The Wrath of Angels

  But my grandfather liked Lambton Everett IV because he had known him for a long time and believed that his flaws were minor, and his decencies major. Lambton Everett IV appeared never to have been married, and it was said that he was a bachelor of the most pronounced kind. He seemed to have little sexual interest in women, and none whatsoever in men. There were those who were convinced that Lambton Everett IV would die a virgin; my grandfather speculated that he might possibly have tried intercourse once, if only to strike it from the short list of things he felt that he should do before he passed away.

  But it turned out that my grandfather didn’t know Lambton Everett IV at all; or rather he knew only one Lambton, the face that Lambton had chosen to present to the world, but that face bore no more relation to the reality of the man than a mask bears to its wearer. Lambton shared little with my grandfather about his past; my grandfather knew him only in the present, in his Maine existence, and he accepted the fact of this with no rancor. In his bones, he knew Lambton to be a good man, and that was enough for him.

  Lambton Everett IV was found dead in his house in Wells on a gray Tuesday morning in December. He had failed to turn up at the Big 20 Bowl for his regular Monday morning session, and telephone messages did not elicit a response from him. Two members of his bowling team visited him shortly after breakfast the next morning. They rang the doorbell with no result, then walked to the back of the house and peered in through the kitchen window, where they saw Lambton lying on the floor, his hand clutched to his chest and his face frozen in an agonized grimace. He had gone quickly, the coroner later said: the pain of the heart attack had been immense, but brief.

  My grandfather was one of four men who carried the casket from the church on the morning of the funeral, but he was surprised to be informed by Lambton’s lawyer that Lambton had nominated him as executor of his will. The lawyer also gave my grandfather a letter addressed to him in Lambton’s messy scrawl. It was short and to the point: it apologized to my grandfather for springing the executorship on him but promised that it would not be an arduous task. Lambton’s instructions for the disposal of his estate were relatively simple, mostly involving the dispersal of the proceeds of the sale of his house and possessions among a number of named charities. Ten percent was to be given to my grandfather to do with as he saw fit, along with a gold-and-onyx pocket watch that had been in Lambton’s family for three generations. My grandfather was also directed to an album of photographs and newspaper clippings in Lambton’s bedroom closet, the contents of which Lambton requested he share only with those who might understand them.

  It is difficult for men and women to keep secrets these days, especially concerning matters that might, at some point, have found their way into the media. A quick Internet search can expose even the most personal of histories to the light, and a generation has grown used to being able to access such information with the click of a mouse, but it was not always so. I think now of my grandfather seated at Lambton Everett’s kitchen table, the album open before him in the fading winter daylight, and the sense he had that Lambton’s shade was somewhere nearby, watching him carefully as his secret pain was exposed at last. Later my grandfather would say that, in looking through the album, he felt like a surgeon lancing a boil, releasing liquid and pus, scouring the infection so Lambton Everett IV might be permitted the peace in death that had been denied him in life.

  The album revealed another Lambton Everett, a young man with a wife named Joyce and a son called James. He was still recognizably himself, according to my grandfather: a gangling man, an awkward yet strangely handsome individual, smiling contentedly beside his tiny, pretty wife and his grinning son. In the final picture taken of them, his wife and child were twenty-nine and six respectively. Lambton was thirty-two. The picture was dated May 14, 1965, the place Ankeny, Iowa. Three days later, Joyce and James Everett were dead.

  Harman Truelove was twenty-three years old. He had been dismissed from his job slaughtering hogs for undue cruelty to the animals, his sadism exceptional even in a profession where casual brutality was the norm, inflicted by men of subnormal intelligence on animals that were probably smarter than themselves, and certainly more worthy of continuing their existence. Harman Truelove’s response to his firing was to set fire to the pens housing the hogs awaiting slaughter, burning two hundred of the animals alive, before hitting the road with only a single change of clothing, sixty-seven dollars, and a set of butcher knives. He hitched a ride as far as Bondurant with a man named Roger Madden, who lied and said that he was going no farther just to get Harman Truelove out of his truck because, as he later told police, ‘the boy wasn’t right’.

