Madman Walking

by L. F. Robertson

  * * *

  Judge Redd’s report was not the end of the game, though. The judge’s mandate from the state Supreme Court had been to act as what the court called a referee, to take evidence, make factual findings, and make a recommendation. The state Supreme Court would review Judge Redd’s findings and recommendation and decide whether it agreed with him that Howard should get a new trial. First there would be another round of briefing, in which the losing side made objections to the referee’s findings and the winning side defended them, and then more waiting while the Supreme Court weighed everything before it and decided how it should rule.

  So we filed our defense of Judge Redd’s ruling and waited some more. Mike presented our claim for fees and expenses to the state Supreme Court, saying, “Maybe they’ll be inclined to be generous since we won,” and divided the money when the check arrived. They weren’t as generous as they might have been, but it was enough to allow me to dream briefly of a trip to Paris before I consigned most of it toward a new roof for my house.

  46

  Mike visited Howard soon after Judge Redd issued his report, to give him the good news. He told me afterward that Howard seemed somewhat pleased, but concerned that he’d be retried and sent back to the Row. “I told him I really doubted it,” Mike said. “They have the gun and the DNA and Forbush’s testimony, and Scanlon and the other AB guys who testified at the hearing would testify at a retrial. And they have to deal with the embarrassing facts about their concealment of the letter. I doubt that this case will be tried again. I’m not sure how he took that; you know how he is. He seemed to listen and then went off on some other topic.”

  But with the prospect of exoneration and release from prison before him, Howard changed. He still called, but only every couple of weeks, to rant about why the court was taking so long to issue a decision and why we didn’t do anything to hurry it along. He spoke of suing the lot of them—the prison, Sandra Blaine, the judge, the mayor of Wheaton, the governor. He complained about the prison—the guards, the food, the absence of air conditioning. But the urgency and focus of his anger was missing.

  It isn’t unusual for men faced with the prospect of leaving prison to be anxious or even depressed about what the future might hold for them. When I traveled to San Quentin to visit Walt Klum, I saw Howard also. He looked older and tired, but when I asked him how his health was, he said he felt okay. He seemed a little more connected with reality: in between descriptions of the multitudinous conspiracies against him and flights into strange realms of religion or space travel, he sometimes talked about getting out and seeing his mother, of eating home cooking and learning about computers and the Internet. Often he worried that the state and his family would make him see doctors, put him on medication, or try to lock him up in a mental hospital. I tried to keep him focused on the positive side of his freedom, and he seemed a little easier when the visits ended.

  Once he talked about the parable of the prodigal son. “My father was like his father; he thought I was dead, and then I came back. And,” he said, with something like satisfaction, “my brothers were angry like his brothers.” He stared intently at me across the table. “Now my father’s dead.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said again, impatiently. “He’s dead, and so am I. How do I come back if he isn’t there?”

  “But you’re not dead,” I said lamely.

  “I’m dead,” he said. “I was dead the last time, too, but they didn’t know.”

  One day I had a letter from him in my mail. I waited until I was back home to open it; Howard’s letters, though less frequent, never included anything but long rants and drawings. This one was a single folded sheet of paper with the words, “John 8:23” hand printed in the center.

  I looked up the verse online. There were many versions, from different editions of the Bible, but the King James, which was generally Howard’s choice for quoting, read, “And he said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world.” It seemed of a piece with what he had been saying in his visits and phone calls; I figured I’d mention it to Mike, the next time we talked.

  In October, wildfires burned through Sonoma County. All of us, it seemed, knew someone who had lost everything as the fires burned past the woods and into the town itself. Mike’s home and office were okay, but some friends of his who had lost their home were staying at his house. Harriet and Bill were also hosting refugees. I didn’t have room for guests, but I was playing foster mom to a couple of dogs while their families found someplace to live.

  On a hazy October morning, after I had spent an hour walking Charlie and his foster sisters in the smoky air and was bringing a basket of apples into the kitchen, I heard my office phone ring. I left the basket on the counter and hurried to pick it up. It was Mike.

  “I just heard from the prison,” he said. “Howard passed away last night.”

  I felt as though the floor had dropped away under my feet.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He sounded as stunned as I was.

  “What happened? Do they know?”

  “Not much yet. What the woman from the prison said was that guards found him in his bed and unresponsive. He apparently died in his sleep. I just called Dot; she’d already heard from them.”

  “How is she taking it?”

  “Pretty well. I asked her if she’d be okay—not that there was much I could do, I guess—and she said she was and that she’d called Lillian and her sons, and they were coming over. I offered to work with the prison on funeral arrangements, but she says they’ll take care of it.

  “When I get the death certificate,” he said, “I’ll notify the court. They’ll probably let the case drop as moot, but I’m going to file a motion asking them to write an opinion because the misconduct here was so egregious, it needs to be called out in some way.”

  I said I’d help him with it.

