The Enchanted (24 page)

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A Letter to the Reader

Dear reader,

I had always hoped that someday I would write a novel—it was my longest-lasting, most heartfelt dream, born of a childhood defined by poverty but limitless when I opened a book.

It is in the pages of fiction, I believe, that the greatest truths are told.

But I was always too busy with parenting and work to sit down and pen that novel. And I was uncertain about how to find the right story, the right voice.

When I began doing death penalty investigations, I was bound by confidentiality. I knew I could never write a nonfiction book about my cases. And so the work existed in a magical, secret place for me. All the stories, the memories, the turns of the roads, the faces of clients became stored in my heart, like secret treasures.

But then one day I was leaving the death row prison in Oregon. It is an ancient stone fortress, built in 1866. It was a bright, sunny spring day, and I can remember the ducks flying overhead to the nearby pond. I was on the way to my car, keys rustling in my hand, and feeling the despair from inside slowly lift off my skin in the sunlight.

I turned around to look at those walls.

And I heard a very quiet, distinctive voice.

This is an enchanted place,
he said.

It was not my voice. It was the voice of a man, I realized. He was hiding in a cell I had not yet found.

But he was there. And he wanted me to listen.

It took many months, but I followed that voice into this novel. At first it was difficult. I had to get to just the right place, emotionally, to hear that voice. I imagined myself dropping all of my own thoughts and opinions, like useless coins, down a deep well. Clink, clink, clink. A big part of death penalty work—and of all good fiction writing, I believe—is abandoning our assumptions and letting others tell their truth. Clink, clink, clink. Each dropping coin was another place in my heart opening up to the truth of that voice.

A lot of the things the owner of that quiet, soft voice told me came as surprises. And yet once I heard them I instantly recognized them as truths. I knew they were true from my life, my own history, and my work with men facing execution. Sometimes those truths were hard to hear. But more often, listening to him made my heart sing, because he was right. Life can be enchanted, for all of us. Even him. Even me. And yes, you.

Over time the narrator visited more and more often. He perched at the edge of my desk and talked in that low, melodic voice. I could see him there, with long scaly nails and filaments of gray hair, and to this day you cannot convince me he was not as real as any
person. Sometimes, to my shock, he would appear in my car, putting his bare feet up on my dash as I drove to the same ramshackle homes the lady does, and I would have to pull over and write down what he told me.

The day came when I got to the final page. I wrote down his final words.

And poof—he was gone.

I have not heard his voice since. I miss him.

What is reality? From an outsider, prison reality may seem one way. But for people who have never been locked up, or have never let those inside climb into their minds and hearts until they can feel truly them, it is hard to imagine the reality. The true reality is not in the walls, or the corruption, or even the day-to-day routines. It is in the minds of the men inside. It is in the way hope can grow fertile even in the most arid soils. It is in the way a book from the library cart can open a door in a soul that lets it fly free. It is how we construct ourselves, even in the midst of horrible despair. It is how the sound of horses can be heard through hearts continents away. It is a breath of sweet air that melts with the wind, to be carried away . . . to China, or some faraway, hopeful place.

What is redemption? I do not know. I only know that we all have souls—those magic places inside us that yearn to be accepted. I believe we can carry both the pain of the victim and the truth of the accused without doing
disservice to either. Perhaps by understanding the causes of crimes we can truly honor the gravity of them. Only then, as the narrator says, can we stop men like him from happening.

I am lucky to have had my past. I am lucky to have listened to both killers and victims alike.

And I am lucky to have turned my head that day and heard the voice that let me write my first novel, the voice that gave me the confidence to tell the most remarkable truth of all: the truth of our souls.

Author's Picks

I'
VE ALWAYS BEEN
a voracious reader. When I was a child, the public library was my sanctuary. As they were for the narrator of
The Enchanted,
books were my solace, my hope, and the incarnation of my soul.

A big part of the process of writing
The Enchanted
was immersing myself in the books the narrator would have read. I also sought out those books that touched on some of the themes I was exploring: the power of story to redeem; the role of imagination in the construction of hope; our deep hunger for a connection to the natural world; our ability to find beauty even in despair.

