And as the cooler, drier air sucked the moisture up and out of the warm sea spray, fog was born. The same fog that 150 years before had prompted men to fashion a tower at the land’s edge and place a light atop it, to warn off mariners. The same fog that had been rolling across the barrier islands, settling in, and enveloping them for centuries, for millennia, for as long as there had been land and water.
Now, as Jorgensen squinted out through the porthole, seeing nothing, he could tell it was socked in pretty good. And with the breeze already dropping as the evening neared, he knew it’d be around for a spell.
“We won’t take much more of your time,” said one of his guests. The law school professor, if memory served him.
“Not to worry,” said Jorgensen. “I’m afraid you won’t be going anywhere till morning. And I trust you’ll put up with fish stew.”
For a time, Boyd Davies was put to work in the fields, cutting grass, piling up stones to make a fence, or pulling weeds out of the vegetable patch. But it didn’t work out too well.
“The boy would get like real innerested in a stone or somethin’ like that,” recalls one of his sisters, “or stop to stare at the root of some turnip, like he’d never seen nuthin’ in the world like it. Only then he’d go and do the same ezzack thing all over again, an hour later. It wasn’t that he was bad or anythin’ like that. It was jest that in the end, you couldn’ get no work outa him. Thassall.”
So for Boyd, it was back to idleness - idleness broken only by the occasional companionship (or at least the company) of children half his age.
Which might have been fine, but for one thing. If Boyd’s verbal and social skills showed virtually no signs of developing with his years, outwardly his body was growing up on schedule. By the time he was fifteen, the boy was taller than his mother, and Hattie stood an even five-six. Over the next three years, Boyd would grow another half a foot, ending up just a shade over six feet tall. And although he never seemed particularly interested in food (other than to poke it around on his plate and stare at it), he must have been eating something, because subsequent records attest to his having reached 205 pounds by adulthood.
But Boyd’s size wasn’t the only thing that was changing. Where before his face had been smooth and soft, now the beginnings of a mustache and beard appeared. Round, boyish features gave way to the longer, more angular ones of an adult. And although he still spoke little, on the occasions that he did, his voice was noticeably deeper.
Inside his body, other changes were taking place - changes in glands and hormones, changes that awakened stirrings and itches, leading in turn to urges and cravings and needs - all part of God’s great design for propagating the human race.
But hardly the thing for a little boy walking around in the body of a grown man.
“It wasn’t Boyd’s fault,” one of his sisters would explain later. “The little boys would come around, ‘cause even though he was big like a grownup, they could play with him like he was one of them. They’d climb on his back, rassle with him, punch him with their little fists - he never seemed to object. And the little girls, they’d pull up their skirts to tease him, like little girls do, or try to tickle him, to see if they could get a reaction out of him. For the most part, he’d pay them no mind, pretend he didn’t notice what they were up to. But every now and then, he’d sneak a look, you know, or maybe tickle one of them back. He was different from other people, Boyd was. But he was still human.”
The local police were a bit less charitable in their assessment of the situation.
According to Juvenile Hall records (at the time, a boy was considered a juvenile in Virginia until his sixteenth birthday, at which time he was deemed a youth and could even be treated as an adult if the offense happened to be serious enough), Boyd was arrested three times. On each occasion, a complaint was signed by the parent of a considerably younger child. Two of the arrests were for “public lewdness,” the equivalent of indecent exposure, a relatively minor infraction, particularly in the case of a youngster. The third arrest was more troubling. The official charge was sodomy in the third degree, and although the complaint has long since been destroyed or lost, there is some suggestion that Boyd was accused of inserting a finger, or fingers, into the vagina of a seven-year-old.
Because of his status as a juvenile - and more likely because he was widely viewed as a “retard” - Boyd was permitted to plead guilty to a lesser offense and avoid incarceration. But he was ordered placed on “court supervision” (presumably a strict variety of probation) until his twenty-first birthday.
