And
it watched me back, I was sure of that, and perhaps was puzzled why one who was
so near the light would want to leave it.
And
then I lay down again, a strange bed, a strange room, and with the sound of Nathan's
breathing I tried to pace myself, to measure my own thoughts, and lose the
sounds of rushing thunder that so relentlessly filled my head.
I
knew I would not find peace. It was ironic, for this lack of internal peace had
only come about because I was trying to avoid a war.
Someone
else's war. I had to believe that, had to keep telling myself that it had
nothing to do with me.
When
dawn broke, daylight growing from the horizon, I dressed and went out and stood
on the edge of the highway until the last of my ghosts had left the fields.
I
must have been there an hour, perhaps more, and when I returned Nathan Verney
was still sleeping.
Slept
like a dead man.
I
remember thinking that:
Nathan Verney sleeps like a dead man.
I stood
over him for a minute or two, and then I reached out and put my hand on his
shoulder. He stirred, turned, breathed deeply, and then opened his eyes. He had
been elsewhere, for when he rolled back and looked up at me there was a moment
of puzzlement, and then realization dawned as to where he was and why.
'The
war's over, right?' he said, and I smiled half-heartedly.
For a
while, the few hours he had slept, he had been elsewhere. For a few hours he had
been granted the blessing of forgiveness. He had taken it, taken it willingly,
and in taking it was now learning how it felt to have it withdrawn.
He
was quiet for a little while, and then he rose, he washed, he dressed and,
saying nothing to me, he went to the door and opened it.
I
stood up, put my bag over my shoulder, and the pair of us walked down to meet
the world once more.
The
world was out there, it was the same as before, and it was as ready as it had
ever been to take us on.
Even
after reaching Sumter, even after watching the first and second appeals fall on
deaf ears, I still believed that someone somewhere would realize the terrible
mistake that had been made. I believed there was still a war to be waged, and -
more importantly than that - I believed I possessed the spirit to fight it. I
don't think it really ever came home to me, and I don't believe I lost that
spirit, until Father John Rousseau sat across from me in
God's Lounge
and gave me the date.
November
11th 1982.
He
told me on October 5th. Told me on October 5th that someone somewhere had
decided I had thirty-six days left.
Coincidentally,
one day for each year I'd been alive.
Father
John said he would increase my visits, that he would now come for two hours every
other day, that we would talk more, that we would have time to talk of
everything before…
'Before
what?' I remember asking him, which was unfair.
Before
you die, Daniel,
he'd said, and I'd turned to him and there was such a look
of hard reality in his eyes I couldn't bear it for more than a second.
He'd
reached out, reached out across the table there in
God's Lounge,
and
he'd gripped my hand and squeezed it tight.
I
realized that in that moment I had felt the first human contact for many weeks.
Perhaps months.
Message
delivered, Father John had left.
Clarence
Timmons came soon after to return me to my cell. He didn't say a word. He knew
the date had come. I was relieved he said nothing because I would not have
known what to say in return.
Mr.
West, however, knew exactly what to say. I was sleeping when he came, and he
took a wooden chair from the corridor, just a plain deal straight-backed chair,
and he dragged it all of ten yards towards my cell. Dragged it slowly, as noisily
as he could, knowing full well it would stir me into consciousness.
When
I opened my eyes I could see his half-lit face right there above me through the
bars.
'Jesus
Christ!' I started.
Mr.
West raised his hand and pressed his finger to his lips.
'Ssshhh,'
he whispered. 'Quiet now… don't want to be wasting what little breath you have
left there, Daniel.'
I
closed my eyes and tried to shut him out.
I
could smell him, the boot polish, the detergent, and beneath that something bitter
and acrid and rotten… like some long-dead thing preserved in formaldehyde.
'Got
your date eh?' West went on.
His
voice was sibilant, insistent, penetrative.
'You
know I'll be coming for you then, don'tcha?' he asked, a rhetorical question
that required no answer at all.
'I'll
be coming for you… and you'll piss yourself and cry and plead like all the
others.'
I
could hear in his voice that he was smiling.
'But
there won't be a goddam thing you can do, Daniel, 'cause no-one gives a rat's
ass what happens to you… hell, I doubt if anyone even remembers you're here.
These lawyers and judges and pro bono social conscience paralegals, hell they
get on their high horse about some bullshit, some weak-minded pathetic sense of
guilt about how we shouldn't be frying your ass… but they get bored awful quick
don't they? Get bored and go off to chase some crap about the ozone layer and
chemical pollutants near playgrounds and Christ only knows what.'
West
sighed, as if tolerating such people was a necessary part of his work.
'These
people don't know what they're dealing with… they know nothing of life and
death, eh Daniel?'
I
opened my eyes.
Mr.
West had leaned even closer.
I
could see he was smiling.
'Life
and death is a little simpler, a little more straightforward than they could
ever imagine. And that's something that we both know a great deal about, isn't
it?'
