A Quiet Belief in Angels (44 page)

Thomas Billick came in the third week of February. I was taken from my cell and shackled, both wrists and ankles. I walked a long way down featureless and identical corridors, shuffling awkwardly between two wordless orderlies. The chain between my ankles dragged heavily, and the metal bands cut into the skin of my heels. I was shown into a narrow, poorly lit room, and there—seated quietly against the wall—was my defense lawyer, looking as ill-at-ease and nervous as a man could be.

“You are well?” he asked unnecessarily.

I was pushed down in a chair facing Billick, and then the two orderlies stepped back and exited the room. The harsh grating of an external bar, the jangle of keys in the lock, the sense that everywhere I turned there was yet another means of preventing my free movement.

“So, we have good news,” Billick said. “The district attorney has heard our presentation of the case, and has agreed to accept a plea of guilty on the count of second-degree murder.” Billick opened his attaché case and removed a sheaf of papers. “Second-degree murder is considered intentional but neither premeditated nor planned.” He looked up to see if I was paying attention. “It says here that such a crime is not committed in the reasonable heat of passion, but is caused by the offender’s obvious lack of concern for human life.” Billick smiled like he was giving a birthday gift to a small child. “That means no death penalty, Joseph, isn’t that good news?”

I lowered my head, looked down at the cuffs on my wrists.

“So all you need to do is plead guilty to second-degree murder, and not only will we remove any risk of a capital trial, we will also limit the length of the proceedings dramatically. A judge is always more favorable when such a case is presented. It is far less expensive to the state and the county when a straightforward plea of guilty is entered—”

I looked up at Billick. “But I am not guilty, Mr. Billick. I am not guilty of any kind of murder, and I will not plead guilty to something I have not done.”

Billick looked at first shocked, and then he became flustered and agitated. “I don’t think you fully comprehend the gravity of your situation, Mr. Vaughan. There is a very strong case against you, and I would not be remiss in my trust of confidentiality if I told you that there are no other lines of investigation currently ongoing. The police have exhausted all their inquiries as to any other party that may or may not have been involved—”

“Meaning what?”

Billick cleared his throat. “Meaning that your trial date has been set for March thirtieth, a little more than a month from now, and you
will
stand trial for this murder, Mr. Vaughan, let there be no mistake about it.”

I tried to raise my hands but the shackles prevented me. “I don’t understand what’s happening here, Mr. Billick. Someone killed Bridget, someone came into the house where I was living and killed the woman I loved—”

Billick was shaking his head. “For all intents and purposes, Mr. Vaughan, that person was you.”

“No,” I said forcefully. I felt the swell of fear and anger in my chest. Once again I tried to move my arms, to somehow emphasize what I was saying. “I didn’t kill anyone, for God’s sake!” I shouted. “I didn’t fucking kill anyone, Mr. Billick. What the hell is it going to take to get someone to understand what’s happening here. This is a travesty. Go find Paul Hennessy. Go talk to Ben Godfrey . . . he will tell you that I couldn’t have done something like this. I have money, Mr. Billick. I have three thousand dollars—”

Billick shook his head again. “You
had
three thousand dollars, Mr. Vaughan.”

I stopped suddenly. I frowned. “What do you mean? What the hell are you talking about? I have three thousand dollars from the sale of my mother’s house.”

“An account which has now been frozen by the state, Mr. Vaughan. That money is no more at your disposal than it is at mine.”

“You can’t do that! What the hell gives you the right to do that?”

“Me?” Billick asked. “I am not doing anything, Mr. Vaughan. I am not the one who has charged you with the crime of murder, and whether that murder was planned or not, whether it was first or second degree, it was still murder. The murder of a helpless and innocent young girl. A pregnant girl, Mr. Vaughan.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. I saw their faces. Virgina Perlman, Laverna Stowell . . . all of them. I heard their voices somewhere. I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to see one of them there, white and beatific, as innocent as Bridget, as Alexandra . . . and I believed that I might have been the envoy of Death.

My father, my mother, Alex . . . ten little girls . . . Elena, Gunther . . .

