The Enchanted (3 page)

The books brought brilliance to my life, and they brought an understanding: Life is a story. Everything that has happened and will happen to me is all part of the story of this enchanted place—all the dreams and visions and understandings that come to me in my dungeon cell. The books helped me see that truth is not in the touch of the stone but in what the stone tells you.

And the stones tell me so much. But if I get some things wrong, then please forgive me. This place is too enchanted to let the story go untold.

T
he lady stays up late in her apartment, reading York's files.

Death penalty trials come and go like lightning storms, little bursts of electricity in the sky that fizzle and pop, leaving only the smell of ozone and wet newspapers. As soon as the verdict is read, the court staff rolls up boxes and the jurors go home. It is over and forgotten.

Twelve years after his trial, York had run through most of his appeals. He was on the conveyor belt to death. No one noticed, and no one cared. The lady has seen some cases drag on ten, twenty, or even thirty years before the prisoner was executed. Despite the delays, the prison still executes several men every year—there are dozens on the row and more coming all the time. A regular industry, she knows, that pays the keep on both sides.

The lady winces when she reads who were York's trial defense attorneys: two dump trucks widely known as Grim and Reaper for their ability to get their clients killed. They were famous for doing as little as possible while billing as much as possible. But once a man is sentenced to death, she knows, getting death off the table can seem insurmountable, no matter how incompetent the
original trial attorneys. A new attorney has to show outrageous violations of the law, or important new evidence that should have been uncovered and presented at trial. As they like to say on the row, York was blood pudding.

So York did the unimaginable thing. He gave up. He renounced his appeals. He said he wanted to die.

All of a sudden the Advocates rose up and the anti-death penalty groups rallied and the money poured in and famous people came begging York to change his mind. He went from another forgotten killer on his way to the chamber to a victim deserving of mercy. The Advocates raised the money to hire decent defense attorneys, and the attorneys hired the best mitigation specialist in the state, all to save the life of a man who had decided to die.

Which is where she comes in.

There are dozens of men on the row who would kill—and she thinks literally—to get her services. Instead, the honor goes to the one who wants to die. She rubs her tired eyes. They look pink in the light.

She goes to bed in silk pajamas that no one sees. She draws a clean sheet against her scrubbed chin. Her apartment feels empty and cold even to her.

The lady thinks about what it will be like to work this case. She has been a death penalty investigator for eight years. She takes on only one or two cases at a time, hired by attorneys who represent the men on appeal. With more than forty men on the row, that means only a fraction get her services. Usually, she has at least a year to investigate a case. Death penalty investigation is labor-intensive—it
takes months to locate ancient records, to track down witnesses from decades before, to plumb the truth of a crime.

Since York denounced his appeals, his execution date has been set—for August 6. The height of summer. She glances at the calendar above her desk. It is May. She has three months to save his life. One season, she thinks, to end an execution.

All of her clients have wanted to live. Some wanted it desperately, others dispassionately. But all wanted it. When she struggles with what she does, she can at least tell herself that she is fulfilling their rights and desires.

Not the case with York.

She thinks about what it will be like to go against a condemned man's wishes, to save him from himself. How does a person know when he wants to die? Is it a flash of light or a slow understanding? Maybe this is just his clever plan to avoid death.

Before she goes to sleep, she thinks, almost unwillingly, about the fallen priest. She sees him striding up to the window, a figure in miniature. His gait is firm and sure. He is wearing the black priest robes he once wore, but he flings them open as if discarding them. When he steps through the glass, she knows she is sleeping, and she dreams all of a sudden that he is there beside her, a little figure that she caresses with care, fearful of breaking.

T
he guards at the end of the hall are talking about the man they call Arden.

“I hear he's finally coming up,” says one.

A hush falls whenever someone brings up the inmate they call Arden. If a prison can have a monster, Arden is ours. In a place full of the worst kinds of killers, his acts alone defy words or explanations. Others may talk about what York did, but no one talks about what Arden did, because some things are too awful to contemplate.

I slide along the rock wall and put my face to the stone and listen.

“It's about time,” the other guard says.

“Yeah. Warden says it was one of those things.”

I wonder if they mean the man they call Arden is up for parole, but there is no way anyone is granting a monster parole.

“What about York?” The voice is teasing now. The idea of killing York lightens the conversation.

“Are you volunteering for the black shirt?”

There is no answer. They all know the rules—if you volunteer for the execution squad, you don't tell anyone.

“I don't know. Might have a hard time actually killing the asshole, you know.”

There is a faintly surprised silence. “Me, too.”

The little men with hammers chatter and then shush as well.

L
ate spring is rampaging outside. Even down in the dungeon, I can tell. The guards bring rain in their hair and on their regulation jackets. They shake it off when they
come down the dungeon stairs. A little trickles into my cell. I get down and taste it. It is not the taste of fall rain, which tastes like rotting leaves. It is not the taste of winter rain, which tastes like cold melted ice. No, this is the taste of spring rain, fresh with cut grass and new life.

“Might flood tonight,” the guard says outside my cell.

“Shit,” the other replies.

I retreat from my bars, wondering why people who live outside choose such ugly words. Maybe that is what happens when you are outside, and the world clangs and barrels and shouts twenty-four hours a day, from your radio your television your wife your neighbor the lawn mower down the street and the scream of airplanes from the sky. Maybe then you use ugly words to tell life to shut up.

The outside is too big and scary for me to think about anymore. The outside is one wild circus where people and ideas clash. I have been inside one locked room or another since I was nine. I am accustomed to it, buried inside rooms that are buried inside other rooms that are buried inside electric razor fences. The walls that might make others feel like they are suffocating have become my lungs.

