God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  Instead she was beaten and choked to death, and rammed with a stick through the right eye, and burned, and left in the woods, and found two days later so badly charred and decomposed she had to be identified through dental records.

  How much could it matter to that grandmother’s husband that Danny Fabre was struggling to edge his reading grade level past a 7.3, that he was about to give his tenth Toastmasters speech, that he was, one September evening eleven years after the killing, sitting in the Angola chapel waiting for an Episcopal service to begin? What would Jack Clark have said about the three convict acolytes standing in a back corner in their albs, one of them holding a tall, sleek cross while they giggled and surveyed the five or six women among the group that always arrived with the visiting minister and that milled with the crowd of inmates, and what would he have said about the way every convict in the modern, white, octagonal chapel waited for his five-second hug, his five seconds of press-time with one of those women, and about the way Danny Fabre got up to get his, circled to the back to find a crystal-eyed, heavyset, bow-haired woman in her twenties who came monthly to the prison to have the inmates swarm around and claim their moments, to have them fall in love just that fast, to have their kisses miss her cheek and graze the corners of her lips, to have their ribs and bellies crush her breasts, to have their arms loosen so reluctantly, to have Danny enfold her, and what would he have said about the way his wife’s killer, right after his allotted seconds, turned to me and pointed out how so many of the other convicts came to church only to be near the women, and how he didn’t think that was right, didn’t like that at all?

  Exactly how moved would Lynn’s husband have been as the service began and the inmates attending for the first time were asked to stand and introduce themselves and did so not only by name but by prison dorm, “Joseph Powell, Ash One,” “Tyrone Michaels, Spruce Four,” “Preston Causey, Mag One,” the incantation of their Angola homes rising to the gently pitched ceiling? Exactly how moved by the cherubic minister’s attempt to restore, in his optimistic tones, a sense of sanctuary after the guard took the count—how moved when the minister’s reading from the Book of Common Prayer, “O mighty God, to You all hearts are known…,” pandered so thoroughly to what these men wished to think of themselves, that their hearts, their invisible hearts, were as good as anyone’s, maybe even better, that their crimes were things of the past, that it was only in blindness, non-heart-seeing blindness, that humanity could condemn them? And how moved would he have been when the congregation, fully attentive now (even those ten or twelve who’d won the chair jockeying and wound up sitting beside a female), gave their self-serving response, “Glory to God in the highest…. You take away the sin of the world.” Exactly how moved?

  Especially when the sermon illuminated the difference between the laws of man and the law of God, how the necessity of Moses’ rules (“to reveal God to the world”) had been distorted by the Pharisees who made themselves supreme judges and whose decrees divided humankind by mere earthly notions of good and wicked (“The laws of Moses had been to glorify God and wound up shaming men!”); especially when the minister told of the confrontations between the legalistic Pharisees and the loving Jesus. “Now when the Pharisees gathered unto Him, they saw that some of His disciples ate with hands unwashed. And they asked Him, ‘Why do Your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?’ And Jesus answered them, ‘Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites. You worship in vain, with your lips but not your hearts! You teach as doctrines the precepts of men! You leave behind the commandments of God! And of those commandments, two reign above all! Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart! And love thy neighbor as thyself! Love above laws! What really matters is not what’s on your hands! No! What matters is what’s in your heart!’”

  But there was blood on those hands! Those hands had punched and throttled her. They had taken that stick and driven it into her skull. They had scorched her body. Her life was on those hands. And she had been that neighbor, the one with a place in her heart for everyone, the one who had let him in to use the telephone and given him a ride when he needed it, and he had broken her, mutilated her, and now sat transfixed as the minister declared, “We must not think of salvation as something we in ourselves can accomplish. We are all the same in our helplessness. When we ask ourselves what, in our souls, can we lay before God that God wants, the answer, we all know, is nothing. So we turn to Jesus and say, ‘I can’t save myself, can You do it for me?’ ”

  Nothing? Nothing? All the same? She the same as Danny Fabre? Did nothing we do matter? Nothing as long as you said ‘Forgive me’? Didn’t it matter what Danny Fabre had done? And didn’t she have a thousand times more to lay before God than he did, a million times more—how could you measure the difference between them? And he sat there so riveted, so soothed.

