Carthage

  Struck by guards’ billy clubs he lost consciousness.

  Wasn’t self-defense but an aggressive attack to protect another inmate as witnesses would testify but still, Kincaid had violated the prison rules. Just to disobey an officer’s command was a violation of the prison rules. To resist officers, try to shove them away, strike them—violations of the prison rules. On Brett Kincaid’s otherwise unblemished prison record was a notation of assault, refusal to obey officers, instigation of riot.

  The man he’d mistaken for Private Muksie had been hospitalized in the prison infirmary. The younger man Muksie had been harassing had escaped with only lacerations and bruises.

  Kincaid drew “administrative punishment” of eight weeks in solitary confinement.

  Warden Heike’s gravel voice thickened and deepened with outrage was amplified through the prison in lockdown for twenty-four hours.

  Zero tolerance for infractions of Clinton Correctional rules. Zero tolerance for fighting, threatening and intimidating, possession of weapons, insubordination and resistance of officers’ orders.

  Sentenced to solitary confinement naked. Hoofed-creatures like horses pounded through his sleep and these sharp heavy hooves striking close beside his head he could not turn, he was so exhausted.

  In solitary he was the torso, the stump. No purpose now in struggle and so he ceased.

  His medications had ceased. Only vaguely did he miss his medications as you might miss a badly rotted little finger after it has dropped off and is no longer yours to fret over.

  Eight weeks in solitary. Cruel and unusual punishment Zeno Mayfield would charge if Zeno Mayfield were on Brett Kincaid’s side and not now his enemy.

  In solitary you have no appetite. You lose weight steadily—Brett Kincaid lost twelve pounds. Medications he took if they were brought to him but most meds he forgot since they were not brought to him in his new quarters. Man, you on some kinda diet? Or, whadajacallit—chemotherapy? You real sick, man? God damn!

  Once a day for an hour removed for exercise in a segregated part of the Yard, every other day removed for a (lukewarm) shower so his skin crawled with festering microbes invisible to the naked eye. Yet the corporal submitted to his punishment without resistance as without apology or remorse for the corporal could not see how he had erred. The instinct to help the harassed inmate, a stranger to him, young kid looking scarcely twenty, had come so strong.

  Saying, to Father Kranach who came to visit him concerned and alarmed Fuck I would do it again.

  First he could after solitary was go to the Church of the Good Thief where he knelt, prayed.

  Like a hungry man, feasting.

  It was not God and it was not Jesus Christ but Saint Dismas to whom he prayed.

  Help me, I have sinned. It did not seem a request of madness wishing to save his soul in the twilit interior of the Church of the Good Thief where he knelt hiding his contorted face.

  Only enter my soul and my soul shall be healed.

  HE WAS SINCERE. Desperately he wanted to be good.

  Yet a second time fifteen months later, the flaring-up overcame him.

  This time in the mental unit where B. Kincaid was an orderly under the supervision of a light-skinned black CO named Foyle—(for there was a shortage in the facility of men like Brett Kincaid who gave evidence of being intelligent, responsible, reasonable)—he’d attacked a guard who’d been harassing an inmate—(the inmate a soft fat slug of a man with albino eyes, pasty skin, white eyelashes)—poking at him with his billy club and Kincaid told him to stop, Kincaid spoke sharply to him telling him to stop but the guard ignored him laughing and so Kincaid strode to him and this time too without speaking he seized the billy club out of the guard’s hand and brought it down hard over his head fracturing the skull.

  So swiftly! The corporal heard the crack.

  This time the warden intervened, directly. The corporal had assaulted a corrections officer and would be charged with a felony—assault and battery, aggravated.

  There would be formal charges, brought by the Clinton County district attorney. There would be more than simply administrative punishment, months in solitary confinement: seven-to-ten years added to the corporal’s sentence.

  God damn he didn’t give a damn!—didn’t give a fuck.

  Recklessly he waived his right to an attorney as he would waive his constitutional right to a trial. Not repentant for he didn’t see that there had been any other course of action possible for him.

  Fucker who’d hit him, tried to break up the scuffle, and his CO-friends, dealt drugs in the facility. The corporal knew.

  Drugs were everywhere in the facility. No way in but through guards but the guards’ union was so strong, their connection with downstate drug smugglers so established, Brett could not see how the situation would ever change.

  (The CO he’d assaulted had been dismissed from the facility for excessive force, drug dealing. But that did not mitigate the corporal’s sentence.)

  Shitty to think how you were but the sum total of brain cells inside your skull. No mystery why people went crazy like rabid beasts sometimes just wanting to bite and tear with their teeth—there was a wild elation in this.