Hattie McDaniel was determined to see that her son got into no further trouble with the law, and she put him on the shortest of leashes. She confined him to the house; she made a habit of taking him with her whenever she went out; and she “deputized” his sisters, requiring them to immediately report to her any transgressions committed by Boyd that they might become aware of.
Hattie’s vigilance seems to have paid dividends for a while, because from the time he was placed on supervision until shortly after his seventeenth birthday - a period of a year and a half - there appear to have been no further instances of Boyd’s getting into trouble, and his name doesn’t appear on any of the Pittsylvania County arrest blotters.
All that ended one August evening in 1981.
One of Boyd’s sisters recalled later that the family was sitting around the dinner table when they heard a car drive up. That fact itself was unusual. Neither Hattie, her sister, nor just about any of their friends owned a car. Folks who came calling would take the Greyhound bus to Gretna, over on Route 29, and walk the two miles to the house.
One of the little children - for by this time Hattie had become a grandmother several times over, and the house was now home to three generations - ran to the window, looked out, and reported breathlessly, “It’s the police, Nana!” And, indeed, it was. They were there for “Boyd Davis,” they explained, and for a moment, the family took hope from their mispronunciation of his last name. But their hope was short-lived. The warrant one of them held in his hand had the correct spelling. And shortly beneath it, the words “RAPE IN THE FIRST DEGREE.”
The officers were decent enough. They allowed Boyd time to get dressed - he’d been shirtless and shoeless when they’d arrived - and say his good-byes, which were characteristically brief. Then they put handcuffs on him, walked him out to their car, put him in the back seat, and drove off.
Three years would pass before he’d come home.
It seems that Hattie’s vigilance had been less than perfect. According to court documents, two weeks earlier Boyd had been down by the railroad trestle bridge, about half a mile behind the house. There he’d been playing with two girls, one ten, the other eight. The ten-year-old had taken off some of her clothes, saying she wanted to wade in the creek, and had dared the others to join her. At that point, the eight-year-old had left and run home, “to tell.” She returned forty minutes later, with her father. When they got there, her sister and Boyd Davies were lying on the bank of the creek. Both of them were naked. When the ten-year-old’s father threatened to beat her, she cried out that Boyd had made her take her clothes off and had “done things” to her.
The girl was taken to a doctor, who upon examining her found a slight enlargement of her vaginal opening, which he characterized as “consistent with penetration.” When asked by the doctor, in the presence of her father and two detectives, if the young man had “put his thing in there,” she hesitated for a moment, then nodded her head up and down once.
Boyd was given a court-appointed lawyer named Owen Hubbard, a black man now in his seventies. One can imagine Hubbard trying his best to explain to his client that he was looking at thirty years in prison if he were to stand trial and be convicted. And one can hardly fault him for prevailing upon Boyd to accept a reduced plea that carried a maximum of seven years, but would have him out in two or three.
“And he was mighty lucky at that,” Hubbard said afterward. “Had that be
en a little white girl who’d a cried rape, they’d a thrown away the key. You can bet the farm on that.”
Following his sentencing, Boyd was sent to the processing center in Lynchburg, where he was classified as an adult, rather than a youthful offender. One would be hard-pressed to imagine what criteria the authorities relied upon to make such a determination, other than the seriousness of the original charge and the physical size of the defendant, but make it they did. From Lynchburg, Boyd was transferred to the Brushy Mountain State Prison, near Bluefield, in the western tip of the state. The prison is Virginia’s maximum-security adult facility, housing the system’s most hardened and dangerous murderers, robbers, and rapists. Almost all are recidivists serving double-digit sentences; many are in for natural life.
When he arrived at Brushy Mountain, Boyd Davies was all of seventeen years old.
“I’m an old man,” said August Jorgensen, rising from his chair at the table. “My wife, God rest her, used to complain I like to eat with the chickens. But I can’t help it; habits are habits. When it starts getting dark outside, I start fixing supper. So as we used to say in Richmond, we’ll be in recess for a while.”
