Given

Given

Given

SUSAN MUSGRAVE

© Susan Musgrave, 2012
All rights reserved

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Thistledown Press Ltd.
118 — 20th Street West
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6
www.thistledownpress.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Musgrave, Susan, 1951-
Given [electronic resource] / Susan Musgrave.
Electronic monograph in HTML format.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-927068-34-2

I. Title.

PS8576.U7G58 2012         C813'.54         C2012-904715-5

Cover illustration by Judit Farkus
Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie
Printed and bound in Canada

Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.

Given

For Given

We lose our children not once, but over and over again.
— Neil Gordon,
The Company We Keep

People sleep, and when they die, they awake.
— Mohammed

Contents

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

AFTERWORD

PART ONE

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
— Henry Ward Beecher

S
HOELACES ARE THE MOST POPULAR WEAPON IN
prison. With no elasticity and a high breakage point they can be used to hang yourself or strangle other people.

My shoelaces had been taken away from me when I was moved to the Condemned Row — the State didn't want me turning myself into a wind chime before the governor had signed the warrant. I had grown accustomed to walking around with my shoes loose, flopping open, but now, standing beside the prison transfer van, I felt, in a strange way, naked.

“What's the first thing you plan on doing, you get yourself freed?” Earl, my driver asked, as he unlocked my waist chains and manacles and helped me into the back. There were, I saw, no door handles, which was why he'd felt secure enough to remove my shackles.

I told Earl I'd always figured the first thing I'd do if I were ever released would be to return to South America to find my son. “Right after I get finished buying shoelaces.”

Earl, a big man with grey hair mussed up as if he'd been tossed out of bed, and everything he felt hidden behind chrome mirrors, hefted my prison-issue duffel bag marked “Property of Heaven Valley Correctional Facility” onto the seat beside me. “That's a long way to go to look for somebody,” he said, giving me an opening, but I wasn't about to tell him I'd had to look in a lot more farther away places since I'd left my son's body behind on Tranquilandia; I'd had to begin the search in the shrunken rooms of my heart, to find myself first, the hard way.

“As long as you keep moving you can get anywhere you want,” Earl said, looking up at the sky. His view was that most people went from being alive one minute to being dead the next, without knowing the difference. “Half the people walking around, they don't even know they're already dead. The rest of them die before they ever learn to live.”

He turned on the radio, volunteering, over the static, that he had some knowledge of my case. In his opinion “women of the female gender” didn't belong behind bars; being locked up didn't make them any easier to get along with. He said he believed prisoners of all genders should be set free and given jobs, so they could make themselves useful. In his country, for instance, during the ethnic cleansing, they had enlisted men serving life sentences for rape and murder, because they made the best soldiers. “There are men who like to see blood. Lots of it.”

Officer Jodie Lootine, the guard everyone called the Latrine because of her potty-mouth, slid in next to Earl; it was her job to make sure I reached my destination without making a jackrabbit parole, the reason my destination remained a secret, surrounded by a bodyguard of lies. All I'd been told was that I was being transferred to a remand centre where I would be held pending a new trial.

Years before, when I was first admitted to the Facility, I had been given a pamphlet called the
Inmate Information Handbook.
One of the first rules, right after “If you are a new inmate only recently sentenced by the courts, this will probably be an entirely new experience for you,” was “Don't ask where you are going, or why, they will only lie to you anyway.” We had
our
rules, too, the rules of engagement with prison guards, wardens, classification officers, or even the all-denominations chaplain who came to wish you
sayonara
in the Health Alteration Unit, a.k.a. the death chamber.
Don't ask questions. It spares you the grief.

Something else I'd learned from the
Inmate Information Handbook
. “You will feel completely alone, because you are.”

I checked my Snoopy wristwatch — bequeathed to me by Rainy the night before she took her trip to the stars: it was still ticking. “Within a week you will forget you ever had friends.” Months had gone by since I'd lost Rainy and Frenchy,
the two best friends I could never hope to find
; (a Rainyism) but though they'd been executed they had never stopped being with me, carrying on the same way they did when they were alive. Sometimes it seemed they hadn't really died so much as I myself had become a ghost.

