My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Christopher Schoenlicht, sinner. Mute in his own defense. For there is, or was, nothing to say. He would not speak the name of the true murderer, for he could not. And knowing, sensing, despite his confusion, and his naïveté regarding the law, that both he and the true murderer would be tried for the death of the woman, for there would have been no distinction between them: brothers by blood, brothers by the soul.

  And there was sin. His spirit encrusted, festering with sin.

  Even as his earthly, sin-ridden father proclaimed there can be no sin yet Christopher, once Thurston, knows there is sin.

  For what is The Game but sin?

  For what is The Game but Satan’s strategy, to blind the sinner from his salvation?

  He lapses into a waking sleep. He shouts, springing to his feet to grasp the bars of the animal cage, and shake them—but they are unmovable, as if set in stone. His body is on fire with the bites of demon-insects. A flaming snake is coiled in his bowels, writhing and thrashing. His eyes bulge out of his head, rivulets of tears and sweat conjoined. Then, by a miracle, the chaplain is beside him, not shrinking from kneeling with him on the filth-encrusted floor, for here is a man of God, here is a true believer (fondly mocked by prison guards and by the more hardened of the condemned men) defiant in the face of mere earthly disgust. Grasping Christopher Schoenlicht by his shoulders, shouting into his face, Verily I say unto you! With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible. The man of God and the condemned sinner shouting together, singing, laughing. Hallelujah. Hallelujah!

  2.

  And in this way he became, he exulted in, as a snake may be said to exult brainlessly yet luxuriantly in its skin, the murderer of . . . but he has forgotten the seductress’s name.

  A whore, like any whore of Babylon, Noph, Tahpenes, those wicked cities of the plain that have broken the crown of Thy head.

  Clutching at him, his young maleness. Kissing him freely and lasciviously in the secret and forbidden places of his body. The whore, the female. The woman old enough to be his mother. The lewd drifting eyes, the mouth hungry for his maleness. And the repulsive hairy mouth between her fattish legs that snatched hungrily too: squeezed, plunged, bit: drawing him, his name unknown, down to sin.

  Whether Christopher, or Thurston.

  Thurston, or Christopher.

  Did it matter which of them? it did not, for Satan named them both.

  He accepts this fate. Yet weeps, racked with agony. Kneeling and clutching at his hair, yanking it out in handfuls. Enraged suddenly, pushing away the woman’s caressing hands, his strong forearm suddenly locked beneath her chin, her piercing cries, her panicked struggle, now the moment of bringing his arm back, jerking it deftly back, as he’d once seen his brother Harwood snap the neck of a mangy dog that had been trailing them about and would not go away and what a sensation to feel the delicate bones snap and to feel Death convulse in his arms.

  So, it was I.

  Was it?

  ABRUPTLY, THREE DAYS before his execution, the condemned man refuses to allow the prison chaplain back into his cell. For I am saved, as much as I will be saved.

  Christopher Schoenlicht, the most “publicized”—“notorious”—“notable”—of the half dozen condemned inmates. Is this young man something of a mystery, even to the veteran guards? Even to the veteran warden? And to the prison physician, required by law to examine him or to make a pretense thereof, to declare him, as the morning of his death rapidly approaches, in “fit condition” to be hanged?

  Tall, cadaverous, bearded youth. He’s silent, or sullen. Or struck dumb. Never entirely well, his stomach shrunken and his skin the color of aged ivory, always a fever, always mucus glistening at his nostrils, yet he’s spared the waves of pneumonia, malaria, Asiatic cholera, bloody flux that periodically rage through “The Wall” and eliminate, as in a dramatic display of Darwin’s famed principle of survival of the fittest, of which, in days long ago and only faintly remembered, Abraham Licht spoke approvingly, the weakest of the men. And God saw that it was good, and it was good.

  The condemned man’s age is given as twenty-five. The file for him will note that he has no (known) family, no (known) past record, no (known) history. A possible victim of amnesia, one observer has speculated. No, declares another, a victim of mental illness. But no, insists another, simply a hardened criminal, a subspecies of human being, caring no more for his own worthless life than for the life of the woman he murdered.

