by Mike Bond
I’d visited Uncle Jack one summer to learn farm work, and fell for a neighbor, beautiful strong-willed Erica Tillson, salutatorian of the local high school, who later became a famous Portland lawyer. She certainly laid down the law, taking me up the Stroudwater River in a green canoe and screwing me half to death in the hayfield that had once belonged to my ancestors.
I was only fourteen at the time and new to this. She was three years older and quite experienced, though I was a fast learner. But in September she went off to Harvard, and when the haying and apple picking were done I flew back to Hawaii.
Now tracing my fingertips across the ancient stones brought a warm recognition, a sense of kinship, of our common lives, that who we are goes back to who they were. That this side of my family and my Hawaiian seafarer ancestors were one. That it’s idiotic to fight. That all living things are one, we and these majestic pines and the crows calling across the River and all other beings, even those we kill and who kill us.
The vision vanished, the headstones just cold granite, the wind bitter down my neck as it wailed through the pines. I climbed the ridge to look down at the River’s ribbon of ice, wanting to understand: the girl and boy paddling upriver in the green canoe and everything that had happened since.
Again no answer. I descended the aisle between the stones and Expeditioned through the gray bitter afternoon to Warren, a lovely old village on the St. George River that is now home to the Maine Maximum Security Prison, where former Special Forces Master Sergeant Buckford Franklin was waiting to be tried for first degree.
PRISONS TERRIFY ME. I’ve been twice Inside and don’t ever want to go back, not even to visit. The dread that I’ve been tricked back Inside and now will be there forever.
Warren Max Security did nothing to allay such fears. Its white façade and neutral building pods were like a trip to horror in another dimension: the old jails were evil, but these new ones delete whatever’s left of your soul.
Of course most folks in jail should be there, and if they weren’t, most of them would be perpetrating more crimes against the rest of us.
I should know.
But each time a steel door thunders shut behind you and your steps echo down a gritty concrete hall between two concrete and steel walls under a concrete ceiling, you can smell the heartbreak of all the millions jailed for life.
Jailhouse air. Stench of old sweat, filthy feet, sour farts, clogged nostrils, nasty hatreds and vile food overlaid with the smell of the guards’ synthetic uniforms, leather, anti-perspirant and oiled steel.
A level of Hades. That contains three kinds of people:
Those who have harmed others
Those who might harm the state
Those who didn’t do it
Concrete. Concrete and steel. Every living thing excised except the inmates sallow in the death of life. Condemned means damned together.
Most of them for good reason. If you’ve spent any time Inside you know. It’s sad but inexorable how some people get screwed by horrible parents, home tragedies and beaten fear, by everything going wrong, and end up committing the crimes that put them there.
Imagine how they see us on the other side of the glass – as we rush in from Outside, from the world, free to go back at the flick of a switch? It’s how the dead might envision the living. With infinite envy and deadly mirth.
“SO, ASSHOLE,” I says to Bucky when we finally get hooked up. “How you get into this?”
He scratches his shaved head and gives me that hard stare through the bulletproof glass. “Who the fuck told you?”
“Who you think?”
“She should shut up.” He looked me over. “When?”
“Yesterday.”
“You got here fast.” He shook his head. “Won’t do no good.”
“You do it?”
He snickered. “You have to ask?”
“I don’t have to ask.”
He studied me through the smears on the glass from too many people trying to touch each other. “Thanks.”
I glared back at him, massive and muscular in his orange prison suit. “So how we gonna get you out?”
“We ain’t gonna get me out.”
Seven minutes left. He was on non contact with a max of three visits a week; Lexie’d already used two for this week so it’d be days before I could see him again. What he said quickly was the night the environmental guy, Ronnie Dalt, VP of Lobbying for Maine Environmental Resources, had been killed in Augusta, Bucky had driven over to Jefferson to see his great uncle Silas, an hour away. But when the cops interviewed Uncle Silas he was having one of his goofy spells (he’s ninety-seven) and couldn’t remember a damn thing.
