by Deeanne Gist
As she turns a tree-studded curve, the view opens up to a series of emerald lakes strung out below, like a chain of jewels. The view is jaw-dropping. She sees a small lookout and stops. When she leaves her car, the air tastes impossibly clean.
The glittering lake below is so beautiful, it looks surreal. A red-tailed hawk wheels overhead, and a small bronze plaque tells that the local Native Americans once considered these lakes sacred. Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully. She savors the blue forests and endless sky.
When she gets back in her car, she feels mildly depressed. The car smells like stale coffee and soggy sandwiches.
I should move out here, she thinks suddenly. I should rent a little cabin in the woods near these lakes. I could paint or write and clean cabins for a living. Something simple. Or I could just come here. To be away.
The idea grows as she passes more little towns without names and long stretches of nothing but those dappled blue forests, the trees rising over the road and sights of velvet green mossy ground in the forests. She puts down her windows and hears the distant roar of rivers. She imagines what it would be like to live out here, to walk out on the cabin porch every morning with a cup of coffee and see those stellar lakes, to taste the air and fill her eyes with the blue forests. She imagines curling in a white bed under the steep eaves and cooking simple suppers over a one-burner stove. She imagines serving dinner to herself and a man. He sits at the table, a fuzzy silhouette. Her mind turns skittishly away from seeing his face.
The fantasy ends when she turns in to the little town of Sawmill Falls. She drives past a long-closed mill with a caved-in roof alongside a noisy creek and down a street with Closed signs on all the shops. The town appears deserted. She climbs a dirt road that bounces her old car over the ruts. At the top of the dirt road, she finds a smaller road, almost too small to climb, and this takes her to the top of the hill. There she finds a falling-down gate covered with poison oak.
She parks and walks the rest of the way up the road.
Sure enough, the abandoned-looking shack at the top of the hill is the worst home she has seen all day.
“Like I said, I ain’t moving much lately.”
York’s aunt wheezes from her chair. Little tufts of gray stuffing poke through the chair springs. Aunt Beth is a prematurely old woman with wild iron hair and a broad broken smile. She could be forty or she could be seventy. As with most of the poor people the lady meets, poverty has made her ageless. Her swollen feet are in a bedpan full of sudsy-looking water.
“That’s Epsom salts, for my feets,” she explains.
“My grammy used to do the same thing,” the lady says easily, and then thinks, Is that true? Did Grammy soak her feet in Epsom salts? She has no idea, but it doesn’t matter. It felt true for the moment.
“So you want me to talk about my nephew,” York’s elderly aunt says sadly.
“Only if you want,” the lady replies gently. She’s already explained her job in the simplest form: She is here to learn about York, so the attorneys who represent him can try to save his life.
It takes the old woman a while to warm up, but when she does, all the lady needs to do is listen.
“I remember when my sister had him. He was a pretty baby. So pretty. But sick, you know? You heard of Shirley, I bet. She never went to England, I’ll tell you that. She told stories. But that baby was conceived right here in Sawmill Falls.”
“His father?” the lady asks carefully.
“Who knows? She slept with the whole town.”
The old woman checks from under shaggy gray eyebrows to see how the lady responds to that information. The lady doesn’t respond. In her heart, she just hears warm voices.
“The town must have been bigger back then,” the lady finally says, smiling.
The old lady cackles with laughter. “You something.”
“What was he like as a little boy?” the lady asks.
“He was—funny. He used to say his bones were on fire. He got sick a lot. Then all of a sudden he changed.” She paused. “He stopped saying he was sick. He just got—oh well—different. Shirley didn’t know how to raise a child. You know that, right? A horse kicked my sister in the head when she was little, and then she got the vee-dees. You know, the one that goes to your brain?”
“Syphilis,” says the lady. She thinks: York’s mom had tertiary syphilis of the brain.
“Yes, that’s the one. I always felt sorry for Shirley, myself. When she was little, she would open her legs for a piece of candy.” The old lady coughs. “The men of this town didn’t treat her right.” She looks out the broken window, where a scrap of curtain dances in a faint breeze. “Not right at all.