And now Bridget . . . consigned to the same fate, and that fate delivered by the very same hand.

I knew with everything I owned that her death had been my doing. Indirectly yes, but I was nevertheless to blame. This was my punishment for what I had done in Augusta Falls. I knew that Haynes Dearing would be the only one to truly understand, but Haynes Dearing would be the very last person to come to my assistance.

I started to cry. I leaned forward and felt my chest heave. I was wracked with such pain I could barely breathe.

Billick rose from his chair and backed up toward the door. He knocked on it without turning, and within a moment I heard the grating of bars, the keys in the lock, and the orderlies released him. I looked up as the door closed once again, and Billick was there—his small, white face peering in at me through the narrow porthole.

“Get me out of here!” I screamed at him. “GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

Billick’s face disappeared.

There was nothing in the room but my own labored breathing.

I knew then—without doubt or hesitation—that the end was rapidly approaching.

My trial began on March thirtieth at five minutes past nine in the morning. The charge was of murder in the first degree, for refusing to plead guilty to second degree put me at the mercy of the District Attorney’s Office. It was a Monday, and the presiding judge was the same man who had overseen my arraignment. His name was Marvin Baxter. He seemed older than I recalled him, his hair cut scalp-close, his eyes set too far apart, his mouth a thin and bloodless line of determination and austerity. Prosecutor Oswald stood silent and determined, looking at me just once as I entered the court. Everything seemed ponderous and oppressive, and yet somehow insubstantial, as if with a wave of my hand I could have vanished it all away like a pall of mist. But I could not move my hands. They were cuffed to the arms of the chair.

Billick said little, raised few objections, even when the words spoken about me could only have been uttered about some other man entirely. The whole of my past seemed to unfold from the lips of people I had never met, never spoken to. They talked about my mother, the death of my father; they spoke about how I had discovered the dead body of a little girl on a hilltop. They mentioned it in passing, as if it were nothing at all, but I watched the faces of the jury and they seemed intense and serious and very alert. They carried in boxes of papers, things I had written, and they read those things aloud as if they were references of my character. Questions were left hanging in the air like ghosts.

There was no word of Haynes Dearing, and he did not come to rescue me.

The days drew forward, one after the other, and at night I was remanded to a cell beneath the courthouse, lightless and dank, its very walls impregnated with despair and degradation.

Later I could recall little of the proceedings: the back-and-forth of questions, the awkward cross-examinations, the appearance on the witness stand of Aggie Boyle, her sister, of Joyce Spragg and Letitia Brock. Bridget’s parents came too. Her father spoke of his religious fervor, his commitment to the Lord, his vigilant adherence to the Ten Commandments, his hopes for his daughter, an only child; and behind me, three rows back and to the left, the hushed courtroom listened to the stifled sobbing of Bridget’s mother.

The better part of six weeks dissolved without seam or juncture between one day and the next. During the weekend I was returned to Auburn and held alone in solitary confinement. A juror contracted influenza, and between April sixteenth and twenty-second, Judge Marvin Baxter initiated an adjournment. We returned on the twenty-third, and it was then that I began the first of four days of questioning on the stand.

I believed my soul had been wrenched away to some other place. I believed in nothing but a pure will to survive, and beneath that the certainty of my own innocence. From the stand I could see Paul Hennessy, Ben Godfrey, other faces I knew from Brooklyn, and in the final week of the trial Reilly Hawkins appeared. It was then that I folded beneath the weight of what had happened. The past had come to find me in New York. A past I had lived to outlive, and yet now a past that would see me swallowed whole.

I cried on that stand. I held my heart in my hands and showed it to Judge Marvin Baxter, to Albert Oswald from the District Attorney’s Office, but they did not believe me.

On Tuesday, May twelfth, 1953, a jury of my peers—eight men and four women who knew nothing of truth but my name—returned from their deliberations.

My heart, to that point nothing more than a small, dark stone in my chest, was a red fireball of tension.

“The defendant will rise.”

I gathered what was left of me together as best I could, and with the help of the orderlies I somehow gained my feet.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?”