The odometer on Bucky’s truck was broke and he’d last topped up from the 91 octane tank he uses to refuel snowmobilers when they come through. “Since I get it by the tanker full,” he said, “it’s cheaper than 87 octane at Cumberland Farms.” So how could he prove how much gas he’d used, prove it wasn’t enough to drive to Augusta to kill Dalt?
“So who did kill him?” I says.
“You tell me.”
I nodded. “It ain’t right, Bucky.”
The buzzer rang. Such a horrible sound when you’re Inside, a raw snarl up your spine and clattering in your ears that means the person on the other side of the bullet-proof glass is going back into the world while you stay buried in concrete.
Bucky bit his lip. “Go see Lexie.”
We were on thin ice here. “Maybe.”
“She could use some help.”
I walked the grimy sidewalk past the concertina and machine guns into a moonless night, inhaling the frozen air to flush the prison rot out of my lungs, across the icy echoing blacktop to the two-ton juggernaut that would take me away from all this and leave Bucky behind.
“Turn left in two hundred yards,” the cheery dashboard lady said as I sailed the Expedition out of the parking lot. I hate guns but if I’d had one I damn well might’ve shot her right in the computer.
I headed toward Thomaston, Highway 1, Waldoboro and Route 22 north toward Jefferson and beyond to Route 220 between Liberty and Freedom and the turnoff to Bucky’s and Lexie’s Eagle Mountain farm. It started snowing, big fat flakes swarming in the headlights, the Expedition slithering all over the glacial roads like a hippo on ice.
Overwhelmed as I was by Bucky’s fate, it was easy to forget in Afghanistan I’d disliked him, a guy who lived for regulations and was determined to make me live that way too. For what he’d decided was my own good. And what he’d done to me because of it.
But like I explained in that other book, in Special Forces you never leave a buddy behind. No matter the risk or what he did. Especially if he once saved your life.
That goes for our country too.
Down for Life
THOUGH AT OPPOSITE ENDS of our country, Maine and Hawaii are, other than climate, much alike. Places where you say who you are, be who you are, keep your word, and don’t cheat or lie or take advantage of each other. Where you protect other folks because they are your tribe.
Both places independent-minded, rugged, yet conscientious of the common good. Both maritime, enriched yet trivialized by tourism, surrounded by natural beauty which they both love and are diligently trying to destroy. And both plagued by two of the most corrupt political systems in the United States.
Not long ago Money magazine rated Hawaii the most politically corrupt of the fifty states. Even worse than Russia, it said. Though lately Maine’s apparently been catching up.
It didn’t use to be this way.
On the Hawaiian side, my ancestors crossed the treacherous Pacific from Polynesia in rickety rafts lashed with vines, rowing for thousands of unknown miles with no compass, using only the stars, the currents, the birds and the winds, yet often able to reach the exact place they sought.
They had a broad sense of family and clan, an open enjoyment of sex, ferocious bravery in battle and kindness toward each other in peace, and reverence for our ‘ain
a, the precious earth, sea and sky that gives us all life.
On my haole (European) side, my ancestor Elias Hawkins grew up in the once-bucolic town of Hallowell, Maine in the 1830s. He lived with his hatmaker father, schoolteacher mother, six siblings and the family cow, ducks and chickens in a little saltbox on Water Street that has only recently been torn down, went to school when possible and attended the Old South Congregational Church on Second Street.
Life was tough; it either killed you or made you strong. As a boy Elias worked at many trades, in winter swimming the near-frozen Kennebec River to push ashore logs from timber drives which he then sold for ten cents each.
Hallowell was the tidal head of the Kennebec, the “long land water” where once a famous Abenaki village, Koussinok, had stood. Many boys from town had gone to sea back when half of America’s sailing ships had been built in Maine, and many had Maine crews.
