God of the Rodeo (33 page)

When the silence lasted too long, she started begging again.

“What do you want from me?” he asked. “You can go any second.”

She remained still in the doorway.

“It’s on you to make some kind of move,” he added.

Right away, he understood how his words sounded: that all she needed to do was come toward him, kiss him, make love with him, and that then she could do what she wished, leave and take care of her business and still have him to return to. He let that possibility linger.

“You can’t do that and come back here. This ain’t about just you.”

She looked bewildered, incapable of figuring out what he meant. He felt almost cruel for trying to wedge his own problems into her private fight. She seemed so terribly at a loss, so helplessly immersed in herself.

My main concern is me
, he reminded himself, for he was about to comfort her, to put his arms around her, to force some other human life into her small, sealed universe, to seal himself to her.
My main concern is me. My main concern is me
. She slipped out the door.
My main concern…

He lay back on the bed. He couldn’t sleep, but forced himself to rest, to save his energy. Because in a few hours, it was time for work, time for Conoco.

L
YNN
C
LARK’S GRANDDAUGHTER
, B
RITTANY, LIKED
to play with rocks. The little girl was two and a half, and Lynn was fifty-one, and together they gathered rocks from around the yard, piled them, patterned them, stashed them like treasures. Lynn, a welfare caseworker, had just taken a new job, and lived alone, an hour and a half from her husband of thirty years and from the yard where she and Brittany sometimes did their collecting. One evening her neighbor, a young man named Danny Fabre, asked to use her telephone…. “She was always falling for a sad story,” her husband, Jack, a retired newspaper editor, remembered…. Later that week Danny stopped by for the same favor. And the following Monday night he asked if she could give him a ride to a nearby town.

Earlier on that Monday her husband had received a delivery of gravel—he planned to resurface the driveway. The small pyramid stood beside the house, and periodically throughout the afternoon he thought, I should call Lynn. I should tell her,
“You
and Brittany won’t have to go looking for rocks anymore, ’Cause I’ve got a whole mountain of ’em.” He imagined their joy, playing with that mountain. He started to call, but something distracted him. And afterward, he thought that if he had, somehow it would have steered the day a
degree or two to the right or left, onto a slightly different path, just different enough that the murder would never have happened. A mound of gravel-a miracle to a two-and-a-half-year-old child—would have saved his wife.

Instead she was beaten and choked to death, and rammed with a stick through the right eye, and burned, and left in the woods, and found two days later so badly charred and decomposed she had to be identified through dental records.

How much could it matter to that grandmother’s husband that Danny Fabre was struggling to edge his reading grade level past a 7.3, that he was about to give his tenth Toastmasters speech, that he was, one September evening eleven years after the killing, sitting in the Angola chapel waiting for an Episcopal service to begin? What would Jack Clark have said about the three convict acolytes standing in a back corner in their albs, one of them holding a tall, sleek cross while they giggled and surveyed the five or six women among the group that always arrived with the visiting minister and that milled with the crowd of inmates, and what would he have said about the way every convict in the modern, white, octagonal chapel waited for his five-second hug, his five seconds of press-time with one of those women, and about the way Danny Fabre got up to get his, circled to the back to find a crystal-eyed, heavyset, bow-haired woman in her twenties who came monthly to the prison to have the inmates swarm around and claim their moments, to have them fall in love just that fast, to have their kisses miss her cheek and graze the corners of her lips, to have their ribs and bellies crush her breasts, to have their arms loosen so reluctantly, to have Danny enfold her, and what would he have said about the way his wife’s killer, right after his allotted seconds, turned to me and pointed out how so many of the other convicts came to church only to be near the women, and how he didn’t think that was right, didn’t like that at all?

