Carthage (48 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
If she did not lack courage.
Better to have never been born. This is the most ancient wisdom.
As far as her legs could carry her. Though she’d been exhausted from sleepless nights working on the
Frankenstein project
yet now she was suffused with a strange radiant throbbing energy and she was whispering and muttering to herself as in a language newly discovered and known only to her.
How she hated the university, and all who dwelled there! Misshapen creatures ascending and descending stairs and many of the stairs upside-down and none took notice for the damned souls in Hell have no eyes with which to see their own ludicrous fates.
(The university that despised
her.
)
(The university that had rejected
her
.)
(But Cressida could not ever admit this! How to explain to her parents?)
(In all of the biological world it is only the
human world
in which parents are stricken by the shame of their offspring. Not in any species other than
Homo sapiens
is this possible.)
Better just to die, to put an end to her life. It would be a mercy certainly to spare poor Zeno saying another time with forced Daddy-bravado
But still, Cressie—you can try . . . Maybe transfer in your junior year to Cornell . . .
And Arlette would want to hug her, to console her. And Cressida in a paroxysm of self-loathing
did not want to be consoled.
As far as her (now faltering) legs would carry her. Whispering and muttering and laughing to herself. The professor had not liked her. Always you believe that those whom you adore will adore you. Not in any species other than
Homo sapiens
is this possible—this delusion! The professor had seemed to be inviting his most brilliant student to
claim a disability
—or did he think she was crazy?
“The fact is: I am the sanest person I know.”
Sadly Cressida laughed.
That
was a depressing fact.
Running out of the professor’s office like a little cornered rat that has managed to escape her corner. The look in the man’s face—in his eyes. He’d been frightened of her!
God damn she wished now she’d taken the
Frankenstein project
away with her but she’d have had to step around the stunned professor to approach the table and might’ve come close to touching him and the professor might’ve recoiled from Cressida or might have attempted to restrain her and—
Better to forget. Erase from her mind.
Trembling at the thought of stepping so close to him. Risking the man’s touch.
As it was, his eyes had caught at hers. She would not soon forget
that
.
Because the project is late it must be penalized.
Better for you to die. Never to have been born.
Her other university courses she’d neglected for weeks in order to work on the project for Eddinger who’d rejected her anyway. And now exams in a few days for which she wasn’t prepared. And an exam in Eddinger’s course, she could not possibly take.
Could not possibly see the man again.
He had rejected
her.
And now she hated
him.
Thinking how she deserved to be annihilated, obliterated. Erased.
All so
petty.
And what a clean death it would be, to throw herself into this rapidly-rushing river so much wider and deeper than the Black Snake River of Beechum County. Swept downstream, vanished. No one would know where she’d gone.
No one would miss her. Not for hours.
Except the riverbank was choked with underbrush and debris from recent storms. Thorns catching at her clothing, her hands.
The St. Lawrence had flooded its banks a few weeks before. Small bridges over local creeks had been washed away. She was desperate to find a bridge, for she would have to throw herself from a bridge in order to drown most effectively.
The nearest bridge was back in Canton. But traffic flowed over this bridge in a continuous stream.
There stood Brett Kincaid at a little distance, on the riverbank.
Cressida don’t, that is a mistake.
Wanting to hide her face in shame so that Brett Kincaid would not see.
I am your secret friend Cressida. You can’t hurt yourself, you would be hurting me.
Was this true? Cressida wanted to think it was true.
Now she was more than two miles from Canton in the countryside she was beginning to feel better.
Beginning to feel relieved, less exhausted.
It was so, she wanted to “die”—she wanted to “disappear”—but she did not want to
be dead.
Dead
was dull flat black-matte.
Dead
was an empty hive.
If
dead
she would never see Brett Kincaid again.
Her brother he would be, her brother-in-law—her
secret friend
.
She would not ever see her parents again, and Juliet—whom she loved.
“If they love me I guess I love them.”
She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others’ perception of her, and love of her.
So strangely her heart was beating, she could not catch her breath.
This happened to Cressida sometimes when she was very excited, anxious. When she was very happy.
Her narrow rib cage rising and falling and quavering with the quick pulse of her heart.
Heedless if anyone might be observing her she lay down on the weedy riverbank, amid thorns and spiky grasses. This was not a comfortable place in which to lie but when Cressida’s heart beat quickly she had learned to lie down flat on her back and lift her arms above her head and slowly inhale/exhale and to repeat this several times and often then the rapid heartbeat would slow to normal. She’d never told anyone about this infirmity, if that was what it was.
Heart palpitations. Racing to keep pace with her thoughts.