  And how much could it matter to Lynn’s husband that Danny’s efforts as a Toastmaster earned him, that summer, a red CTM tag to wear on his white T-shirt?

  And how much could it matter that a few weeks after earning it he let his temper surge in a dispute with several other club members, an argument he described incoherently to me and that I never fully understood and that wound up involving a guard and that resulted in Danny’s being suspended by the Forgotten Voices? He hadn’t hit anyone, but his hands had been raised. How much could it matter that Captain Newsom, the taciturn and gawky officer who had allowed Danny into the organization a year ago, who Danny felt had “seen I was sincere,” spurned him at a going-away gathering when he retired, wouldn’t so much as make eye contact with him, because a glimmer of Danny’s past, a sign that it was unpurged, had shown itself in the fight? And how much could it matter that the club president and his fellow Forgotten Voices executives later told Danny that they knew his heart was in the right place and that his commitment to self-improvement was strong, and assured him they would vote to lift the punishment soon?

  For his tenth speech, the one that brought him his CTM pin, Danny had stood behind the lectern with the appointed ah-counter—pencil ready above his legal pad—sitting to his right and the pink cone hat beside the dictionary on the foldout table, and below the window to his left the razor-wired passageways. Danny gripped the edges of the lectern with his large hands and leaned slightly forward. He looked for a good while at the members in their school chairs-the man with the wounded, half-shriveled eye and the man whose hobby in a previous life had been sailing and who wore Top-Siders as a way to declare that life still present—and he began with such histrionic drama it would have been laughable anywhere else: “Hope.”

  He paused a long, long time. But no one in the room shifted and no one could possibly have felt that Danny was struggling to find his next thought or didn’t have any next thought prepared and was on his way to another sputtering performance and no one could possibly have noticed the right-angle ears that sprung from below his short hair (the ears he seemed less and less needful of discussing with me now, though he had decided to ride in the upcoming rodeo), because everyone was focused on that single word which his sonorous voice and his explosive forward-leaning body and the prolonged gaze of his yellow-tinged green eyes had given a presence. He stepped out from behind the lectern. “Does anyone in this room know who the author is, of hope? Anybody? Raise your hand.” He waited, as though he actually expected someone to answer. “God. God is the author of hope.”

  And God, too, between the cone hat and the traffic-light timer, had a short-lived presence, if only because Danny wished it.

  “I want to tell you a little story.

  “Last summer, exactly a year ago, right before I joined Toastmasters, I got up for breakfast one morning. And I said, I’m going to lay back. I’m not going to go. I don’t feel like eating. But there was something pushing me out the dorm. There was something pushing me down the Walk.

  “And there by Spruce was this little bitty kitten. And I reached down to pet it. But somebody said, ‘Watc
h out.’ And I turned like this. Sudden.”

  Danny twisted his neck abruptly, acting out his fast turn, staring back at the lectern he had left as though at the man who had warned him.

  “He said it had a big gash on it. But I bent down. I picked it up, and I turned it over. The middle of its belly had a gap where something had done tore it wide open. So I took this little cat—it had maggots falling out of its belly—and I went to the freeman at the C.C. gate to get me some peroxide. I shampooed this cat. I washed him up real, real good. I got all the infection out of him. And that night I left him in a hobby-shop box. Closed him in with the tools. And next morning when I went to check on him, that cat was so weak—the way he wobbled out of that box? He made it across the hobby-shop floor, and out the back door and across the Walk, and onto the grass to use the bathroom.

  “I picked him up again. I asked this ho, Patricia—y’all know him—I asked him, ‘Pat, can you build a box on your drop, put some little steps on it so this pitiful kitten can get in and out?’ And he did. He built it. And that’s where the kitten lived. But over the next few days, when it would wobble out and go curl up outside one of the dorms, I’d see people take it and shove it to the side with their foot, like this, and I almost got in fights behind that cat. I almost. But I never did.