  Harman ate a bowl of soup in the Hungry Owl Diner, left a quarter as a tip, and started walking. He had decided that he would stop when the sun began to set, which it did just as he reached the house of Joyce and Lambton Everett, and their son James. Lambton, who had traveled to a conference of insurance adjusters in Cleveland, was not home, but his wife and child were.

  And they spent a long night with Harman Truelove and his knives.

  Lambton got the call in Cleveland the following day. Harman Truelove had been picked up by police as he headed northwest on foot toward, he said, Polk City. He hadn’t even bothered to change his clothes, and he was sticky with blood. He had left a trail of it from the Everetts’ bedroom, all the way through the house, and halfway down their garden path. Curiously, he had cleaned his knives before he left.

  This my grandfather learned from the album at Lambton Everett’s kitchen table. He would later recall softly touching the face of the woman and the boy in the picture with his fingertips, and allowing his hand to hover over Lambton’s image, just as he might have done if the man were seated before him, seeking to express his sorrow and regret yet conscious that Lambton was a man who had always refrained from unnecessary physical contact. Even his handshakes had been as delicate as the touch of an insect’s wings against one’s skin. My grandfather had always considered it merely to be another of Lambton’s peculiarities, like his refusal to eat meat of any kind and his particular hatred for the smell of bacon or pork. Now the odd details of Lambton’s personality began to take a new form, each making a terrible kind of sense in the context of what he had endured in life.

  ‘You should have told me, my friend,’ my grandfather said aloud to the listening silence, and the drapes behind him shifted slightly in a cool winter breeze, although the day outside was still as stone. ‘You should have told me, and I would have understood. I would never have mentioned it to another soul. I would have kept your secret. But you should have told me.’

  And he was overcome by the knowledge of his old friend’s suffering, now at an end – no, almost at an end, for the story was not yet fully told, and there were more pages to come. Not many, but enough.

  Harman Truelove refused to confess to his crime. He declined to speak to the police or even to his own public defender, and did not answer when his lawyer asked him where the bruises on his face and body had come from, for the police had tried hard to make him talk. There was a trial, although few witnesses were called, for Harman Truelove’s guilt was never in doubt. Something of Harman Truelove’s past was revealed in the course of the police investigation, but more was kept hidden, and only a handful of people were privy to it: years of physical abuse, dating back even to his time in the womb when Harman’s father, an alcoholic itinerant laborer and serial despoiler of women, had tried to induce an abortion in Harman’s mother by kicking her repeatedly in the stomach; the subsequent death of his mother when Harman was two years old, ostensibly by her own hand in a bath of lukewarm water, although the coroner was heard to wonder why a woman who had been intent upon slitting her arm open with a straight razor might also have bathwater in her lungs; the years spent on the road with his father, beating following beating until Harman Truelove could not speak without stammering; and the death at last of that terrible man who choked on his own vomit while lying unconscious in a drunken stu
por, his twelve-year-old son found beside him holding his father’s cold hand, gripping it so tightly that the rigor mortis had sealed the child’s hand in the father’s and the police had to break the dead man’s fingers to release his son. By mutual agreement, the prosecutor and defender decided that it was unnecessary to share such information with the jury, and only after Harman Truelove had left this earth did it become public knowledge.

  Before sentencing, Lambton Everett requested a moment with the judge, a dour yet fair man named Clarence P. Douglas, who, despite being at least two decades from retirement, tended to inhabit his role in the manner of a man who was set to throw it all in the following day and claim his watch and pension, with subsequent plans for nothing more arduous than fishing, drinking, and reading. He didn’t seem to care whom he offended by manner or decision just as long as whatever he did was in accordance, insofar as was possible, with the requirements of both law and justice.

