by Neil White
In my mind, Linda was just about perfect. Attractive. Smart. Petite. Quick-witted. The kind of woman people wanted to be near.
We left Oxford for our honeymoon under an awning of brilliant, yellow ginkgo leaves. That evening at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta, with its polished wooden walls and ornate antiques, the clerk handed me two keys. One for the room, the other for an honor bar.
As Linda bathed in the opulent marble tub, I unlocked the bar and tore into the Godiva chocolates and imported nuts. I opened a bottle of Moët & Chandon, and then a bottle of red wine, then a bottle of white, just in case she preferred it to champagne. I scattered M & Ms and caramel squares and imported candies on the bedside and coffee tables. Linda stepped into the room in her robe, fresh from her bath, ready to consummate our marriage. Her skin was smooth and lucent. I could smell the lavender bath oil from where I sat in an overstuffed chair, my mouth full of macadamia nuts. She saw the pile of empty wrappers, corks, and foil. She glanced over at the open bottles and the mounds of candy.
“Look, honey,” I said, “they have this great bar in our honor.”
Under her breath Linda said, “I’ve made a mistake here.”
We loved to tell the honor bar/honeymoon story. We had laughed about it a hundred times with friends and family. And when Linda laughed without reserve, small dimples on her cheeks exposed a tenderness underneath her regal air. I hadn’t seen the dimples in more than a year. Now, on the deck of a prison visiting yard, we didn’t have much to laugh about. I sat down next to her and held her hand. “How are you?”
She forced a smile and glanced down at the ground below. At the entrance to the prison, a guard had waved a handheld metal detector over Linda’s entire body. Then he did the same with the children. One of the female guards said that Linda’s sundress, a dress she had worn to church, was too revealing, too low cut. The guard added that she would be turned away in the future if she arrived in anything like it.
Linda was mortified. She had done nothing wrong. Except marry me. The last year had been a series of humiliations. Bankruptcy. Criminal hearings. Newspaper headlines about my prison sentence. A front-page photograph of the two of us, with Linda prominently featured in the foreground. Expulsion from private clubs where our friends still gathered.
I had convinced Linda early in our relationship that together we were going to make a difference. With her talent and refinement, and my drive and salesmanship, we could conquer any task. I was confident and self-assured—very different from her father—and I knew she was drawn to that trait in me. I asked her to join me in building a publishing empire that would bring with it influence and power, money and prestige, and lead us to places neither could quite imagine. The details of our conquests were not fully developed, but I assured her that the ride would lead in one direction. Up.
We sat among the other inmates. The words came hard.
I told her about Doc and Link and Frank Ragano and CeeCee and other interesting inmates I had encountered. I left out the stories about the leprosy patients. I told her every funny incident I could remember. I hoped to see a glimpse of her dimples. But she couldn’t muster much of a smile.
“I’m glad you’re having a good time.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
But it didn’t. She was bearing the brunt of things now. She lived outside. She had to face the stares from neighbors, from other moms in the carpool line. She answered phone calls from creditors. She overheard the talk about how much money I’d lost and about how many people I’d hurt.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “So sorry I put you and the kids in this situation.”
Linda was tired of my apologies. I had said I’m sorry so many times it didn’t carry much weight now.
“If you’re really sorry,” she said gently, “you’ll change.”
I knew she was counting on that. If I could change, she had told me, she might be able to take me back. But I didn’t know how to change. And, secretly, I didn’t think I needed to. I didn’t want to become a different person. I simply needed to operate within the bounds of the law. I wasn’t about to let go of the skills I’d developed or the plans I’d made. And I had a new plan as an undercover reporter that was going to secure my future. But I didn’t tell Linda. At least not yet. No need to get her involved. Plus, she might not have liked the idea.
Little Neil grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the playground. The racquetball had bounced over the fence and stopped about ten feet outside the perimeter.