“I tried to take him when he was born, you know. Biggest mistake of my life was giving him back to his mom, even if she was my sister.” The old lady rubs one cheek, bringing a spot of rosy color. “Funny how it all comes back. He was sweet as a baby, you know? Sweet as sugar. And then he hardened. I can’t ’splain it another way. He was like sugar in a jar that hardens. And after a while you take it out, and it is one rock-solid lump.”
The old lady stretches her legs. “Oh, this water feels good. Be a dear and put the pot back on the stove for me? I need a heat-up.”
The lady gets up and puts the kettle back on the greasy stove. A coffee can of bacon grease stands on the buckled linoleum counter near the stove. It has fork marks in it. A dirty fork is sitting on the dirty stove near the grease can. The lady looks around the kitchen corner and sees no food.
“By the time he was ten, he was a mean child,” the aunt says behind her. “You could tell he wasn’t going to be any good.”
“Like how?” the lady asks, reminding herself to get some groceries for the aunt before she leaves town.
“I took him in when he was ten. His mama had disappeared again. That was the way with Shirley—she’d take a ride somewhere, and weeks later someone would find her in a ditch someplace. Or she would be down at the mental hospital for her vee-dees. Little York would be alone and nobody would know it. This time I found him in that house, just sitting in the corner like always. He’d been eating the wallboard, he was so hungry.” The old woman looks to the lady to see how she takes this news. The lady smiles gently; she has heard far worse, experienced far worse.
“He still didn’t want to leave, saying he was waiting for his mama, so I said, ‘York, honey, I’ll get you a pet if you come with me.’ That’s how I got him up here. He said, ‘Auntie Beth, I want a pet rabbit. A pet rabbit I’m gonna name Troy.’ Isn’t that funny? Troy. Oh my. So the next day I drove all the way into Burnt County—I could drive back then—and bought him the cutest little white rabbit. Just a doll with pink ears. You could see the veins in those long pink ears.”
The lady sits peacefully, listening to the old woman talk.
“He named it Troy, too. That’s what got me later—that he named it first. ’Cause as soon as he got that rabbit, he took it from me and said, ‘Auntie Beth, I’ll be back.’ I asked him, ‘Where you goin’, honey?’ And he just smiled and said, ‘To the woods.’ He came back about an hour later, blood all over his whole body, up his arms and smeared all over his little hands, and that little rabbit pelt dangling from his hand. It looked like a bloody fur jacket for a doll.”
The old woman breathes. “You know what he told me?”
“What?” the lady asks.
“He said, ‘Troy had a party.’ ”
The lady leaves much later and buys groceries. She buys a big bag of russet potatoes and beans and bacon and eggs and coffee and a box of powdered milk. Remembering back to her own childhood, she makes sure to get the essentials: shortening and white flour and salt and pepper and a bottle of Tabasco. She throws in a big block of old-fashioned white soap and another bar of Fels-Naptha. For a treat, she picks up the only dusty can of peaches in the town store.
The old woman is ecstatic to get the peaches and insists the lady open them right then and
there and pour them into two plastic bowls. The old woman lumbers to her dime-sized porch, and they sit knee-to-knee and eat their peaches.
The sun sets over the scrubby woods below, and the sweet peach juice runs down the lady’s throat. It tastes like a miracle.
“No one ever comes to see me,” York’s aunt says shyly. “Can you come again?”
“I can come again,” the lady says, and watches the old woman rock with pleasure as she eats her peaches.
The lady goes down to view the chamber where York wants to die. She doesn’t need a pass or permission. It is no secret. They even bring walking tours down.
The Chamber of the Vine is at the far end of our dungeon, down a narrow hallway where the walls continually weep moisture and strange toadstools grow in the corners. When men walk this hall, they know it is their last journey. Only those who work here return the way they came.
