by Deeanne Gist
I wasn’t very good at reading back then. The last time I remember being in a real school was when I was eight. It was a little schoolhouse near my grandparents’ place. I remember the smell of wet woolen socks on the ancient radiator, and the freshly shaved red neck of the older boy who sat in front of me. Those are the only details I can remember. As for most men in prison, my memories of the outside have become faint over time. The outside world has become the unreal world. When I dream, my dreams are of the inside.
Reading was hard. Even the simple words stumped me. But I kept going back, mostly because I had no other place to go. Eventually, I came to like puzzling over the words in the dusty sunlight that came in the barred windows and lay in long slashes across the wooden table.
Bit by bit it got easier, and when it did, the floodgates opened, and all of a sudden I was reading. I read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. I read Louis L’Amour and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wuthering Heights and the Best American Short Stories collections. I read every book I could on nature, so when the author took us on a walk in the woods, I was there, too. I fell completely for the dark strangeness of Sidney Sheldon and the magic of Ray Bradbury. I read my favorite books over and over again and each time found new things inside them, as if the writers had put in new words in my absence. I’d be reading a passage from my favorite, The White Dawn, by James Houston, and all of a sudden there would be a new paragraph that I could swear I had never read before.
I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbia Indians made their longhouses, or how to make a solar toilet, or how to dry bear meat in the sun. I could tell you all of this if I could talk, but instead the words stayed inside of me and marveled. This I could accept, or so I told myself for a long time. Because the words were there, and they carried me to another place.
After many years of this, the warden came in. The chair I sat in had two deep grooves in the seat where my skinny shanks fit. The area of my table had come to be known as for me and me alone.
The warden was brand-new back then, and a lot younger. His hair was glossy and black, and his face was tanned. He looked like a man who went boating. He held his hand as if proud of his thick gold wedding ring. Everyone joked about how he paraded around his young wife when she visited.
He stood next to my spot at the table where I stacked the books like walls around me. He picked up Butterfly Collecting for Young Boys. “Here you are, just like they said,” he said.
I nodded, swallowing.
“They say you don’t go to the yard or to mess.”
No. I shook my head. I wanted to say: The books are enough.
He paused, turning the book over to see a photo of a boy on the back cover. The boy was wearing a short-sleeve shirt. He had a face full of obligatory freckles and a wide innocent smile. He was holding a butterfly net and stood against a field covered in dazzling blue flowers.
“I appreciate you staying out of trouble.”
I knew what the warden meant: He appreciated me staying out of the yard, away from the inmates who liked to hurt me, because he was afraid I might someday hurt them back.
“Fellow like you is smart to play it safe,” he added, putting the book gently down in front of me.
The other inmates in the library that day were watching all of this with their jaws open. One was a man I knew—he lived in my cellblock. He was a huge, muscled ruddy man with narrow teeth turned in like a rabbit’s. I knew as soon as I left, he would lumber up and saunter after me, following me down the dark, empty stairs.
The ruddy man watched the warden talk to me. His smug grin turned to puzzlement at what the warden did next.
The warden smiled and patted me on the back. The warden—patting me.
And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but always had room to be read again. I became fascinated with how writers did that. How did they make a story feel so complete and yet so open-ended? It was like painting a picture that changed each time you looked at it.
Some of the things in the books troubled me. The high school biology textbooks reorganized my mind into epicenters of new worlds until the cells of my own walls began to race. The color plates in the medical textbooks showing the insides of people made me shake. It was as if someone had planted these books in the library to remind me of a question that had troubled me for so long: What lives inside the coils inside people? Why did God create us with so many winding, dark puzzles? In times like these, I would have to go back to something comforting like The White Dawn.
Sometimes, when reading a book, I would think of the other people who might have touched it before it was donated. A nice woman who lay down with her baby for a nap might have held the book I was reading. I could see her, lying in a sundress on faded rose-printed cotton sheets, the book splashed open in the sunlight. A little of that sun could have soaked into the pages I was touching.
After a time, it seemed that the world inside the books became my world. So when I thought of my childhood, it was dandelion wine and ice cream on a summer porch, like Ray Bradbury, and catching catfish with Huck Finn. My own memories receded and the book memories became the real memories, far more than the outside, far more even than in here.
But after many more years, I did the other bad thing, and they sent me here.
When you do a really bad thing inside a prison, they don’t have many choices. They can kill you and call it an accident, or they can send you into the dungeon. I got sent to the dungeon.
The doors here no longer bang open. If they ever did, I would panic. I would hide on my cot with the blanket over my head. There is no library down the hall with two rights and a left. There is now only me, in my cell, trapped forever. But the trusty still brings me books on his cart.
And the warden comes. Every few weeks he passes my cell, silently pushing a book through the slot. I wait on my cot, blanket over my head, and after I hear the book drop, I scramble for it.
