From the Chrysalis (6 page)

A man died, Liza,
he wrote. His words echoed, reminding her of how she had felt when she’d first read about the crime. Somewhere she had also read it took about two or three years to get over a bereavement. If somebody died at your hands, it was more or less the same.

Do you still think about him? A man you hardly knew?

Not if I can help it,
he answered.
I’d go crazy if I did. Besides, I’d really rather think about you.
 

At the close of every letter he wrote for the next two years he added,
So now you know there’s a wayward cousin thinking about you in some godforsaken place.
 

He didn’t mention that he was also writing to everybody else he knew, anybody smart enough to toss him a rope. And he didn’t mention the pond, either. Why? Because she had been fourteen? Or because of the prison censors, those prurient men who got off on reading other people’s thoughts. What a job. She knew he hadn’t forgotten though. Because she hadn’t. And somewhere inside they were the same.

She ended up staying in Dublin almost five years, and during that time he wrote her eighty-three letters.
 

Tell me, Cousin, just how do you feel about me? I’d like to see you open a bit yourself. Or am I blind?
 

P.S. Take care of yourself. I don’t know what happened to you there in Dublin, but it seems to me you haven’t valued your heart.
 

She counted and re-counted his letters the same way some girls do their friends, poring over them like the poems she loved. She agonized over droughts, for there were still periods when he either couldn’t or wasn’t allowed to write.
 

… because some nut stabbed me in the back. We both had to go to the hospital. The blade broke off in my back. So the director charged us both with fighting. He put us in lockup and took thirty days good time off us. Can you believe that? Can you?

Her grandmother was usually scouring pots or hand washing clothes in the background, a sour expression on her face, although Liza helped with the housework now. Gran had turned sixty-six in 1971, but she seemed older. She’d been almost used up by the time she was forty-five, and if she’d ever had any use for a man it was hard to remember it now. Strong hands, strong backs, but most of them don’t use them, she said. And dear Jaysus, they wore out so soon. Just look at her. Her boys sent what they could, but she’d been on her own for almost fifteen years.
 

“You’re a right lunatic, girl,” she’d say, scrubbing the cutting board until the thin skin on her knuckles glowed. “What do they call it in the States?
Boy crazy
? I’ve never seen a girl so bewitched by men. First that would-be actor and now a jailbird. Never seen nothing like it. Unless it was your mother Maeve.”

Just one man.
 

Liza yearned, reluctantly letting go of dream of Trinity and scouting out the closest university to Maitland Penitentiary instead. She also wrote more and more letters to Dace, to everybody except her estranged parents, the closer she came to going back. It had been a long time coming, but she and Dace were both grown up now. They could do what they wanted. When she got home everything was going to be all right.

Chapter 4

Yard-Out

Maitland Penitentiary is about to explode. We are doing everything to prevent it, but so much is outside our jurisdiction. First, we are understaffed. Roughly one third of our inmates require psychiatric care, but our hospital is too small and our staff too overworked to process the necessary paperwork. Second, there is still widespread anxiety about the scheduled transfer of inmates to Maitland Supermax.
 

[Unanswered letter from the Warden to the Regional Director of Ontario, 17 June 1971]

I am not of that feather to shake off my friend when he must

need me.

[Shakespeare, William,
Timon of Athens
, Act i]

Recreational Yard, Maitland Penitentiary, July 1971:

Sun sprayed through the barbed wire and sparkled on the mica in the dirt. For a super-sized dog kennel, Dace Devereux thought the Big Yard looked pretty good.

Dace, a.k.a. #2909, was soaking up the sun. It took a lot of heat to reach the chill in his bones. B Block had just got out, so they had almost an hour in the Yard unless some stupid fucker jerked the screw’s chain. His eyes cut to the black scaffolding in the corner. Fat Frank stared down the barrel of his gun, aimed directly at Dace.
 

So let him. The last thing he needed was to get some institutional charges written up, like Rick had the other day. Dace had gotten all that
fuck you
stuff out of his system the first year, thank you. Prison had its charms all right, giving losers a lifelong sense of belonging, but it was high time he left.
 

Although he was taking a bit of a chance and he knew it, he leaned back against a brick wall and closed his eyes. The bricks felt hot. What the hell was keeping Rick anyway? It made Dace nervous. Maybe he had gotten slammed down again. Or maybe … His mind leaped ahead, anticipating a variety of calamities. The sun was a two-faced bitch sometimes, but an hour in her rays sure as hell beat eighteen hours in his cell.
 

He had almost dozed off when he was accosted for the first time that day. “Hey, Iron Horse,” somebody said. A friend, since he’d used a nickname. It sounded like Eugene, a guy up his tier. Dace cocked an eye open just in case. Yeah, it was Eugene.
 

“Hey, man,” he said without moving his lips.

“Hey, man,” a different, unexpected voice said. “Stay alive.”
 

His eyes popped open, but there was nobody there.
 

