by Deeanne Gist
He didn’t ask me to talk. He smiled and passed me a piece of paper. I took the stub of pencil he offered. I applied the pencil to paper and pressed as if my dreams were leaking out.
“Show me,” he said.
I slowly drew a picture for him and silently handed it over.
He looked at the picture for a long time, and then he raised his eyes to me. The look he gave me was of infinite compassion. It was the first time anyone in my life had ever looked at me like that. Like he understood me.
“Where?” he asked.
I remember looking out his window to the freedom outside, out past the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and the tiny plot of grass inside and the metal swing that no child ever rode.
I tapped my chest. It was inside me.
He nodded as if that made perfect sense.
He didn’t ask the questions the others had asked, about why I didn’t talk and what had happened to me and why I bit and growled and ran. He just sat back in his chair and looked at me for a long time.
I saw myself through his eyes. I saw a skinny boy with wild hands and wilder eyes.
“I wonder if we can help you,” he said.
I shook my head.
His eyes met mine for a long time. Then we both looked out the window to the freedom we both knew I should never have.
The lady visits with York once a week now. She tells herself she doesn’t have time; she should be working nonstop on his case. But she promised to build him a castle, the safe place he needs to tell his secrets, just like all the other clients. He may even change his mind.
Today the sun is weak and honey-colored. York smiles at it with his funny-notched teeth. He doesn’t care about what she has been doing on his case. He wants to talk about himself.
He speaks of the little things that are coming back to him. “It’s funny how being close to death helps you remember,” he says. “There was this school bus would come pick up all the kids in Sawmill Falls to take them to the school in Squiggle Creek.” He tells how he would wait for the bus outside the shack where he lived with his mom at the end of a dirt road. Sometimes the bus came, but most of the time it did not. He talks about a teacher who taught him how to count using dots. He talks about Auntie Beth and how she cooked a mean fried chicken on that old black stove back in the day. “Hell of a cook,” he says, and the lady wonders how much of this was imagination born of hunger.
He talks about his mother. “She was a good mom,” he says defensively.
The lady nods. “She loved you,” she says simply.
“Yeah. People don’t get that.”
“Why not?”
“Because—you know.”
“Love isn’t stopped by illness,” the lady says gently. “Not yours or hers.”
York gives her a startled glance and then nods. He is close now.
“She tried—she did,” the lady says, so softly. “She couldn’t. But she loved you. And you loved her. No matter what you did later.”
His eyes are growing darker.
“The ones who came to visit—they didn’t love your mom.”
Now she sees the rage. It is right there, behind the glittering eyes.
York begins speaking in a low voice. It is a voice that reminds her of birds that sing after dark.
“I got older, you know, puberty, and it was like electric flashes went off in my head,” he says. “I had these—strange currents.”
“Yes.”
“It started when I was about twelve. I had been eating dirt—I was hungry, okay—and I thought maybe a strange walnut seed had planted itself inside me, you know, right inside me above my parts. I thought maybe the walnut had sprouted.”
She has to be so careful, each step. “What did the walnut seed become, York?”
He looks anguished. “A hard tree that wanted to push and push.”
She bows her head, listening. Storms blow through her. What is it in our world that breeds such howling despair?
“Lots of times I go to sleep and think tomorrow will be the day I wake up and feel sorry,” York remarks. “But when I wake up, I never feel sorry.”
She raises her damp eyes. “Could you?”
“How would it matter?”
She thinks how the attorneys who hire her don’t understand. They don’t understand that men like York were damaged long before they got here, damaged by what they did, then damaged by years spent living in the isolation of the dungeon. The attorneys think that getting them off death row will turn these damaged creatures into walking, talking real people with rounded edges—real people who can take a deep breath that doesn’t hurt their soul.
Men like York are like the sightless fish that live in caves deep underground. Hauled above, they will perish.
“I understand why you want to die,” she tells York.
“Most people say that,” he says.
“I’m not talking about living on death row,” she says. “I meant I would want to die if I were you.”
He stares at her. There is heat in his hawk eyes. “Yeah? Why? Because of what I did?”
“Yes.”
The anger in his eyes passes and is replaced with sadness. “I don’t like having to be nice, especially to a pretty lady like you, but I’m willing to do it this once. I’ll ask you please.”
“Please what?”
“Walk on out of here and let me die.”
When a man like York says he feels no remorse, I believe him. How can men like us really know what that word means? We hunt around inside ourselves like squirrels trying to find nuts, picking up each emotion and asking ourselves, “Is this remorse? Is this guilt?”
Men who have not been violated don’t understand what it is like to have the edges of your body blurred—to feel that every inch of your skin is a place where fingers can press, that every hole and orifice is a place where others can put parts of their bodies. When your body stops being corporeal, your soul has no place to go, so it finds the next window to escape.
My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my tongue, my heart, and my mind.
