“That’s why? To keep them perfect?”
“I would have done anything for Lucia and River, but I couldn’t handle it any more. Lightman. His mother. Santane. The rattles.”
“Then why not take your own life? Why take theirs instead?”
“Suicide is a sin, Aunt Ellen. And I couldn’t leave River with the Nogalus. Who wanted Lucia besides me?”
“Your mother would have taken Lucia. She would have taken them both. Please don’t call me Aunt Ellen.”
“But she wouldn’t have wanted them. She might have started to love them, but I couldn’t take that chance. Lightman wanted River, and I couldn’t let that happen. No one wanted Lucia except God and me. Now they’re safe in a way we can’t even imagine.”
“They’re not safe, Ruby. They’re dead.”
She laid the photograph gently on my knee. “Thank you for bringing this, but please take it with you. I want to remember my daughter with her lovely eyes open.”
“I know that you’ve lied to me. You’ve lied about a bunch of things. Royce would never have concocted a plan like that kidnapping. And why put the notes about Nod inside their shirts?”
“I have not lied to you, Aunt Ellen. There may be things I haven’t told you. I did not tell you that I drove out to the camp the day before it happened, that I went by myself to make sure that I knew the route. I knew that the kidnapping plan was weird, but Mr. Dabley had the rattles. When I got out there, two men I’d never seen were carrying out guns and boxes. They were hateful men. One of them snarled at me, and the other one said my father was going to get what was coming to him.”
“And after that you still gave the children the Benadryl and took them out there the next day?”
“Those men were moving out, so I thought it was part of the plan. And I needed to see Daddy. I needed to talk to him.”
“You still believe it was Royce who wrote you those letters?”
“Could you bring me the rattles? And his shirt?”
“Ruby, you were right. Royce is alive, but no one can find him.”
She stared down at her lap. “Did you know ‘Jesus wept’ is the shortest verse in the Bible?”
“Yes, I know that.”
“I understand now why Jesus cried.”
“Ruby, do you remember Nod? Do you remember the camp?”
She studied her lap, as if the answer lay in Corinthians. “Daddy thought I didn’t, but I did. There was this man, he was so skinny he looked sick. He had a voice sort of like music, and he gave me something to drink. I got so sleepy my eyes closed, but I could still hear them talking and moving around. I had on my baptism gown, and my hair was wet. I remember my hair being wet, but my dress wasn’t, so maybe that’s not a correct memory.”
“Are you making this up for me right now?”
“I never told Santane. They took off my underpants. I was lying on the altar. There was a bright light, but Daddy came and stopped it.”
“Do you know what they wanted to do?”
“Daddy was yelling at them. He had a snake around his arm. ‘She’s my daughter! She’s my daughter!’ I’ll never forget it. I was only six. I think I was six. We were still living in secret places, and we had to pretend Daddy was someone else. That was when I found the pictures and he made Rommel get down in the hole. But after he left, I could always remember him shouting, ‘She’s my daughter!’ and then I could go to sleep.”
“They were planning to sterilize you.”
“Yes, I realized that much later. But Daddy wouldn’t let them. Then, after Lucia was born, when she got so dark-skinned, I knew I’d ruined any chance of ever belonging to Daddy again. River would belong to Lightman no matter what, but Lucia only belonged to me and to God. The duct tape was in the trunk with Lightman’s toolbox. It felt like somebody else was hitting me in the head and tying me up.”
“But why try to hide what you had done?”
“So he would come.”
“You still thought Royce would come?”
“He said he loved me more than anything.”
“He didn’t, Ruby, he didn’t love you more than anything. He’s alive, and he didn’t come, and he won’t come, and he doesn’t love you more than anything.”
“I know he loved Santane, and I’m not nearly as yellow as she is. I could have had my eyes fixed.”
“Let me get this straight. You thought that if the children were gone, then maybe Royce would claim you? Ruby, don’t you understand that during all those other years, he could have contacted you and didn’t?”
“Yes, but he sent Mr. Dabley and the rattles, so he must have changed his mind.”