The warden always seems to know which book to bring. When the sun grows dusty hot outside the walls and the sky is gunslinger blue, the warden brings a western. When rain slates against the towers and the world has gone hopeless with gray, it is Bible stories. When the halls ring with the cries of riot and the bars of my own cell rattle with pain, the warden drops a soft book on the floor, solace in its pages: the collected poems of Walt Whitman.
And oh, my favorites, like the tastes of childhood. Every few months the warden passes me The White Dawn, and for a few precious days I traverse the open heavens on hard-packed moonlit snow and see the blue splashing arctic lights, and I fill my belly with frozen seal meat and laugh with my Inuit friends.
When I first started reading, I didn’t know how to sound some words. I would whisper them inside my head. Sioux, paisley, ruche. Obsolete, rubric, crux. How do you say those words? How do they sound when others say them? Are they as pretty as they sound inside my head?
Once, early on, I tried endlessly to say the word “Sioux” inside my head. I am still not sure how it sounds. Is the X silent? I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?
I decided that in the end, it doesn’t matter. In my mind, the words sound right. They chase each other around like boats on a lake after dusk, and who cares if my metaphors or semicolons or whatever are correct.
The books brought brilliance to my life, and they brought an understanding: Life is a story. Everything that has happened and will happen to me is all part of the story of this enchanted place—all the dreams and visions and understandings that come to me in my dungeon cell.
The books helped me see that truth is not in the touch of the stone but in what the stone tells you.
And the stones tell me so much. But if I get some things wrong, then please forgive me. This place is too enchanted to let the story go untold.
Chapter 2
The lady stays up late in her apartment, reading York’s files.
Death penalty trials come and go like lightning storms, little bursts of electricity in the sky that fizzle and pop, leaving only the smell of ozone and wet newspapers. As soon as the verdict is read, the court staff rolls up boxes and the jurors go home. It is over and forgotten.
Twelve years after his trial, York had run through most of his appeals. He was on the conveyor belt to death. No one noticed, and no one cared. The lady has seen some cases drag on ten, twenty, or even thirty years before the prisoner was executed. Despite the delays, the prison still executes several men every year—there are dozens on the row and more coming all the time. A regular industry, she knows, that pays the keep on both sides.
The lady winces when she reads who were York’s trial defense attorneys: two dump trucks widely known as Grim and Reaper for their ability to get their clients killed. They were famous for doing as little as possible while billing as much as possible. But once a man is sentenced to death, she knows, getting death off the table can seem insurmountable, no matter how incompetent the original trial attorneys. A new attorney has to show outrageous violations of the law, or important new evidence that should have been uncovered and presented at trial. As they like to say on the row, York was blood pudding.
So York did the unimaginable thing. He gave up. He renounced his appeals. He said he wanted to die.
All of a sudden the Advocates rose up and the anti-death penalty groups rallied and the money poured in and famous people came begging York to change his mind. He went from another forgotten killer on his way to the chamber to a victim deserving of mercy. The Advocates raised the money to hire decent defense attorneys, and the attorneys hired the best mitigation specialist in the state, all to save the life of a man who had decided to die.
Which is where she comes in.
There are dozens of men on the row who would kill—and she thinks literally—to get her services. Instead, the honor goes to the one who wants to die. She rubs her tired eyes. They look pink in the light.
She goes to bed in silk pajamas that no one sees. She draws a clean sheet against her scrubbed chin. Her apartment feels empty and cold even to her.
The lady thinks about what it will be like to work this case. She has been a death penalty investigator for eight years. She takes on only one or two cases at a time, hired by attorneys who represent the men on appeal. With more than forty men on the row, that means only a fraction get her services. Usually, she has at least a year to investigate a case. Death penalty investigation is labor-intensive—it takes months to locate ancient records, to track down witnesses from decades before, to plumb the truth of a crime.
Since York denounced his appeals, his execution date has been set—for August 6. The height of summer. She glances at the calendar above her desk. It is May. She has three months to save his life. One season, she thinks, to end an execution.
All of her clients have wanted to live. Some wanted it desperately, others dispassionately. But all wanted it. When she struggles with what she does, she can at least tell herself that she is fulfilling their rights and desires.
Not the case with York.
She thinks about what it will be like to go against a condemned man’s wishes, to save him from himself. How does a person know when he wants to die? Is it a flash of light or a slow understanding? Maybe this is just his clever plan to avoid death.
Before she goes to sleep, she thinks, almost unwillingly, about the fallen priest. She sees him striding up to the window, a figure in miniature. His gait is firm and sure. He is wearing the black priest robes he once wore, but he flings them open as if discarding them. When he steps through the glass, she knows she is sleeping, and she dreams all of a sudden that he is there beside her, a little figure that she caresses with care, fearful of breaking.
The guards at the end of the hall are talking about the man they call Arden.