When you don’t have a soul, the ideas inside you become terrible things. They grow unchecked, like malignant monsters. You cry in the night because you know the ideas are wrong—you know because people have told you that—and yet none of it does any good. The ideas are free to grow. There is no soul inside you to stop them.
When I left the state mental hospital at eighteen and the wind chased the papers from my hands and I walked until I found that house, I thought maybe my soul was hiding behind the fluttering cloth over the window.
My soul was not there. The ideas were there, and the ideas hatched into something too terrible to name.
I had good attorneys, even for back then. They were not like Grim and Reaper. They hired a man who had the same job as the lady. The man brought in witnesses. Some of the jurors cried. I listened to the witnesses—the social workers, the neighbors, even my grandparents, looking so very old and sad—through a veil of hair. The newspapers said I was without emotion. How could I have emotion, hearing my life played backward?
When the jurors came back and said no death, the attorneys slapped me on the back, while behind me, I heard a woman groan. The attorneys said a life sentence was unheard of in cases like mine.
The attorneys seemed ecstatic, but they were not going where I was going. I had been handed a bomb to carry for the rest of my life. The bomb was my life.
The attorneys for whom the lady works have a private firm. They have a nice table in a conference room. They have a secretary to answer the phone. There are enough honors and plaques and awards on the walls—many from the cases she worked on—to make your head spin.
They have everything but common sense, she thinks.
The attorneys refuse to believe that York genuinely wants to die. The
y refuse to discuss whether he has a right to consider it. They’ve been arguing about it for close to an hour.
“He is not changing his mind,” she says.
“How do you know that?” asks the younger attorney somewhat belligerently.
She takes a sip of her coffee and calms her voice. “I’ve been pushing him lots of different ways. I even told him I’d want to kill myself, too, if I were him.”
“You told him what?”
“But I get nothing. He reacts a little, and then poof. It’s gone.”
“He’s committed,” the older attorney says thoughtfully.
She gives him a grateful glance. “Not just committed,” she says. “If he were just committed to dying, we could try to change that—make him get committed to living. No. This is something different.”
“What is it?” he asks her, and she can see the respect in his eyes.
She pauses. “He’s ready.”
The older attorney winces. The younger one just looks truculent. He changes the subject. “How is the work going?” he asks her.
“Well enough,” she replies evasively.
“Finding anything?”
She thinks of York’s mom, sitting on her bed in a flowered blouse with her bare wet legs. She doesn’t feel like talking about it. She drinks her coffee and doesn’t reply.
“We only have a few more weeks,” he adds, as if she doesn’t know this. She takes another sip.
The two men let it go. They trust that if something is there, she will find it.
As she leaves the office, the older attorney puts a hand on her arm to gently stop her. She turns and sees the interest in his eyes. The lines of care etched around his eyes tell her it is a warm interest, a nice interest.
She can’t go there anymore. She has before, and it never works.
The building that scares me the most is Cellblock H.
I don’t like to even think of it, a cold white building in the middle of our warm beige stone. Our stone walls are alive, but Cellblock H was made out of cold concrete, built during the 1960s by men representing all the advances in modern mental health science. The walls are spackled smooth. There are no windows in Cellblock H, not even the narrow windows with bars like the other men have in the other cellblocks. That no one cut windows is like God deciding a body doesn’t need to breathe. It is a building without a throat. Men go in there and never come out.
The officials call it the Intensive Management Unit. The inmates call it the death house. The crazy men—well, crazy in a way that annoys the guards—get sent to Cellblock H. If you are quietly crazy here, no one minds. Cellblock H is supposed to provide all the best in care. The orderlies don’t wear uniforms, and guards don’t strap guns. Air-conditioning whisks away all bad smells, and soundproof walls silence even the loudest screams.
The cells are tight boxes of solid metal, including the doors. There is a narrow slot for the meal trays, but it’s closed between feedings with a soundproof metal hinge. When a man is locked inside one of these metal boxes, no one can hear him scream. An inmate can stay in those metal cells for days, for weeks, for years. No one knows or keeps track. Only a clipboard hanging outside tells the guard who is in the box and when the inmate was last fed. If the clipboard gets dropped or someone takes it away to make copies, it might never get returned. Then the man inside the box is truly alone.
Once years ago the guards noticed a bad smell coming from one of the metal cells at the end of tier one. It was a cell they thought had been empty. There was no clipboard, so there was no reason to believe the cell was occupied. When they opened it, they found a man who had died weeks before. The constant air-conditioning had whisked away most of the smell and preserved what was left of his hands. He had gotten so hungry, he had eaten off his fingers.
There was an investigation, like there always is. The lost clipboard was found; it had been buried in a laundry bin. The inmate had been the head of one of the prison gangs. There was some confusion over why he was in Cellblock H in the first place. There were whispers that a rival gang leader and a corrupt intelligence officer had set it up. The confusion was so great that the investigators threw up their hands and called it a regrettable mistake.
The little men with hammers are inside the walls of my cell.