I know this much is true — Rainy and Frenchy never stopped suffering for their crimes. Rainy, who looked so frail it was hard to imagine her giving birth to anything heavier than tears, had borne conjoined twins who'd needed a medical intervention, one she couldn't afford. When they were six-weeks-old she left them in a Glad bag on the railway tracks where, she hoped, they wouldn't know what hit them. When a reporter asked Rainy to compare being given the death sentence to being run over by a train, she said “the train was quicker, the train was softer.” Rainy believed she'd one day be reunited with her joined-together twins. She was saving all her hope, she said, for the afterlife.

Right until the very end Frenchy insisted
she
deserved to die for killing her son. They'd been robbing a bank, which they probably shouldn't have been doing since they were both high on pharmaceuticals and also on probation at the time. The gun went off by mistake, Frenchy said. If her son had lived she would have made it up to him, though she didn't know how you could say you were sorry enough times to make up for shooting a family member in the head.

The newly dead use up a lot of our skull space. They were the ones we talked about when we got together, once a week, for mandatory group therapy. Rainy thought group therapy on Death Row was a joke; an even sicker joke was their insistence upon cleaning your arm with an alcohol swab before giving you a lethal injection. “It don't look good, you die first from some bad-ass infection,” Frenchy tried to explain.

“Can I ask you a question?” our care and treatment counsellor always asked, instead of going ahead and asking the question itself. “If you love something, aren't you supposed to let it go free?” She talked like a fortune cookie and was something of a know-it-all. Rainy used to say she was so full of herself she didn't have room to eat.

We can be free of life, but can we ever be free of death? Rainy, who'd expected nothing from life
(“
one door closes, another bangs shut
,”
she was forever saying) and hadn't been disappointed, didn't think death would be all that different, just more of the same walls painted avocado green, televisions tuned permanently to the God channel, and guards who tortured you with jokes you had to laugh at if you didn't want them horking in your soup. In prison we learned to laugh about everything that had happened to us in the past, because not laughing hurt too much inside. You had to let it out, the rage that was ready to split you apart, like a wishbone, one way or another.

Without acknowledging me the Latrine took a pair of aviator shades, Oakley's Eternal, with opaque pink frames, out of her handbag and put them on. Earl, who kept stealing glances at my escort's breasts, started the van and we pulled out of the Admissions and Discharges lot. It was bad luck, I knew, to look back, at least until the prison was out of sight. I didn't intend to look back. Not now, not ever. Visitors to Heaven Valley say it's the most beautiful prison in the world, but those of us who've done time inside that place know — the only beautiful prison is the one you are leaving behind.

As we headed into the early morning smog that hovered over the City of Angels, Earl offered the Latrine a bottle of mineral water. She shook her head, dismissively. “Bottle of water costs more than a gallon of gas,” Earl said, as if he didn't appreciate the rebuff. He rambled on about the hard time he took from the War Department — his pet name for the wife — how having that cancer hadn't improved her disposition. She still tried to shove breakfast down his throat every morning when he'd sooner watch the TV. He said he had to drink bottled water to wash away the taste of the sausages and beans he choked down before leaving home, because eating was easier than arguing. “Some women think the way to a man's stomach is through his mouth,” he said.

He paused and took another swig, as if to prove his point, his eyes straying back to my escort's breasts, groping at their yeasty rise and fall, and resting there.

“I go along with it. I mean, if she wants to force breakfast into me so I'll live longer, I'll eat. It's easier than paying for a divorce.” He made a face, as if the water had an unexpected bitter taste, too. “You married? Kids?”

My escort stared straight ahead out the window. “Was. Once. Dickwad had kids but not me, personally. Fuck, no.”

The traffic had slowed and Earl switched to a more philosophical mode. We hadn't really made much progress out here in the modern world — a commuter on this six-lane freeway moved more slowly than an old-time horse and buggy, he said. When we rounded a bend in the road I saw the cause of the congestion: two women trying to hitch a ride beside the broken-down body of their van. One of them held a crying baby; Earl said “sorry ladies.” What with all the “criminal element and their ilk at large all over the place,” he said, you'd have to be crazy to pick up hitchhikers these days, even the fairer sex, because it could be a trap. “You pull over and the next thing you know you're driving them down the road where they have a murdering party to go to. No sir. I've got enough problems in my life without stopping for more.”