Time of the Locust (2 page)

Burials

“I
am dead to you.”

These were the last words Brenda remembered hearing her husband, Horus Thompson, say after the verdict was read. Murder. Life. Prison. Seven years later, she was still trying to shovel soil over the sound of this proclamation. On this morbid anniversary, she dropped Sephiri off at the Autism Center and headed to work at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She was exhausted from cleaning up an accident Sephiri had made on the living-room carpet at four o'clock that morning. He was wide awake after that. She had to lock him in the bedroom with her to keep him from wandering away. He'd spent the rest of the night taking her shoes out of the closet and lining them up along the center of the room. The coffee she drank for breakfast sloshed around her insides, ineffectual against a desperate need for sleep.

The
whoosh
and
clank
of doors opening and closing in other corridors of the building filled the silence as usual. Brenda walked through a cloud of someone's cologne, which mixed with the smell of the building's ancient wooden molding and the pine disinfectant that drifted about. On any other day, she would not have noticed through the regular haze of sleep deprivation. She would have taken on the morning disasters and her overscheduled day as usual. But today marked the anniversary of the last time she saw her husband.

The man she loved, the man she thought she knew enough about, was handed a life sentence that marked a chasm between them forever. Brenda remembered how the earth plates shifted where she stood in the courtroom that day. The ground opened up and fell away when Horus turned around and proclaimed the terrible words to her. She barely heard him in the deafening thunderclap of the verdict announcement. She could still see him shackled. His face was familiar, but a transformation had already begun, a morphing into something right before her eyes. Her bladder emptied where she stood, and she groped in the air for something to awaken her from the nightmare. Manden, Horus's brother, called her name softly in the aftershocks, his strangled voice shattering the glass that held her sanity in those seconds. “Brenda . . .” he said, then faltered.
“Brenda,” he said again, unable to get past her name, which hung in the air for a moment, then was gone over cliffs.

And there was that other voice of righteousness, of justification and punishment. The defense attorney had long ago faded into the oblivion of her mind, out there where the rings of cowardice and haplessness lay. But the voice of the prosecutor had burned into Brenda like a branding iron as he made his statement. All through the trial, the prosecuting attorney had not been a man. He was an entity. The verbal manifestation of an institution. Crime and punishment. Law and order. His voice felt like a weapon, a malevolent presence that filled her head as she sat there in the wooden pew, as the ground fell away and the roof was ripped from its beams with proclamations, with the electricity of wrath. . . .

“I've told you everything about this case, ladies and gentlemen,” he had said. “But most important, I hope I have helped you to understand that Horus Thompson is a lone-wolf terrorist. Now, is that a crime? Ask yourselves. Yes, we've heard the stories. We may even feel some sympathy. We know of his obsessions with the notion that the victim killed his father back when—let us recall the tender age—at the age of seven he claims to have witnessed the shooting death of his father at the alleged hands of the victim. Yes, we have heard of his troubled childhood, his broken family, his alleged psychic break. But his brother, Manden Thompson, was there, too, wasn't he? Why Horus Thompson and not his brother? Why would one take the law into his own hands and not the other?

“Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not going to stand here and deny the statistics. As we have heard repeatedly from the defense, there are numerous reports of the disproportionate number of black men in prison. Record numbers of persons are also being placed under probation or parole supervision. You heard the defense remind us that by 1989, the total inmate population in our nation's prisons and jails is expected to pass the one-million mark. We've all heard about findings claiming that almost one in four—twenty-three percent—of black men in the age group twenty to twenty-nine is either in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole on any given day. And Horus Thompson is twenty-seven years old.

“In this year 1986 alone, three hundred forty-two out of every one hundred thousand blacks were admitted to state or federal prison. I've read that this is triple what it was in 1926. It's reported so far this year that blacks make up forty-four percent of new prison admissions, though they are less than an eighth of the population. And as the defense has also pointed out, the black presence in the prison population has increased to nearly half this year so far. Citizens, I am not going to stand here and tell you that the Thompson family won't suffer, that they haven't suffered. The Thompson family will most likely struggle under the strain of Horus Thompson being yet another young black male under the control of the criminal justice system at a time when he should be starting a family, mastering critical life skills, and advancing in a career.

