Carthage (49 page)

In the front row of seats his mother Ethel Kincaid continued weeping. Wailing loudly and bitterly like a TV female shameless in emotion to no purpose other than to make others uncomfortable and to rouse in them an acute wish to escape her company. For it seemed clear to Mrs. Kincaid that her son’s enemies in Carthage had campaigned against him, and had won; and in his physical state, a sentence of fifteen to twenty years at Dannemora was a death sentence, for he would never be released in his lifetime.

Bailiffs held back the distraught Mrs. Kincaid, who wanted to rush to her son to embrace him. As the corporal himself shrank from the excited woman and could not bring himself to face her.

Exiting the courtroom stiff-walked by bailiffs gripping each of his arms above the elbow. The awkward shackle-shuffle through a doorway at the rear which no one except courthouse employees and law enforcement officers could use as Mrs. Kincaid cried after them—
Murderers! Murderers of my poor soldier-son!
—and then to a corridor and another door outside which a van with barred back windows was waiting to transport Brett Kincaid immediately to the Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora, New York, to begin his indeterminate sentence
fifteen to twenty years
.

AT DANNEMORA,
at the Canadian border—“Little Siberia.”

For much of the first year, in isolation.

For it was believed by the warden of the facility, K.O. Heike, that the corporal’s crime was such, the publicity had been such, some of the inmates would have the impression that Brett Kincaid had raped and murdered a child, and his life in the general population would be at risk.

BUT WHAT RELIEF
THEN,
in that
other world.

Now he’d
crossed over
. Now he was imprisoned like a beast, and surrounded by beasts. And in the eyes of the COs—the guards—there was no ambiguity, he was not the corporal but only just a young-white-Caucasian-inmate B. Kincaid with
medical disabilities
who’d been designated
security-risk
at the time of his transfer.

The terms of his incarceration were so much a part of his official identity, it was as if
fifteen to twenty years
had been tattooed on his forehead.

Manslaughter, voluntary. Fifteen to twenty years.

As soon as a man was incarcerated at Dannemora, he would think of how much time he must “do” before being released. How much time before he might apply for parole.

Except if his sentence was life-without-parole. Except if his sentence was death.

Often, the corporal forgot, and thought—
Am I on Death Row?

For in even his lucid moments the corporal did not truly believe that he would ever be freed from the isolation unit, from a confinement of a few discolored walls, floors and ceilings, and bars, let alone from Dannemora—(of which he had but the vaguest impression having seen the astonishing long sixty-foot-high concrete wall of the color of old, soiled bones when he’d been first brought to the facility in shackles to begin his sentence as prescribed by law); he did not truly believe that time was continuing to pass like a stream bearing him along as in his younger, former life but rather, time had become a molten substance very sluggishly moving and it was against this movement, against the current and not with it, he had to struggle just to stay afloat and keep from drowning.

This effort, this exertion—most days, it required all of his strength.

Except for a shifting team of volunteer-lawyers, most of them newly graduated from upstate law schools—Albany, Cornell, Buffalo—he had few visitors.

He had few callers.

And sometimes, if a call came for B. Kincaid, he refused to speak to the caller.

His throat closed up, as if a fist had been shoved down it.

The
Kincaid case
as it was called had generated controversy in legal circles, in upstate New York. But this controversy did not involve the corporal who refused to give thought to what his life had become as a
case
.

God did not think of a man as a
case
. For a
case
is to be
solved
—and a man cannot be
solved.

Still it was known to him, for he’d received letters on the subject from numerous parties, that in Beechum County where the search for the
missing girl
had prevailed for months there remained outrage in some quarters that Brett Kincaid’s sentence was so “light” and that he would be eligible for parole in so few years; and there remained outrage in other quarters, that Brett Kincaid had been incarcerated at all, and in the notorious maximum-security prison at Dannemora, for the prevailing belief in these quarters was that the wounded Iraq War veteran was not the man responsible for the disappearance of Cressida Mayfield; or, if he was the man, he hadn’t been legally responsible for his actions and if he’d been institutionalized at all, he should have been sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

Defense funds had been established, to “bring justice” to Brett Kincaid. Who these individuals were, calling for funds on the Internet, what connection they had with one another or with Corporal Kincaid or any of the volunteer-lawyers officially attached to his case the corporal had no idea. Father Kranach was concerned, none of these strangers was accountable for money sent to them in Brett Kincaid’s name but Brett Kincaid himself seemed scarcely to care.