She had hiked several miles from Canton. Now her legs were tired, with a pleasurable ache. In the May sunshine lying on her back in the spongy grass she fell into a doze. She fell into a dream of home—of the creaky porch-swing on the side deck of the house on Cumberland Avenue in which suddenly she was lying, wrapped in Daddy’s disreputable old red-plaid camping blanket from L.L. Bean, that Mom was always trying to throw away and Daddy was always retrieving from the trash. She smiled, remembering: that scratchy old blanket, that gave such comfort on chilly nights! Yet still she was lying in the sun—the sun beat against her eyelids.
Cressida? Cressida
. Not twenty feet away the young soldier regarded her with concerned eyes. He alone knew her heart, he alone cared for her. He was leaning on crutches—this was a new development. She could only just make out his face which was cruelly scarred.
“MISS?”—
it was a male voice, more annoyed than concerned, waking her from her stuporous sleep; a man, a young soldier, in U.S. Army fatigues, wanting to sit in the seat beside her and so would she move her things? “Thanks!”
In New York City in the massive Port Authority bus terminal she transferred to a bus bound for Watertown in upstate New York. Here she saw many young soldiers in fatigues, in small groups in the cavernous waiting room and queuing in bus lines and among these soldiers were young women. By this time she was very sick.
Head wracked in pain. Each thought was a shard of glass sharp and wounding.
Skin burning and sensitive to the touch as if the outermost layer had been peeled off and she was dazed and exhausted from a dozen trips to the lavatory her insides emptying out in rushes of scalding diarrhea. She could not keep food down but gagged helplessly. Even water, she could not tolerate.
Coming home. If anyone will know me.
Forgive me.
D
RIVING THE LONG WALL.
Sixty-foot-high wall with no (visible) end.
So suddenly the wall looms close beside you—you failed to see the beginning of the wall and can’t see the end.
The wall is of finite substance: concrete. But its circumference is infinite.
You are outside the wall, driving the long wall. Inside, the wall encircles.
Though the (exterior) wall can be measured the (interior) wall cannot be measured.
The color of old, soiled bones. The long wall.
In the distance you’d seen the long wall but had not recognized it for never before had you seen anything like the long wall sixty feet high bordering a state highway.
Inside, hidden from civilian eyes, the Clinton Correctional Facility for Men at Dannemora, New York.
Until suddenly the long wall looms beside your vehicle so high you can’t see its height nor can you see the guards’ watch-towers at intervals at the top of the long wall.
The long wall, that looms just a few feet to the right of your vehicle. The long wall that swallows up most of the view from the windshield of your vehicle.
How many miles on Route 375! How many hours through the careening countryside, glacier-hills of the Adirondacks in the coldest most northern edge of New York State.
The long wall, of the hue of old bones. Bordering the small town of Dannemora.
To the right of Route 375 North, the long wall stretching to infinity.
To the left of Route 375 North, the bleak storefronts of Dannemora.
Driving the long wall where at the (gated) entrance you will be permitted inside. Where somewhere inside the long wall he is waiting for you.
Into the small bleak town of Dannemora outside the long wall as the banks of the Styx border that bleak river. Into and through Dannemora which is a deserted town at this hour of the morning and yet, the long wall continues.
H
E WAS A TRUSTEE.
He was
trusted.
In the mental unit and in the adjoining hospice he was an orderly, for it was his role to establish and maintain
order.
Though not a (baptized) Catholic yet he was Father Kranach’s closest and most trusted assistant in all matters of the upkeep of the Church of the Good Thief and at counseling sessions in which the chaplain participated; and an editor of the prison newspaper which appeared on alternate Mondays.
He’d been a corporal in the U.S. Army. Wounded in the U.S. Army in the war in Iraq and somehow, this was known and respected in the prison among both inmates and guards.
Though long-ago discharged. Sent back home wounded and broken and less than a man yet through prayer strengthened and reclaimed to himself as a man trapped to the waist in quicksand might haul himself out of his imminent death by the frantic actions of his hands, hands and arms, pulling himself up by a rope to save his life so the corporal had managed to restore some measure of his manhood and the dignity of his manhood and some measure of his ruined soul.
Prayer to others beside Jesus Christ for instance to Saint Dismas who was the Good Thief, he’d learned to pray as you might speak to one of your own kind, a lost brother.
Of the two malefactors crucified beside Jesus on Calvary hill it was Saint Dismas who was the “Good Thief” of legend. For it was Saint Dismas who had rebuked the other thief who’d taunted Jesus if ye be King of the Jews, save thyself and us, with the fierce words,
Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.
And he said unto Jesus,
Lord remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.
And in his last agony yet Jesus said unto him,
Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
Many times the corporal had read these words in the Bible, given to him by the Catholic priest Father Kranach. Many times reading the book of Luke which was one of the shorter books of the New Testament, filled with wonders as with horror and revulsion.