My gorge rose, and I feared that I would throw up. “You thought you would get rid of the kids and get your eyes fixed, and then he’d come?”
“Please get his undershirt and bring the rattles to me,” she said, staring down at the Bible. “I need them.”
“She killed them because they weren’t white,” I said to Blake. “Whatever crazy plan went on and whether my brother was involved or not, she killed the children in an attempt to please him. I don’t know how to stand it. Maybe it’s taken me all this time to face it clearly. Estelle has probably guessed it all along. Ruby put her children in that refrigerator because she thought that was what Royce would want her to do, and then maybe she could get him back. She looks like me, and he’s my brother and we’re white, Blake, white people like you and me. I drove my brother to school. I defended him against our stepfather. He was a wonderful kid. I always say I hated him, but I was just jealous. He got more privileges because he was male, but so what? Then he wrote that wonderful novel. Maybe I could detach better if he weren’t my brother. If I believed in Satan, I’d think Satan had grabbed him with those snakes. I just want white terrorists to be somebody else’s problem. Let me watch the news and go tsk tsk tsk. Let me change the fucking channel!”
“Ellen, you are not personally responsible for racism in America.”
“He sent Ruby those rattles. Who knows what he and his people are capable of? I keep thinking that my brother and his followers are somehow tied to Timothy McVeigh. Is there any way you can find out who is really buried in my brother’s grave?”
“Maybe no one. I think it’s true they found your brother’s DNA at Whidbey Island. I’ve checked several sources. But apparently all they found were fragments. So, who knows what they sent to you to bury? It’s possible your brother escaped when the house caught fire and Mathews chose to stay. In any case, their followers think they’re both heroes. Look at McVeigh and the people like him. If your brother got burned and managed to live through it, he might be very important to these people. He might be viewed as a martyr who can still lead.”
20
The new batch of Royce’s papers was fragmented and semicoherent. There were drafts, illegible hand notations, soliloquies of rage and self-pity, and rapturous encounters with his destiny. There were also a few facts.
Royce’s research traced the origin of the Silent Brotherhood to the Christian Identity movement, which had been rooted in the nineteenth-century British Israelist movement. The British Israelists had been pro-Semites who believed that the Northern Europeans were the lost tribes of Israel and that the Jews were the original tribe of Judah; therefore, the Jews were white and could not be the enemy. But, in the 1920s, the Israelists had evolved into the Christian Identitists, who, caught in a global tide of anti-Semitism, began to declare that Anglo-Saxons were the chosen people, and they devised elaborate theories to account for the existence of the Jews. One biblical hypothesis involved an ongoing fight between the archangel Michael and the fallen angels; a more evolutionary theory postulated that white people emerged from Homo sapiens, but Jews and the dark races emerged from lesser lines of humanoids.
Royce, studying this material, arrived at his peculiar conclusion: the mistake about Jews was the vital flaw in the white supremacist analysis, and anti-Semitism was a disastrous path. Like his mentor, Royce subscribed to the
notion that evolution would transform men into gods if the white race could purify itself, but his views about Jews thrust him into open conflict with both Pierce and Mathews.
Each of these three men believed he held the crowbar that would move the rock of history, but Joe Magnus was infuriated that Royce had stepped so rapidly into a leadership position. The most coherent and talented piece in Royce’s papers was his novelistic attempt to imagine his old friend’s point of view:
FOR JOEY
This was how it had always been, Royce in front of him, and Royce knew shit about coons, never sat next to them in school, never faced gooks, never learned that killing could be joyous. He’d only killed Joe’s father.
Joey had despised his father, good riddance, but he hadn’t understood that he would lose his chance to join the Marines and get stuck taking care of his mother and sisters. But then his draft notice came, so he got out of that mess. He loved basic training, loved that it was so hard, and when he felt the thudding of his heart before he slept at night, he felt happy.
