The Enchanted (7 page)

The minute she sits on the soft bed, she has a strong
urge to call the priest.
Come home
, she wants to say, which is strange, because she has never wanted to call him before.

She turns on the old television and dials through a comforting static before realizing there are only three channels out here. She turns off the television. She sits on the edge of the bed eating her pastry, which crackles with honey and walnuts. She hears an owl call and a break of brush from an animal, hears a television in another room and a woman's voice and the sound of water lapping against the shore. She lies down and thinks of the laurel hedge of her childhood, and the magical world inside it, and how she could never tell anyone that even now, as she drifts to sleep, she imagines a place where she can feel whole.

B
ack in her cold city apartment, the lady reads the old medical records for York and his mother. His attorneys will be happy, she knows, when she tells them.

What the attorneys don't know is the fever that follows finding poison.

Her clients rarely walk to freedom—that is a myth. She can count her truly innocent clients on one finger. Most of the men she works with are guilty. They may not be guilty of all they were charged, but they are guilty of more than enough. Many are guilty of even worse, the crimes that were suspected and never proved.

No, the dream of the death row client is to escape execution for a life behind bars. They want to escape the dungeon
into the rest of the prison. They want a visit from their mom that involves a touch. They want to stand in the sun, to play a game of ball, to eat at a table with other men, to see the sky and feel the wind. Those are their dreams, maybe small to others but huge to them. It is a modest dream, in a sense, and yet one that is amazingly hard to achieve for a man on death row.

At least all of her clients have wanted that except for one—York.

The lady goes to bed and thinks of a beautiful girl who managed to have “miscarriage” after miscarriage starting at age eleven, until by some miracle she avoided Dr. Hammond's abortion fish hook until it was too late and she gave birth to a little baby boy when she was sixteen. In a note at the bottom of York's birth record, the doctor had scribbled,
Sterilized.
There was no consent form or signature.

Shirley probably didn't even know that Dr. Hammond had done it—so the town men could go on fucking her without recourse or retribution. She was a little girl who displayed obvious signs of the brain damage and venereal disease that would take her life. Only instead of receiving help, she was passed around like a broken toy.

What was it like? It had to be a dark time for the town. Maybe it played as much a role in the town's decline as the death of timber, as guilty souls and angry women slunk away and a vacant, beaten Shirley was left to wander the streets with a malnourished little boy in her arms.

And as for little York? His medical records were cursory,
as if Dr. Hammond didn't have the time to bother with the unwanted. But each limited entry told a terrible story. Dislocated hips at age one—as if someone had spread his little legs into a frog shape and pressed with adult weight. Strange illnesses that came and went. Burns to the arms at age two. A “wet gray fungus” growing near his anus for the better part of a year when he was only three.
Will not respond to sulfur
, the doctor had written, and seemed to give up until the fungus went away on its own. Missing clumps of hair. Partial unexplained deafness. Broken toes, lacerations, burns to fingers.

If child abuse had a record, this was it.

And each time the good Dr. Hammond bandaged the child of the town slut and sent him back to whatever hell he lived in.

She sleeps and she dreams, hot dreams, and several times she startles awake, knowing she has shouted something into the empty night. The nightmares are back. She dreams of glittering knives and of men falling to earth in boxcars from heaven. She dreams of men who lie on children, breaking their little hips into frog shapes. The men pull out knives and flay the toddlers, holding the wet skins like flags in the night. She is in her damp childhood bed again, listening for footsteps in the dark.

A man is standing by her bed. He turns into York. He is holding a knife.

Tit for tat
, York says in her dreams while he slashes.
Tit for tat.

It is always like this. The nightmares are like some
loathsome midnight monster that spawns whenever she is deep inside a case, when she begins to see the person who did the terrible things. She becomes his heart, his family, his victim.

She thinks of York's mother, and she turns her face to the wet pillow and dreams again.

Y
ears ago, when I was general population in the cellblock far above me, I had a little window. I was lucky to have that slot of stone, barred with iron, that gave my nose air and, if I wanted to pull up with my aching arms, a view of the sky.

Down below that window was the yard I avoided. During the days, I could hear the crash of metal, hear the catcalls of my tormentors. I would crouch under that window, convinced they could see through the stone.

But in the evenings? I had the freedom of a view.

The lip of that sill lifted me to my heaven. At dusk, when the yard cleared and no one was around but the walking shadows, I could see into the world itself.

As the night around me fell during those days, I could hear the men down the halls going to mess or the showers or the activities room—the faint din of thousands of men as they buried their ways inside the emptiness of our walls. That was when the yard was cool and serene and empty.

That was when I would perch, remembering the books I had stored in my heart that day to forget the ache
and sadness of my body. I would hold myself on that windowsill and just look into the yard below. So beautiful it was, filled with soft shadows. How the dust looked as the sun fell, like freshly driven snow. How the baseball diamond glowed to where I could see the reason for the name. How the guard towers softened in the falling light, and the guards held their night rifles like dark toys.

Bit by bit the sun would go down, and the sky would fade to purple and then to close, and the faintest stars would twinkle beneath the dusk, and the yard seemed truly empty—and waiting. The air glowed before the night canvassed the sky with blackness.

That was when I would see the soft-tufted night birds.

I never knew when the birds would come. It might be one night out of three for weeks or only once an entire year. Like the golden horses or the men with hammers, the birds were free. On lucky nights, they would appear out of nowhere and fall out of the sky like soft darts from heaven. One, two, three. Four and then many.

I could see them so clearly from my cell window—see their soft warm bodies, warm bundles of gray and brown feathers, see the spread of their brown tails and the tilt of their inquisitive heads as they fell past me. Their eyes were warm and dark and all-seeing, like the eyes of the lady.

