by Rod Madocks
Passed
I took Interstate 43 to New Berlin. When we were kids at Waukesha we called the place ‘The Bubble’ because nothing ever happened there. Mulvina Schott did home readings but I didn’t want her to see my skank apartment. ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum’, don’t say nothing bad about the dead, that’s what should have hung outside of her office; instead there was a poster there with a picture of an angel and these words—’peace will fall, time will pass, loving memories will always last.’ Not great poetry but at least it was signaling that she likely wouldn’t hurt me. Her workplace was a two story colonial in a conservation area. There was a flock of grackles in her lot. I find them spooky birds, always hanging round for a main chance with their drag-ass tail feathers and sinister greenish sheen to the black feathers.
Mulvina was an attractive woman with a round Slavic face and tilted eyes, in her 40s and real classy looking. I felt she was apprising me without being too obvious about it and I tried to control my tremor. She took my $75 dollars saying that we should get the ugly part over, then led me into her consulting room. It had soft pastel colors, was full of crystal objects and smelt of aromatherapy oils. I had the thought I wasn’t going to get too many surprises. Mulvina explained how she worked, by ‘channeling’ spirits. I needed to be respectful and aware that spirits responded well to compassion. All the while she gave her spiel her intense dark eyes were boring in on me. Again she told me to relax. I told her I always shook like an aspen. She remained sitting for a moment and recited a sort of prayer. I asked if she was religious she said she was raised Catholic and gradually learned she could communicate with spirit after her mom died when she was 11. She said that’s what she called people who had passed, they were ‘spirit’. I really warmed to her then. I knew I was in good hands. She said the universe pushes us to find our true calling I said I could go with that. She asked me my object and I handed the bundle over. As soon as she had it I could see her smooth brow furrow. She looked puzzled and maybe a little worried.
“I think you’re a sensitive too,” she said.
Spool Three
On the brink of eternity
Exeter Prison, 23rd February 1885
—I thought of being dead and of the world moving without me. All I had known crumbled away. There were no choices left, no threats to make, no promises to give. I had gone to bed healthy and woken with a fever and all seemed strange. I felt Berry’s eyes on me from somewhere close. Watching, measuring, calculating the drop. The warders treated me like an invalid friend whose condition should not be mentioned. Mr Rainford the Chief Warder had handed me a bundle of ribboned scented mail. He said such women often wrote to condemned men, “Somebody loves you, John Lee,” he said in jest.
Sister Millie and Ma came to see me for the last time. I kept a light mood with them and Ma said that I looked as though I were going to a dance. I tried to show them a quiet goodbye in my eyes. Those last days gave me a sort of peace that I’ve never found again. I could see the years ahead without me, Ma sitting by the fire listening to St Mary’s chimes, Katie finding other lovers, Lizzie’s child going out in the world, the sea off Babbicam combing its shoals in all the nets of time to come.
Pitkin and Hine, the village priest, came to my cell also but they discomforted me much more. They had been called supposedly to melt my hard heart to confess. They both hammered on at me for hours until in a weak moment I wrote something on a piece of paper. They pulled the scrap away from me and held it to the lamp. I remember exactly what I wrote. It said, ‘I was asleep that night, and woke to see Lizzie and a masked man creeping down the stairs. That man was Cornelius Harrington.’
Pitkin shook his head. He said it wouldn’t do, but I’d had enough of them and sent them away. It was too late for bleating. The jig was up. A navy saying that, did you know? They said that the ship would sail when the sailor stopped dancing at the end of the rope.
Doctor Kaiser: You told them what really happened on the night of the murder?
—It was too hard to put it all into words but they should have paid attention to that note. After that it was too late. Big, bearded Berry came forward. His cod-fish eyes showed nothing. There was brandy on his breath.
“Poor fellow I must do my duty, step ahead, lad,” he said to me. Then the three minute walk going slowly along the block corridor. The Chief Warder and the Chaplain were ahead and men to each side of me. I set myself to walk straight and keep my head up. The Chaplain’s white gown shone in the corridor. He read aloud from his prayer book. What did he read? Something about how in the midst of life we were in death.
