gun from the inside of hidden . . . in her dress! There was a gun in her dress big bra!”
This was almost funny.
The news reporters scribbled.
My momma fanned herself, tilted her head.
Annie snuggled closer to me.
“She,” Terrence said, flushed and blotchy while pointing at Momma as she tossed back her hair, “in hot blood, I mean, in cold blood, shot three men naked! No, that’s not what I meant! She shot three men and they died and they were angry they died!”
Maybe they were angry they died. I didn’t care. Was I supposed to care?
Everyone laughed.
“Are you all right, Mr. Walters?” the judge droned.
“Yes! Yes!” He wiped his sweaty forehead. “But I want to remind everyone that this pinkish woman is remorseless and wears a bra! No, no! She keeps a gun in her bra! Look there, no, don’t look. There’s a gun! No guns!”
Terrence the Ferret was done and he knew it. He covered his eyes.
“Anything else, Mr. Walters?” the judge asked.
My momma grinned.
“No.” He glared, sweating, at my momma. “She’s a bad, bad, nasty bad woman who shoots men in the hard groins!”
More laughter. Terrence the Ferret looked pale and sickly, but he had one more argument.
“ Women should not shoot men they’re mad at. Women should not have the guns to do that. They should not have their racks up and shooting. They can’t take the law”—he turned and stared at my momma and pointed a finger as my momma drew a finger down her cleavage—“into their breasts!”
Laughter filled that courtroom, even the jury box, but I could tell, even as a kid, that this attorney had ticked that jury off. Especially the women on the jury.
It was my momma’s head attorney’s turn to talk.
Dale O’Conner had been raised in the south before moving to Boston and used his drawl to his advantage, through and through. Elegant, but a homebody type. Smart but not snobby. He opened with some down-home information about himself.
“Hello, everyone. My name is Dale O’Conner. My whole family worked in the mines.” He smiled softly. “My father couldn’t believe I wanted to be an attorney but, folks, there was something about the law I couldn’t step away from. I believe in the law, you see. I believe in justice. I believe that people should face the consequences of their actions, but I also believe that the law shouldn’t be too punitive. I believe all that. When my dad was working in the mines he sometimes called a dangerous spot the ‘dark zone.’ ”
He paused, pushed his hands in his pockets. “That’s what we got here, folks. A dark zone. You’ve met my client, Mrs. Marie Elise O’Shea. Her husband, Big Luke O’Shea, who owned O’Shea’s Fisheries, was the father of their tw
o girls, Madeline and Annie. He died in that ferocious storm a few years back in the Atlantic. That loss ’bout crushed my client. She loved her husband very much. But she kept working at her beauty parlor, kept taking care of her girls, and when she thought love came along a couple of years later, she took a chance on it. She took a chance on love. Who among us hasn’t? We’re humans, we take a chance on love.”
I saw the women in the jury smile wistfully. A man wiped an eye.
“That ended disastrously. Her daughters, Madeline and Annie, were horribly abused by Mr. Barnes and Mr. Gyrt and Mr. Samson. Monsters all of them. I cannot begin to describe the . . .” Here Dale stopped, as if to control his feelings. “I cannot describe, as a parent, how it would be to know the terror, the grief, the desolation that Marie Elise felt when she found out what had happened to her sweet, innocent daughters, what crimes had been committed that those men were rightly convicted of.” Dale cleared his throat, then told the jurors, in short, quick form, what had happened to Annie and me in the shack and showed the photos to the jury.
We bent our heads, so humiliated, so hurt, ashamed.
Our momma didn’t want us in court, but our grandparents, and their attorneys, knew the impact we would have on that jury. Free the mother! She shot those men for her two daughters ! Here they are! In pink!
“I have daughters. Two of them. And I have three sons. You all probably have kids, too—nieces and nephews. Maybe grandkids. How would you feel if this happened to your children, your grandchildren?” He waited that one out, so the jury could build their own graphic images. “Why, it’s unimaginable, and if it did, I can guarantee you, you’d feel rage and pain cracking your mind wide open, like a split watermelon.”
Most of the jurors nodded.
“I’m telling you, folks, we parents and grandparents lose our cotton-pickin’ minds when our kids are threatened, if we think their health, their safety, even their emotional health is in jeopardy. We fly into Papa or Mama Bear mode, don’t we? Nothing matters except our kids when we get right down to it. We don’t love anyone more than we love our kids, do we? We might love our spouses mighty hard, and our parents, our brothers and sisters, but any parent, when you get right down to it, they love their kids the most, they love those kids to distraction. They love them completely.”