“I hear he’s finally coming up,” says one.
A hush falls whenever someone brings up the inmate they call Arden. If a prison can have a monster, Arden is ours. In a place full of the worst kinds of killers, his acts alone defy words or explanations. Others may talk about what York did, but no one talks about what Arden did, because some things are too awful to contemplate.
I slide along the rock wall and put my face to the stone and listen.
“It’s about time,” the other guard says.
“Yeah. Warden says it was one of those things.”
I wonder if they mean the man they call Arden is up for parole, but there is no way anyone is granting a monster parole.
“What about York?” The voice is teasing now. The idea of killing York lightens the conversation.
“Are you volunteering for the black shirt?”
There is no answer. They all know the rules—if you volunteer for the execution squad, you don’t tell anyone.
“I don’t know. Might have a hard time actually killing the asshole, you know.”
There is a faintly surprised silence. “Me, too.”
The little men with hammers chatter and then shush as well.
Late spring is rampaging outside. Even down in the dungeon, I can tell. The guards bring rain in their hair and on their regulation jackets. They shake it off when they come down the dungeon stairs. A little trickles into my cell. I get down and taste it. It is not the taste of fall rain, which tastes like rotting leaves. It is not the taste of winter rain, which tastes like cold melted ice. No, this is the taste of spring rain, fresh with cut grass and new life.
“Might flood tonight,” the guard says outside my cell.
“Shit,” the other replies.
I retreat from my bars, wondering why people who live outside choose such ugly words. Maybe that is what happens when you are outside, and the world clangs and barrels and shouts twenty-four hours a day, from your radio your television your wife your neighbor the lawn mower down the street and the scream of airplanes from the sky. Maybe then you use ugly words to tell life to shut up.
The outside is too big and scary for me to think about anymore. The outside is one wild circus where people and ideas clash. I have been inside one locked room or another since I was nine. I am accustomed to it, buried inside rooms that are buried inside other rooms that are buried inside electric razor fences. The walls that might make others feel like they are suffocating have become my lungs.
I sit on my narrow bunk and caress my long yellow toenails and stare at my walls. I think about the river that runs next to our prison, and the pond and how ducks paddle in it. I think about the cold, mucky water and can feel it against my feet, feel the darkness and pull of the swaying weeds below. I pretend my feet are the duck feet, paddling in the sloughs. I taste the muck in my billed mouth, feel the tendons of my feather wings as they pound the slate sky.
Every few years the river rages until it overruns its clay banks, and the muddy slick water races over the parking lot and into the lower levels of our prison, into the basements and especially into our dungeon. Many times over the years I have seen the water slowly bead and then run down my walls and across the floor. Most times it rises only as high as an inch or two, a current that flows mysteriously and delightfully to what I think is the south.
A few times over many, many years, I have seen the water rise as high as my cot. That is when the screaming really starts. The other men are frightened of drowning. I am too busy putting one finger after another in the cold water and feeling the joyous rush to care.
I am too excited to sleep.
Later that night the red warning lights in the hallways flash, trembling with the unseen storm outside. The guards trot down the halls, dragging ancient pumping m
achines. The machines roar to life with vast gurgling sounds. The underground river is breaching our buried walls; it is seeping and running down into our cave, and I watch it run down my walls. I think about it running in waves down to the caverns below, where the golden horses stomp with delight.
The inmates begin screaming. “What the hell’s going on?” They have the panicked voices of men trapped underground. This place is one big grave. But didn’t they already know that?
“I ain’t Noah, and this ain’t the ark!” Striker shrieks from the other cell next to mine.
I am in ecstasy. I place my bare feet against the stone floor and tremble, feeling the first cold trickle, wanting that chilly new information, excited about what chain of life it will tell me about next.
There is a saying among death penalty investigators, the lady knows, that you always end up in the worst house on the block. No matter how poor the neighborhood, no matter how depressing the trailer court, the worst home on the street is always where the family of your client lives. Or the family of the victim.
A colleague of hers used to joke that he didn’t even need to pick up cases anymore. He just went to trailer parks and hung out in the worst trailer until he got a new case. Other investigators acted offended, but she understood. That colleague died not long after, out in the field. He knocked on the wrong door, and a man with a sawed-off shotgun blew him away.
She thinks of that investigator as she winds her way through gorgeous blue conifer forests, past glistening rivers and curves that give glimpses of heaven. She is hours out of the city and in a part of the country she never knew existed. This beautiful country, her old friend would say, is not what you expect in death penalty investigations.
She passes elk crossings and small towns with odd old-fashioned names, like Burnt Tree and Hope Creek. The towns are no more than a single store hanging off the side of the road and cabins barely visible in the rising hills beyond. She sees a deer munching grass, unconcerned at the side of the road, her sandy rump showing, her fawn at her side.