“Why don’t we come back and finish tomorrow?” suggested Jessica Woodruff.
“Take a look outside,” Jorgensen told her. “When the fog gets socked in like this, only an idiot would try crossing the narrows back to the mainland. I know these roads like the back of my hand, and even I’d be hard-pressed to make it. Miss one turn, and you’re in the drink.”
The three of them moved to the porthole and went through the motions of peering out into the distance. Jorgensen might have saved them the trouble by telling them what they’d see. The answer would have been simple: nothing, absolutely nothing. But they did their peering anyway. After a moment, their protests diminished to apologies, and from there to thanks.
It had been a good summer for shrimping. Not like years ago, when he and Marge could wade into the shallows, stretch the long, weighted net between them, its cork floats bobbing on the surface, drag it to shore and come up with hundreds - no, thousands - of shrimp, squirming and wriggling and sparkling in the sunshine.
It had taken him only half a day to train Jake to work one end of the net. He’d grasp it in his mouth, swim out parallel to Jorgensen until the water was too deep for him to stand, and paddle around in circles (dogs are good at many things, but treading water in one spot didn’t seem to be one of them), waiting for his cue. Then, with a whistle from Jorgensen, he’d head back in, the net still firmly in his mouth. As they neared the shore, the weight of their catch would become considerable. Jorgensen, wading, would struggle to drag his end of the net, sometimes slipping in the sand or stubbing a toe on a rock, on occasion even letting the net slip from his hands.
Jake never let go.
And the irony was, he wouldn’t eat the shrimp. Not live, not shelled, not cooked, not disguised and buried in any of his favorites. He’d wrinkle his nose, snort once or twice, step back, and shoot the old man a look, as if to say, “You expect me to eat cat food?”
Now Jorgensen pulled a small bag from his freezer, and another, and another after that. Setting them into water to thaw, he began chopping up onions and peppers and tomatoes and okra and potatoes, and anything else he could find. But no garlic; he hated garlic. He remembered how, for one of his birthdays, Marge had presented him with a custom-made charm on a thin silver chain. He’d had to look closely to see that it was a tiny figure of a vampire. “Wear that around your neck,” she’d told him, “and it’ll ward off garlic.” He smiled now at the thought of it.
In a little oil, he began sautéing the onions, adding the rest of the vegetables depending on the amount of cooking time they’d need. When they were good and brown and beginning to stick to the iron skillet, he poured in some fish stock, some tomato juice, and a little white wine, then added a couple of bay leaves. He gave the mixture a stir, put a lid on the skillet, and turned down the flame to let it simmer.
“Take a walk upstairs,” he told his guests, “and pick out rooms to sleep in. Then make sure you leave the doors open, so they’ll warm up a bit.”
He watched them file up the staircase, grasping the rail tightly and watching their feet. It took some getting used to, it did. The first morning they’d brought him home from the pound, Jake had balked at the sight of the steps, whining and cowering in terror that he’d slip through the openings. But by evening, he’d gotten hungry enough to give it a try, and by now, it was second nature to him, just as it was to Jorgensen.
He set the table, using mismatched bowls and silverware and glasses, and jelly jars when he ran out of glasses. He wasn’t used to company and didn’t much care for it. But fog was fog, and he’d been speaking the truth when he’d told them there was no way they could make it to the mainland until morning. Besides which, the story of Boyd Davies had already gotten to him. Not because it was out of the ordinary; it wasn’t. Oh, the details were different; they always were. But if the defendant hadn’t been born brain-damaged, then he’d been horribly abused as a youngster. If he wasn’t severely retarded, then he’d developed schizophrenia as a teenager. In Boyd’s case, it had been his total lack of verbal and social skills. It was almost as if there was a rhythm to the stories, a predictable cadence that was - in some strange and unfathomable way - familiar and comforting, even as it was haunting and disturbing.