Vietnam was stinking and hot and strange, and he learned not to trust anyone. He’d only been in country four months, cited for bravery, made his first kill, when the lieutenant he trusted got wounded. The new lieutenant was a half-breed from West Point, and Joe made one little joke about fragging him and a dishonorable discharge followed. Now he couldn’t ever live in Charleston, but fuck them all, he’d go out West and find the righteous men he’d heard about.
He was a good soldier in the Brotherhood too, until Mathews made him kill a white man. Lonnie mouthed off in a bar about one of the bank robberies, probably so drunk he didn’t even know he was talking. But a few nights later, Joe and another man had to walk Lonnie out into the woods to dig up a cache of arms, but instead they hit him with their shovels and buried him. Not a good feeling.
Then Royce became a star, writing those stupid articles. How could Royce be a leader if he had a gook kid? Something had to be done about Royce’s kid, so Joe started saying that half-breeds needed to be fixed. Not killed, just fixed, so they wouldn’t be able to make more garbage. They clipped the black kid, the one named Stretch, who wasn’t really Jonesie’s, just someone he’d picked up as a pet, and they were going to do Royce’s girl next, but then Royce came in with that fucking snake, and that little doc—he was a veterinarian but righteous—got more scared by the snake than he would have been by a gun. So Royce got to take his kid away.
Mathews decides we have to be separated, so it’s me he sends to Elohim City to meet this Strassmeir guy who knows how to make bombs, and he tells Royce to study poisons and learn to make something called ricin.
Killing Lonnie sounded too detailed to be made up, so I assumed it was an event Royce had actually learned about. His need to understand Magnus was touching but nauseating too, because he could do it with such empathy. I glimpsed once again how difficult it had been for Royce to grapple with his humanity, and to try to extinguish his capacity for personal love.
But this was the most disturbing fragment I found in his papers:
Of course we must breed eugenically. Mixing races dumbs us down and will lead to genetic chaos. How can it be in society’s best interest to make room for the impaired? And the dark races are impaired by definition. Sentimentality is always weakness, Ellen …
Had my brother really written my name in these pages Santane gave to me? Had he addressed me this way, directly? Was it possible that, during all these lost years, my brother and I had remained lodged in each other’s brains like splinters?
PART III
We have met the enemy …
—WALT KELLY, Pogo
1
At first I couldn’t find him.
It seemed easiest to base my search in New Mexico, since Sister Irene wanted me to keep seeing Ruby, and whatever had happened between Ed Blake and me still felt ragged, unfinished. Ruby’s prison was located near Santa Fe, several hours from both Albuquerque and Gallup, so I alternated between staying at the El Rancho Hotel, which had begun to feel like an old friend, and sleeping at Sister Irene’s house, at first on her living room sofa.
Assuming I was still being monitored, I changed my room regularly at the El Rancho, which might have been silly but did let me sleep with a lot of stars. I tried the Kirk Douglas room, then the John Wayne, the Katharine Hepburn, the Rita Hayworth, and even the Ronald Reagan, before settling into Troy Donahue. I searched every room meticulously, yet found only a dead spider under Errol Flynn’s carpet. Ed Blake had suggested, somewhat uncomfortably, that I might stay at his house when I was in Gallup, but I declined. The rooms at the El Rancho didn’t have refrigerators, so I bought a mini-fridge to stash my Cokes and ice cream. The manager let me store my belongings in Troy Donahue whenever I was away.
At Sister Irene’s, whom I’d begun to think of as The Friendly Nun, the sofa was soft and lumpy, and the third time I arrived, she had arranged for someone to “refocus” her meditation and prayer space above the detached garage. Off the large single room were a toilet and shower, so she’d added a bed, a small refrigerator, a toaster oven, and a microwave.
“You’re moving me in?” I said, not quite sure how to accept such largesse.
