Carthage (23 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
If they asked him are you speaking of
Cressida Mayfield
he would say yes. But he did not once utter the name
Cressida Mayfield
in his own words.
Had he forgotten the name? Could he not bring himself to speak the name?
The girl. Juliet’s sister.
The one who came to the Roebuck Inn for me.
Like being infected—AIDS, HIV. You can’t help but infect others you touch. That is the nature of evil.
The other one—his fiancée—had spoken of babies. Her he was badly frightened of hurting yet she continued to love him. Or to claim that she loved him.
Wanting to place a pillow over her face when she slept. (For instance.) So he would not harm her.
Her face was very beautiful. He could not harm her beautiful face.
She would help him, she’d said. They would have a baby: she would become pregnant. There were ways. There were “techniques.” They would learn.
He’d come to realize, killing her might be more merciful than disappointing her.
You do not want to disappoint those who love you or whom you love. Always it is the easier thing to kill them as it is easier to kill a civilian who might fuck you up with a complaint, easier than to negotiate a deal, once a person is dead there are no longer two sides to a story.
This was Sergeant Shaver’s advice. All the guys repeated it like you’d repeat a joke that gets funnier each time you tell it.
IN THE MORNING
they drove him to the Preserve. Five police vehicles accompanying.
At Sandhill Point he walked unsteadily. He was cuffed in front—still, he walked unsteadily.
He paused to cough, a violent hacking cough. Tears started from his eyes running down the onionskin face in tiny drops.
Couldn’t locate the grave. Wasn’t sure in which direction it was.
Detectives were skeptical, there could be anything resembling a grave out here. The narrow spit of land had been examined many times. The search had been practically inch by inch.
After a while the corporal seemed to have located the grave-site. All you could see was marshy soil, a few rocks. No evidence of a body having been laid in this area but a photographer took pictures.
He’d had to place her in the river, he said.
The grave had been a mistake. Wild animals would have found her, devoured her. He could not bear the desecration of her body.
He’d carried her, he said. Led them along the bank of the Nautauga River in underbrush, stumbling over boulders, rocks. Where the river was approximately fifty feet across, where a stand of birch trees emerged startlingly white and beautiful out of the morning haze on the farther shore, there he thought he’d placed her in the river, making his way out into the boulders near shore.
He crouched, he demonstrated how he’d done it.
And where had the Jeep been, he was asked.
The Jeep! Must’ve been somewhere close by.
She was carried away by the river, he said.
What would happen to her then, how far downstream her body would be carried, all the way to Lake Ontario maybe—he would not know.
In the hands of God. I guess.
He’d stumbled back then to the Jeep and blacked out.
Sometime in the night he’d wakened, a terrible gut-cramp and he’d begun to vomit.
Like battery acid the vomit tasted in his mouth. He’d thought possibly the things in his brain, in his eye, possibly one in his heart to control the micro-valve, one or all of these might be malfunctioning as a result of the vomiting but had no way of knowing.
Next he knew, the deputy was shaking him.
Son! Son! Wake up.
MUCH OF THIS,
the Mayfields witnessed.
Fascinated and scarcely daring to breathe, the Mayfields witnessed.
Like what you would never imagine—the way the world is without you in it.
In the interrogation room, through the camera we could watch.
We could hear, and we could watch.
Except Brett’s head was so low, so bowed. All we could see was the baseball cap part-sideways on his head he’d pulled down in shame.
It would require some time to realize what they were seeing and hearing and it would require even more time to realize that those long weeks, months they’d been searching for their daughter, making telephone calls, on the Internet twelve hours a day, sending out
ENDANGERED MISSING ADULT
to thousands of households, their daughter had not been alive.
If Brett Kincaid’s testimony was truthful their daughter had not been alive even at the time she had become, to them,
missing.
Each of the Mayfields had been deceived: self-deceived.