  “And do you know after a couple of weeks, it seemed like everybody on the East Yard, at one time or the other, stopped and gave this cat milk or something to eat. This cat had so much food in front of him. This cat was loved by everybody. And within a month’s time this little cat was healing up. He was growing. You’d walk by and he’d just jump up on your leg. Just jump up. Because that cat had hope. Because I had hope.

  “Mr. President, Mr. Master Evaluator, Mr. Sergeant at Arms, Captain Newsom, fellow Toastmasters, hope will heal your wounds. Hope will fill your heart. Hope will help you, someday, make it out of Angola. Hope will keep you moving ahead. Hope will make you live. Hope is your master key.”

  How much could any of it matter? When we spoke over the phone about Danny Fabre, Lynn’s husband remembered that eleven years ago he had “literally wanted to tear him apart.” He had hoped for a death sentence. In the middle of his trial, Danny had asked to plead out, and when the prosecutor came into the hallway behind the courtroom to seek the approval of the victim’s family before he accepted the plea, Jack Clark went along only because he thought of the years and years of appeals the family would have to live through before the execution. He expected—because Fabre looked so wild in the courtroom, his long hair disheveled and his eyes strange in a way Clark recalled but could no longer describe and his feet chained to the floor—that Fabre would wind up killed by another convict soon enough.

  “Now,” Lynn’s husband said, “the desire for retribution is a little bit less…. Let him think about it for the rest of his life.” So I mentioned, briefly, the changes Danny was trying to make, and asked if these could ever have any meaning, not necessarily in terms of his imprisonment or release, I struggled to explain, but in some sort of moral terms I couldn’t find the words to express. To which Jack Clark said simply, quietly, “I want him to stay there forever for what he did.”

  It was, perhaps, the closest thing to a miracle at hand: the provision of time, the possibility of quietness, the difference between “tear him apart” and “stay there forever.”

  SIXTEEN

  I ASKED MYRON HODGES—THE GUITARIST LITTELL had once heard playing “The Wind Cries Mary,” the guitarist I had once heard playing the same wistful Hendrix song, the guitarist I had hoped to hear at last year’s rodeo, the guitarist whose band had woken late for a rodeo rehearsal and been told by Warden Cain the day before the event, “Y’all won’t touch an instrument again as long as I’m warden of this penitentiary!”—what advice he would give Johnny Brooks about getting married in prison. I don’t know why I have waited so long to write about Myron Hodges. Sometimes I think I have put it off, postponed it until so near the end, precisely because Myron, of all the inmates I knew well at Angola, was the man I imagined freeing. Johnny Brooks or Buckkey Lasseigne may have been equally safe bets for a second chance. But for me, Myron was the one. Despite the warnings I gave myself about fantasies of pardon-board heroics, I often imagined helping him out of Angola, helping him to a new life as a musician.

  As my year wound to a close, Myron emptied trash cans and mopped floors at Angola’s hospital. When cellblock inmates were brought to be examined, they waited their turns in one-man cages; sometimes one masturbated to the sight of the nurses walking by. Myron mopped up the semen. But he also helped to change the bedsore dressings on a man who’d broken his neck in a prison football game two years ago and was now a quadriplegic. James, the quadriplegic, often requested Myron’s help. He liked Myron to shave him as well. Myron was careful, and Myron told him stories about his music and about his marriage.

  “Get that yellow pan right there from under the cabinet, and rinse it out and fill it with water,” James had instructed the first time the nurses sent Myron in to do the shaving. “Now get the lotion from out the top drawer.”

  These days James said only, “Run me another ep.”

  Another episode. Another installment of Myron’s Angola story.