  I went through the rest of the day feeling lost and unfocused. I couldn’t stay at my desk, so I set up the apple peeler and made applesauce, then took the dogs for another walk. There was an exercise class that afternoon, and I decided I really should go. When I met Harriet at her house, I told her, “Howard Henley died last night.”

  “Oh, no, you mean the man whose case you just won?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. All that work you did—and he was innocent, too. And now he’ll never get to be free—that’s really terrible.”

  “It really is,” I said. “You know, I’ve known him for probably fifteen years. He used to phone our office and ask for me, then spend the whole call ranting. Why I should miss that, I don’t know. But he didn’t deserve to be there.”

  Getting winded and sweaty was good therapy, though my heart wasn’t in it. When I came back to the house I fed my menagerie of cats and dogs and made myself a dinner of scrambled eggs and toast and applesauce and ate it without really tasting it. The evening opened out before me oddly empty. I couldn’t shake the feeling of floating that had followed me through the day.

  I turned on the television, then turned it off. I tried to think of something to read or some music to play that would calm the bitterness I felt and the resurrected sense of loss. I felt, for once, very alone, with no one to talk to, to help me think through the tangle of thoughts and emotions that seemed to tighten around my chest. It occurred to me that in all the time I’d been acquainted with him, I’d never really learned who Howard was. He was a cause, an innocent man wrongly on death row, but on a personal level, he was a stranger, difficult and incomprehensible. I saw of him, at different times, a constant minor irritant, a collection of exasperating demands and delusions, a man in self-inflicted torment from his paranoia, the unlucky possessor of a damaged mind. If there was any solid ground beneath his shifting mental state, I never found it. His life had seemingly been nothing but a twisting path downhill, a succession of self-inflicted wounds culminating in a farcical trial and
a wrongful conviction of murder. And he had died in prison for no good reason.

  “I’m dead,” he had told me in my last visit. “I was dead the last time, too, but they didn’t know.” But in a way we did know. We knew that there was no way we could save Howard because whatever there was to save was gone. We had fought to keep him from being killed by the state and to free him from prison, for the principle that innocence should be vindicated. We had satisfied our own need that justice should be done. But Howard the man was beyond saving, a man no one wanted, who couldn’t exist in the world, who had nowhere to go because he had lost the ability to be free.

  I wondered how it must feel to be a parent and watch your child turn into someone like Howard, alien, hostile, frightening. I thought of Lyle Henley’s endless patience and Dot’s vigil at the courthouse, the unconditionality of their love for the solemn boy in the old photos and the crazed, ruined man that had both been their child. Of Howard and Steve Scanlon, each in their separate hells, and of Springer and Blaine, unshaken in their belief that they had done what was right.

  In the end, we had won—but won what? There was a poem by Wilfred Owen I’d learned in school, about a soldier killed in World War I; I looked it up online and read it again.

  Move him into the sun—

  Gently its touch awoke him once,

  At home, whispering of fields half-sown.

  Always it woke him, even in France,

  Until this morning and this snow.

  If anything might rouse him now

  The kind old sun will know.

  Think how it wakes the seeds—

  Woke once the clays of a cold star.

  Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides

  Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?

  Was it for this the clay grew tall?

  —O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

  To break earth’s sleep at all?

  And finally the floating feeling ended, and I sank to earth.

  Goddammit, Howard, I thought, I can’t even cry for you. I walked into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of brandy.

  47

  Dot Henley invited Mike and me to a memorial for Howard, to be held at her house on the Saturday of Veteran’s Day weekend. “It’s nothing formal, just a get-together for our family and friends. I’m hoping the weather holds, and we can have a barbecue,” she said, “but if not, we’ll just have it inside.”

  Mike and I decided to save the planet by driving down together from his house, leaving early in the morning to get there by two or three in the afternoon.

  There had been rain a few days earlier, but the day of the memorial was dry and the sky a wintry blue dotted with white clouds. A dozen or more cars were parked in the roundabout and driveway in front of Dot’s house, and a few more on the road in front.

  Hearing voices from behind the house, we walked around it and found a sizeable group of people socializing or picking from the food tables. Bob and Kevin and a couple of other men were cooking hamburgers and hot dogs on a fancy gas barbecue. It was Kevin who first noticed us and waved us over.

  “Ms. Moodie, Mr. Barry! Good to see you—come on in and have a beer and some food, and say hi to Mom.” He smiled, his face flushed from the heat of the grill. “We’ve got burgers, hot dogs, beans, potato salad, lot of other things, and drinks with and without alcohol. My buddy Zach here is cooking tri-tips, and those’ll be up pretty soon. Help yourself; and Mom’s over there.” He gestured toward somewhere in the middle of the tables and chairs scattered on the lawn.

  We walked in the direction he had pointed until I spotted Dot sitting in an Adirondack chair, with several people around her. I recognized her friend Lillian, but no one else.

  Dot was wearing a dark blue dress and a black cardigan. She seemed a little tired, but cheerful. She smiled when she saw us. “I hope you don’t mind my not getting up,” she said, “but once I sit in one of these chairs, it takes a lot of effort to get out.”