The first bird would always land in the yard and waddle out to the middle, alone. As if that gray expanse were nothing to her, as if it took no courage. And then following her with mincing steps came the other birds, as if heralding
her courage. They would lower their wings and dance around her like a ballet. As much as she preened, you could see she was alone out there, plain and dowdy.

The other birds would spread their soft pummeled wings, like graphite mixed with brown stone. Tiny steps at first, tracing their very wingtips in the dust, and then greater steps that were not broader or bigger but were somehow stronger, like the stamping of tribal feet. The birds raised their claws and traced those wings through the dust, and after a while I saw that they left a pattern—a life pattern.

Sometimes I wanted to clap my hands to see what would happen. Of course I never would do that. I just watched, holding perfectly still, a lone face embedded in the stone.

For at least an hour, the soft-tufted night birds would dance, tracing their circles in the dust until the entire yard was decorated with the lace of their efforts.

And then all at once, as if a silent explosion had happened elsewhere, as if an alarm had sounded in a distant sky, the soft-tufted birds would stop, freeze, and look up. One by one the females would lift dun wings and take flight. Their forlorn male dancers would rise reluctantly after them until the dark purple sky was filled with their churning wings.

And then the sky was empty. The brown birds and their soft-tufted angel boys were gone.

I would watch them go and wonder about where they went. I thought it was probably a tree in a faraway forest.
It would be a dream tree, and the branches would be filled with dozens of them, dark and warm and roosting. A child could fall asleep under that tree and wake up reborn.

Then my eyes would drift to the soft dusty yard, traced with their wing patterns.

A breeze would come, picking up to a brisk wind, and I knew by morning all those delicate patterns would be gone. The dust would be fresh again, like the smooth skin of a baby. So that when the men came out in the morning, they would tear no fabric, render no skin.

The soft-tufted night birds are like that. They are peaceful animals that want no harm.

I
t is amazing what we hear down here in the dungeon. The guards talk all day as they sit on their stools down the hall, watching us—watching a cellblock where nothing ever happens, where the doors rarely open. If they are lucky, once a week, they might chain a man to take him to the Dugdemona cage. The only way to fill the empty space and endless boring hours is with words.

They try to keep their voices down, but it never works. They talk and talk. The guards talk about the warden, about the lady—they can spend days talking about her and the priest—about the other guards and the budget and the hiring and promotions and corruption and dope and new inmates and everything else in between. It is like a pipeline of information to our cells.

Today the guards sound sad. It comes through in the morose clanking of their utility belts as they shift on the stools, in the bitterness underlying their voices.

“New shipment of men coming in,” one of them says.

The other guard is silent for a moment. They both know what this means. We all know what it means.

“Tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“More numbers,” the first guard says, and you can hear his discomfort in how he shifts on the stool.

“Conroy will be happy,” the other one whispers, almost too quiet to hear, but we all do, and the walls sigh with sadness.

T
he warden is thinking about the new shipment of men coming into general population when he sees the lady sitting patiently in the death penalty visiting room. The wood Dugdemona cage in front of her is empty. The lady sits in the chair, waiting for York. She sits very still, as if in waiting, her soul has left her.

The warden has come to tell her that the guards bringing York are running late. She looks up at him as he enters, his feet politely halting as he steps past the threshold. It is just the two of them, the lady and the warden, their eyes meeting.

For once he doesn't know what to say. “What, no attorneys?” he finally jokes.

She smiles. “I try to avoid them.”

“Like wardens?” It is out of his mouth before he thinks twice.

Delight fills her face. “No, I always want to talk to you.”

“That would be a mistake on my part,” he says, coming toward her.

Suddenly he wants to talk to her, wants to face her, wants to ask her how she feels, trying to get killers off. Doesn't she care about what they did? Doesn't the reality of it ever bother her? Instead, he remarks of York, “The prince apparently woke up with his head on a pea called his ass.”

She's not offended. “It's not like I would invite him to tea.” She smiles.

He is standing close to her now. Close to the cage where she will talk to York, hunting for secrets to get him off the row.

“It's just a job to you,” he says.

“It's not just a job to either of us.”

“Aha.”

“You like being the jailer,” she says calmly.

“That I do. And you like being what?”

She stares up at him. With her short black hair and her gaze—so intense—she resembles a cat, a tiny, beautiful cat, born to hunt, to drive her prey from the woods. She is tougher than any convict, he thinks, harder than the men she frees from the row. She is more dangerous than all the killers combined because she is aware of what she does—and she chooses not to stop.

The smile vanishes and she just looks sad. Her eyes tell him she wishes it weren't so. But it is.

H
e thinks of the lady as he leaves work that evening, as the sunset illuminates the sky with gold shot through with streams of ocher. Everyone says
bye-warden, bye-warden
, as he makes his way through the locking doors. The words are like grooves on the stones. He waves to the female guard working the front tower, her rifle at the ready.

He is glad that women work here now. When he was younger and now starting in corrections, it was only men. The prison was harder and yet somehow weaker. Now the women put pictures of their kids up on their lockers and leave brownies in the lunchroom, but when they go on the rows, they go hard—and laugh while they do it. Even the hardest male convict wants a mom, he thinks, and these rough-and-ready women are ready for that role.

When he drives home, he tries to think of all the good things in his life. Fishing for sturgeon. Elk hunting in the woods. Baseball. His wife once accused him of being like all men by trying to make his life into a picture book and ignoring the next page.

None of the happy thoughts work. As always after he has talked to the lady, he is angry. She infuriates him in a way no one else ever has.

He has spent his life being the jailer. He knows he has his faults—he can be surprisingly naive for a warden.
There are things that happen in the prison that he doesn't know about and doesn't want to know about. He is wise enough to know that as long as the wheel turns, a certain amount of dust gets thrown.