  And God saw that it was good, and it was . . . good.

  The Game is never to be played as if it were merely a game: but what The Game is, or was, he no longer knows.

  ARE YOU LISTENING closely, Thurston?

  Will you follow my instructions?

  . . . taken to the prison morgue . . . and from there, by arrangement, to a Trenton funeral home . . . for Lord Shaw will see to it, you won’t be buried in a pauper’s grave . . . then to Manhattan where you will be given clothes, money, identification papers, all that’s required . . . to get to the Canadian border near Kingston, Ontario.

  The snowy-haired ruddy-cheeked English gentleman continues to speak, now daring to grip Schoenlicht’s unresisting hand, squeezing the fingers tight to bid him hear, understand, obey. Even as his mind shakes itself free. Beating and thrumming. Moths’ fluttering wings, the scuttling of rats and giant hard-shelled beetles here in the sewer pipe; the marsh, acres of swampland, marbled clouds reflected in a pool of standing water, a face suddenly reflected . . . a boy’s face . . . but whose? . . . he can’t see, eyes blinded by tears.

  Thurston?

  You will follow my instructions?

  And we will be united again in Ontario, no later than June 4.

  TALL, SWAYING ON his feet, breath shallow and panting and eyes sunk in fatigue, this is Thurston, isn’t it? . . . allowing Abraham to grasp his hand in parting, allowing Elisha, eyes bright with tears, to embrace him . . . for they are brothers, unlikely as it seems. For what is a man’s mere skin, set beside his soul? Thurston’s fingers have closed about the precious little vial but his eyes evade Abraham Licht’s fierce gaze.

  I will, I must. Renounce Satan and his ways.

  Murmuring aloud, “Yes, Father.”

  He doesn’t come to the cell door after the guard has locked it, to watch his visitors walk briskly away.

  THE GUILTY LOVERS

  (BUT, AS THEY are not precisely lovers, need they feel guilt?)

  Millicent, bold and reckless, pretty spoiled Millicent, would inform Father of their love at once, because it is so pure and noble a love; and beg his permission for them to be lawfully wed. Elisha, less certain of Abraham Licht’s response, and made rather more subdued than elated by the discovery of his love for Millie, cautions her repeatedly to wait.

  At least until Thurston is free, and safe in Canada.

  At least until Father is himself again.

  IN THIS PRECARIOUS spring, as May rapidly flies past, they walk together a great deal, in secret, but rarely allow themselves to touch. Kisses are forbidden now, except in certain circumstances: chaste greetings, ceremonial farewells. If they are observed speaking together in low urgent whispers in the manner of plotting lovers they are not in fact speaking of that (which is to say, their alarming desire for each other) but, perhaps, about Thurston and what will become of him in Canada . . . or what Elisha might recall of Millie’s mother (“Tell me anything you remember,” Millie begs) . . . or what Millie might recall of her early childhood in Muirkirk, when Elisha was away . . . or the fortunes of Harwood, the prospects of the youngest children, the likelihood of Father’s marrying again (“Though in actual fact I doubt that he has ever been married at all,” Elisha says).

  Regarding Thurston—Elisha is confident, or seems so, that the plan will work: for Father has seen to every detail, and will even be present at the “execution,” as Lord Harburton Shaw. But Millie, drawing slightly away from him, will say only in a faint voice, “Oh Elisha, my darling—my dream h
as prepared me for the worst.”

  THE INGRATE SON

  1.

  CONDEMNED MURDERER STRUCK DEAD

  BEFORE GALLOWS AT “THE WALL”

  Witnesses Reported “Shocked”

  This, the banner headline for the New York Tribune for 30 May 1910. Tall lurid black letters like a shout.

  For it happened that, before a small crowd of witnesses including the distinguished English prison reformer Lord Harburton Shaw, the young man convicted of having murdered Manhattan socialite Eloise Peck apparently fell into a swoon at the very sight of the tall ugly gallows at the State Correctional Facility, and died within minutes despite the attempt of an attending physician to revive him.