For Jesus did despair. There was no doubt, Jesus did despair as a man would despair in his place.
And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent. And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.
Holding the Bible at an awkward angle in front of his face. His single “good” eye. Near-transparent fine-printed pages lifted to a wan fluorescent light in his cell shared with another inmate.
Gave up the ghost
. These words so struck him.
Gave up the ghost
. He had wished this but God had not taken from him his life that was damned, and worse than damned—of no more worth than trash, feces dried and flaking on a nearby wall not hosed-down in years.
In his former life in his former religion which was the Protestant religion the corporal had not known of the Good Thief for he had known little of the existence of saints and the influence of saints upon humankind. And still in this new radically altered life—(he did not wish to think this was the
afterlife
)—he was slow to believe in the authority of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and in the rituals and prayers of that Church though his closest friend was Father Fred Kranach who had counseled the corporal in his hour of need seeing in the corporal’s ruined-boy’s-face the innocence and purity of his heart and the remorse for all he had done to injure others.
It was Father Kranach who’d explained to the corporal that the Church had not canonized the Good Thief but the common belief was, Jesus had himself canonized the Good Thief in his agony on the cross.
Nor was the name “Dismas” to be found in the Scripture but only in common legend.
Meaning that Saint Dismas is outside the Church. An outlaw and a loser yet blessed of God.
And so it is, Father Kranach said, no one prays to Saint Dismas who is not an outlaw and a loser.
The corporal said, But your church is named for him, Father—the Church of the Good Thief!—for this seemed to the corporal very strange, and wonderful. And Father Kranach said, That is the wisdom of the Church. Saint Dismas is a rogue saint recognized as the only way to God for men like the most desperate inmates of Clinton Correctional, those who have committed unspeakable and unforgiveable acts and who are as far from God as the inhabitants of a cave are far from sunlight. Those men who would be ashamed to approach Jesus, for the evil in their hearts, yet are able to approach Saint Dismas for all that they know of him through legend.
But he isn’t a real saint?—in the Catholic Church?—the corporal seemed anxious to know; and Father Kranach said, If Dismas is a “real” saint or not is irrelevant, Brett. For all that matters is that men come to God through him, and find Jesus through him, who would otherwise be lost. That is enough
sainthood.
WERE YOU COERCED
into
confessing he’d been asked repeatedly and always he said no, I was not.
Of his own free will he had confessed to the terrible crimes he’d committed even those he could not recall clearly through the mist of memory and when trying to recall, it was like trying to hear a small still voice amid a crazed clanking and clattering of heavy machinery.
There is something hurt in my brain the corporal told them. In a hoarse and numbed voice answering their questions for seven hours and his gray-ghost-figure and faltering words videotaped through the long night. Hoping he would be granted mercy, a death by firing squad which was a soldier’s proper death standing at attention in some remnant of pride despite the black hood over his head.
Informed then, such an execution would be only in Nevada.
He would sit on Death Row at Dannemora, they told him. For it was rare any prisoners were executed in New York State in recent memory.
And this was stunning to him, and a cause of dismay.
For he had pleaded guilty. To all charges, to any charges brought against him he had pleaded guilty for there was no yearning in the corporal greater than a yearning for expiation, and for annihilation.
Such a death then would be instantaneous and he could not but believe, his soul too would be annihilated.
Give up the ghost
—he had wished for this release!
Yet somehow it happened despite his intentions, the corporal was not allowed to enter a plea of
guilty
to first-degree homicide after all.
The question was, where was the girl’s body? Without the girl’s body could the corporal be charged with
murder
? For the corporal’s confession was of no more intrinsic legal worth than the corporal’s denial of the crime would have been, in the absence of witnesses to the crime and “substantial” physical evidence.
So the corporal’s lawyer argued.
Yet, the prosecutor denied this vehemently.
The prosecutor argued that there is legal precedent for such charges. Verdicts of
guilty
have many times been brought against defendants in cases in which the bodies of the victims have not been found, having been hidden or destroyed by the defendants; and in this case, there was the defendant’s confession, the corroboration of several witnesses having seen the defendant with the missing girl earlier in the evening, and enough physical evidence to proceed to trial.
He’d led them to Sandhill Point in the Nautauga Preserve. Desperate to reveal to them the girl’s broken body. He’d told them of the shallow grave in which they had laid her—in which he had laid her—covered her with dirt and leaves, with their hands—the butts of their rifles—then it seemed to him this was a mistake for there had been no grave in this rocky soil but he’d staggered carrying her body that was still warm, limp and heavy for one so small he carried to the river to be swept away and lost where the Black Snake emptied into Lake Ontario miles away to the west. By this time exhausted and staggering and sick in his gut, terribly sick having to lean on a deputy’s arm and his wrists cuffed at his waist in front of his body yet still he was having difficulty keeping his balance. And the disgust for him in their faces, he could not bear to see. And worse yet the irritation, the impatience, as in a game among the more deft and skilled players there pass glances of derision aimed at those less deft and skilled, and these scarcely disguised from the objects of derision. And he was made to think
I am not a man now. I am something less than a man.
