Third Interlude Gwen, Under the Shadow #9
“I ran back. I thought Harry would come back too. I thought he was right next to me. We were both pacifists. You don’t leave someone dying if you’re a pacifist. I got my shirt off and wadded it up to stop the bleeding.
I called for help, but there was a klaxon going off by then.
No one heard me. No one saw us hunched down between the cars.
It wasn’t the blood loss that killed Jason Einaudi.
It was a heart attack. He’d already had one, a few years before, which was what forced his retirement from the police.
He was gone a long time before anyone saw us there.
So was Harold. Harold got back to the others and over the fence and still teaches to this day.
I walked out from between the cars with blood all over me, crying my eyes out, and hardly even noticed when they put handcuffs on me.
I was found guilty of murder on federal property—a man had died while I was in the act of felony trespass, which is not only considered homicide under the law, but carries the death penalty.
Only I had provided medical aid to the dying man and I was a person of faith.
I could’ve avoided jail altogether if I had been willing to name the people who entered the navy base with me.
I wouldn’t do that, so I was sentenced to twelve years, with a three-year minimum.
After my sentence was announced, someone called my name, and I turned, and Jason Einaudi’s daughter, Heather, leaned over the rail and spat in my face.
I can’t say I blame her. I wouldn’t have blamed my own son if he’d spat on me. ”
Erin was quiet for a while. A tractor trailer roared past out on the highway. She said, “I think I forgot whose life we were
trying to save today, Gwen. We set out to save Wendy, but I think by the end I thought we were saving mine. I was going to
give her back her kid . . . and then maybe I could have back mine.”
“You never lost Arthur,” Gwen said.
Erin smiled in the dark. “I don’t suppose you notice he ran for England just about three seconds after I was paroled.”
Gwen didn’t have a reply to that.
“Do you think you can ever save enough lives to make up for even one killing?” Erin asked.
Not even one, Gwen thought of saying, and believe me, I’ve tried, Reverend.
Instead, Gwen told her, “I think Officer Einaudi should’ve left his damn gun in his damn holster. I think it was one kind
of travesty that the court found you guilty. And it’s another that you think they were right.”
Erin took Gwen’s hand in the dark. “God bless you, Gwen Underfoot, but I don’t think you can really understand what it’s like—to
think you’re going to save a life and end one instead.”
Gwen’s throat hurt, it was so constricted with emotion, but she didn’t utter a sound. If she did—if she lost her grip on her
emotions—she wasn’t sure if she would laugh or sob.
16.
A little after 5:00 a.m., the reverend let herself out to walk across the street to the all-night gas mart and get them some coffees and cheap breakfast pastries. Gwen hadn’t slept and still couldn’t, so she sat on the edge of the bed and she called Donna.
“It’s early, Gwen,” Donna said, in a voice crabbed with sleep.
“No, darlin’,” Gwen said. “It’s not early. It’s late. We got things to talk about, and we should’ve talked about ’em a long
time ago. There’s four hundred women dead because you wanted to wipe out one of ’em, and she probably didn’t even do what
you think she done.”
“Doesn’t matter if she did or not. She helped bury a murdered foster child.”
“She was as much a victim as any of those children.”
“She still knew it was wrong to bury a child in a cellar. A nine-year-old—”
“Oh, give it a rest. I didn’t call to argue about Francine Trout, and I’m not going to play the moral version of rock-paper-scissors
with you. There’s forty-eight guards, six night nurses, and a half dozen other staff members burned up with all the prisoners
in Black Cricket. You want to claim you have a right to judge any of the women in that prison, when you just killed four hundred
plus yourself? Erin Oakes was down on her knees yesterday, praying with a woman trapped in the rubble, when a wall fell. It
almost crushed her. It almost crushed me.
Do you remember Erin Oakes? Woman who officiated at your brother’s wedding?
Spoke at his funeral? Arthur’s mother? Do you vaguely remember how we all sold our souls to King Sorrow to keep her from being hurt?
Don’t you fucking get it yet? We gave away something precious—we gave away our happiness, our peace—to protect
the people we love. Only the people we love will be lost anyway. King Sorrow will take everything we give him and he’ll take everything we wanted to save. He’s already started! Look at
what happened to Van.”
When Donna replied, she sounded almost businesslike.
“You’re hysterical, Gwen. I can’t do hysteria before my first cup of coffee.
The difference between you and me is you want to live in a world where we all pay to look after murderers and rapists and child abusers, and I think a world without those people would be a fucking Eden.
You run around in that ambulance of yours, resuscitating drug addicts, so they can get stoned again and maybe run someone down when they’re behind the wheel of a car.
Whereas King Sorrow burns the wicked right off the face of the earth before they can hurt anyone else.