The priest’s office is near the Chamber of the Vine, so he can give prayers to the condemned men. The prison goes through a priest every few years. Usually, the priests make it through a handful of executions and then leave. Most are still wet behind the ears and using the job as a stepping-stone for better positions. It sounds important to be a death row priest. But few can last long in the casual atmosphere of death. The warden is betting the fallen priest is so shamed by being fallen that he might be hopeless enough to last—an angel with clipped wings in our midst.
The lady walks past the office of the priest. She looks in his window, hoping to see him, but his desk is empty. His office is cluttered and yet seems lonely. There is a plant with dust on the leaves, dying for lack of sunlight. There are books everywhere, falling over the shelves and piled on his desk. An empty coffee cup waits.
The door to the death chamber is open.
The Chamber of the Vine is small and painted bright orange. Perhaps the orange color was meant to look cheerful. Instead, it looks nauseating. The paint has peeled off the eternally damp stones, falling in long orange pieces to the floor. The pieces are swept up before each execution.
There is a large window made of heavy safety glass set in the far wall. Through it, the lady can see the small room where they allow the witnesses. Folding chairs are stacked against the wall.
A greasy old black phone hangs from the wall. A peeling grimy white sticker on it says SUPREME COURT.
The lady sniffs. There is no smell of death, though men die here all the time. There is only a smell of disinfectant that can barely hide the wet mildew smell of river.
She touches the table in the middle of the room. It is as narrow as a graveyard slab, covered with a thin sheath of black vinyl. The vinyl is so when the men soil themselves, as they often do in the posture of death, the table can be wiped clean easily. Straps hang from the sides. The canvas straps are old and frayed but as strong as steel. The buckles are metal and rusted.
At least a hundred men have died here, she thinks, and feels inside herself for a response. She is not sure she has one.
The lethal injection machine is standing near the table. It looks a bit like a fuse box with an open door. Instead of fuses, there are milky tubes topped with injector buttons. The tubes feed in to the IV bag, which snakes cloudy tubes onto the floor.
At the base of the machine is a set of control buttons. The red buttons are labeled: ARMED, START, and finally, FINISH.
“See something?” It is a voice behind her.
She turns, her bones turned liquid with shock. She hates being surprised. It is the priest, as warm and cautious as ever. He is wearing the same oxford shirt as always, the same trousers hanging on his thin frame. His eyes look haunted. She wonders if he knows how much pain is visible in his eyes.
She touches the machine and hesitates. “Do you ever think they deserve to die?” she finally asks.
“I’m a Catholic priest,” he says with a startled laugh. “Or I was.”
“We all die,” she says. “For some it just comes earlier.”
He steps closer so he can look into her face. Concern has etched his brow. “Life has meaning,” he says.
She feels more naked than ever before. She thinks of York and his mother. She thinks of his pet rabbit. Her eyes feel suddenly wet. “There is too much pain in the world, that’s the problem,” she says, her voice low and husky.
“Pain and beauty, and beauty in the pain.” His voice is a whisper that strokes her.
She looks up at him. His eyes meet hers. For the first time she feels a connection with him. It feels like a warm current. It feels like electricity. It feels like warmth that has been born in her belly.
Chapter 3
Back so long ago, when they built this enchanted place, they killed men in three ways: They waited for them to die, they worked them to death, and they hanged them.
Not much has changed. Instead of working men to death, there is a slow starvation of the body and soul. And instead of rope, they use a machine.
I once overheard a guard say that in the beginning, they hanged because rope was cheap. Then they stopped and went to guns—firing squads. Bullets got expensive, and blood is messy. Brains and blood, who wants to clean that up? Then came the electric chair, but that wasn’t what it promised to be, either: too many dancing corpses. After an execution, the guard joked, the place reeked like a bad hair salon. Finally, they sent the scientists to invent the easiest and cleanest way to die. They came up with the Chamber of the Vine.