  Fucked up like he was, he wouldn’t have to face a parole board for a long time at least.

  Remorse? For what?

  His sentence was so long now, he couldn’t envision its ending. If he maxed-out, without parole. And maybe he’d accumulate yet more administrative-punishments to set his release time back, back, back.

  Twenty-seven years old when he’d been incarcerated and so now—(but what month was this? what year?)—thirty-one, or –two.

  The girl he’d murdered would remain always a girl. Yet the other, the one he’d loved so much, and had almost married, would remain a girl too, a beautiful young woman for he would never see her again.

  She’d died to him too.

  All of the Mayfields—died to him.

  Or was it instead that the Mayfields lived, and the corporal had died?

  (Secret) meaning of the Purple Heart.

  (Yet the shameful fact was, Brett had coveted a Purple Heart. In his fantasies of serving overseas, impressing his absent-drunk-daddy and his sweetly naïve fiancée and all of Carthage gaping at him in his army dress uniform like Tom Cruise he’d considered the Purple Heart as the most likely medal he might be awarded; and if so, the trick would be to be wounded but not to die.)

  Ten days into solitary his brain was sluggish and functioned like his mother’s decades-old Mixmaster set to liquefy but the blades barely turning and the contraption rattling, vibrating and listing to one side.

  Ten days more, a watery gruel leaked from his raw-burning anus and what (tepid, sickening) water he managed to drink, he vomited back up again in a spume of the hue of watery urine.

  Father Kranach came to see him in his delirium. Father Kranach pleaded with the warden to have Kincaid hospitalized in the infirmary but the angry warden paid no heed. Won’t be the first to precipitate his own demise and won’t be the last.

  Waking a week later and where was he after all?—strapped to a metal bed in the infirmary stinking of human feces, vomit and disinfectant strong as lye.

  Flies crawling the windows. Out of caulking cracks and out of zigzag cracks in the ceiling.

  What he’d thought in his dream was an old-time (World War I?) dirigible floating high above his head was in fact a bag of IV fluids dripping into a vein in the crook of his right elbow.

  And that pinch in his penis, not an incandescent wire shunted up into his gut but a catheter draining toxic liquid out of his gut into a bag beneath the bed.

  A medic was telling him Seems like you was pretty sick, man. Your temperature was a hundred and three degrees F with a nasty blood infection and just the medication alone it’s damn strong it can kill you. If you don’t remember this last week that ain’t such a bad thing.

  CAN’T GUARANTEE YOUR safety, Corporal. Take precautions.

  IN THE
CHURCH of the Good Thief he prayed.

  On his knees prayed. In the quickened beat-beat-beat of his heart prayed.

  In the alcove to the church the astonishing figure of the crucified Saint Dismas. The perfect male body naked except for a cloth about his loins and how realistic the torso, the thighs and calves, the head and the face contorted in agony as it is passing into something else—peace, a kind of joy.

  And he was struck by the perfect male body—not disabled, not “defective” but perfect and yet, rigid in death.

  He thought The body is crucified on the cross of the world. There is no escape from the crucifixion as there is no escape from the body.

  He had not ever thought of the male body as beautiful, still less perfect. Yet now, contemplating the sculpted figure of the legendary Good Thief, the figure’s muscled shoulders and arms slung around the horizontal bars of a thick wooden plank, he felt such intense pity, sorrow—he felt that something was breaking inside him, that was not for him but for another, who stood outside all that he, Brett Kincaid, could know.

  In the church services he’d visited in prison there was much of Jesus in your heart and if you would accept Jesus as your savior but Father Kranach did not speak of Jesus but of Saint Dismas.

  Patron saint of thieves, losers.

  He will intervene for you. If you ask.

  The Church of the Good Thief had become his place of solace. His place of comfort. Ever more now, he’d spent so much time in solitary and had felt his soul like a small landslide.

  The Church of the Good Thief was not a chapel or even a small church but a good-sized church that could hold as many as two hundred people built inside the sixty-foot-high concrete wall circling itself like a snake swallowing its tail. The church was comprised of rock that looked as if it had been hewn by pickax out of a nearby mountain.

  The Church of the Good Thief had been constructed by Dannemora inmates in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The materials were secondhand from abandoned houses, barns, local buildings. Some materials were donated. The Appalachian red oak made into pews, said to have been a gift from the notorious Lucky Luciano, a former inmate at Dannemora.

  There were numerous carvings, stained glass windows bearing the faces of saints that had been modeled by Dannemora inmates.