You want to ask me who I think does more good? I say all hail the King.”
Gwen sat with the phone in her hand for a long time after Donna hung up, while the little hotel room slowly filled with a
gray morning glow.
17.
The following September, Amos Finch, a retired phys ed teacher in Florida, fifty-five and Caucasian, was arrested in a sting;
he had started up a conversation with whom he thought was a thirteen-year-old in a chat room, and agreed to meet her in Sarasota,
only to find the vice squad waiting for him. He made bail and the following evening shot himself with an unregistered gun.
A careful investigation of his house revealed a hole in the wall behind the washing machine and a bundle of photographs and
little girls’ underwear, several prurient videotapes of girls changing into swimming suits . . . and a friendship bracelet
identified as belonging to the late Cady Lewis. Finch had briefly been a suspect in the Lewis abduction—he coached her swim
team and owned a black van—but had been cleared back in the day, on the testimony of his now ex-wife who claimed he was home
and napping at the time of Cady’s disappearance. When the police went to interview the ex about her former testimony, they
discovered she had fled the country as soon as she heard of Finch’s death.
In the weeks that followed, one of Francine Trout’s former court-appointed attorneys wrote an opinion piece for the Miami Herald, claiming that Francine had been highly suggestible and would gladly have admitted to almost anything if she thought it might
mean a better prison, a better cell, and a chance to be close to horses. He used the piece to call for reform in the way confessions
were extracted. He said Francine had been a victim all her life and only a society wild for payback could have been blind
to it.
On her talk show, Donna McBride was entirely unsympathetic and reminded her viewers that Francine Trout had participated in
the abuse and murder of a foster child.
“That child was buried in a basement and Francine was buried in rubble,” Donna said. “Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense
of fair play.”
Gwen, back in Maine by then, was going to call Arthur, had to talk to him, wanted, maybe, to cry a little to someone who cared.
But at the last moment she remembered it was something like two in the morning in Oxford. So instead she sat in her open window,
staring up into the star-littered night. Now and then a plane would cross the darkness, big as a dragon, climbing into the
sky from the Portland International Jetport, lights blinking at the ends of its wings. She wished she were up there on one
of them, flying away, instead of down here, in Gogan. At some point she got down a steel thermos of dragon tears, holding
all Llewellyn Wren had not swallowed. She swished them back and forth, inside the thermos, and wondered if they tasted as
sweet as Llewellyn had said.
18.
Bitches were crying from one end of the block to the other.
Word had come after lights out, passed along by one of the guards: Black Cricket prison, in Vermont, had been destroyed in a massive gas explosion.
They were already talking three or four hundred dead, a disaster on an enormous scale, women crushed, women burned to blackened bones.
When Daphne Nighswander thought about it, she just had to laugh.
She should’ve been there. She should’ve died with them. Only a scrawny, addicted born-again had killed herself, and in her
suicide note had blabbed about Daphne’s heroin supply. The powers that be had shipped Daphne off to the supermax in West Virginia.
They wanted to punish her for being a bad girl, but they had saved her life instead. Seemed like God was watching out for
someone, and it wasn’t emaciated born-agains who committed suicide because they felt guilty about licking a little pussy and
being addicted to black tar.
“And you know what day it is,” said the woman sitting at the foot of Daphne’s bed. Her occasional cellmate.
“Sure do, babe,” Daphne whispered. “The day they took you from me.”
There was a doctor who said Daphne had done damage to the white matter in her brain, probably through the habitual use of
methamphetamines in her younger days. She said Daphne might experience issues with her balance and could struggle to retain
new information. She might even hallucinate. Daphne didn’t say that she had been seeing Jayne off and on for over a year.
They might prescribe a pill to make her go away. Daphne didn’t want that—Jayne was good company. And on lonesome nights like
this, when the cellblock was full of people whispering and sobbing and carrying on, it felt good to have someone close.
Jayne stretched out behind her, spooning her from behind and putting one blackened, withered arm around her mother’s stomach.
She was good company, but Daphne couldn’t quite get used to looking at her face, where the skin had blistered off to show
the charred muscle and cooked skull beneath.
“Easter,” Jayne said.
“The day of the resurrection,” Daphne said to the dead girl holding her from behind.
“The day of the return,” Jayne promised. “Your return is coming, Momma. The stone will roll back and you’ll walk out of this place where the world tried to bury you and you will pass judgment upon the quick and the dead.”
“I plan on being the quick,” Daphne said. “There’s some others are going to be the dead.”
“Shut up in there,” a guard said, and banged the barred window of her cell.
Daphne squeezed her lips shut to clamp down on fresh laughter and burrowed back into her daughter’s embrace.