  “I know that feeling,” I said.

  Someone found chairs for Mike and me, and we sat with the group around Dot. Lillian said hello and introduced her husband Ed, a solid man in jeans and a madras shirt. Dot pointed out the people gathered around: a cousin, a couple of tall, athletic grandchildren, and her daughter, Howard’s younger sister, Corinne. “Corinne came down here from Ashland, Oregon. She works in the costume department at the Shakespeare Festival, and she’s an—honey, I can never pronounce it…”

  “Ayurvedic practitioner.”

  “Right.”

  Corinne was a faded bohemian, with long, graying hair bound in a single braid at her back by a crocheted piece of blue yarn. She wore a long dress in Indian cotton, a brown paisley print shawl, and an array of necklaces and rings. She gave me a vague smile and said, “I’m glad you tried to help Howard. I didn’t stay close to him. I had to let go of a lot of anger.”

  “What was the problem?” I asked.

  “Really nothing anymore,” she said. “Just that I was here, in high school, when he started acting weird and getting into trouble. It was awful to go through all that as a teenager. You can imagine what it was like, how the other kids talked about him, and me. I was always different anyway, and I’d get called Crazy Corinne because I was Howard’s sister. It took me a long time to stop blaming him for my problems.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know he could be difficult.”

  “Corinne,” said Dot from her chair, “let Ms. Moodie settle down and get something to eat.”

  “Oh, yes,” Corinne said, “I forgot. You should do that. There’s an awful lot of meat here today, but I made sure Mom and Bob got some vegetables.”

  Mike had made his way to the food, and I joined him. We filled our plates, got bottles of beer, and found places at one of the tables on the lawn, where we introduced ourselves to a few more family members and friends.

  After I’d eaten, I made my way to another table I’d spotted. It was set up on the patio, like a shrine, with memorabilia and candles and an urn. There were a couple of school award certificates, a class ring, and behind the urn a poster collage of photos of Howard. Most were from his childhood: baby pictures of Howard in Dot’s arms, as a toddler holding Lyle’s hand, Christmases under the tree, family photos from trips, Howard with a dog, Howard and his brothers and Corinne at Disneyland, the photo I’d seen in Dot’s album of Howard in his Boy Scout uniform. His high-school graduation photo was there; in his robe and mortarboard he was unsmiling, already a little distant. This was the age, I remembered from my reading, when young people often experience the first terrifying delusions and hallucinations that foreshadow the psychosis that will later overwhelm them. There was one of him as a very young man, on a boat. And then almost nothing—one snapshot of him and his father outside a building, Lyle smiling, Howard thin and unkempt.

  Dot came over, walking gingerly across the lawn with her cane, and stood with me. “Lillian and Bob’s daughter Megan made the collage for me. He was a good-looking kid, wasn’t he? And so nice. He loved that dog, and he cried so when she got hit by a car and had to be put down.”

  “How have you been?” I asked.

  “All right,” she said. “My hip surgery is scheduled for right after New Year’s.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Hope it goes really well.”

  She thanked me. “I’m a little worried, needless to say. But the doctor says I’ll be fine.”

  “Did the prison ever tell you what the cause of Howard’s death was?” I asked.

  “Heart failure, they said. Apparently he’d had heart disease for a while, but he was too out of touch with reality to understand what his symptoms were and tell anyone.”

  “This must be hard,” I said. “It sort of upends the order of things to have your child die before you.”

  She hesitated a moment before answering. “You know, after I heard Howard had passed away, I realized that in some way he died for me a long time ago. After he disappeared that time, to
Florida or wherever, he came back a stranger, and I just didn’t know him. And then he went to prison, and I never saw him after the first couple of times we visited; he hardly seemed to care that I was there. I did what I could for him—we all did—but when he actually passed away, I realized I’d done my grieving for him years ago—he’d been gone for that long. So it wasn’t that bad.

  “Lyle, on the other hand—Lyle never gave up on him, never stopped loving him and feeling pain for his condition. Howard was his firstborn, and he had a special place in Lyle’s heart. It hurt him to see Howard become so angry and hostile to us, and it broke his heart when Howard was convicted and sent to death row. I went to the hearings for Lyle’s sake, really, as much as Howard’s. I hope that up in heaven he’s able to see that you proved Howard’s innocence.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  Bob joined us. “The tri-tips are ready. Mom, you should let me get you some.” He glanced at the table shrine and said to me, “You know, maybe some good came from all your work after all. You probably don’t know this, since it’s local news, but after Judge Redd came out with his report, the Gazette published a big story and an editorial about Howard’s case and how he ended up on death row even though he was probably innocent—the evidence they hid, the way they relied on that drug addict Gomez to make their case, the fact that they didn’t do anything to find out if Scanlon was telling the truth, and the way they kept the testimony about Scanlon’s confession out of the trial.”