He lifted the bags from the water they’d been standing in and spilled the contents onto a chopping block that was nothing more than a cross-section of a pecan tree that had grown too big for its own good. He added the fish first, stirring the pieces into the stew. There were redfish and mullet, monkfish and sheepshead - whatever had been unlucky enough to be in the way when Jorgensen and Jake had dragged the shrimp net up onto the beach.
He found a loaf of bread in the freezer and put it into the warming oven of the stove. Marge had lobbied hard for a microwave, but he’d always hated gadgets, and had explained that it might make trouble for his pacemaker.
“You don’t have a pacemaker,” she’d said.
“I might get me one,” he told her.
His guests were descending the stairs gingerly, complimenting him on the rest of his home and thanking him again for his hospitality. He stirred the stew, adding some sea salt and hot pepper, and poked a fork into a piece of fish. It resisted for just a second before flaking. He added the crab and shrimp and put the cover back on.
“Smells divine,” said Jessica Woodruff, and, indeed, it did. “What is it you call it again?”
August Jorgensen shrugged. “I call it the sea,” he said.
With Boyd Davies’s communication skills virtually nonexistent, little is known of his three years at Brushy Mountain. Prison records suggest he was an average inmate, being “written up” for minor infractions of the rules on four occasions, and placed in solitary confinement once, for a period of five days. Though one can hardly imagine a confinement more solitary than Boyd’s to begin with.
His mother and two of his sisters visited him, but only on the rarest of occasions. From Pittsville to Bluefield is only a hundred miles as the crow flies, but by bus, it took nearly five hours and cost $38. And it wasn’t as if Boyd had anything to tell them once they got there, anyway.
This much is known: By the time Boyd came home three years later, his body was covered with old bruises, and scarred in half a dozen places. He could no longer bend the middle three fingers of his left hand, or raise his right arm above his head. His left eye was half shut, leaving him forever after with an appearance that, if you didn’t know him, you’d think was slightly sinister.
In all other respects, he seemed the same - at twenty, a little bit older, but just as quiet, just as withdrawn, just as unreachable, and just as totally absorbed in absurd little things that couldn’t possibly have interested another human being for more than a second or two.
There was one other thing. Since Boyd had been released after serving only three years
of a seven-year sentence, he still “owed” the state four years. The way the state went about securing this debt was to place Boyd on parole for the balance of his sentence. As a parolee, he was informed that any arrest, for however trivial an offense, would land him back in Brushy Mountain for the next four years. He could be strip-searched at any time, compelled to submit to random urine tests to detect the presence of alcohol or illegal drugs, and subjected to unannounced searches of his home (which, in Boyd’s case, meant his family’s home, and all their belongings). But most onerously, he was required to report every two weeks to a parole officer in Lynchburg, fifty miles to the north.
His parole officer, a man by the name of Sean Kenny, remembered Boyd’s first visit years later. “He shows up the first time with his mama. Can you believe that? A twenty-year-old man, and he’s got to bring mama along, to hold his hand. I knew right away he was never going to make it, not with an attitude like that. But that wasn’t all. He’d never once give me a straight answer to my questions, or pay attention to something I was trying to tell him, even when it was for his own good. And he had this nasty way of never making eye contact, of always sneaking me a glance out of the corner of one eye, like he was mocking me, trying to get over on me. He was some piece of work, that one was.”
Hattie McDaniel recalled the meeting somewhat differently. “There was no way I was going to put him on a bus and let him go by hisself. So I took him. And they gave him a white man, Irish fella. And I said to him, ‘Sir, my son is different. You gots to understand, to make some allowances.’ And you know what the man says to me? He says, ‘Miss Davis’ - he never could understand that my name wasn’t the same as my son’s, and that even Boyd’s name wasn’t Davis - ‘Miss Davis,’ he says, ‘this here is America you’re living in, and under our constitution, it’s your son’s right to be treated ezzackly the same way as everyone else.’”
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