  A record of their conversation found its way into the local newspapers following Douglas’s eventual retirement, since Lambton Everett had placed no stipulation of secrecy upon him, and Douglas clearly felt that it did not reflect badly on the man: quite the opposite. The article in question was one of the final entries in the album, although my grandfather felt that it had been placed there with a degree of reluctance, as it had not been as carefully cut and pasted as the others, and was separated from the previous cutting by two blank pages. My grandfather took the view that it had been added out of a desire for completeness, but Lambton Everett was somehow embarrassed by it.

  In the oak-lined quiet of his chambers, the judge was requested by Lambton Everett to spare Harman Truelove from death by hanging at the state penitentiary in Fort Madison. He did not want ‘the boy’ to be executed, he said. The judge was surprised, and more. He asked Lambton why Harman Truelove should not be subject to the full vengeance of the law.

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you, sir,’ said Judge Douglas, ‘that what Harman Truelove did was evil, as bad a thing as I ever heard of.’

  And Lambton, who knew some but not all of Harman Truelove’s past, replied, ‘Yes, your honor, what he did was as close to pure evil as makes no difference, but the boy himself isn’t evil. He never had the start in life that the rest of us had. What followed wasn’t much better, and I think it drove him crazy. Somebody took a child and twisted him until he wasn’t even human any longer. I looked at him in that courtroom, and I reckoned that he was in even more pain than I was. Don’t misunderstand me, your honor: I hate him for what he did, and I can’t ever forgive him for it, but I don’t want his blood on my conscience. Put him away somewhere that he can’t hurt anyone ever again, but don’t kill him, not in my name.’

  Judge Douglas sat back in his leather chair, folded his hands across his belly, and thought that Lambton Everett might well be the most unusual individual who had ever set foot in his chambers. He was more used to hearing the hounds baying for blood, ready to tear apart the accused themselves if the law wasn’t prepared to sate them. Few lambs crossed the threshold of his courtroom, and fewer merciful men.

  ‘I hear you, Mr Everett,’ he said. ‘I even admire you for your sentiments, and it could be you’re right in some of what you say, but the law requires that the boy should die. I suggest otherwise, and they’d curse my name right along with his until the day they put me in the ground. If it helps you to sleep any easier, his blood isn’t on your hands, nor on mine. And maybe ruminate on this: if that boy is in as much pain as you think, then it could be that the kindest thing anyone could do for him is to put an end to it once and for all.’

  Lambton Everett took in his surroundings, the leather furnishings and the book-lined walls, as Clarence Douglas marked the traces of grief upon his face. He had not met Lambton until the case came to trial, but he was well versed in trauma and loss. What kind of man, he wondered, pleads for the life of another who has cut apart his wife and child? Not merely a good one, he decided, but a man who carried something of Christ Himself within him, and Clarence Douglas felt humbled in the man’s presence.

  ‘Mr Everett, I can tell the boy that you asked for his life to be spared. Should you choose to do so, it could also be arranged for you to visit with him, and you could tell him yourself. If you had any questions, you could put them to him, and see how he responds.’

  ‘Questions?’ said Lambton, looking up at the judge. ‘What questions could I have for him?’

  ‘Well, you might want to ask him why he did what he did,’ said Clarence Douglas. ‘He never told anyone why he murdered your wife and son. He never said anything at all, barring the word “no” when they asked him if it was he who had taken the lives of your wife and boy, even though there’s no doubt that it was his hand that did for them. One word, that’s all they got out of him. I’ll tell you the truth, Mr Everett: there are doctors, psychiatrists and their kind, who are curious as all hell about that boy, but he’s as much an enigma to them now as he was when they put the cuffs on him. Even allowing for his history, there’s no explanation for what he did. There are folk who’ve had worse upbringings than him, worse by a country mile, but they never killed an innocent woman and her little boy because of it.’

