Eve
Chantry looked at me, and in her eyes I could see what was coming.
'She
caught something alright, found her rod floating in among the weeds, and on the
end of that line was a fish. But she was gone, drowned…'
Eve's
eyes were filling up, and from the small table beside her she took a silk
handkerchief and held it to her face.
'Jack
went running down there when he found her bed empty. He knew. He knew what had
happened. He was shouting and crying before he even reached the edge of the
Lake.'
Eve
paused again. Her cigar had gone out. She lit it once more, needful of a brief
hiatus in the telling of this tragedy.
'I
remember looking from the window of the house…' She raised her hand and sort of
indicated a direction out towards the Lake.
'I
saw him standing there. And then he went down. He was holding her limp body,
her long hair wet and trailing on the ground. He was on his knees, his head was
thrown back, and never in my life have I heard anything like the sound that
came from him. It sounded like his soul had been wrenched from his body…'
Eve
raised the handkerchief again and wiped her eyes.
'She
was twelve years old… 1938 it was, and for the few years between her death and
his own he was a ghost of himself. He went to the war in '44, and apparently he
saved some boys, nothing more than boys they were. Three boys from Boise,
Idaho, who wouldn't have known him from
Adam.
He gave his own life saving them. But he wasn't saving them, he was saving
Jennifer…'
I
leaned back in my chair.
I was
overwhelmed, exhausted, and yet my head was clear despite the quantity of punch
I'd drunk, the cigar I'd smoked, despite the warmth of the fire.
I
looked at Eve Chantry and she seemed ageless and perfect, an island of calm
amidst some raging torrential sea.
My
heart, for what it was worth, went out to her, and losing Caroline Lanafeuille,
even seeing Nathan disappear at the end of the road, even losing my father,
meant nothing in that moment.
Jack
Chantry had lost his world in Lake Marion, lived for a few years on borrowed
time, and then committed himself to die because he couldn't bear the burden any
more.
Eve
Chantry had lost her daughter, then her husband, and since that time had lived alone
here in Greenleaf.
'Too
much,' I remember saying, my voice sounding thin and weak. I couldn't imagine
saying anything that would have been fitting or relevant to the situation.
'Or
not enough,' Mrs. Chantry said, 'depending on which way you look at it.'
During
that month while Nathan was in Chicago I spent a great deal of time with Eve
Chantry. I invited her down to Christmas at our house, but she didn't come. I
remember standing there on the porch watching the road, my mother calling for
me to close the door against the wind, and I did close it, but I stayed outside
for nigh on an hour. Folks came and went, but none of them was Mrs. Chantry.
Later,
after dinner, I walked down to the edge of Lake Marion and looked over the water.
I
imagined Jack Chantry stumbling up towards me, the limp body of his
twelve-year-old daughter in his arms, a sound like a wrenched soul rushing from
his lungs. I felt a tight fist of emotion in my chest, my throat, felt that
fist turn back on itself and grip my heart. I could feel veins and arteries
swelling between its relentless fingers.
I
started to cry. I cried for someone I neither knew nor had ever seen, but in
that release was perhaps the loss of Caroline, of Nathan, of my father.
Later
I walked back and stood at the end of the road near Eve Chantry's house. The
lights were still on, their multicolored reflections against the snow.
I
didn't walk up there. I figured if she hadn't come out it was because she
wanted to be alone.
Perhaps
she wished to share Christmas with the memory of her daughter and her husband.
Perhaps
she wished to share memories that were simply between herself and God.
Some
things are like that.
I
understand that now.
Understand
that the best of all.
Two hours
after Father John Rousseau's departure that day in August, Max Myers came up to
see me. From his overalls he produced four packs of Lucky Strikes and pushed
them through the bars. They were from John Rousseau.
I
gave one pack to Max and asked him to give another pack to Lyman Greeve. Lyman
Greeve didn't smoke, but he was saving trade-ins for a harmonica. He wanted to
learn to play 'My Darling Clementine' before he died. He'd seen some guy do it
in some old cowboy movie with Audie Murphy or Randolph Scott. It had become his
life's purpose.
The
other two packs I kept myself, and though I wanted to smoke them all I took
four cigarettes, wrapped them in some paper, and pushed them into a gap between
the wall and the edge of my sink. They would be safe there.
When
I knew it was all over, when I had a time and a date that I knew wouldn't
change, I would take them out and smoke them.
Two
for me and two for Nathan, because we had always shared everything.
It
had begun with a baked ham sandwich, the best in North Carolina, and it would
end with a Lucky Strike and an inevitable promise of death.
Seemed
to make sense to me.
Simple,
like most things should be but, ironically, like most things never are.
My
time was coming, crawling backwards towards me relentlessly. And Mr. West knew
my time was coming too, and as it approached I seemed to see him more
frequently. I watched him just as he would watch me. I tried to place myself
behind his eyes and see the world from his viewpoint.