“The repercussions of this situation are undeniable. It is yet another assault on community stability that adds to an already debilitated state of affairs. As the defense has said, any potential contributions this man could have made to the community will be stunted. Some will be lost forever. Ladies and gentlemen, this, in a larger sense, impacts us all. But are any of these things crimes? Perhaps in a larger sense, these things may be crimes. What we've all read and heard about is certainly a shame.

“But is what Horus Thompson did a crime? Is murder a crime? The answer, we know, is absolutely yes. The stakes are high. Because, ladies and gentlemen, what we are dealing with now, who we are dealing with now, is a man who has chosen vengeance for his own misguided recrimination, as his sword. Knowing what we know, we can no longer presume this man here is innocent, no matter his reasons for doing what he did. We must call him what he is: a cold-blooded murderer, who lured the victim from his home and drove him miles away to kill him. Citizens, that is who we are dealing with.

“Let's remember very clearly and without hesitation that a peace officer is any person who by virtue of his office or public employment is vested by law with a duty to maintain public order or to make arrests for offenses. This is who and what the victim was. A soldier of law and order, of justice. This is a fact. And at the very least, we must ask ourselves the most important questions we as citizens, as a nation, face. We must look ourselves in the eye and commit to the dire necessity of ensuring that we live in a society of law and order. I charge you all with committing to the great and important responsibility of guaranteeing that we enforce those statutes consistent with the intention of law and order. We must not labor in doubt, in questioning and quibbling over the determination of rules outside of those great intentions.

“Are we going to invent our own rules and then act accordingly? That's really what we are talking about. We may be tempted to descend into thoughts about Mr. Thompson's reasons for doing what he did. We may even be tempted to think that the alleged murder of Mr. Thompson's father was in some way more significant than the victim's murder. But even with this temptation, we must consider what we know as fact.

“And more important, the so-called slaying of Mr. Thompson's political-activist father, some twenty years ago, is not the concern of the court today. Jack Thompson is not here today to defend his son's actions in killing Officer Sam Teak. What is of concern today is what Mr. Thompson took from the victim. His life. His mortal connection to his family. His legacy. I don't think you need me to stand here and give you a history lesson on racism. On bigotry. On the bitter fruits of this country of which we are all aware.

“I'm not going to lecture you on the litany of racially biased experiences of black people in America. I am sure that many of you are already aware of that. I can say that there has been group after group, legislation after legislation, in my lifetime—even before my lifetime—established to help black people in their own communities. To help black people in this country.

“And I won't argue that by and large, history has shown us that the burden of promoting and protecting the interests of the black community has fallen to those who may only have an interest in the black community. Ladies and gentlemen, our quarrel is not with them. The civil rights movement has taught us much. And if it has taught us anything, especially now in 1986, it has taught us that peace for us all is most important. This is America, ladies and gentlemen. And if any individual can kill even a peace officer—be he retired or not, he has served his duty to all of us—then we make the dangerous trip to a troubling place, ladies and gentlemen. We enter a jungle from which I fear there is no escape . . .”

Brenda remembered how the voice thundered at the end and the outraged gasps of the jury. They were melted by the prosecuting attorney's hot fire, forged and hardened into something impenetrable. As Horus was led away, she had to step back, as if from the edge of something, then step back farther still, as the drop and descent of things began. The things that she knew to fit into neat piles, with right and wrong organized in primary colors, easily distinguishable and unadulterated. Foundations collapsed around her, and the braces she had spent the four-month trial fortifying buckled and snapped. She looked on in horror and awe. The free fall of consciousness and the atrophy of doubt. The tumble of hope and the fall of dream. In a matter of seconds, Horus looked at her from across a great expanse and said, “I am dead to you.” She did not understand what that meant until much later, when the loudness of his absence filled her ears, and she could hear nothing else.