Saying to the priest, “Anywhere I am is Death Row. And where I am, I belong.”

ILLUMINATION ROUNDS—WHITE PHOSPHORUS—STREAMING
onto the enemy.

Deafening roar of attack helicopters, he woke cringing and whimpering in his sleep and the interior of his mouth and lungs coated with sand.

Both his legs were gone. Yet, the pain remained.

His hands, his arms to the elbow. Blown off, and the stark white bone shining through the blood bright as ridiculous false blood of a child’s TV horror film.

Screaming he’d heard his name, one of his friends screaming his name he was hearing this now but could not see where.

Fuck they deserved some fucking fun, the guys said. If you survived and had not been blown up or shrapnel in your guts or heads you deserved some fucking fun shooting at civilians like rats freaking in terror, cutting off a finger, an ear, a teeny dick, nipples—making a pouch of civilian-Iraq faces sewn together like to keep snuff in, or meds.

See it’s like some warrior-custom, Muksie was saying. Pouches made of enemy-faces and actual scalps to wear on your head but prob’ly you’d had to cure the damn things—like “taxidermy”—so they wouldn’t rot and stink on your head.

THOSE WHO TELEPHONED
Brett Kincaid in Clinton Correctional Facility were few. And all were female, from Carthage.

Of these the most persistent was Brett’s mother Ethel Kincaid. For Ethel in her shrewdness had found a way to make calls to her incarcerated son at taxpayers’ expense through a county family-services “emergency” fund.

As Ethel in her shrewdness and something very like a subversive sense of humor had found a way to keep alive her son’s case in the Carthage press and TV news by announcing “fresh clues”—“new witnesses”—“exculpatory evidence”—at regular intervals, calling such local-media figures as Evvie Estes of WCTG-TV and Hal Roche of the
Carthage Post-Journal
and when they failed to respond to her phone messages approaching them on the street, stalking them to their very homes secure in the knowledge that probably, certainly, no one in Carthage would dare to summon the police to arrest her, Ethel Kincaid the grieving mother of the wrongly persecuted, wrongly convicted and incarcerated Iraq War hero Corporal Brett Kincaid.

Since the late summer of 2005 virtually every lawyer in Beechum County including those long retired and elderly had been contacted by Mrs. Kincaid to aid in the campaign to free her son and had learned to avoid the grieving mother.

Even individuals convinced that Corporal Kincaid was unjustly convicted and willing to contribute money to his “defense fund” had learned to avoid the grieving mother.

It had happened more than once that Ethel Kincaid had approached Cressida Mayfield’s parents in public places, individually—Arlette she’d approached on the front walk of the battered women’s shelter in the suburban village of Mount Olive at which Arlette had become a frequent volunteer following her daughter’s disappearance, with a demand that Arlette “make full disclosure” of the whereabouts of her daughter; Zeno she’d approached in a Carthage restaurant in which Zeno was seated with friends, denouncing him as a “class-warfare enemy” whose daughter had “run off” and was alive somewhere in an “illegal conspiracy” to keep her innocent son in prison.

At a performance of Euripides’
Medea
staged at Carthage Community College in the spring of 2008 the startled audience had at first thought it was a continuation of the play, performed in “modern dress,” when, after the lights came up, a middle-aged woman with a ravaged-girl’s face leapt into the aisle to declaim in a loud voice that here she was a “true loving mother”—“not a crazy monster-mother like Medea”—but did anybody “give a damn about”
her
?