I
opened my mouth to say something, but West stared at me, again pressing his
finger to his lips.
'I'm
gonna share something with you, Daniel, and hell you better listen 'cause I'm
not the sharing kind see?'
I
breathed out silently. I couldn't imagine being anywhere more terrifying in
that moment.
'Eight
years old I was, just eight years old, and the little town I came from was just
a nothing place. Kids down there didn't get much of an education, but there was
a schoolhouse, plain room wooden schoolhouse, and we went down there each
morning and did what was asked of us -'
A
sudden stabbing pain in my shoulder.
I
jumped.
A
nervous exhalation escaped my lips.
'Wake
the fuck up, Ford,' Mr. West hissed. 'Don't you go fallin' asleep on me.'
I
shook my head.
'Should
think the fuck not.'
I
opened my eyes wide.
'So we'd
go down there, and on the way was this house, and on the porch of this house
was some big old ugly mean sonofabitch dog, all teeth and noise, slavering
jaws, snap- pin' and snarlin' and scarin' the living shit outta these little
kids. Guy who owned the dog, fat ugly motherfucker, he'd just watch through the
window and laugh as the kids scattered past. He fuckin' loved it, man, fuckin'
loved every minute of it… but I saw him, I saw what he was doing, and hell if I
was gonna let him carry on frightening those little kids the way he was. Let it
go for a month, and then I took a big piece of steak, ground up some sleeping
tablets my ma used to take when she got the fever, and I covered that meat in
enough of that shit to floor a horse. Rode down there on my bike one night and
hurled that meat up and onto the porch. Motherfuckin' dog didn't even wait to
smell the thing, just wolfed it down in one mouthful.'
West
laughed to himself, a cold and disquieting sound.
'And
then I waited, waited for no more than ten minutes, and that dog was snoring
like a rattlesnake in a tin can. I climbed over the fence, had a canvas sack,
some rope and a tire iron. Went up those steps like I was on eggshells and then
I tugged that bag under that dog until he was all trussed up inside like a
Thanksgiving turkey. And then I took my tire iron and I smashed the living fuck
out of its head, kept on smacking into that bloody pulp of brain and skull
until I could see how soaked with blood the canvas was. I dragged that sack
across the porch, down the steps and all the way over the yard to the street. I
tied a rope to the sack, the other end to my bike, and then I cycled away,
dragged that poor motherfuckin' mess of shit all the way to the end of the
highway.'
Mr.
West laughed again.
I
felt sick to my stomach, the vision of a demented eight- year-old kid with a
tire iron and a canvas sack with a dead dog inside.
'And
then I set that fucking thing on fire, stood there while it burned… and hell if
roasting a dog don't smell like a Sunday afternoon barbecue.'
Mr.
West was silent for a few seconds, and those seconds stretched into some dark
forever where humanity and empathy and compassion could never exist.
'And
you know what, Daniel? Smells just like yo' gon' smell come your fuckin'
birthday.'
West
started to laugh - softly at first, like a distant train rumbling somewhere
across the state line - and then he appeared to be caught in the contagion of the
moment and his laugh became louder, more raucous, ugly and threatening.
'My
daddy knew about people like you,' he said. 'Sympathisin' with the niggers and
the Jews and all the other dregs of humanity. Worked his guts out trying to
keep our home clean of scum. And hell, if they didn't kill him for it…'
West
paused, and in his eyes was a sense of something as close to emotion as I had
ever seen, was ever likely to see.
'People
like you will never understand the war we're fighting… the war we will go on
fighting until we take our country back. And my daddy knew that, and his daddy
'fore him, and as far as we're concerned you did us a service by killin' one of
them niggers so we didn't have to do it ourselves.'
West
sneered, his face twisted and contemptuous.
'You
know what it feels like to see your daddy get killed, boy? See him dragged
along the road by his own father, blood spilling from his head where those
niggers beat him with sticks… niggers that weren't good enough to be shinin' his
shoes…'
He
stood up, dragged the chair back to the wall.
He
paused for a moment, catching his breath perhaps, and then he crossed the
corridor again and looked down at me.
'Sleep
well you piece of shit,' he whispered.
I lay
there, my eyes closed, and I listened until his footsteps had faded into
nothing.
And
then I started to cry.
Max
Myers came down later, reached his hand through the bars and touched my hair. I
had been drifting away, losing all sense of reality, and then I heard Max's
voice saying I
heard you got your date, Danny boy. We all gon' miss you,
kid. Let me know if you need anything, okay? Let me know if you need anything
at all.
And I
reached up and touched Max's hand, and he gripped it, and I gripped back, and
then his fingers slipped from mine and I heard him walking down the block, his
soft-soled shoes on the linoleum, the squeaking wheels of his magazine trolley.
They
would all come in turn, one by one, and say what they had to say, and express
whatever emotion they were capable of expressing at such a time, and I would
nod and smile as best I could, and hear them, and reply with whatever words I
could, and believe that never would it be possible for anyone to understand how
such a thing felt.