Brenda couldn't wrap her mind around her new title: prison wife. At the behest of friends in those first few weeks after the thunderclap, who quickly retreated to their own lives, Brenda began reading the essays in a newsletter for family members of the incarcerated.
Bound by Love
arrived in her mailbox. She began and ended reading the essays across her cold marital bed in one day, unable to stomach the carnage of words, the cry of phrases. One essay seeped into her soul, so that she could not bear to look upon the newsletter again, for fear she might come across an especially bleak voice that haunted her, which read:

“He did not die. But he is not alive. How can I grieve for him? How can I let him go? What is there to hold of him? His shirts? His razor and deodorant? The shoes still at the bottom of the closet? The belief that he will one day be home when I arrive? No. There is nothing to let go; there is nothing to hold. There are only tears in the dark. There is only the wolf in the wilderness, and I don't know if the wolf is him or me. We call to each other in the blackness, but our lonely howls cannot penetrate the thickness of time. There is only his face in my dreams, his voice in my thoughts. His mannerisms in my children, two boys and a girl who do not know him anymore. They know him only as a word among the many others in the lexicon of their speech, a word that will fade into the Latin of the past. He is only among the shadows of the setting sun. One year anesthetizes the next. One decade lays to rest the one preceding it. He is exhumed only in memory. He did not die. But he is not alive . . .”

Brenda had been unable to read any further. In the beginning, she didn't want to believe that such a thing could be true. How could she have lost Horus to the past without realizing it? She hated herself for believing what he had told her before he left town that day. Before he left town to end their lives without her permission. He was going to work things out with his brother, Manden, he said. Work what out? What was left to work out? Deep inside, she knew that something was wrong.
He'll handle it
, she told herself. It took years to admit that she should have asked more questions, that she knew the morning he left that there was something else.

In all the time Brenda knew him, Horus spoke of his family only a few times and with great difficulty. He talked in that odd way of one carefully reciting a collection of facts, as if saying anything more might conjure the living or the dead. His father was murdered in front of him. There was no justice done for his death. After this, his mother became mentally ill and passed away. He and his brother were raised by an uncle they didn't know and would never come to like.

She listened to Horus each time and allowed herself to be led. She went willingly down a path of simplifications, of illusions. And it still made her face hot when she thought of it: that there had been another man beneath the man she married. But it was this man who took over that night, that weekend, her life, and Sephiri's future. He had his reasons, Horus said when the police came to their front door. There are reasons for everything. This she knew. But where had she been in his reasoning, in his ruminations? What about her life, their life together? The man whose tenor she used to listen to under the sheets at night, the one who held her and called her Baby, so that it meant a million things at once, was now an echo, a resonance left after something larger was gone. Horus Thompson had been reduced to a thought, a concept. A living, breathing man said that he was dead. And it was true.

Brenda struggled to breathe, lumbering through the stale air of the government building. The walk from the elevator to the office suite at the end of the mile-long corridor seemed to take an eternity, and her swollen ankles felt as if they were on the verge of bursting. The 258 pounds she carried made themselves known loudly, tiring her with every step. Midway to the office, she was drenched in sweat, the deodorant under her arms and between her thighs already melting.

She'd had a time getting Sephiri ready for the special van that came to pick him up every day. Dressing him this morning had been like trying to hold on to a slippery fish. He screamed and ran around the house. He urinated on the carpet and threw popcorn all over the floor. She finally cornered and tackled him in the coat closet. She held him in her arms in a straitjacket embrace while he kicked and flailed. After a time, he settled down, and they panted there together in the darkness, listening to their hearts beat through their chests.
A mother should not resent her child
, Brenda thought, rebuking herself. She should not feel apprehension when she puts her hand on her baby's forehead after he has already fallen asleep, when he is quiet and has passed out from jumping and shrieking or filling a house with silence. Shame grew once more in the pit of her stomach as she clutched her son in the dark, and she began the ritual of smothering her disgrace.