Arlette had believed that she’d been prepared for this terrible news. How many times she’d instructed herself
You must prepare Zeno. He will not be able to prepare himself.
Zeno had believed that, of the two of them, obviously he was the stronger, the more responsible. He would have to protect Lettie—and Juliet as well.
They can’t. They aren’t strong enough. It will be me.
Yet, Zeno hadn’t really believed that Cressida could be dead.
Arlette hadn’t really believed that Cressida could be dead.
A
missing person
cannot be a
dead person.
For a
dead person
is not really a
missing person
even if the body has not been discovered.
FINALLY THEY WERE
allowed to see him.
Twelve hours after the taped confession finally they were allowed to speak with the ravaged young man who had almost become their son-in-law.
Zeno asked
Why?
Kincaid said
Don’t know, sir. I don’t know.
How tired he was, suddenly!
His head fell onto his crossed arms on the table before him. In an instant like a lighted match snuffed out, he was asleep.
B
ENEATH SILKY SATINY THINGS
in a bureau drawer in her bedroom she’d placed it. The letter her fiancé had given her when he’d departed for Iraq—“Only open this if you will never see me again.”
She’d known what he meant, at once.
She’d taken the envelope from him quickly, so that no one might see.
She’d kissed him good-bye. Hugged him, kissed him, pressed her tear-streaked face against his.
“Of course I will see you again, Brett! Don’t say such a thing.”
NOW IN THE
EVENING
of October 13, 2005, when it was becoming known through Carthage that the young corporal so long suspected of having murdered Cressida Mayfield had confessed to police, now when it was known to the Mayfields that Cressida was gone utterly, and would not ever return to them, and that Brett Kincaid too was dead to them, and would not ever return to them, quietly Juliet entered her bedroom, went to the bureau and slid open the drawer and removed from it the envelope she’d hidden away nearly two years ago in the hope that she would not ever be drawn to seeking it let alone opening and reading it.
Downstairs, a murmur of voices. Relatives and friends were gathering, to console.
How to mourn, a death so bodiless? Forever
missing.
Yet there would be a church service of some kind for Cressida—a funeral rite for the
missing
. Arlette in despair could not be consoled, otherwise.
On the envelope was written, in Brett’s careful, slightly back-tilting handwriting:
JULIET MAYFIELD MY FIANCÉE.
Blindly now she opened the envelope. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, fumbling to open the envelope.
Dear Juliet,
If you are reading this then something has happened to me.
I will not see you again I guess. I love you
so much
!
Sometimes I believe in the “after life”—where we will meet again. It is not always possible to believe but I am trying.
Some thing will happen to us all in time. There is no great sorrow
really
in losing me at this time and not another. If you read this Juliet, do not look back. If you can help it.
It is strange how knowing a thing should give you the strength to do it but sometimes you are not strong enough. God does not always make us strong enough.
Do unto others. Love thy neighbor.
Thou shalt not kill.
If you are a soldier you must do certain things, you would not do if you had a choice.
You must acknowledge, you may not return safely to your home & loved ones.
Dear Juliet I am hoping that when we are married one day I will discover this letter hidden away where you forgotten it. And I will put it back in its hiding place & not say a word.
For I love you so, Juliet. That is the one true thing that I know. I don’t feel young now. I think I am old in my heart.
It will do no good to grieve with Ethel. She will grieve in her own way angry & alone. You & your mother should not try to help her, she will resent it.
Look to the future now Juliet. Marry somebody who deserves your love & have the kids we would have had (I know that is crazy to think, I am not serious really)—& God bless you most of all be happy my darling Juliet. Know that I will be thinking of you always.
I wonder where I will be right now—when you read this.
I love you. Always you will remain—my darling Juliet.
Love, kisses & hugs
Brett
W
HO CAN OPEN THIS
DOOR?
Any volunteer?”
The door looked heavy. Set in the stone wall. A look as of the grave, ancient and weathered. The visitors were hesitant. A thin damp wind rippled in their hair like ghost-fingers.