“Go get it, Dad,” Neil said. Maggie stood next to him and pointed at the blue ball. They waited for me to step over the three-foot fence and get the ball. I looked around. A guard was watching me from the deck. It had been made clear to the inmates. If you go outside the fence, you lose visiting privileges.
For as long as my children could remember, I had ignored fences and boundaries and rules. I climbed buildings to get balls out of gutters. I jumped curbs to get closer to the entrance of football games. I talked clerks into giving us rooms at overbooked hotels. Nothing much had prevented me from getting what I wanted, and I made sure my children knew it. Now I stood at the edge of a knee-high fence, embarrassed to be so helpless.
CHAPTER 16
That night, just before lights out, Doc asked if I would take a look at the mole he had removed with the razor blade. He stood up, turned his back to me, and pulled up his khaki shirt.
“Did I get it all?” he asked.
I stared at the scab left from Doc’s self-surgery. The spot looked black and jagged. I told him I couldn’t really tell much.
“Is any of the mole left?” he said. “Can you describe it?”
I couldn’t believe he wanted me to examine his back. I couldn’t begin to distinguish between the remnants of the dark mole I’d never seen up close and the scab forming over his incisions.
“I can’t tell,” I said.
Doc sighed in frustration. He walked over to the mirror and looked over his shoulder to try to get a good look at his handiwork.
After lights out, I lay in the dark thinking about Neil and Maggie and how my imprisonment would affect them. Linda told me that she and the kids had been invited to spend the month of July in a Florida condominium with our friends the Singletarys. I thought she needed a vacation from my troubles more than I needed visits. I encouraged her to go.
Linda had never promised to stay with me. The last year had been difficult for her. Too many lies. Too much trust to regain. From the outset, she had never made any guarantees.
I didn’t know if Doc was still awake, but I asked aloud, “I wonder if my wife is going to stay with me.”
Groggy, Doc answered, “Was your marriage solid?”
We had been seeing a psychologist, I told him.
“Not a good sign.”
“I hope we can pick it back up when I get out,” I said. I thought the counseling had been helpful.
“Don’t waste your money.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“If you have a male counselor, he’ll just want to sleep with your wife,” Doc said. He rolled over in his bed and pulled the covers up over his shoulder. “If she’s female, she’ll just want to screw you.”
A stained-glass window behind the pews in the Catholic church where leprosy patients worshipped.
CHAPTER 17
On a Sunday morning in late June, in spite of the three-hour round-trip, Linda brought the children to Carville for the Catholic church service. Families entered the Catholic church from the outside. Inmates and leprosy patients entered from within the colony. A long, curved hallway connected the church to the main buildings. About forty inmates waited for Father Reynolds at the doorway. The leprosy patients went straight inside through an automatic door donated by an ancient order of knights whose members had contracted leprosy during the Crusades.
Stan and Sarah, a couple from the Caribbean, approached the church entrance. Both blind, they wore oversized sunglasses to hide their si
ghtless eyes. Stan tapped his white walking stick hard against the floor and walls. Sarah, his elegant wife, who had contracted leprosy in her early twenties, held Stan’s left arm in hers. She trusted him completely to guide her through the labyrinth of hallways. The blind leading the blind.
“What a curse,” one of the inmates said as they passed us by.
Father Reynolds arrived and led the inmates into the chapel. The church was built in the shape of a cross. The large center wing was available to inmates and families. The left wing was reserved for leprosy patients, the right wing for visitors and nuns. The wings met at a marble altar draped in an ornate cloth. Father Reynolds knelt at the altar. A gold chalice stood at the center of the table.
Linda, Neil, and Maggie waited in a pew in the center wing with the rest of the wives and children. I rushed over and sat between Linda and Neil; I put Maggie on my lap. I was overjoyed to be in church with my family. As Father Reynolds started the service I put one arm around Linda and with the other pulled Neil closer. No guards loomed over us. Even in prison, it felt like a safe place. A sacred place. I had never been in a Catholic church. I was Episcopalian, but the services were virtually indistinguishable.