The following were on my bedstand as I wrote
The Enchanted:

The White Dawn: An Eskimo Saga,
by James Houston. This stunning little classic recounts a story about how three survivors from a whaling ship are rescued by an Eskimo village. At heart, it is a story about celebrating life even in struggle. One of my favorite quotes: “Look at me, old and crippled, and yet still waiting for all the good things and bad things that life will bring to me.”

Dandelion Wine,
by Ray Bradbury. A novel that captures all the magic and hopefulness of childhood, as recounted by a twelve-year-old named Douglas Spaulding. The quiet meditations on the importance of family—of love—ring
both sweet and true. One of my favorite quotes: “No person ever died that had a family.”

The Woman Warrior,
by Maxine Hong Kingston. One of my favorite memoirs, this lovely book weaves together fable and reality until the lines become blurred and, perhaps, irrelevant. My favorite quote: “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.”

West with the Night,
by Beryl Markham. Another amazing memoir, this book was written by a pioneering female pilot. It wouldn't seem to have much to do with the stone prison of
The Enchanted,
but I believe the narrator would have loved Markham's observations on life. My favorite quote: “There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt.”

Crazy Weather,
by Charles L. McNichols. A beautiful coming-of-age novel recently and deservedly resurrected in an edition with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin,
Crazy Weather
tells the story of a reservation boy on a journey to find his identity. I think the narrator took comfort in this story as he approached execution. One of my favorite quotes:
“Above the sky was the color of turquoise fresh-cut from the mines near Sante Fe. A cloud of fluffed cotton floated across it. This is Heaven as it should be, he thought.”

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T
he author would like to thank the following: Luppi, Dontonio, and Markel Denfeld Redden; Richard Pine; Gail Winston; Kirsty Dunseath; Maya Ziv; Eliza Rothstein; Bill Hamilton; Nathaniel Jacks; Victoria Schoening; Ellen Rogers; Lane Borg; the staff of the Metropolitan Public Defenders Office; Bob and Laura Hicks; Stephanie Hunter; Mary Ellen Haugh Rubick; Nancy and Steve Rawley; Julie Shaw; Jimmy Scoville; Todd Grimson; Louis Pain; Randy and Amy Christensen; the performing arts communities of Portland and Ashland; Gary Norman; Deborah Lee-Thornby; Katherine Dunn; Edward Taub; Shirley Kishiyama; Marty Hughley; and most especially, her clients.

Photo Gary Norman

RENE DENFELD
is an internationally bestselling author, journalist, mitigation specialist, and fact investigator in death penalty cases. She has written for the
New York Times Magazine
, the
Oregonian
, and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, and is the author of four books, including the international bestseller
The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order
;
Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall
; and
All God's Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families
.

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hc.com
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“Denfeld has done a wondrous job of taking us into the gruesomeness of death row and giving us the visual tour through the eyes of one who has been able to find the beauty inside. . . . If you enjoy mystery and suspense as well as a bit of magic and horror, you will find it all here. The story is enthralling and keeps you reading far into the night. This would be a great book for a discussion group and would create a great deal of argument and buzz, rounding out the feelings and thoughts of all those involved.”

           
—
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  
“[An] evocative first novel. . . . Denfeld's humanizing of the potential for horror that is within all of us and her insistence that the reader see the beauty in the darkest corners of life sizzles through her sharp prose, which both makes us flinch and invites us to imagine.”

           
—
Booklist

  
“
The Enchanted
wrapped its beautiful and terrible fingers around me from the first page and refused to let go after the last. A wondrous book that finds transcendence in the most unlikely of places, enshrouding horrible things in a gossamer veil of fantasy with a truly unforgettable narrator. So dark, yet so exquisite.”

           
—Erin Morgenstern, author of
The Night Circus

  
“
The Enchanted
is . . . a testament to the power of words, language, and symbols to reshape one's reality, and it is
an extraordinarily empathetic look at the sorrows and joys of even the worst aspects of human life.”

           
—
The Oregonian

  
“A striking one-of-a-kind prison novel . . . [with] rich, haunting prose. . . . A stunning first novel from an already accomplished writer.”

           
—
Publishers Weekly

  
“Rene Denfeld is a genius. In
The Enchanted
, she has imagined one of the grimmest settings in the world—a dank and filthy death row in a corrupt prison—and given us one of the most beautiful, heartrending, and riveting novels I have ever read.”