Blood thundered in the veins at my temples. A cold sense of inner emptiness was suddenly replaced with abject and hopeless terror.

“Yes, Your Honor.” The foreman rose and stood silent.

There were words, so many words I wanted to say. Those words clawed up from the base of my throat, but as I swallowed I lost them all. My eyes wide, my face drawn and bloodless, my shackled hands grasped the rail ahead of me as if it were a life raft.

“Very good. On the charge of murder in the first degree, that the defendant, Joseph Calvin Vaughan, did willfully murder the person of Bridget Sarah McCormack on Thursday the twentieth of November, 1952, does the jury find the defendant guilty or not guilty?”

Heart like a hammer, crashing against an anvil.

The foreman, his face like a Halloween pumpkin, eyes incapable of looking at me even though he knew I was there, cleared his throat. The clerk of the court crossed the narrow walkway between the bench and the aisles, and took a folded slip of paper from the foreman.

He returned, each step redolent of a funeral march.

He did not look at me either. None of them could. I thought to turn back, to look over my shoulder at Hennessy, at Ben Godfrey, at Reilly Hawkins. My mind screamed for release, for forgiveness for whatever I had done to deserve such a thing, but the only sound was the thin crackle as the judge unfolded the paper and looked down at the verdict.

“We, the jury, find the defendant, Joseph Calvin Vaughan . . . guilty.”

I stopped breathing.

I felt my knees collapse beneath me.

I started to scream, to cry, to sob, holding onto the railing as the orderlies tried to pry me away. I remember shouting at the top of my voice. “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! It was him! The same one who killed the children. He killed Bridget! He killed Bridget!”

“Clerk!” Judge Baxter shouted above the tumult of noise. “Clear the court at once!”

I heard those words. Beyond that there was little else to hear but a rushing sound in my ears, a rushing sound that filled my body, my mind, my soul.

And then there was a feather, a single white feather that drifted across my line of vision and disappeared in a ray of light from the window.

I was going to die. That much I knew.

I prayed that Death would come soon, cold and unfeeling . . .

I saw myself as a child, standing there in the yard amidst the scrubbed earth and dry topsoil, amidst the carpetweed and chickweed phlox and wintergreen, but this time He would be visiting with me.

Soon now, soon enough, walking down . . . Death would come to take me.

In my dreams I can walk all the way to Georgia.

In my dreams the walls hold me no better than mist or smoke, and I pass through them without effort, and the land rises, and the trees bank away toward the horizon, and around my face is the orange haze of boxwood leafminer flies, and my spirit is adamantine and unyielding, and my thoughts are peaceful, and belong to a time before my father, before the ten little girls, before Elena and Gunther Kruger, before Alex and Bridget and Auburn, Cayuga County.

In my dreams I am a free man.

The sky grows. The perspective of telegraph wires, birds like clusters of semibreves on staves, eyes winking, cawing their music, and bunches of withered grass and earth swollen with rain, and the sound of a dog in the distance pleading for home.

Wood cabins and ramshackle outhouses, and rusted signs reading
Mobil
and
Chevron
and
Red Parrot Diesel
; stooped men with heavy loads, yellow dirt, the smell of sowbelly pork; clothes paraded along ropes to dry, snapping in the wind like the colors of some ghost legion; and the sound of horses, of feet pressing down on mud ridges as I walk; and the sweep of some lone silence that echoes the past, the haunt of fine rain against my face like varnish for skin, and I am nearly home . . .

And then I wake.

I remember Auburn.

A slow-motion descent into darkness, the sounds and smells of humanity divested of all value and identity. The stench of sweat and earth, the rolling interminable machine of men, the shackled lines of bowed shoulders and hunched backs, the changle of hoes and picks against unforgiving earth and stones and rocks; the sleepless nights, the hacking rasps of phlegmy chests, the swells and aches of dislocated joints and torn muscles; the creaks of cots and hammocks, the rush of rain against corrugated roof and thin wooden walls; the squeal of rats, the scritch of bugs, the hypnotic chant of cicadas. Trapped in the belly of the beast, and the beast was black and ravenous and never satiated.