A bell kept ringing. Out the narrow door, into the cold air, and down the steep stairs to the Governor’s garden; the bell louder now and the sound of rooks circling the prison roof. We moved along a path through the thin grass and up to the open shed before us. No scaffold, no steps, just a trapdoor and a bare room ringed by men. All of a sudden, I made out the beam and noose above me in the dark. It was just as in my dream.
A Reading
Mulvina told me she was an empathic. She picked stuff up, emotional and mental, from me and the object I had brought for her to hold. She told me she never knew what would happen in a reading. She couldn’t guarantee bringing ‘spirit’ through. Apparently those that passed took their feelings and personalities with them, they could be having a bad day and not feel like talking. Did I understand? I nodded. She explained that spirit spoke to her and she jotted it down because often it came so fast. She in turn would relay the content to me. Sometimes she did a spirit portrait if the images came. She warned me she was not a counselor and if I needed psychiatric help it wasn’t what she did. I again agreed. I could tell she thought I was a screwball. Maybe she saw that fear in my eyes because she then explained that she was only there to “communicate, appreciate and validate.” She told me to chill out, feel free and be open to communicate. Hell, that was a tough one for someone like me. She said she did not know what spirit would bring. It might not be what I wanted to hear but it would certainly be what I needed to hear. She said not to interrupt her because the voices were often fast and whispery, they could be like psychic nudges, fleeting communications. I was getting tense with this build up and it was a relief when she finally got going with it.
I handed her my object: a pair of old twisted eye glasses wrapped in Mom’s silk headscarf. Mulvina held it all tight in both hands and seemed to be rocking up and down, like a child trying to comfort itself. All of a sudden she opened her eyes wide and looked at me. Her eyes were spookily greenish in the light. She shook her head and began to mutter to herself real quick. I could hardly hear her. She put the scarf bundle down and began to write quickly on a pad. All I could hear was that scratchy sound of the felt tip on paper and her muttering. I can reconstruct some of it because she gave me the pad later. It went like this (I’ve put in the punctuation, there wasn’t any in the original):
“He’s here, my skirtful of hell. Banjo, banjo where are you? His collar. Got something? He’ll show you the way. Want to protect, tree falling in a wood, like that. Saw a journey, letters curled, strange. There, a sudden parting. There are three of them wanting to speak, definitely three, one small, no voice. Are you lost? A tower, you’re making your way there. Quit hurting me! My name is Georgia. You are trying, oh you are trying. Rigid for a moment, a voice saying… Can I get it? Bootiful oh my lovely boy, gone. Craters I call ’em craters, black sand is in his veins, weird shaking, find love, need to forgive. They are three of them here. They forgive because there’s nothing to forgive, shadow. I feel I don’t know what it means? Again threefold. Feel someone is dogging you. You see him also? Protect, this man Eebus, prison of your making, beaten down like pigeons, listen!”
“Phew!” said Mulvina, “I’ve never had that before. It was like headphones being switched on too loud and not being able to turn it off. It’s quite short but that’s all I could stand.” She dabbed at her brow with a rolled Kleenex and lit a scented candle. I could see her h
ands were shaking.
“That was intense. Like a wind blowing through me,” she said. She read out what she had written and told me, “I’m sorry, honey if it doesn’t make sense. I felt a lot of spirit. Many voices but one presence. There was something else.” She started scribbling and scratching on her pad again and showed me a weird cartoonish figure she had drawn. I found it hard to make out, there was a seated figure which Mulvina said represented me then there was another shape hovering over me. I couldn’t get it, a big dark smudge maybe wearing a hat or was that a shock of hair? She also had a clump of figures to one side. They looked like those pictures of grey aliens with big eyes. Mulvina tried to explain that the figure over me was not entirely benign and the smaller entities, the alien figures, were trying to help me.