In his loud bullying voice the Lieutenant repeated: “No volunteer? There must be a volunteer.”
The Intern dared not glance in the direction of the Investigator, who was her employer. The Intern dared not call attention to herself, whose hope was to remain diminished and invisible as a plain brown-speckled hen is invisible in a dense underbrush.
It was the Intern’s first journey as the Investigator’s assistant. The Intern desperately hoped, it would not be her last.
“Anyone? I’m waiting.”
The Lieutenant was an affable-seeming man with smudged-Caucasian skin and a quick sly smile like a razor flash. He might have been any age between forty-nine and sixty-nine and he was of moderate height, about five feet nine. He had the look, at about 180 pounds, of a stolid-bodied man who has lost weight recently.
He wore the dun-colored guards’ uniform of the Orion Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men at Orion, Florida. He carried no firearm, but attached to his leather holster was what appeared to be a mean-looking billy club or baton. His face was weather-creased and totemic. His pebbly eyes scraped over the faces of his listeners.
The tour had begun nearly ninety minutes ago. The execution chamber was the last stop on the tour, at the farther end of the dour cinder block building designated Death Row. The Lieutenant had just led the tour group through Cell Block C which had been a harrowing experience but they had not visited the Death Row cell block, off-limits to civilians. Of the fifteen visitors most had begun to stagger with exhaustion and apprehension.
In the dining hall which had been the stop before Cell Block C there’d been two volunteers to sample the prisoners’ food and these young people stood now abashed and silent.
“We will not enter if the door is not opened, my friends.
There must be a volunteer.
”
The restless eyes passed over them, rapidly. Since the start of the tour, even before the Lieutenant had led the fifteen civilians through the first of the prison gates and inside the high wire-mesh walls, it seemed that he’d been counting them compulsively. With his eyes, counting.
One, two, three . . . six, seven . . . twelve, thirteen, fourteen . . . fifteen.
You could figure that inside the prison facility guards were trained to count. They were trained to account for.
All individuals in the corrections officers’ vicinity inside the prison walls were their responsibility. Fifteen civilians had been processed through security checkpoints to be guided through the prison by the Lieutenant and so fifteen civilians had to be released at the end of the tour.
Otherwise, as the Lieutenant had genially informed them, the entire prison would go into
lockdown
.
At such a time no one would exit or enter the prison until all individuals known to be inside the facility were
accounted for.
The Intern swallowed hard. The Intern stepped forward out of invisibility to volunteer.
“Sir, I will.”
Was this a surprise? The Lieutenant might have preferred another civilian.
Of the fourteen other civilians all were taller, stronger-looking, more mature in appearance and bearing than the Intern who could not have been taller than five feet one and who didn’t look the age she must have been—(that is, twenty-one)—to have been allowed into the prison.
The Lieutenant knew, or should have known, that the Intern was a twenty-five-year-old female, since he’d seen her ID at the start of the tour; but the Lieutenant had forgotten this detail, for he’d paid very little attention to the Intern during the tour, addressing most of his provocative remarks to the half-dozen young women sociology graduate students from Eustis and their female professor as well as to the most distinguished of the civilian visitors, a tall straight-backed white-haired gentleman in a proper suit, white dress shirt and tie, of an age beyond seventy, who resembled a retired professional man, or a judge, and who’d been taking notes in a little notebook through the tour.
There were several men who might have volunteered. But they’d avoided the Lieutenant’s questing eye.
Since the dining hall visit, and particularly since the visit to Cell Block C, even the sturdy-bodied male civilians were looking as if they’d strongly preferred to be elsewhere.
Several times on the tour the Lieutenant had winked at his charges saying, “Damn hard to breathe in here, eh? And you folks have just arrived at Orion. Think if you’d never again depart for the rest of your life!”
