A Quiet Belief in Angels (45 page)

The whispers and moans of men amidst nightmares where guilt was never assuaged; the weals and welts of rawhide whips against exposed flesh, against sun-scorched skin, against broken spirits; the unforgiving thunder of summer, the waterlogged floors, the stench of rot, the fetid reek of undergrowth swollen with stagnant water; the filthy clothes, the absence of nourishment, the darkness, the pain, the longing, the despair.

The box: standing out in the middle of the yard, too short for a man to sit straight, not wide enough to lie on his side, knees against his chest. Twenty-four hours. Hunched down tight, forehead to kneecaps, the spine arched painfully, the roof against the back of the head. No water. No words. No release.

Twenty-four hours and a man cried until salt lined his eyelids and stung like acid. Thirty-six hours and he heaved and retched and screamed through some awkward madness. Drag him out and he’d lie there for three or four hours before he could straighten his body. Escape attempts. Bad-mouthing. An orderly who took a dislike to someone, and he’d say “In the box,” and someone would disappear to return a different man.

The Scales of Justice, they called it. A man had wooden slats bound to his legs so he could not bend. Buried to his thighs in the ground, earth packed hard, unforgiving, no hope of movement. Arms extended out from the shoulders, in each hand a billy can half-filled with a pint of water. He stayed like that, with arms outstretched for two, three, four hours at a time. Spill the water and the time would start over.

“An hour on the Scales,” someone would say, and he’d be out there digging his own hole before the trustees bound his legs. Legend had it a man had stood for seven hours all told. Slept forever after with his arms outstretched, didn’t speak for nine weeks, and when he did he said, “Billy can, billy can, billy can” over and over until that became his name. Billy Can from Cayuga County. Billy Can from Hell.

Billick came one time, looking pleased with himself. “No death sentence,” he said. “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Vaughan. Your jury voted for life imprisonment. Count your blessings, eh?”

“Life means life,” they told me, over and over again.

“Life means life, boy,” they said, until it echoed in my ears, reverberated through my mind like the memory of the man I’d once been.

Images of Bridget, of Alexandra, of Elena, of my mother.

Images of some other pale existence that faded even as my thoughts touched them. I had to stop myself from thinking of them again or they would disappear forever.

I remember Auburn.

The first month folded like a blanket around me, cocooned within. The second month was like a straitjacket, arms tied tight around my waist, buckled at the back. Third and fourth like a shroud so heavy I could barely breathe. After that the months blended seamlessly one into another, claustrophobic, unforgiving.

“Can’t break a man’s spirit,” Jack Randall told me. “There’s something inside a man you can never snap. You can break every single bone in his body and you’ll still find something in there fighting back.”

So believed Jack Randall until he and his brother attempted to escape.

Late November, 1959. There was a gentle breeze from the south that crept between the cots and seemed refreshing.

Jack and William Randall, their faces blacked with dirt, crawled out through a hole in the floor and made it fifteen yards along the edge of the compound and they were seen.

All hell broke loose. Dogs. Orderlies. Searchlights.

They built them new boxes side by side. A week inside for each man.

Whatever they might have possessed, whatever Jack Randall held inside of him, it was broken in half and stamped into nothing.

William slit his wrists in January of 1960.

Jack died of loneliness in the spring.

I remember Auburn, and most of all the thought that followed me every moment of every day: that I knew who killed Bridget, and that I knew why. I had no name, no face, no awareness of his identity, but he was there—in my dreams and when I woke, pressing his dark soul against me as a reminder of my betrayal.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I
AM HERE FOR LIFE. UNTIL MY BODY YIELDS UP ITS FULL AND FINAL breath.

Four walls, a stone floor, an iron bunk, a changeless day folding into yet another of the same color and rhythm.

Here for the rest of my natural life.

Joseph Calvin Vaughan, the murderer.

Through all those years I never heard from Thomas Billick again. I waited patiently through June, July, August, September. I followed the lines, the rules and regulations; I bided my time, but by Christmas I seemed to forget what I was waiting for.

In the New Year of 1954 I did hear word of the outside world, and it was Hennessy who came, and he sat with his face in his hands in the narrow visitation room, and for a long while he could not look at me without choking back his tears.

Ironic, but I spent much of our time together consoling him. I asked him of Brooklyn, of where he lived, of the work he was doing, of his new friends, his plans.

“You must write, Joseph,” he told me. “Write down everything that happened and give it to me. I will make sure someone sees it. I will take it out there and make people understand the terrible thing that has happened to you. You must do this, Joseph. If not for yourself, then you must do it for me. I cannot stand knowing that nothing is being done to help you.”

“Nothing can be done,” I told him. “What do you think will happen? According to everyone it was a fair and just trial. I could not defend myself. I could not prove where I was in those two hours that morning. They saw what they wanted to see, they believed what they were told to believe, and now I am here for the rest of my life.”

“No,” Hennessy insisted. “I can’t leave it this way. It’s taken me six months to summon the courage to come and see you. I have spoken to the police. I wrote a letter to the governor of New York. I’ve done everything I can. No one wants to listen. No one cares what happens to you, Joseph. No one but me. I need you to write it down. I need you to give me something I can use to help you.”

I told him once again that I could do nothing. I told him the same thing every month until the end of the year. Finally I gave in, and I began to write. Late at night I scribbled words on the coarse paper that was used to wrap produce in the kitchens, and each month Hennessy would come, each month he would smuggle out a handful of folded sheets and would laboriously type them.

I began at the beginning. I started with the death of my father, and I detailed the events of my life.

One thing I chose not to write. One event, one memory. One thing that will stay with me until the moment of my death, and then when He comes perhaps I will tell Him, and He can exact His judgment.