I
believed Mr. West saw faces, more faces than those who inhabited D-Block.
And
when he dreamt, he dreamt in monochrome, and the faces were there too.
Most
often they were silent, but sometimes, only
sometimes,
they spoke, and
when they spoke they said terrible things.
He
listened, but he did not reply. If you talked back to your own memories you'd
go crazy.
And
Mr. West wasn't crazy.
He
was just
necessary.
He
believed all men possessed a purpose. Some to father children. Some to build
scrapers that towered over the earth. Some to plant trees and corn and
pomegranates.
Some
men were born to die, and then there were those born to kill them.
Such
was his belief, and neither desire nor pleasure nor emotion entered into it.
What he did was functional and precise.
Most
of all it was
necessary.
And
so it was that he watched me, and other times he watched Max Myers as he
wheeled his trolley away from my cell, and understood that for now he was here
merely to see that all of us met our just end. It was neither his duty nor
interest to question why, to ascertain innocence or guilt, for all men were
guilty - if not of the thing with which they were charged, then of other sins.
Sins
Mr. West knew all about.
For these
last thirty years he had served other men, men with political and judicial
ends, men without names and faces, and he had taken care to execute his duties
with professionalism and pride.
Now,
in these latter years, he had walked these corridors and gantries, listening to
the guilty as they cried and prayed in the dark of night, and he had fulfilled
his function: to take them down along those same corridors to their rightful
and punctual deaths.
To
Mr. West I was such a man, and though I did not cry or pray, he believed I
would.
Time
would come that I would.
I had
walked where I shouldn't have, and though I seemed no more capable than a Girl
Scout of America of killing a man, I had nevertheless crossed the line.
The
law was the law, written or otherwise, and the Bible said what the Bible said,
and people like Richard Goldbourne - a man Mr. West had never met, but knew a
little of - would not have tolerated such a violation of his own sense of
morals, however twisted those morals might have been.
And
so the nightmare had to unfold - as slow as Sunday chess, as tragic as a child
suicide.
The
details of these events, I was certain, were unknown to Mr. West. He had not
been involved, had not wished to be involved, but he knew of people who knew
people who would have taken care of such a detail.
I
would pay the price for my omission.
My
sentence was served, and would be carried out, and come the day I twitched and
jumped and smouldered, come the day my blood boiled beneath my skin, a natural
imbalance would be rectified.
Such
was life and death and justice in the motherland, the good ol' U.S. of A.
One
time I watched Mr. West smile as Max Myers disappeared around the corner at the
far end of the corridor.
He
turned himself, turned quietly, for he believed that half the punishment served
here was the stealth and swiftness with which he appeared and disappeared, the
readiness to twist the nerve when it was bared, to turn the light of truth upon
these sad victims and help them see the raw and bloody ugliness of their own
dark and twisted hearts.
He
smiled again.
My
time would come, and Mr. West - in his whiter-than- angels shirt and his black
glass shoes - would be there to see me home.
In
some small way I wished to speak with him, to tell him of how these things had
occurred. He would not have listened. I knew that. But nevertheless some part
of me wished to be understood, by anyone I think. I wanted to let him know that
within these walls resided a human being, a
real person,
not just a
name, a face, a number. I wanted him to know that behind these eyes were
memories, each of them a thread, and in pulling that thread an entire world
would unravel behind it. I wanted him to know of Jack and Eve Chantry, of the
events of that Christmas, of things I had said and done that would perhaps
redress the balance of my humanity in his eyes. But the difficulty was never my
humanity, it was his. He possessed none, and would not have understood anyway.
I
watched him come and go, his quiet movements, his darker thoughts, and saw the
cloud of hatred that ever settled over him like a mantle. I would turn my eyes
away, close them perhaps, and in closing them begin the process of opening yet
another verse, another chapter of my thoughts.
These
were all that remained, and as such they were the most precious thoughts of
all.
I
thought of Nathan, and how he did not return from Chicago until the second week
of the New Year.
It was
1966, I would be twenty soon, and adulthood, its threat and promise, was
arriving with greater vigor and tenacity as each new day unfolded.
The
third cousin was dead. They had heard on January 2nd, and the Verneys had
stayed the extra week to see the boy's body flown home and buried.
Nathan
had changed. That was obvious from the first moment I saw him standing there at
the end of my drive, his hands in his pockets, his head down, his manner
subdued.
As
children we would have shouted and screamed and run towards each other. We
would have chattered back and forth, each interrupting the other until we were
exhausted from laughing.
That
day in January the mood was that of a funeral. And no black Methodist gospel
affair, but a silent white suburban melodrama, tempered with Excedrin and
single malt.
We
spent a little time at the Lake but it was cold, and much of the time we did
not speak. I remember asking him if he had thought about the war, about
receiving his Draft Notice, and he just shrugged. He didn't say anything. He'd
had enough of the war already.