The Lieutenant was just slightly vexed that the volunteer who’d stepped forward wasn’t at all a volunteer he’d have chosen. You could see that the prison tour was the Lieutenant’s public life and that each stop was like a station of the cross culminating with, at this farther end of the ugly cinder block Death Row, the execution chamber.
“Well! You don’t hardly look like you weigh one hundred pounds, fella, but—step right up.”
In fact, the Intern had weighed ninety-seven pounds the last time she’d been weighed on any proper scale which had not been recently in her haphazard and pieced-together life. The Intern ignored the condescending
fella.
The Intern did not mind that the issue of her
sexual identity
would seem to be, for the Lieutenant, and for others very likely, at this moment, gazing not at her but at the effort she represented as she tugged at the door in their place, not an issue at all.
Damn heavy door.
“Try again.”
The Intern tried, harder. Clearly the Intern wished to refute any notion that she/he was a runty little fella.
Yet still, the damned door did not budge.
One of those miserable public situations in which you pose as a good sport. You
persevere.
In others’ eyes, strangers’ eyes, you are judged kindly—capable of taking a joke.
Was
this a joke? The Intern tugged so hard at the door her arms felt as if someone were trying to yank them out of their sockets.
“Is it locked, sir?”
“No. It is not locked.”
The Lieutenant laughed, irritably. As if he were playing some sort of cruel crude trick on the civilian!
Though the Lieutenant quite liked the acquiescent
sir.
For a tour-group is a heterogeneous and unpredictable gathering of individuals of whom a certain number are sure to be
not on the tour guide’s side.
Another time the Intern tried to open the door. She was panting now, embarrassed and self-conscious. Perhaps the Lieutenant wasn’t punishing the Intern so much as those others, seemingly more capable, who’d held back in dread, and allowed the runty little fellow to step forward in their place.
The Intern perceived that power over generations of confined men had corrupted and deformed the Lieutenant as the hardiest of trees is deformed by a pitiless wind.
Why had the Intern volunteered to try to open the damned door, when no one else had stepped forward?
No one could know: the Intern had been prodded into action because the Investigator, who was the tall white-haired gentleman with the little notebook, had cast her a significant glance a moment before.
Well, the Investigator hadn’t cast her a look she’d actually
seen
. She had sensed it.
Go ahead, McSwain! Step forward.
In such circumstances, in public places, it was to be their protocol: without a word the Investigator might signal an order to the Intern, who was not to question his motives.
This signal had come swiftly and deftly as a neutrino passing between them. For the two were not strangers as they appeared to be—(they’d taken care to keep a little distance from one another on the tour but they’d come to Orion in the same vehicle, driven by the Intern). But no one, even the sharp-eyed Lieutenant trained to intercept covert glances among his charges, seemed to have noticed.
“Sir, I think the door must be locked, or stuck . . .”
“One more try, fella! Then you can give up if you wish.”
In dark corduroy trousers, long-sleeved shirt and corduroy jacket, and hiking boots the size of a child’s boots, the Intern resembled a precocious sub-species of schoolboy virtually non-existent in central rural Florida. She wore glasses with round dark plastic rims. Her long-sleeved shirt was white cotton, and not entirely clean. Her face was small-boned, plain and fiercely intent. Her dark hair was razor-cut at the nape of her neck, short as a boy’s. A premature furrow wavered across her forehead and a bluish vein throbbed at her right temple.
A final try, and still the door would not budge.
“All right, then! I will open it. Excuse me.”
The Lieutenant positioned himself in front of the ancient-looking door, grasped the knob and tugged and lifted—(the Intern saw: this was the trick)—until the door swung open like a gaping mouth.
The point of the Lieutenant’s demonstration would seem to be:
Death is not easily approached.
In a matter-of-fact voice, as if to suggest how effortless the task had been for him, the Lieutenant explained that, in fact, the door to the execution chamber was always kept locked—of course. “It’s opened only for occasions like this and when an execution is being prepared.”