Exactly how moved would Lynn’s husband have been as the service
began and the inmates attending for the first time were asked to stand and introduce themselves and did so not only by name but by prison dorm, “Joseph Powell, Ash One,” “Tyrone Michaels, Spruce Four,” “Preston Causey, Mag One,” the incantation of their Angola homes rising to the gently pitched ceiling? Exactly how moved by the cherubic minister’s attempt to restore, in his optimistic tones, a sense of sanctuary after the guard took the count—how moved when the minister’s reading from the Book of Common Prayer, “O mighty God, to You all hearts are known…,” pandered so thoroughly to what these men wished to think of themselves, that their hearts, their invisible hearts, were as good as anyone’s, maybe even better, that their crimes were things of the past, that it was only in blindness, non-heart-seeing blindness, that humanity could condemn them? And how moved would he have been when the congregation, fully attentive now (even those ten or twelve who’d won the chair jockeying and wound up sitting beside a female), gave their self-serving response, “Glory to God in the highest…. You take away the sin of the world.” Exactly how moved?

Especially when the sermon illuminated the difference between the laws of man and the law of God, how the necessity of Moses’ rules (“to reveal God to the world”) had been distorted by the Pharisees who made themselves supreme judges and whose decrees divided humankind by mere earthly notions of good and wicked (“The laws of Moses had been to glorify God and wound up shaming men!”); especially when the minister told of the confrontations between the legalistic Pharisees and the loving Jesus. “Now when the Pharisees gathered unto Him, they saw that some of His disciples ate with hands unwashed. And they asked Him, ‘Why do Your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?’ And Jesus answered them, ‘Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites. You worship in vain, with your lips but not your hearts! You teach as doctrines the precepts of men! You leave behind the
commandments of God! And of those commandments, two reign above all! Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart! And love thy neighbor as thyself! Love above laws! What really matters is not what’s on your hands! No! What matters is what’s in your heart!’”

But there was blood on those hands!
Those hands had punched and throttled her. They had taken that stick and driven it into her skull. They had scorched her body. Her life was on those hands. And she had been that neighbor, the one with a place in her heart for everyone, the one who had let him in to use the telephone and given him a ride when he needed it, and he had broken her, mutilated her, and now sat transfixed as the minister declared, “We must not think of salvation as something we in ourselves can accomplish. We are all the same in our helplessness. When we ask ourselves what, in our souls, can we lay before God that God wants, the answer, we all know, is nothing. So we turn to Jesus and say, ‘I can’t save myself, can You do it for me?’ ”

Nothing? Nothing? All the same? She the same as Danny Fabre? Did nothing we do matter? Nothing as long as you said ‘Forgive me’? Didn’t it matter what Danny Fabre had done? And didn’t she have a thousand times more to lay before God than he did, a million times more—how could you measure the difference between them? And he sat there so riveted, so soothed.

And how much could it matter to Lynn’s husband that Danny’s efforts as a Toastmaster earned him, that summer, a red CTM tag to wear on his white T-shirt?

And how much could it matter that a few weeks after earning it he let his temper surge in a dispute with several other club members, an argument he described incoherently to me and that I never fully understood and that wound up involving a guard and that resulted in Danny’s being suspended by the Forgotten Voices? He hadn’t hit
anyone, but his hands had been raised. How much could it matter that Captain Newsom, the taciturn and gawky officer who had allowed Danny into the organization a year ago, who Danny felt had “seen I was sincere,” spurned him at a going-away gathering when he retired, wouldn’t so much as make eye contact with him, because a glimmer of Danny’s past, a sign that it was unpurged, had shown itself in the fight? And how much could it matter that the club president and his fellow Forgotten Voices executives later told Danny that they knew his heart was in the right place and that his commitment to self-improvement was strong, and assured him they would vote to lift the punishment soon?

For his tenth speech, the one that brought him his CTM pin, Danny had stood behind the lectern with the appointed ah-counter—pencil ready above his legal pad—sitting to his right and the pink cone hat beside the dictionary on the foldout table, and below the window to his left the razor-wired passageways. Danny gripped the edges of the lectern with his large hands and leaned slightly forward. He looked for a good while at the members in their school chairs-the man with the wounded, half-shriveled eye and the man whose hobby in a previous life had been sailing and who wore Top-Siders as a way to declare
that
life still present—and he began with such histrionic drama it would have been laughable anywhere else: “Hope.”