Though a small town Hallowell had six newspapers, several churches and schools, and a growing economy based on beaver skins, lumber and fishing. The salmon and sturgeon runs in the River, Elias later wrote, were so massive you could walk across on the backs of these huge fish – all gone now. And the alewives and all the other smaller fish who once filled the river solid with their migrations.
Growing up as a rough, tough kid, Elias also was drawn to seeking out the mysteries of life, the path with heart. In his words, he wanted to understand how to live deeply and well and share that with others.
He attended Bangor Theological Seminary and fell in love with Ellen Howell of Portland. The day after they were married they sailed on the schooner “Gloucester” for the Sandwich Isles, as Hawaii then was called, and where he had been offered a post as the first missionary on the Big Island.
The journey took nine months, including the perilous passage between Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego. Their cabin was a blanket-draped cubicle in the hold with a bed, a small table, and enough room for one person to stand at a time. By the time they reached Hawaii Ellen was eight months pregnant, and soon gave birth to the first of their nine children. Readers of Michener’s Hawaii will recognize their story, for the missionary character and his wife in that book are based partially on Elias’ diary.
Soon after arriving on the Big Island Elias realized that God had called him not to preach religion to the Hawaiians but rather to help them survive this catastrophic white invasion. He built the first girls’ school in Hawaii and the second boys’ school, brought sugar cane to the Big Island and macadamia nuts to Hawaii – all in the hopes of giving the people a chance to build their lives, and to keep the girls, as he put it, from ending up as prostitutes in Honolulu.
When King Kamehameha granted Elias a large chunk of the Big Island, Elias passed it back to the Hawaiian people at a dollar an acre and used those funds to build more schools. Life was tough, you built things with your hands, and you cared for each other as one family. Once a year a ship arrived from Hallowell with lumber, nails, clothing and other supplies; in its hold, wrapped in straw, were a few chunks of last winter’s ice from the Kennebec River that the family used one day a year to make a special feast – ice cream.
To put it mildly Elias is revered by the Hawaiian people, and his schools, home, public library and gardens are now the Elias Hawkins National Historic District in North Kohala. One of his sons, Benjamin, was the first doctor on the Big Island. He kept a horse always saddled in the barn because often in the night someone would come running from faraway, perhaps Hilo even, or the south end of the island, to report a sick or injured person, and Benjamin would ride the many miles through the darkness to reach them.
It is from this mix of Hawaiian tribal love and New England ecumenicism that my own blood has come, and how I try, for better or worse, to live.
FROM HIGHWAY 1 I turned northwest through the forests and farm fields of Knox and Lincoln Counties, a frigid moon rising over fir-dark hills in a veil of blowing snow. Every ravine, crevice and rocky cleft was silvered, the dark sawtooth ridges like waves rolling to the horizon, the backbone of Maine. The backbone that the Wind Mafia were going to drill, blast, herbicide, and cover with thousands of howling, red-flashing towers twice the height of the clouds… It didn’t seem possible.
Long before you get to Lexie’s and Bucky’s farm you see the red-strobed turbines towering like War of the Worlds monsters over the once-beautiful crests of Eagle Mountain. Below in a fold of the hills lies their farm, acres of pasture in deep drifts, tall dark pines, red barns and outbuildings, the old white house with its steep roof and clapboard siding.
It was snowing harder, small hard flakes flying across the headlights. Lexie’s gate was open; I drove across the rattling cattle guard and up the long drive with snow squeaking under the tires.
She came out the kitchen door holding her hair back from the wind, gave me a brief hug. “So you came.”
We went inside and I pulled the door shut against the wind. “I had a choice?”
She didn’t answer, standing in the middle of the kitchen, arms folded, an angry unhappy face. Her blonde hair was tousled, unkempt. She wore an old levi blouse with torn elbows. The light from the overhead bulb made shadows in the hollows of her throat and under her eyes. I ached to take her in my arms and I hungered to walk out of there and never come back.