  What a spectacle! What guilty horror passed through the gathering! The execution ritual was hastily aborted and all witnesses save prison authorities were ushered out of the yard and urged not to make further inquiries. It would subsequently be reported in a terse statement by the prison warden that the convicted murderer Schoenlicht had died of “severe cardiac arrest”; for the first time in the history of the notorious prison at Trenton, a man had cheated the gallows minutes before he was to be hanged. As an indignant Lord Shaw told New York reporters, “Witnesses were more shocked and shamed, it seemed, that the means of ‘punishment’ was so cruel as to frighten a man to death, than they would have been had the poor lad been hanged.” For some weeks a controversy raged in the Post and other New York and New Jersey newspapers over the “cruelty” or “justice” of hanging, or of any form of capital punishment. Lord Shaw was a hero to some, an interfering foreigner to others; in his zealous wake, a campaign for execution reform was begun by several Christian organizations to which Lord Shaw was rumored to have contributed generous sums of money. He was said, too, out of pity for the young murderer who’d died of fright, to have arranged for a private burial for him, to spare him “the final ignominy” of a pauper’s grave in the untended cemetery behind the Trenton prison.

  Unfortunately, the idealistic Englishman departed the United States to return to England, unless to sail to Australia, in pursuit of his cause, in early June; and disappeared from the controversy.

  2.

  “What? What do you mean—vanished?”

  “Only, sir, that he—it—is not here. As you can see.”

  “But he—it—must be here. A corpse cannot rise out of his coffin and walk away, surely. I insist that you and your assistants search the premises more thoroughly.”

  “Sir, you can be sure that we’ve done so. More than once, from bottom to top, sir. But he—it—the remains of ‘Christopher Schoenlicht’—is gone; and good riddance, we say. And this was left behind, sir, pinned to the satin lining of the casket—”

  An envelope upon which the name LORD SHAW was hastily scrawled in pencil.

  With shaking fingers Lord Shaw took the envelope, strode out of Eakins Brothers Funeral Home on South Street, Trenton, and, in the street, where his valet Elijii awaited him behind the wheel of a small truck with an open, tarpaulin-covered rear, read aloud this enigmatic message:

  “Thurston & Christopher—forgive.

  I am neither now.

  I renounce Satan & his ways.

  Farewell.”

  From out of the truck Elijii called anxiously, “Lord Shaw? What is it?” seeing the elder man stricken in the grimly pale metallic-smelling Trenton half-light. “Where is—Thurston?”

  The elder man’s face was draining of blood; yet ruddy spots remained on his cheeks, as if in mockery of manly vigor and good spirits. For a long moment he did not speak, until the Indian servant climbed from the vehicle to stand before him; then he said, feebly, though with mounting anger, “He is ‘risen’—and he has, it seems, ‘ascended.’ At any rate, it seems he is gone.”

  “What? How?”

  “Presumably, he walked away. He has, he says”—waving the scrawled message in Elijii’s face—“‘renounced’ us. And has gone.”

  The young Indian, his showy white silk turban so tightly wound about his handsome head that his forehead appeared compressed, gaped at his master in astonishment. Lord Shaw’s elegant British accent had abruptly disappeared and in its place was a harsh, choked American accent, the flat nasal vowels of upstate western New York colliding with the clipped consonants of New York City. Seeing that no one was near, Lord Shaw roundly cursed, “Hell! Damnation! Son of a bitch—his lineage!” swinging himself up into the passenger’s seat of the truck, saying, “And we, too, will be gone. Elijii, don’t stand there like an idiot. I’ve had enough of Trenton, New Jersey, and of the folly of ingrate sons, to last me a lifetime, and more.”

  TWO

  BY NIGHT, BY STEALTH

  1.

  If you cry your tears will turn into fiery red ants and eat away your eyes.

  If you cry your tears will burn rivulets into your cheeks.

  If you cry poison thistles will spring up where your tears have fallen.

  If you cry our enemies will hear and rejoice.

  Never cry except in solitude. But never cry if you can laugh instead.