  He shuffled awkwardly in his seat, for there was a dreadful intensity to Lambton Everett’s gaze that made Clarence Douglas regret he had ever started talking about the murderer Harman Truelove, that he had ever even agreed to admit Lambton Everett into his chambers.

  ‘There is no “why”’, said Lambton, slowly and deliberately. ‘There can never be. Even if he came up with some answer for me, it would have no meaning, no weight in this world or the next, so I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t even want to look at him again after this day. I just didn’t want to add to his suffering, or to mine. I didn’t want to add to the suffering of the world itself. I figure it has enough to be getting along with. It’s never going to run out.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Everett,’ said Clarence Douglas. ‘I wish there was something more that I could do for you.’

  So Lambton Everett returned to the courtroom, and the jury read their verdict, and Judge Clarence Douglas passed sentence, and some time later Harman Truelove took the long drop.

  And Lambton Everett eventually traveled northeast, making for the sea, and he came to rest at last in Wells. Although he said nothing of his past, still he brought it with him in his heart, and in his mind, and in an album of old photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings.

  My grandfather turned back to the picture of Lambton with his family. Yes, he was still recognizably a younger version of the man that my grandfather had known, but the years had exacerbated his awkwardness, and the flawed dimensions of his limbs. It struck my grandfather that people sometimes spoke of men and women being broken by grief and loss, and they meant by that a psychological or emotional fracturing, but Lambton Everett resembled a man who had been physically broken, one who had been torn apart and then imperfectly reassembled, and he had spent the remainder of his life struggling with the physical legacy of what had been visited upon him.

  My grandfather closed the album, and he shut his eyes, and he registered Lambton Everett’s presence nearby, could almost smell the scent of pipe tobacco and Old Spice that had been so much a part of him.

  ‘Go on, now,’ said my grandfather. ‘Go to them. They’ve waited for you long enough.’

  He thought that he heard the drapes flutter once more behind him, and there was a sound that might have been an exhalation, like a second dying, and then the scent faded, and he felt the emptiness of the room, and he opened his eyes again as his ears discerned a soft ticking.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah.’

  On the table before him was Lambton Everett’s pocket watch, the one that he had bequeathed to my grandfather in his will. But my grandfather had not taken it from the closet in which he had found it alongside the album. He had left it on Lambton’s bed. He was certain of it, as certain as he was of anything in this world.


  He slipped the watch into his pocket, and put the album under his arm, and that night, while I watched, he burned the record of Lambton Everett’s pain on a pyre behind his house. When I asked him what he was doing he shared with me Lambton Everett’s story, and it came to be a foretelling of what was to pass in my own life. For, like Lambton, I would see my wife and child torn apart, and I would travel to this northern state, and there my pain would find its form.

  Now, seated at that small, dark table on the Lower East Side, the paper Epstein had given to me held tightly in my hand, I thought again of Lambton Everett, and that bond I had imagined as linking our experiences was severed. What kind of man pleads for the life of one who has taken his wife and child from him, Judge Douglas had asked himself: a good man, was the answer, a man worthy of salvation.

  But what kind of man takes the life of one who has murdered his wife and child? A vengeful one? A man driven by wrath, twisted by grief? Lambton Everett had appeared broken in form, but the best of him had remained intact within. It was as if his body had been forced to absorb entirely the impact of the blow in order for his spirit, his soul, to remain unsullied.

  I was not Lambton Everett. I had taken many lives. I had killed, over and over, in the hope that it might ease my pain, but instead I had fueled it. Had I damned myself by my actions, or had I always been damned? Was that why my name was on this list?

  ‘Liat, pour Mr Parker a glass of wine,’ said Epstein. ‘I will take one as well.’

  The list contained eight names. Unlike the document given to me by Marielle Vetters it was printed, not typewritten. Davis Tate’s name was on this list too but, his apart, my own name was the only one that I recognized. There were no other letters or symbols beside it, no numbers that might be dates or figures. It stood alone, and was printed not in black ink, but in red.