“Well, it’s not like there are any motels near the prison,” she said. “And you won’t be here that often. I might find a guest space useful. In any case, I can still pray here most of the time.” She pointed at what might be described as an altar. It was a worn art deco vanity from which the round mirror had been removed, and on the wall behind the remaining circle of wood hung a large extraordinary bas-relief cross holding an unfinished Jesus whose tilted head, outstretched arms, and nailed feet were barely discernible, emerging from a polished piece of maple. Jesus’s crown of thorns extruded nubs of lightness, as did his nose, brows, knees, and right hand. The dark sheen of the rest of his form surrounded these smaller elements. The chair that had originally belonged with the amber wood vanity had been pulled back, and a padded kneeling bench was placed on the floor before it. Several rosaries hung from the drawer knobs.
“I hope he’s not planning to spook me.”
Her smile looked like laughter. “It’s just a piece of wood.”
“Right, and I’m just a pile of protoplasm.”
Sister Irene’s eyes continued to bother me. They seemed too clear, the whites too clean, the blue irises too deep, but I decided her disconcerting gaze was an accident of birth. Later that night, as she heated frozen fried chicken dinners for us and socked down several beers while I drank my Cokes, she seemed to be floating around her kitchen in a bright, billowing muumuu. Her short hair was gelled straight up. “You know this one?”
She sang:
Oh, dear, what can the matter be,
Seven old ladies were locked in a lavatory,
They were there from Monday to Saturday,
And nobody knew they were there…
“I’m not much of a singer.” I sat at her breakfast nook, holding very still.
“I’ll bet you know this one.” She flounced through the door into the living room. I followed her and sat on the sofa I’d used on my last visit. Joni Mitchell’s album Blue began to play on an old-fashioned turntable.
“Sister Irene,” I said, “are you trying to tell me you’re gay?”
“I am, indeed.” She sat down across from me on the ottoman of an armchair, and I shrank back like Lily Biggers had on my sofa.
“I’m queer as I can be,” she said, “and proudly so. But I’m celibate, so don’t be nervous.”
“I’m not nervous.”
She laughed. “Ellen, I don’t have that many people I can be my real self with, even for a few minutes, but you’re obviously such an old outlaw, I knew I’d enjoy having you around.”
I said, as if I were holding out a crucifix against a vampire, “I’m a sober alcoholic. And I’m not much of an outlaw anymore. Well, mostly not.”
“Of course I do have to remain closeted at the prison, though I’m sure
some of the inmates suspect. Or maybe they just sense how deeply I love women.”
“Does Janine Pitts know?”
“Janine will have to tell you her own story, or not. We’re good friends, although I’d never heard of her until she became warden here. She’s been warden for ten years, and I had already been here twelve when she arrived. Her presence has been a gift for me, and also for the prison, but I think she needs to retire. She developed a bleeding ulcer a few years ago, and with the stress of a job like hers …”
“Sister Irene, can I tell you that my life keeps getting stranger, even by my own standards?”
“Well, for some of us the world may seem more inexplicable than it does for others, but my guess is that it’s all ordinary.”
“That sounds like something I’d say, but you’re a gay nun in a flowered gown who works in a prison, so of course you’d think it’s all ordinary. Ha, I’ve made you laugh.”
“I’ve been laughing ever since I saw you carrying that trout bag.”
“You knew what it was?”
“Every year I go trout fishing in Montana for a week with two other nuns. They both have trout bags like that one. I prefer a creel.”
“I’m not speechless,” I said.
We drank three cups of instant coffee while I briefed her on the history of the Burns and Magnus and Tillman families. I didn’t say much about Ed Blake except that he had helped me and that I trusted him, off and on. I skipped over our sexual connection and our suspicions about rogue governmental complicities, but I described what it had been like when he took me into the cave, and I gave her a brief version of Ruby’s account of what happened.
“It’s basically what she’s told me,” Sister Irene said. “Maybe a few differences.”
“What kind of differences?” When she didn’t answer, I said, “How can you be a nun? How can you even be a Catholic?”
“I love God and trust him.”
“Him?”
She shrugged. “Have it your way.”
“What about the Catholic doctrines on women? And the politics? You and I are evil in the eyes of your Church. We’re abominations, and that’s the word Ruby claimed those lunatics were using about her children. Aren’t people like us supposed to be God’s mistakes?”
Tomb of the Unknown Racist Page 19