Three or four pages a month, year after year, Hennessy pleading with me to write faster, to detail only those things that pertained to Bridget’s death. But I could not. I had decided to tell the world who I was, and from this they could choose what they wished to believe.

I remember the words of my mother, a day in Augusta Falls a thousand years before.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t ever stop writing. This is the way the world will find out who you are.”

Three days after the killing of John F. Kennedy, a cold November in 1963, I wrote my final words. The Randalls were dead. I believed I was also.

I was spent, empty, exhausted.

I believed my fate would pass into hands other than my own.

I had been in Auburn for ten and a half years. I was thirty-six years old, only a year younger than my father when the rheumatic fever stopped his heart.

Perhaps I was nothing more than an echo of him, and that echo would fade quietly into silence, and through the silence I would walk to meet the end of myself.

It would seem fitting.

Encapsulated within those pages was a life. Perhaps the worth of such a life was measured by the weight of paper, the quantity of ink, the depth of imprint on each individual page.

Perhaps it was represented by the significance of those words, the emotions they evoked and engendered.

Perhaps there was no worth at all save what I myself believed— and I believed there would have been no other way to convey the loss and despair.

My life began, it continued, and now it seemed resolved to close.

If those words were all that remained, then so be it.

Perhaps some of us will have learned enough to make a difference, to influence things for the better, to wait until the moment is right, and then act.

And despite appearances, despite all indications to the contrary, despite reticence for fear of what others might think, I still felt we all possessed this quiet belief.

A quiet belief in angels.

Later, much later, Paul Hennessy told me of the events that followed.

He worked furiously, and filled page after page, neglecting his friends, watching his own life dissolve around him, and then in January of 1965 he traveled out to Manhattan to see Arthur Morrison.

Morrison, it seemed, received the book he had always asked of me, a book of spirit and passion.

Hennessy chose the title, and in June of the same year
A Quiet Belief in Angels was
published.

He came to see me in May of ’66. The world beyond the walls of Auburn State was a different world. Men strove to touch the moon; a war raged in some South East Asian jungle country called Vietnam; civil rights marches led by a man called King, resulted in that same man being jailed for speaking the truth; Kennedy was dead, a nation still mourned.

Hennessy sat facing me in the narrow confines of a visitation booth. Through the wire mesh he seemed distant, almost unreachable, but the words he spoke came through clear and succinct.

“An appeal has been lodged with the United States Supreme Court,” he said. As he spoke, he suppressed his tears, but I did not know if they were of anticipated vindication, or tears for the seeming hopelessness of his task. “Your book has sold and sold and sold,” he went on. His face was blurred. Everything was made from shadows and highlights, insubstantial, almost without definition. “They can’t print copies fast enough, Joseph. Morrison had to close his presses down and send the platens to a company in Rochester. People are up in arms. They are asking whether this book is fiction. They can’t believe that such a travesty of justice could occur in America. Something will happen, Joseph, something will definitely happen.”

“I am disappearing,” I said. “I don’t know what day it is . . . I cannot remember how long I have been here.” I felt my face crease with an awkward smile—the tension in the muscles told me this was an unfamiliar expression.

“You can’t give up hope,” Hennessy whispered. His voice was urgent, insistent, and as I watched his face I remembered Cecily Bryan, the nights we spent at the St. Joseph’s Writers’ Forum, nights walking through Manhattan singing “Days of ’49” and drinking Calvert.

“I have done a terrible thing,” I said, and I closed my eyes weakly.

“You have done nothing,” he replied. “That’s the whole point, Joseph. All the work we have done to get the truth out there, and we have succeeded against all odds. People know, Joseph, they know what happened. They can see how this thing was a terrible, terrible mistake—”

I rose slowly from my chair. I stood looking down at the only friend I had. “I have nothing to say,” I told him. “I am unable to feel hope, I am unable to see anything but what I have here . . .” My voice cracked, and I felt the weight of the past twelve years bear down upon me.

“You can’t give up hope!” Hennessy insisted. “You can’t, Joseph, you can’t . . .”

His voice faded as I walked away.

An orderly let me out of the door and into the corridor. I tried not to look at him. If I was seen crying I would be sent to the box.

Hennessy came back the following day. They came to fetch me but I would not go. They told me later he had left a letter. I did not read it.

I lay on my cot and watched the shadow of bars on the ceiling.

Weeks unfolded into months. More letters came, more visits from Paul. I could not bear to see him. I lost track of time. I recognized the difference between night and day, but beyond that little else.

“Vaughan! Joseph Vaughan!”

My name was being called from somewhere out along the gantry. I turned onto my side and closed my eyes.

“Joseph Vaughan, out to see the warden. Joseph Vaughan!”

I eased myself up and sat on the edge of my cot. My heart started beating more rapidly. I could not ask myself what was happening. I felt afraid, so horribly afraid.

An orderly stood before the gate. He nodded down the gantry. “Number eight cell, open her up!”

The lock released, the gate was drawn back.

“On your feet, Vaughan. You’re seeing the warden.”

I hunted for my shoes. I worked my feet into them and stood cautiously. I felt sweat break out on my forehead.

“Move yourself, for Christ’s sake!”

I started to walk; I stumbled and grabbed the bars for support. The orderly reached out his hand and took hold of my upper arm, pulled me out onto the gantry and shouted for the cell to close. It thundered behind me, and already I was being hurried along to the stairwell at the end.

Minutes later I stood without moving for some interminable time in a windowless corridor. At the far end two trustees watched me through a grill in the door. Eventually the door behind me opened, and I was told to step through. My heart trip-hammered, missed beats, seemed too large for my chest. I closed my eyes and swallowed and waited for something awful to occur.

A young woman came through. She smiled tentatively, but I could return nothing. “This way, Vaughan,” she said, and her voice seemed strange. I realized I had not heard a woman speak for more than a decade.