But now, were they expected to shuffle inside? Inside and
down
? No one edged forward. Already the visitors could smell an overripe earthy-chemical odor wafting from the opened doorway.
“Step inside, friends! I advise you to take a deep breath beforehand.” Like a cruel impresario the Lieutenant stood beside the doorway, beckoning.
Of course, no one wanted to step forward. Especially the young female graduate students hung back, flurried and frightened as birds.
“Oh!—if people have died inside here . . .”
“Can some of us w-wait outside . . .”
The Lieutenant laughed, not unkindly. “No. No one can wait outside. The tour won’t conclude, and you won’t be released to the outside, except through the execution chamber—that is our tradition at Orion.”
Was this true? The Lieutenant rubbed his hands which were large stubby-finger hands, with a zestful air. The pebbly eyes continued to rake the faces of his captives.
“But if human beings have d-died in here—”
“
Of course
human beings have died in here. What would be the purpose of a taxpayer-supported execution chamber, if no one died in it?”
Several of the visitors laughed. As they’d been laughing since the start of the tour, nervously.
It seemed quite natural, the dignified Investigator was the first to enter the cave-like chamber. A tall straight-backed man, he stooped to enter. He set his foot on a grimy stone step, the first of three that descended to a grimy concrete floor as in a crude and unimproved cellar.
The Intern saw: the Investigator’s slender feet were shod in shiny-black-leather dress shoes. No one else in the tour had dressed so
particularly
.
Amid the civilians in the tour group this elderly white-haired gentleman had kept to himself from the start. He had resisted efforts to “befriend” him—he’d resisted the instinct, powerful in such a group as a rush of piranha after prey, to participate in the edgy banter between the Lieutenant and the others. He had not been observed to be disdainful or aloof—he’d been intent upon taking notes in his little notebook, which was not forbidden in the prison facility, like taking photographs or videotaping. (Any kind of camera equipment, however small and ordinary, was forbidden to bring into the prison.) You had the sense, seeing the Investigator scribbling into his small spiral notebook, that, if you looked over his shoulder, you’d discover he was writing in code.
The Investigator passed by the Intern without a glance. The Intern was looking not at the Investigator—she was too professional for such a slip—but toward the Investigator with the expression of a young person who both reveres and fears an elder.
Please don’t make me do anything more—sir! Not in this terrible place.
One by one the others followed the Investigator into the execution chamber. Stepping out of the overcast March morning that was yet a dull glowering-white as if in a cataclysm of the Florida sun in which only an afterglow remained, but that powerful and even blinding in contrast to the dimly fluorescent-lit interior of the execution chamber.
The Intern hung back. How the Intern would have liked to flee, back to the front gate of the prison! But the prison grounds were labyrinthine, and dangerous: no civilian was allowed to wander off from the tour group.
The Intern swallowed hard. The Intern had seemed to know, before she and the Investigator had left their vehicle in a remote corner of the visitors’ parking lot, that accompanying her employer to Orion prison was a mistake she would regret.
Beside the doorway the Lieutenant was waiting for her. With a smile to indicate that, if he didn’t keep a sharp eye, the little
fella
would slip away.
The Intern took a deep breath, and stepped inside. But already it was too late, the dank air of the execution chamber had entered her lungs.
“Go all the way in, please. Plenty of room. Those in front move forward,
please
.”
The Lieutenant spoke chidingly. The Lieutenant spoke with an air of grim jocularity. The Lieutenant assured the visitors that there was room for as many as thirty people in the cramped space.
“In recent years, with lethal injection, there are sometimes double executions. The demand for seats is doubled too, as you can imagine.”
No one was eager to move forward. The frightened young women and their professor had stopped dead in their tracks a few yards from the front of the room. Even those men who’d been bravely stoic about marching around the entirety of Cell Block C to the hoots and shouted obscenities of prisoners were balking now, pushing to the side where there were two rows of straight-backed chairs in front of a grim windowless cinder block wall.