“Maybe you need to figure it out yourself,” she said, “I can’t explain it.”
Truly, I was shaken up by it all but didn’t want to show I was scared. I needed time on it. I asked her for her written stuff and she gave it and the picture.
“Maybe you need to look after yourself, eat better,” she told me. “There is a road though and you’re on it. It’s leading you to the right place.”
I said, “Thanks, I sure hope so, Mulvina.”
She smiled. She really was beautiful with her dark wavy hair. She handed me back the broken eye glasses wrapped in Mom’s scarf.
“Those are your parent’s things aren’t they? They’ve passed? I can feel that,” I nodded. That’s the only thing Mulvina really got right I guess. She asked if I had any questions. I asked her if there was a heaven. She said,” Yeah, it always beautiful there.” She went on to tell me about how sometimes she saw family groups there celebrating something for someone here on earth such as a birthday. She said that dead people call the place whatever they know it to be, some call it ‘spirit world’, it doesn’t matter just like what we call ‘God’ doesn’t matter. It’s whatever you want or believe it to be. In the same way heaven is whatever they want it to be. Mulvina said sometimes she saw a beautiful garden with benches and big beautiful Greek- type buildings that look like they are made of marble. She said that they can create things only with a thought if they don’t like it they think it away, and think something new. Sometimes, according to Mulvina, when a spirit has a very sick and tired body when they go to heaven there is a place they go where their spirit guides will perk them up with more energy. I said it sounded real nice. She told me the big old universe is pushing us along towards discovering who we really are, we may kick or scream and not like it and feel very afraid of being pushed out of our nests but we need to go on that journey.
“And Hell?” I asked. What did she make of that? She replied, “That’s for those souls who are lost, honey. That’s all I know.” I thanked her and I really meant it.
Spool Four
The Eyes of the Lord Are in Every Place
Portland Prison Dorset, 1907
—I was on C Block South. They’d march us in column of twos to the exercise yard. That whump whump sound always filled the place. We’d go in a blue-grey line along the beaten track around the edge of the yard. High stone walls penned us in. We called the stone work ‘ashlar’. You see, we ourselves built most of the walls that kept us in.
Doctor Kaiser: Where is this you’re speaking of now?
—That was in Hell my good sir. Otherwise known as Portland Prison. On a headland it was, a crumbly limestone lump out in the sea, and that endless foot slogging kicked up the limestone dust. In Portland in summer you ate that dust all day and it made a sticky clay in winter. During exercise we had half an hour ‘association’. This was the only official time that we could talk. It was a privilege you got if you were a long sentence man. Some prisoners had forgotten how to speak properly after being for years on the silent blocks, and many of the poor craiturs spoke in a strange way out the side of their mouths without moving their lips.
One long term man was Adolph Beck. He was in his middle years when I met him at Portland. He always whispered for the news when I came to give him his oakum each morning. He was all over the papers just like me. He had been mistaken for another fellow in a crime with eleven witnesses ranked up against him and with no chance of giving his own evidence at his trial. He got seven years and served every day of it, vulishly pleading his innocence to all who came across him. He served his time at Portland and was let out in about ought one but, most strangely, reconvicted again when he was once more mistaken for the same swindler that he had been confused with afore. They eventually changed their minds after a year or so of his second sentence when the actual man who did the deed had been identified. I heard that Beck drank himself to death after being released. According to the papers of the time there has been ‘an unthinkable error of justice.’ Ess, well, I knows all about unthinkable errors of justice.
I had nearly gone mad myself in the early days. Those nine months solitary in Pentonville and the Scrubs were a soul killer. It was a relief to go to the public works at Portsmouth despite the awful hard work, and later in Portland you could whisper to other men during chapel and on the work parties and there was that permitted half hour’s association for long-sentence men with good conduct. After I had done twenty years inside, I needed conversation less anyway. I liked my cell time away from the other men, alone, studying the papers brought by the chaplain from the library. These showed little bits of how the world was changing outside. A new century had come. I had grown stronger over the years; stronger in character that is. I had hardened as a man and grown a horny shell. I wanted to live for my freedom. Thoughts I once had of escape and of revenge had burned away under a thousand workyard suns. I held to a strong will to win over the authorities and to steer my own fate. I was John Lee who could not be hung and could not be put away. I would prevail although so many were ranked against me.