  James didn’t have to give any other instructions. Myron came into the room easily now, without hesitation or revulsion or fear, saying, “Well, looks like you’re about ready for a nice tight shave,” and going straight to the cabinet for the bowl and the lotion and the washcloths, and setting them on the bedside table. Myron knew to ask for two disposable razors at the nurses’ station, not just one, and these he placed next to the other things. Then he sat on the edge of the bed. With wet fingertips, he painted the Vaseline Intensive Care, which James preferred to shaving gel, over the left side only of the paralytic’s face, because the shaving was slow and otherwise the cream would dry before he reached the right side.

  The face had plenty of movement. Between strokes of the razor, as Myron dipped the blade in the warm water, James smiled often, gold caps on his front teeth. Plaited hair, with balls of frizz at the ends of the braids, lay on the pillow.

  Movement ended completely at the neck. A nursing home, to which James’s care had been farmed out for a while, had failed to perform any therapy on his dead limbs, so the muscles in his arms had contracted irreversibly. His right forearm lay across his chest, the wrist bent beyond 90 degrees, as though the palm were trying to flatten itself to the arm. His left hand, half-fisted, lay permanently just below his throat.

  His hands might have modeled for a dishwashing liquid, except that they far exceeded any woman’s dream of elegance or delicacy or smoothness. The slender, atrophied fingers were a caricature of femininity, and the backs of the hands, contracted to the width of a child’s, were barely wider than the wrists, adding to the effect of hallucinatory grace and uselessness. The atrophic skin glowed. It was like a dark and grainless wood, polished to a glassy extreme. And at his folded elbows, infant-size joints on arms that looked like toxic deformities, you could almost see a reflection of the room in his waxy flesh.

  The rest stayed under the sheet as Myron edged carefully with the white plastic razor around the goatee—James’s special pride, because one of the nurses had said she liked it—and told him about the beginnings of the traveling band. The group had been through other incarnations going back in prison history, but this one had received Warden Whitley’s support, in 1991, after Myron taught himself an old Led Zeppelin song. He had grown up in the New Orleans projects; he had not grown up on Led Zeppelin, nor had any of the other musicians who hoped to get the traveling band off the ground. But they knew their warden had been a Zeppelin fan since his days in classification in the seventies, and when they got word that Whitley would show up at one of their rehearsals, Myron made sure to learn every progression, the nuance of every high-volume, high-necked note that lanced the air above the bass line. Zeppelin wasn’t, in the end, all that far from Hendrix, and before turning to
Funkadelic and George Benson, he had grown up on Hendrix.

  Whitley called him aside. “If I make you trusty and then approve you to travel, are you going to run off on me?”

  Myron was only twenty-six years old then, had been at Angola only five years, was serving life for killing a nightclub owner during a robbery. “I can’t answer that question,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if I say no, you’ll think I’m just telling you what you want to hear. And if I say yes, I’m not going to be in that band.”

  “You’ve got a point,” Whitley said, and approved him.

  The Big River Band performed all over the state, pulling up in its mesh-windowed schoolbus, with one guard for an escort, at the Baton Rouge State Fair, at the Trade Days in Natchitoches, at the Rayne Frog Festival and the Four Rivers Raft Race, at schools and nursing homes (where the elderly clapped along to Michael Jackson tunes), playing five or six gigs every month. They recorded four original songs in a Baton Rouge studio, the first Angola inmates to record their work while serving time since 1934 when Leadbelly, discovered by a musicologist, had sent a blues song to the statehouse and won a pardon.

  If I had you, Gov’nor O.K. Allen,

  Like you got me,

  I would wake up in the mornin’

  Let you out on reprieve.

  Myron dreamed he could play his way out of Angola, that someone powerful would someday hear him and be so moved by his talent he would convince the governor to give him clemency, but the song he chose for the studio was a different kind of plea. It went back to something that had happened when he first came to prison. His girlfriend, six years older than Myron, a singer he had grown up admiring and finally begun a relationship with four years before his arrest—the woman he had planned to marry—had tried to visit him, to keep things going. He had refused to put her on his visiting list. And then he had stopped calling.