He paused a long, long time. But no one in the room shifted and no one could possibly have felt that Danny was struggling to find his next thought or didn’t have any next thought prepared and was on his way to another sputtering performance and no one could possibly have noticed the right-angle ears that sprung from below his short hair (the ears he seemed less and less needful of discussing with me now, though he had decided to ride in the upcoming rodeo), because everyone was focused on that single word which his sonorous voice and his explosive forward-leaning body and the prolonged gaze of his yellow-tinged green eyes had given a presence. He
stepped out from behind the lectern. “Does anyone in this room know who the author is, of hope? Anybody? Raise your hand.” He waited, as though he actually expected someone to answer. “God. God is the author of hope.”

And God, too, between the cone hat and the traffic-light timer, had a short-lived presence, if only because Danny wished it.

“I want to tell you a little story.

“Last summer, exactly a year ago, right before I joined Toastmasters, I got up for breakfast one morning. And I said, I’m going to lay back. I’m not going to go. I don’t feel like eating. But there was something pushing me out the dorm. There was something pushing me down the Walk.

“And there by Spruce was this little bitty kitten. And I reached down to pet it. But somebody said, ‘Watch out.’ And I turned like this. Sudden.”

Danny twisted his neck abruptly, acting out his fast turn, staring back at the lectern he had left as though at the man who had warned him.

“He said it had a big gash on it. But I bent down. I picked it up, and I turned it over. The middle of its belly had a gap where something had done tore it wide open. So I took this little cat—it had maggots falling out of its belly—and I went to the freeman at the C.C. gate to get me some peroxide. I shampooed this cat. I washed him up real, real good. I got all the infection out of him. And that night I left him in a hobby-shop box. Closed him in with the tools. And next morning when I went to check on him, that cat was so weak—the way he wobbled out of that box? He made it across the hobby-shop floor, and out the back door and across the Walk, and onto the grass to use the bathroom.

“I picked him up again. I asked this ho, Patricia—y’all know him—I asked him, ‘Pat, can you build a box on your drop, put some little steps on it so this pitiful kitten can get in and out?’ And he did.
He built it. And that’s where the kitten lived. But over the next few days, when it would wobble out and go curl up outside one of the dorms, I’d see people take it and shove it to the side with their foot, like this, and I almost got in fights behind that cat. I almost. But I never did.

“And do you know after a couple of weeks, it seemed like everybody on the East Yard, at one time or the other, stopped and gave this cat milk or something to eat. This cat had so much food in front of him. This cat was loved by everybody. And within a month’s time this little cat was healing up. He was growing. You’d walk by and he’d just jump up on your leg. Just
jump up
. Because that cat had hope. Because I had hope.

“Mr. President, Mr. Master Evaluator, Mr. Sergeant at Arms, Captain Newsom, fellow Toastmasters, hope will heal your wounds. Hope will fill your heart. Hope will help you, someday, make it out of Angola. Hope will keep you moving ahead. Hope will make you live. Hope is your master key.”

How much could any of it matter? When we spoke over the phone about Danny Fabre, Lynn’s husband remembered that eleven years ago he had “literally wanted to tear him apart.” He had hoped for a death sentence. In the middle of his trial, Danny had asked to plead out, and when the prosecutor came into the hallway behind the courtroom to seek the approval of the victim’s family before he accepted the plea, Jack Clark went along only because he thought of the years and years of appeals the family would have to live through before the execution. He expected—because Fabre looked so wild in the courtroom, his long hair disheveled and his eyes strange in a way Clark recalled but could no longer describe and his feet chained to the floor—that Fabre would wind up killed by another convict soon enough.

“Now,” Lynn’s husband said, “the desire for retribution is a little bit less…. Let him think about it for the rest of his life.” So I mentioned,
briefly, the changes Danny was trying to make, and asked if these could ever have any meaning, not necessarily in terms of his imprisonment or release, I struggled to explain, but in some sort of moral terms I couldn’t find the words to express. To which Jack Clark said simply, quietly, “I want him to stay there forever for what he did.”