Doctor Kaiser: How did you survive the experience?
—I became a good judge of character though I was surrounded by hard men. We long sentence men stuck together. The others sometimes spoke of what they had done to be in clink but most of them knew not to ask me about my offence for I was famous on the outside for the authorities’ failure to hang me, and that had brought me respect. They knew that I had carried my innocence for twenty years and even the doubters respected me for that without believing in it for a moment. They looked up to me because of my strong spirit and my fight with the prison system. We spoke of the things we had in common, how the summer sun burned our heads and necks out in that bare exercise yard, how to lessen thirst by sucking stones. We always moaned together about the food. It was barely stomickable. Slimy bits of grey pork each day and split peas and potatoes with half an ounce of salt measured out separately. In the last years they started serving a sloppy vegetable stew which the men called the ‘yellow peril’ due to its roiling effect on our innards. I had lost most of my teeth and it was hard chewing on the tough globs of meat. Hog bristle tooth brushes were given out at some stage but I continued to clean my remaining pegs by rubbing at them with a flannel and a pinch of salt. How my teeth ached. Year after year the prison dentist called with his long, dirty apron and smell of ether, yanking out one tooth after another. Strong-rooted and black as coal, those teeth came out slow as if holding onto their memories.
I did not speak much to the other prisoners about my petitions and the work that family and well-wishers were doing on the outside. It was as if I spoke too freely about it then the hurt when those petitions for release were denied would be the more crushing. I did not want to fall so low as I did before when I really believed I would be set free after the twenty year period had passed. The Home Office had said 'no' to my application and that was the only moment that my will had really gone weak. For a while then I became a mazy-jack and wanted to let go my grip, the hold on hope that I had carried all that time. Then, I’d thought of throwing myself off the one of the sheer prison quarry faces but I soon pulled myself together.
Sometimes I spoke to the friendly ass
istant warder Crook from Crediton, one of two Deb’m men on the staff. Crook fed me news about my petitions and about what the papers said there was danger in revealing this knowledge. When I went before the Governor asking about the progress of my requests the Governor had set the chief warder Luscombe onto tracking down my informants on the prison staff.
Then all of a sudden one summer day in ought seven I was pulled out of a column at exercise and led through the yards to see Governor Briscoe.
They made me wait a long time next a sign that read The Eyes of the LORD are in every place. I knew the sign well as I’d stood outside that Governor’s office so often over the years waiting on this or that, answers to petitions, requests for doctor or dentist. Ess, the Lord had worked in strange ways, saving me from execution but leaving me to that living death.
They pushed me into the Governor’s office. Briscoe was scratching something into a ledger as we came in. He looked prapper angry about something and paid me no attention for an age. They said he had been an officer in charge of military stores at Gibraltar for twenty years. A man for figures. He dealt with the prisoners all the same way. He never shouted or bullied but he made it plain that you did not matter. Eventually he looked up and asked how I was behaving. The staff muttered their usual complaints agin me, how I thought I was cleverer than them. How I was suspected of contacting outside agents contrary to regulations but it could not be proven yet. Said I was on stone dressing gang duties. How I complained of my health and my teeth. The doctor thought I was shamming it. They had nothing good to say about me. The Governor looked at me as if he had found something on his shoe. It was hard to say what he was thinking. Some of the prisoners thought that he was afraid of them. He said he had a letter for me; it was from Ma. They never let me read my own letters because of my drumming up support and petitions for my release. I had requested release every one of the last fifteen years of my sentence and the answer always came back ‘no grounds’.