During the first hymn, I saw an inmate take a roll of quarters from his girlfriend. Across the aisle, another took a small bottle of bourbon from his wife. As we sang stanza after stanza about the glory of God, an eruption of smuggling—coins, cologne, liquor, and Ziploc bags full of cookies and fudge—ensued between husbands and wives.
As Father Reynolds called for the confession of sins, we pulled out the small pad under the pew and knelt. Father Reynolds read from the missalette: Let us call to mind our sins.
The congregation of leprosy patients, nuns, inmates, and families read aloud in unison: I confess to almighty God that I have sinned.
I should have been thinking about my own faults and words and deeds, but I couldn’t resist watching the other men and women pray. The last time I had been in church, I wore a Brooks Brothers pinstriped suit and a $300 pair of shoes. I had been surrounded by my Episcopal friends—a pediatrician, a real estate appraiser, a stockbroker, a newspaper editor, and dozens of other upstanding citizens. Now, on my knees reciting a prayer for forgiveness, I was surrounded by a different kind of congregation. Nat Sykes of Chardon Insurance had collected millions in insurance premiums and left thousands of Louisiana drivers without liability coverage. Daniel Stephens, a Texas savings and loan president, had hired a professional hit man to assassinate his Thoroughbred horses in order to collect death benefits. Lawrence Daily, a jovial Cajun, had been convicted of a price-fixing scheme to corner the wholesale crawfish market. Steve Read, an airline entrepreneur who had laundered money to keep his regional airline afloat, owned the charter airline that had crashed and killed most of Reba McEntire’s band. Ira Kessler collected fees through the front door of his New York pet-funeral business and took money through the back door from Vietnamese restaurant owners. The Kingfish was the first CEO sentenced to prison for dumping industrial wastes in the Mississippi River. The white-collar criminals were joined by an assortment of drug dealers, as well as the Half-man, an expert lithographer and counterfeiter, who was amputated so far up his torso that he was lodged inside a bucket so he wouldn’t fall over in his wheelchair. And there was Sidewinder, who kept his dead mother in a spare room so he could continue to collect her Social Security payments, an act considered so heinous, even among the inmates, he was friendless.
I had been so excited to see my family, I had rushed right past the leprosy patients. I could see them clearly now; they were not kneeling. Some did not have knees. I saw Harry and Jimmy Harris, but Ella wasn’t in church. Stan and Sarah, the blind couple, sat in the front row.
The church had not always been a place of comfort for those afflicted with leprosy. At one point in history, anyone deemed leprous was cast out. A “leper’s mass” was performed. As the afflicted man or woman watched from the outskirts of a settlement, a priest would preside over the burial, a funeral symbolic of the death of the leper. The priest would pour dirt into an empty grave. Cast out, they wandered alone until death. Occasionally, a leper would find a Lazar house where fellow sufferers gathered and lived.
The men and women who sat across from me now came to the same Catholic church that had once banished them. They prayed in unison: I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord, our God.
At Communion, Father Reynolds invited a group of us to stand at the altar. Linda, Neil, Maggie, and I joined Sister Margie, Steve Read and his wife, and a few other inmates with their families. We held hands and formed a semicircle behind the altar table. Neil and Maggie stood between Linda and me. I held hands with Sister Margie; Linda with an inmate who had been convicted of money laundering.
The leprosy patients remained in their wheelchairs and in their pews. Father Reynolds recited the liturgy, drank from the Communion cup, and broke the bread. In the Episcopal church, the next step would be the shared cup.
I had been a lay Eucharist minister, a fancy title for someone who gets to wear a robe and help deliver the wine to parishioners during Communion. I would put the ornate cup to the lips of the communicant, reciting: “the Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation.” During the course of a single Communion, more than a hundred people would drink from the cup. Some lathered their lips with saliva before they drank. Others opened their mouths wide like a fish. Women who wore too much lipstick left a thin, oily film on top of the wine. Some of the older people backwashed bits of the wafer into the dark red wine. It took faith to be a lay Eucharistic minister and still drink from the cup.