I sit on my narrow bunk and caress my long yellow toenails and stare at my walls. I think about the river that runs next to our prison, and the pond and how ducks paddle in it. I think about the cold, mucky water and can feel it against my feet, feel the darkness and pull of the swaying weeds below. I pretend my feet are the duck feet, paddling in the sloughs. I taste the muck in my billed mouth,
feel the tendons of my feather wings as they pound the slate sky.

Every few years the river rages until it overruns its clay banks, and the muddy slick water races over the parking lot and into the lower levels of our prison, into the basements and especially into our dungeon. Many times over the years I have seen the water slowly bead and then run down my walls and across the floor. Most times it rises only as high as an inch or two, a current that flows mysteriously and delightfully to what I think is the south.

A few times over many, many years, I have seen the water rise as high as my cot. That is when the screaming really starts. The other men are frightened of drowning. I am too busy putting one finger after another in the cold water and feeling the joyous rush to care.

I am too excited to sleep.

Later that night the red warning lights in the hallways flash, trembling with the unseen storm outside. The guards trot down the halls, dragging ancient pumping machines. The machines roar to life with vast gurgling sounds. The underground river is breaching our buried walls; it is seeping and running down into our cave, and I watch it run down my walls. I think about it running in waves down to the caverns below, where the golden horses stomp with delight.

The inmates begin screaming. “What the hell's going on?” They have the panicked voices of men trapped underground. This place is one big grave. But didn't they already know that?

“I ain't Noah, and this ain't the ark!” Striker shrieks from the other cell next to mine.

I am in ecstasy. I place my bare feet against the stone floor and tremble, feeling the first cold trickle, wanting that chilly new information, excited about what chain of life it will tell me about next.

T
here is a saying among death penalty investigators, the lady knows, that you always end up in the worst house on the block. No matter how poor the neighborhood, no matter how depressing the trailer court, the worst home on the street is always where the family of your client lives. Or the family of the victim.

A colleague of hers used to joke that he didn't even need to pick up cases anymore. He just went to trailer parks and hung out in the worst trailer until he got a new case. Other investigators acted offended, but she understood. That colleague died not long after, out in the field. He knocked on the wrong door, and a man with a sawed-off shotgun blew him away.

She thinks of that investigator as she winds her way through gorgeous blue conifer forests, past glistening rivers and curves that give glimpses of heaven. She is hours out of the city and in a part of the country she never knew existed. This beautiful country, her old friend would say, is not what you expect in death penalty investigations.

She passes elk crossings and small towns with odd old-fashioned names, like Burnt Tree and Hope Creek. The
towns are no more than a single store hanging off the side of the road and cabins barely visible in the rising hills beyond. She sees a deer munching grass, unconcerned at the side of the road, her sandy rump showing, her fawn at her side.

As she turns a tree-studded curve, the view opens up to a series of emerald lakes strung out below, like a chain of jewels. The view is jaw-dropping. She sees a small lookout and stops. When she leaves her car, the air tastes impossibly clean.

The glittering lake below is so beautiful, it looks surreal. A red-tailed hawk wheels overhead, and a small bronze plaque tells that the local Native Americans once considered these lakes sacred. Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully. She savors the blue forests and endless sky.

When she gets back in her car, she feels mildly depressed. The car smells like stale coffee and soggy sandwiches.

I should move out here, she thinks suddenly. I should rent a little cabin in the woods near these lakes. I could paint or write and clean cabins for a living. Something simple. Or I could just come here. To be away.

The idea grows as she passes more little towns without names and long stretches of nothing but those dappled blue forests, the trees rising over the road and sights of velvet green mossy ground in the forests. She puts down her windows and hears the distant roar of rivers. She imagines what it would be like to live out here, to walk out on the
cabin porch every morning with a cup of coffee and see those stellar lakes, to taste the air and fill her eyes with the blue forests. She imagines curling in a white bed under the steep eaves and cooking simple suppers over a one-burner stove. She imagines serving dinner to herself and a man. He sits at the table, a fuzzy silhouette. Her mind turns skittishly away from seeing his face.

The fantasy ends when she turns in to the little town of Sawmill Falls. She drives past a long-closed mill with a caved-in roof alongside a noisy creek and down a street with Closed signs on all the shops. The town appears deserted. She climbs a dirt road that bounces her old car over the ruts. At the top of the dirt road, she finds a smaller road, almost too small to climb, and this takes her to the top of the hill. There she finds a falling-down gate covered with poison oak.

She parks and walks the rest of the way up the road.

Sure enough, the abandoned-looking shack at the top of the hill is the worst home she has seen all day.

“L
ike I said, I ain't moving much lately.”

York's aunt wheezes from her chair. Little tufts of gray stuffing poke through the chair springs. Aunt Beth is a prematurely old woman with wild iron hair and a broad broken smile. She could be forty or she could be seventy. As with most of the poor people the lady meets, poverty has made her ageless. Her swollen feet are in a bedpan full of sudsy-looking water.

“That's Epsom salts, for my feets,” she explains.

“My grammy used to do the same thing,” the lady says easily, and then thinks, Is that true? Did Grammy soak her feet in Epsom salts? She has no idea, but it doesn't matter. It felt true for the moment.

“So you want me to talk about my nephew,” York's elderly aunt says sadly.

“Only if you want,” the lady replies gently. She's already explained her job in the simplest form: She is here to learn about York, so the attorneys who represent him can try to save his life.

It takes the old woman a while to warm up, but when she does, all the lady needs to do is listen.

“I remember when my sister had him. He was a pretty baby. So pretty. But sick, you know? You heard of Shirley, I bet. She never went to England, I'll tell you that. She told stories. But that baby was conceived right here in Sawmill Falls.”