Only after some minutes did it become clear, to a portion of the audience at least, that the thin, excitable woman with eyes like the glittering steel balls of a pinball machine was in fact Ethel Kincaid the mother of Corporal Brett Kincaid who’d confessed to the murder of Cressida Mayfield in the fall of 2005.

The shrewdest maneuver Ethel Kincaid had yet attempted was to sue for public funds as a victim of 9/11.

Too God damn bad she hadn’t thought of this until nine years after 9/11—four years after Brett was incarcerated—so it was hard to get people to take her lawsuit seriously arguing that she, Ethel Kincaid, was a victim of the terrorist attack if indirectly, as her only son Brett had been sent to Iraq to fight El Kwada—that is, the Muslim terrorists—and in that terrible place he’d been wounded in combat and sent home “disabled” and “defective” and as a result of this was “incarcerated” in a maximum-security prison in a Godforsaken corner of the state, hundreds of miles away virtually in Canada. None of this was her fault as the damaged lives of family members of individuals killed in the World Trade Center or in the hijacked airplanes were not their fault but the result of the terrorist attack from which the U.S. government had not protected its citizens. Ethel had written to the President in the White House as to other, more local politicians and not one of them had responded; and now she was picketing Beechum County family services believing that she deserved an upgrade on her payments and should not have to prove “paupership” but be allowed to own a car, at least.

In her state of nerves since July 2005, Ethel had retired from clerical work. She had not yet sought out employment, knowing there was a bias in Carthage against her.

She did collect unemployment. But that was a laugh, living at the “paupership line.”

Far away in Dannemora, New York, Brett knew of these remarkable episodes in his mother’s life through Ethel’s boasting of them over the phone.

Steeling himself to listen. And sometimes, as her voice rang in his ears like struck glass, he did not listen.

“Never guess what your crazy old mother was doing just this week!”—so Ethel would exclaim as soon as Brett came on the line.

Saying, when Brett failed to respond as a normal son would respond, “Somebody has got to keep your case alive, God damn it! And that somebody has got to be your mother since nobody else gives a shit.”

Ethel yearned to visit Brett at the prison but couldn’t make the long trip by bus, her health had been ruined since that terrible summer of 2005—a bus trip would kill her. There was an offer from a cable-channel talk show to tell her son’s side of the story if Mrs. Kincaid would allow the TV crew to drive her by “limousine” to Dannemora and accompany her to the prison gate and afterward be interviewed by the host
frankly and candidly
on the subject of visiting her only son in prison and such invitations Ethel considered seriously—wistfully—but Brett flatly refused.

“The world needs to be educated to your side of the story, Brett. So you will be granted a new trial or your sentence commuted by the governor.”

And when Brett still failed to respond, saying in a wounded voice, “All the world believes you are
guilty,
Brett. Your enemies never gave you a chance and some you’d thought were your friends turned out to be your enemies and you have to do something about it.”

The corporal seemed to be summoning himself from a long distance but then could manage only a shrug of a murmur his mother could barely hear: “Why?”

AND ANOTHER CALLER
from Carthage was Arlette Mayfield.

Juliet’s mother! Mrs. Mayfield! The corporal could not bear to hear the woman’s voice and refused to come to the phone.

Out of cowardice, shame. Could not come to the phone.

And so, Arlette wrote to Brett Kincaid in the Clinton Correctional Facility, Dannemora, New York. He’d had to steel himself to open the handwritten letter for his instinct was to quickly dispose of it.

Dear Brett,

I am sorry you will not speak with me. But I will try again—of course.

I would like so much to hear your voice, Brett. I would like to see your face. I think of you so often—I pray for you. I think the bond between us is very deep though you and my daughter Juliet were not married yet it had seemed at times—(forgive me, this is strange to say, I know)—that you were my
son-in-law.
And
of the Mayfield family.

There is so much between us, Brett, we must speak of before it is too late.

We were in the courtroom at the sentencing and it was then I felt so strongly, that you were of my family. Though I could not acknowledge it at that time. My heart was broken, I think—the loss of Cressida, that was also a loss of you.