A part of me felt honored to be breaking bread with the patients, privileged to be in a church that offered solace and comfort in a place that had seen so much suffering. I didn’t want to offend any of the patients, like I had Harry, but in good conscience, I couldn’t let my family be exposed to the danger of a shared cup. I held my breath, ready to tell Linda, Maggie, and Neil to pass on the cup if necessary.
Father Reynolds stepped in front of each of us with a small plate of wafers. We stood with hands turned up, and he placed a wafer in each palm. I watched carefully as Father Reynolds gave the bread to Harry and Jimmy and Stan and Sarah.
A woman held her mouth wide open, and Father Reynolds placed the wafer on her tongue. Stan and Sarah held out their tiny fingers—so small because the digits had been absorbed into their bodies. Father Reynolds placed a wafer in their palms and then recited loudly, “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.” That was their signal that the wafer was in place. They couldn’t see it. And they couldn’t feel it.
I watched Harry balance the wafer on what was left of his hands. The light behind him poured in from a dark blue, stained-glass window. Inscribed on the glass were words from the Gospel, I will console them in all their afflictions.
Father Reynolds returned to the altar. It was time to drink the wine. He held the chalice high in the air, recited a few phrases, and took a drink from the cup. Then he put it back on the altar and recited the closing prayer.
None of us would be allowed to touch the chalice. I understood why someone with a disease wouldn’t be allowed to drink, but I didn’t know why inmates were disallowed. Part of me was relieved, but I also understood that I occupied a new place in the eyes of the church. I was an outcast right alongside the victims of leprosy.
CHAPTER 18
On Monday morning, I found myself alone with Ella in the cafeteria. We finished our first cup of coffee before 5:00 A.M. She asked if I had gone to church. I told her that not only did I go, but that my family had joined me. That seemed to make her happy. With no guards around, I asked Ella if she would tell me more about the bounty hunter who brought her to Carville over sixty years ago. With the first hint of sunrise filling the windows of the cafeteria, Ella breathed in deeply as if to pull the memory from a faraway place. She put her shiny hands in her lap and intertwined
her fingers. I wished for a tape recorder, but inmates weren’t allowed to have such devices; one of the men had figured out how to use the parts to build a makeshift tattoo gun.
“Do you mind if I take notes?” I asked.
Ella shrugged like she didn’t understand why I would be so interested. Then, with the air of a seasoned raconteur, Ella continued her story.
The man with the gun drove the truck to Ella’s farm and stopped in front of her tenant house, a shack with two rooms and a stove on the front porch. The man walked to the back of the truck, grabbed a hammer and tacks, and picked up the quarantine sign. “Stay put,” he told her.
Ella’s father was as thick as an oak and tall enough to duck to get through his own front door. He farmed twenty acres of land just outside Abita Springs. Ella’s brothers helped with the crops, and Ella had planned to join them the following season. Her father must have heard the bounty hunter’s hammer as he tacked the sign to the side of the house. He came in from the field. The bounty hunter looked over his shoulder, watched for a moment, and then turned back to finish his job.
“My daddy come over to the truck,” Ella said, “and pick me up.” He carried Ella to the front porch and told her to go inside. When the bounty hunter finished, he stared at Ella’s father, tall and straight on the porch.
Ella’s father spoke first. “She my girl,” he said. “I’m takin’ her.”
The man pushed his coat back, just like he had at the school, to expose his pistol. Ella’s father looked down at the gun and repeated, “I’m takin’ her.” He must have known that this man they called the bounty hunter wasn’t a bounty hunter at all. He was hired by the State of Louisiana as a driver. He wasn’t even a real law enforcement officer, though he tried to pass himself off as one. He was just a hired hand, paid $10 for each delivery to the leper home.