I’m not sure how they get here so quickly. One minute the walls are silent and the next they are there, sometimes in force. They have a very distinctive smell, like wet sawdust and urine. They scamper through tunnels under the yard and under the buildings like gophers, until all of a sudden they pop up here, dozens of them. You’d think the walls would be tight. No. This place is pockmarked with holes and secret tunnels.
I hear them sneaking late at night in the wall behind my cot. I’m sure the warden sent them. No, I think. The warden is okay. He wouldn’t do that. So who sent them?
I slide along the wall and press my ear to it like a stone spider, breathing softly in the dark.
The men scamper and giggle so softly. They snicker in low voices, as if they are having a real party in there. I can never make out exactly what they are saying. I have the dreaded fear that they are climbing to the ceiling to make it collapse. All the collected weight of the earth above will fall on us. It is a clever plan. We will die choking on dirt and dust. That’s okay for me, but I don’t like the idea of them doing that to the others. Well, they can kill Striker, but not the others.
“Don’t do it!” I want to scream at the little men. “Don’t tear down the walls!”
Of course, I can’t talk. I can only huddle on my cot, miserable. I grind my teeth so hard that sharp pains explode along my exposed nerve endings. I listen to the scampering so long, I finally spit out one of my few remaining teeth. It lands on my lap, a long bloody yellow tooth crowned with black.
Hours later, the small men finally fall silent. I want to sleep but cannot. My jaw aches.
I don’t trust them. What did they do? Why were they here?
I realize it now. They have strung a black whirling cord through the walls, and when they leave, they will push the start button and the phone recorder will play.
Please don’t do this, I want to whisper. Please don’t.
The little men don’t care about me. I am just one of the cordwood bodies they scamper over deep in the night, eating the dead skins off the soles of our feet.
Is that a dial tone?
No. I fall back on my cot. A phone is ringing in a distant land. I put my pillow over my face and scream silently inside. I can hear it still.
A trembling female voice on the other line is answering. “Donald?” says the voice once again. “Donald?”
The lady and the priest are walking the grounds outside the prison, under the shadows of the cyclone-barbed walls.
They walk under the shady elms and step over the green spiny creatures under the walnut trees as though they are alive. The priest walks slowly, as if dragging his feet. The lady walks like a forest sprite waiting to find what is exciting around the next corner.
“Most Catholics would say you are doing God’s work by saving lives,” the priest offers hopefully.
She shakes her head. “I’m not saving any lives. I’m only ending a few executions.”
“Is there a difference?”
She glances at him. He knows there is a difference. She looks at the high wall next to them. “There are almost a dozen men in there I’ve walked off the row. They won’t die of execution. But I can’t say I’ve saved their lives.” She pauses. “I can only say I postponed their death.”
His eyes soak up the clean look of her skin, the darkness of her eyes. “For a lot of people, that would be enough.”
“To live like that? I’m not sure.”
“Most of the men you’ve freed are happy to be in there,” he says.
She shakes her head. “What does that say about us or about them?”
He stops under an elm tree. A light wind shakes the leaves above them. July is around the corner, the red circle r
acing forward. The lady feels the press of panic. She shouldn’t be here, talking, when York’s execution date looms.
“Would you save them all?” he asks.
She knows he is asking about himself. “Yes.”
“Even someone like Arden?”
The lady considers what she has heard about Arden—about what he did, or as close as her mind will allow before it skitters away in horror. She thinks about how sad it is that we remember the killers and not their victims. What if the world forgot Hitler and remembered all the names of his victims? What if we immortalized the victims?
The breeze lifts the hair above his brow, and he waits for an answer.
“I would save Arden,” she says.
He nods, and they walk some more as if there is nothing left to say.
The lady has a sick feeling in her stomach. She feels like she has confessed a terrible sin, the sin of her willingness. But the priest feels a lifting of his entire soul. If she would save Arden, he thinks, she might save me.
The lady is debating in her head with the attorneys, since she doesn’t want to do it in person.
She is asking attorney A, the little snot, about giving York some medical tests. Can she ethically ask him to do it without really explaining why? The younger attorney starts talking, and right away she knows this is going nowhere.
She hears attorney B, the older and wiser one, saying no, no, listen to the lady, she knows her shit. Then attorney B starts talking some law stuff that sounds like logarithms from hell.
She decides to deal with it herself. She is feeling oddly secretive about this case. She doesn’t want the attorneys to know what she is doing just yet.
The answer is as easy as a phone call to a medical expert she knows: A vial of blood is all he needs. He’ll get back to her within a few days.
The lady slowly walks the dungeon rows. She says their names to herself as she passes each cell. Jones, Hildebrand, Sandoval, Large, Hall. Junior, Martin, Pearson, Lockridge. Mayfield, Porter, Aguilar, Flack, Green.
The men look out at her behind bars. Ratcliff, Hoffman, Leopold, Mason, Curtis, Rogers, Dowd, Duncan, and Wyatt. Some of the men put their hands between the bars, as if pleading for help.