“I never wanted this,” she said.
“This?” Pretending I didn’t know what she meant.
“You’re going to say I brought it on myself.”
I glanced through the snow-clad mullioned panes at the blizzard hurling itself across the barnyard. “No point in regretting our choices.”
“I keep telling myself that accepting them makes us strong.”
“No one needs that kind of strength, Lexie.”
“I do. Now. Because I’m going crazy. The cows are gone, the chickens, the geese… We even had to sell the pigs, they were crying all night… I can’t sleep, the cat’s disappeared, Bucky’s dog keeps running away, comes home asking me to leave…”
“What do you mean, asking you?”
“Lobo? She comes back and sits out there in the barnyard whining. It can be forty below and she won’t come in. And when I go out she retreats down the road, doing the same thing, and when you get close she does it again. One time she grabbed my sleeve and literally pulled me down the road.” She clasped her temples. “These headaches…”
I was beginning to get one too, an irritating buzz like a bad neon light. The whole thing was miserable. I tried to change course. “So what do you regret? Bucky? The farm?”
She brushed the hair from my forehead with a quick maternal caress, sat opposite at the table. “There’s too much you won’t understand.”
We were both thinking how different things could have been. Would have been. “You had to go and shoot that girl,” she said.
“I had no choice.”
“The other guys…” She waited. “They didn’t think so.”
“She was dying. In the most horrible pain. She begged me.”
She clasped worn fingers across her knees. “And look what it cost you.”
And you? I nearly said.
The turbines’ weird howl went on and on, a 747 landing that never lands, an unending demonic torture wheel. My head pounded.
“I’ll never give Bucky up,” she said. “Not now.”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
“Even if he goes down for life.”
Here with the comfortable oak fire in the stone fireplace, the old pumpkin pine floorboards two feet wide, the ancient wallpaper, the sense of many generations having lived in this place, their spirits still there, the fear struck me, for the first time really, that we might not save him. That he like Maine might be lost forever. The world’s a very cruel place where the good are often destroyed while evil triumphs.
I could see the years ahead of his gray imprisonment, Lexie teaching school somewhere, not enough money, the weekly visits over icy roads to Warren State Prison. When every week nothing
had changed for him and maybe everything for her. And every week he looks into her eyes and tries to figure if she’s got someone.
“One time Lobo saved our lives,” Lexie said. “Right up that valley.”
From where she pointed maybe it was below the far pasture, where a thick ridge comes down steeply, the top towered over by windmills. “We came to a little valley and she wouldn’t let us go further. She actually knocked Bucky down, made us turn around.”
“So?”
“Fifteen minutes later the whole slope came down. Avalanche.”
“Where’s she now?”
“She leaves because the turbines do something to her ears. She’s going crazy.”
“Aren’t we all.” The windmills were a metaphor for the soul destruction of today, the withering earth, humans spreading like melanoma, toxic to almost every living thing except what we enslave.
THE TURBINES STOPPED. Lexie and I breathed out, looked into each other’s eyes for the first time since I’d come. The worm digging in our brains had gone silent.
How to describe it? Someone jackhammering beside you, the sound is physical, inescapable. Or the 747 landing, on and on and on but never landing. The electric drill howling through steel… And then, below it, undetected, the infrasound coagulating your blood and screaming silently inside your head.
And now the silence… The stunning silence. You realized you hadn’t been breathing deeply, hadn’t been able to think.
“Why’d they stop?” I says, afraid they’d start again.
“Curtailment. Only time the turbines produce much power is at night, when there’s no demand, so the utilities have to curtail it, dump the power.”
She’d made the old standby of Maine baked beans and hamburgers and had bought a handle of Tanqueray and some Martini & Rossi Extra Dry in my honor, so we went to work on all that. The martinis loosened things up a bit, and in her drawn weary face I found the shadow of the tempestuous young stripper I’d loved so much.