  NOW THAT HER brother has been sent away to school, now there is no one except the girl who knows of the woman who comes in the night, the woman who smells wet and cold and sharp like night, the smiling woman stepping out of the hill of old bones, lifting her skeleton hand to touch . . . Lifting both her hands, her skeleton-hands, to take hold . . .

  The girl is said to have caused the woman’s death but no one blames her because she was only a baby at the time because she cannot remember the time. Nor does her mother blame her, smiling, whispering, My baby? you are my baby! you love me!

  The slanted crumbling lichen-covered grave markers, the burdocks and thistles and chicory, the dandelions that blossom bright yellow and turn to fluff in days, the smell of hot sunshine, the smell of patches of fog, running too fast in spongy soil you can turn your ankle and fall heavily and cut your silly forehead but never cry if you can laugh instead.

  Because that woman has no power to hurt! because her eyes are stuffed with dirt! the eye sockets empty and stuffed with dirt! any door or window can be locked against her, you can burrow to the foot of the bed to escape her, you can press the pillow hard, hard, over your head to escape her, you can press into Katrina’s arms, Katrina will hide you, the woman is nothing but old bones ground down fine as dust, old bones that are gritty white powder, the eyes are not eyes but empty holes stuffed with dirt, they are not staring they are empty, and that is no voice, that whispering you hear, because she never had a voice.

  MY BABY?

  But she is no one’s baby.

  A tall gawky shy child, nine years old, ten years old, long-legged, clumsy, lank brown hair Katrina keeps thinned and cut short (otherwise it will snarl beneath and hurt, oh, how it will hurt bringing tears into her eyes), small puckered mouth, small deep-set somber eyes, a startled expression, a frightened smile behind the raised fingers, forehead just a little too wide, jaw too thick, feet too long, and she is only eleven years old, joining in the boys’ laughter as they toss dried clumps of mud and cow manure in her direction, as the hard green pears from the Mackays’ orchard fly past her ducked head, her secret is that she loves them all, her secret is that she makes her way by stealth along the back lanes and alleys of the town, at night, she is a red-winged hawk, she is a barn owl with glaring tawny eyes, she spies on them all, she hates and adores them all, how do people live? how do people in other families live? what are the things they say to each other when no strangers can hear? at dusk, at night, behind their partly drawn blinds, behind their filmy gauzy lacy curtains, by lamplight, by the warmth of a wood-burning stove, how do they look at one another? how do they smile at one another? by the high thin tolling of the church bells, as the wind shreds the clouds overhead, what are their secrets we cannot hear?

  She escapes them by flying above the marsh, turning away toward the mountains, where Mount Chattaroy catches the evening sun, she is dipping and circling, soaring, slow,
lazy, perfectly in control, her wide wings scarcely need to move, only the sleek dark feathers ripple in the wind, her beak is made for jabbing, ripping, tearing, but she will do no injury . . . she will do no injury because she is good . . . because she wants only to be a slow gliding shadow, there in the water, to be seen, to be feared, to be admired, to be known.

  She escapes them by turning into a shining copper-colored snake and disappearing into a hole in the ground! . . . she is one of the giant orange butterflies . . . and sometimes a horse, a young colt, silky black mane and tail, black stamping hooves, only the eyes gleaming white, only the teeth flashing white, as she gallops noiselessly along the road . . . in stealth, at dusk, by night, along the road . . . down the long dusty hill and across the narrow wooden bridge that rattles as if the planks are going to fly up into the air as if the rusted girders are going to break but she is not frightened she is not frightened, her powerful muscular legs driving hard, hard, her mane wild, her tail black and silky and wild, her enormous hooves pounding in the earth, she is no baby any longer, there is no need for her to be frightened any longer, the fresh wet smell of the night fills her nostrils, her lungs expand in joy, is that the taste, the acrid gritty taste, of last year’s leaves? is that trickling the sound of the Muirkirk Creek, the shallow rivulets making their way around the great bleached boulders in the creek bed?

  2.

  All that you need to know, Father once whispered, gripping her tight, tight, her tiny ribs aching in his embrace, is that I love you. You are Esther, my daughter, and I love you.