Some of the deputies had known Brett Kincaid as a quarterback on the Carthage High School varsity team two years running and one of those years a championship year in the Adirondack District, not so very long ago. And now to see Brett Kincaid in this state and to hear his shamed words was very hard for these men who’d known Graham Kincaid also.
Afterward too weak to stand he was taken to the Carthage hospital ER to be given IV fluids for “severe dehydration” and kept in the hospital overnight before being released to the Carthage jail still weak and uncertain on his feet and kept in isolation and under twenty-four-hour suicide watch it was believed
for his own protection.
At all times under suicide-watch until finally he gave up all hope—for the present.
And then in the Beechum County Courthouse where he was taken in shackles. Here the large, first-floor courtroom was strangely crowded and the mood was agitated, excited. For there were strong feelings in this place—a strong bias against the corporal who had killed the nineteen-year-old girl and dumped her body in the river and a strong bias in favor of the corporal who was a wounded war-veteran believed to have possibly confessed to a crime he had not committed in order to shield certain of his friends, and suffering from “neurological impairment.”
After months of deliberation there was to be no trial. In this, the citizens of Carthage were disappointed.
No trial, and no jury. For there was no protestation of innocence on the part of the defendant.
Judge Nathan Brede was presiding. In his late fifties Brede was the highest-ranked judge in Beechum County, a former prosecutor.
Impervious and unblinking Brede was a stranger to the corporal gazing down at the young man scarred and part-blind in the wreckage of his life.
A
nd how do you plead, Mr. Kincaid?
Your Honor, my client pleads guilty to one count of voluntary manslaughter as charged and one count of illegal disposal of a body as charged.
Do you so plead, Mr. Kincaid?
Your Honor, my client so pleads.
Mr. Kincaid, do you understand the terms of this guilty plea? Do you understand the consequences?
In the courtroom there was quiet as the corporal seemed to summon himself from some distance, to lift his eyes to the calm-assessing eyes of Judge Brede.
As in a near-inaudible voice the corporal murmured
Yes Your Honor.
You are pleading guilty to one count of voluntary manslaughter as charged and one count of illegal disposal of a body as charged?
Yes Your Honor.
Yes? Did you say yes, Mr. Kincaid?
Yes Your Honor.
Yet it was not so clear to him. All that he knew clearly was the word
guilty.
And the sentence pronounced by the judge—
fifteen to twenty years
.
Fifteen to twenty years!
He had been waiting to hear the death sentence.
Stunned and speechless standing shackled and waiting—and yet, the court had been adjourned with a strike of the judge’s gavel.
So abruptly, the sentencing was over.
So abruptly, the corporal’s fate had been determined.
Not to die but—to live?
Without a backward glance the judge had exited the courtroom. If Nathan Brede had been a former associate, still more a friendly acquaintance of Zeno Mayfield, he had not glanced in Mayfield’s direction, where the father of the victim was sitting in the second row of seats; nor was his attention drawn to the bizarre keening of the defendant’s mother Ethel Kincaid who could not have reacted more extravagantly if the judge had sentenced her son to death.
At the front of the courtroom the corporal remained stunned and slow-blinking for he’d believed that he had confessed to the murder—murders—hadn’t the police officers predicted he would sit on Death Row for the remainder of his life? Yet, the charge seemed to have been reduced to
voluntary manslaughter
.
As if the corporal had not been of sufficient sound mind and body, to have committed a true murder.
And his lawyer confiding in him, in an undertone almost gloating, and repellent to the corporal, he’d be eligible for parole in just seven years.
Good behavior! Out in seven years, man.
He shrank from the man. This was not the original lawyer who had volunteered to represent Brett Kincaid but another, younger.
They knew they couldn’t win shit. Not without the body. They knew they were fucked. Man, seven years! Did you luck out.
Yet, the corporal had been sentenced. The corporal would be removed from the courtroom under restraint.
Shackled at his wrists and legs. Like a wild animal he’d been shackled to be brought into the courtroom to be seated at a table at the front of the room beneath the judge’s high bench where he might be observed by all in the courtroom, in pity and disgust.
For in the jail, the corporal had behaved unpredictably. The COs had deemed him a security-risk to himself as to others.
For it seemed that a sudden fury flared up in the corporal, at unpredictable times. As he could not control seizures of his upper body or paralyzing rushes of pain in his legs so he could not control these outbreaks of temper that ran their course within minutes, or seconds leaving onlookers frightened of him.