Maybe he was going crazy, this close to parole. Some guys did. Straightening up, he panned the yard, something even the dumbest fish did if he valued his life—and he did, he did, he did. People were waiting for him Outside. His father, his sister Rosie, and little Liza. Every time he thought about Liza, he grinned.

A flash of light distracted him, but it was just the sun glinting off the Iron Pile at the bottom of the Yard. A crying shame. Not that he expected much from the stupid bastards who ran this place when they’d cut athletics, school and work programs.
Boo hoo
, he thought, mocking himself and wiping sweat from his brow. The sight of all that rusty metal still bothered him, though. It cost nothing to maintain a set of weights.

His shoelace had come undone. Damn, he thought, as he bent down to retie it. A pale blue letter dislodged from inside his shirt and began a slow, tantalizing descent to the ground. Lunging forward, he swiped the letter in mid-air, almost crushing it in his hand.
 

The next thing he knew, a couple of greeners were staring him in the face.
Stand a little out of my sun,
the library con always said
.
 

“Hey,” the smaller, bespectacled man said.

 
The second suckhole must have thought Dace was deaf. “Fuck,” he said, “Look at his sneer! What’s he mad at us for?”
 

Undeterred by their poor reception, the smaller goon held out a smoke. Dace really wanted a cigarette, but he declined. The Pen was a small society with a three-tiered hierarchy of men and laws governing where everybody belonged. People were always better off with their own kind.

“Hit it,” he said just as Rick showed up.

“Yeah, get the fuck out of here,” Rick added, kicking at their rears.

Both guys jumped. “Okay, okay, we’re going,” they said, bowing away. “Looks like you don’t need no more friends anyway.”

“A real sharp pair of jerks, eh?” Dace said, high-fiving his friend.
 

“Brilliant,” Rick said and looked both ways before he opened his shirt. Dace caught sight of cigarettes and something else that was white.
 

Rick had done hard time, but after five years in—with a bit of a break—everything was cool. “Where the hell you been?” Dace asked, as if he didn’t know. The guy loved to talk. And bum cigarettes.
Hallelujah
, he thought, taking the tailor-made Rick was waving under his nose. Some of the T.M.s weren’t bad.
 

He could have happily stayed right where he was for the next forty minutes or so, but Rick wanted to go walking. Peeling his body off the wall, Dace checked his sweaty outline on the bricks.
Dace was here,
it said
.
Where the hell did Rick get his energy? The guy was practically skipping while Dace’s own legs felt numb. At the door back into the Big House they got a couple of lights from a droopy little joint man, the prison trusty posted there.
 

Rick inhaled half his cigarette in one drag, the way he always did. “Jesus,” he complained as he expelled the smoke. “Nothing ever happens in this stupid place.”

Dace shrugged. Shit happened, but it was the same old, same old. What the hell did he care? He was getting out soon. Still smoking, they strolled around the high-walled gravel yard while Dace mulled over Liza’s letter again.
 

Dear Dace,
 

I got accepted into Maitland University! I’m coming home. Well, not to my mother’s flat on Clinton. And as for my father’s house in Scarborough—yes, I’m a wonderful girl, but when are you going to understand he really doesn’t want to see me? It’s okay, I don’t mind. He’s not the only man in my life. You’re my family, too. I’m going to stay in a new student residence, in a fresh, modern room overlooking a stream. I’m so glad I’ll still be near water. I got a scholarship and Granny Magill is helping. I feel guilty taking her money, but I don’t know what else to do. Besides, she has good reason for wanting to see me gone. She thinks it will be better for me, too. I just hope I can pay her back someday.
 

Dublin is so beautiful. I wish you could have visited. But everything here is so tired and old and although the Troubles are a hundred miles north, people are afraid. And a woman’s life, well, it’s not good. No birth control, and Women’s Liberation has been a little slow, probably because most of Ireland still feels like it’s enslaved.

He grinned, noting that
“Goddamn the English”
had been struck out
.

Even so, I’ve walked the streets so much, Dublin’s in my soul.
 

When I get to university I want to major in English or maybe Psychology. Anybody can read books, so I was tempted by Biology, but I don’t have enough Math. More than anything, I want to see you. I’m coming straight there. How do I get in? Please, please, make sure I’m on your visitors list. Are you behaving yourself? Dear Cousin, you’ve just got to make parole.

Although he didn’t understand all the things she said, he liked the way she said them. She worried him, though. She was hiding something, but he had no idea what. Take that stuff about her grandmother, her other grandmother. What was all that?

He put the letter away and looked around. A small crowd had gathered near the dismantled weightlifting equipment.
 

Rick didn’t notice the crowd. “What’s the problem?” he asked when Dace steered him in the opposite direction.

“It’s just Sandy McAllister preaching again. He’s NG, absolutely no fucking good.”

“I mean your cousin, you lucky bastard. What did she say?”

Dace looked away. If it had been anybody else, he would have ignored him. But a friend could take liberties. He took a couple of drags on his cigarette, hoping to make the smoke last, but they both knew he was stalling. “She’s coming home soon,” he said.