I used to wonder, Who invented this miracle machine? Then one day in the library, I read the man’s name. It was one of the few times I have felt disappointed by reading. A name has no meaning, you see, unless you see the bodies attached, like a man paddling down a river, dragging a sea of corpses.
I think that in the outside world, names come with meanings. A Harriet might bring forth a Samuel, and he is followed by a Dan, maybe, or a Susan. The names are connected like cords of life, each breathing into another, and those names go searching to breathe into others, so the whole idea of a family tree is not a dead spine but a living, breathing thing, with roots under clean soil, and bright sparkling branches hungry for the sky. When someone dies in the outside world, the other names go on breathing, seeking, creating, so that the tree seeds into the fertile forest floor, and it all continues.
In here, names end. We end. Like periods end sentences. Like the ropes and the bullets and the hot electric nodes and the frying chair and, eventually, the cool milky tubes. Even if we live out our lives in here, we end. Our creation is over.
No one knows this more than the corpse valets.
Late at night we hear the metal clacking of the wheels—creakety-clack, creakety-clack!—and every man in here knows what it means: The corpse valets are coming.
Inside their cells, the men listen, even in their sleep, so that the sound of the wheels entwines with their dreams—so that years after a release, a man might stop short at the sound of a metal cart passing, not knowing why he is flooded with sadness and fear.
Only the dead know the corpse valets—the dead and the guard called Conroy, who decides which inmates can be selected for this duty. It has to be a man who knows how to be quiet; how to keep secrets.
And the secrets are so many. How bodies end up dead in cells with signs of strangulation or broken necks, and the guards clear their throats and say natural causes. How others are shot and others die in heaps of blood all erased by the dawn. How no one ever dies here of abuse, of rape, of being killed by the guards. How the records—what records? A prison is a place without history.
Almost every night, the corpse valets collect the dead. Even down here in the dungeon, I hear them, pushing their squeaking carts down the stone halls far above me. They come here, too, after every execution. The door slams, and the men down the row turn their faces to the walls, afraid to see the caretakers of death pushing their cart. Really, there is nothing to see. Even under their hoods, their faces are folded into themselves. If you were to touch them, they would disappear, like smoke.
T
he corpse valets are one of the secrets of this place. Like the endless basements that coil like giant serpents, waiting to open their oven mouths. Like the jaws of the flibber-gibbets. Like the names in the books of the dead that lift from their pages at night to float into the sky, turning the stars into letters that anyone can read.
I think what it would be like to be a corpse valet. To lift bodies and feel the weight of their passing. How odd it is, that the dead weigh more than the living. You would think it would be the opposite, but it isn’t. I think it is because souls give bodies lightness and air. When the soul leaves, the body has nothing left and is desperate to return to the earth. That’s why it’s so heavy.
Others might feel sorry for the corpse valets. They say that once you’re a corpse valet and know so many terrible secrets, the prison cannot let you go.
I like to listen for the sounds of their creaking wheels late at night. I like to think about their passage across the dusty yards in the earliest of morning, when the mist rises off the river and the geese come swooping in, crying at the wonder of life. What a beautiful thing that must be, to feel the weight of the dead even as the earth rises and is born again.
Chapter 4
York is furious that the lady has seen his aunt.
He glares at her from the wooden bars of the Dugdemona cage, his eyes like obsidian. His hands grip the bars. She can see the tensed anger in his body, the barely contained rage that lives inside so many of her clients. She is suddenly glad for the chains, glad for the cage, glad for the keepers at the door.
“You didn’t have my permission to talk to her,” York hisses.
Usually, she cultivates these death row clients for months. She builds a castle for them in the Dugdemona cage where they reign as kings. They feel safe in that castle, so they can tell her their terrible, shameful secrets. From her own history, she knows how strong that castle has to be, how deep its moat of protection has to be to let a grown child tell the world buried secrets. At each and every step, she asks their permission. “Is it okay if I talk to your mom?” or “Do you mind if I visit your aunt?” She knows condemned men feel powerless. In the secret castle they build together in the Dugdemona cage, she gives them power.