  In a Protestant church, at least in those churches Brett Kincaid had visited, he’d never felt this inwardness.

  He’d never felt his soul stirred. The deep root of his being, impossible to name.

  In the churches of his past, including the Carthage church to which he’d gone with Juliet, the focus was outward. Smiling faces of others, singing together the familiar hymns, prayers in unison. Gripping hands. But in the Church of the Good Thief he came to understand the stillness and secrecy of the elusive god.

  For it was the inwardness of God for which he yearned not the communion with others.

  In this inwardness he came to understand that his maimed body was in its way a perfect body. As his maimed soul was in its way perfect. For this was the fate God had provided for Corporal Kincaid. No other fate would have allowed Corporal Kincaid to continue to live.

  He’d tried to speak of this to Father Kranach in the priest’s small office at the rear of the church. Through the single horizontal, just slightly sinking window of the office you could see a broad swath of gardens tended by inmates at the rear of their cell blocks—you could not see, from Father Kranach’s office, the sixty-foot-high concrete wall without end.

  Father Kranach had become his friend. His only friend.

  The priest was of no age Brett could determine: not young but not old, nor even middle-aged. He was short and broad-shouldered with spidery limbs and a nervous habit of stroking his hair—flat straw-hair combed across the hump of his head.

  Always his greeting was a brisk handshake. How are you, Brett?

  And he was sincere, he sincerely wanted to know.

  Seven days a week at the prison the Catholic priest Father Fred Kranach was on call. Unlike the Protestant chaplain who came only when required for services and counseling and then it seemed, judging by his edgy smiles, reluctantly.

  Why a Catholic priest is single and celibate. For a wife, children distract a man and drain his energies from his calling.

  Why a Catholic priest when he is a good priest is an incarnation of Jesus Christ: the single one who is for all, who has died for all, who will dwell in the hearts of all if but beckoned.

  The corporal had never known any Catholic priest in the past. He had not once stepped inside a Roman Catholic church though at the foot of Potsdam Street was old dour-red-brick St. Mary’s, the oldest Catholic church in Beechum County, past which he’d often bicycled as a boy.

  Strange that Father Kranach didn’t seem to care that Brett Kincaid was not a Catholic.

  Father Kranach did not question the corporal about his wartime experiences nor did he allude to the corporal’s disabilities. Only obliquely did he allude to the fact that Brett had “served” in the Iraq War at a young age. More vehemently he spoke of the war—the wars—against terror: the crusade that would never end.

  Like wishing to eradicate evil. But evil will never end.

  In the prison Brett Kincaid rarely looked another inmate in the face. It is wisest not to make eye contact. Yet lifting his eyes to the priest almost shyly, in yearning seeing that Father Kranach was smiling at him seeing him.

  Happy in knowing a secret. Like one who has died and has returned to help others.

  He had thought it was a curse, the wreck of his body. Yet now he understood, God had allowed this wreck of a body to prevail, and to endure.

  In other, earlier wars fought by American soldiers, such severe wounds would have meant death.

  Feeling in the Church of the Good Thief not happiness but a cessation of grief, pain.

  Cessation of guilt.

  These were temporary and not permanent. Yet, his spirits were lifted.

  For Father Kranach had explained to him, at his bequest, the principles of the Catholic confession.

  Father Kranach instructed him in an abbreviated act of contrition O God I am heartily sorry for all my sins. Only enter my soul and my soul shall be healed.

  In the fourth year of his incarceration, she came to see him.

  Many times she’d requested permission from him to visit and always he’d told her no, not a good idea. Often he didn’t reply to her letters at all.

  Yet of course, Arlette Mayfield did not give up. She was a Christian woman for whom pride was a sort of shining cloth, expensive silk for instance, the value of which lies in trampling on it and allowing others to trample freely on it.

  Until finally Brett said yes.

  Though he didn’t want to see Arlette Mayfield, did not ever want to see any of the Mayfields, or anyone from his life back there, yet he gave in, he wrote back to Mrs. Mayfield saying yes.

  And immediately Arlette replied to him, saying she would drive to Dannemora the following Friday, stay overnight in a motel and arrive at the prison when visitors’ hours began at 8 A.M.

  For Arlette would be driving alone, it seemed. A lengthy drive following narrow circuitous routes through the foothills of the Adirondacks.

  This was a relief. He could not bear to ever see Zeno Mayfield again.

  Juliet’s parents. So very close to having been his parents, too.

  PROCEDURE WAS: visitors arrived at the front entrance of the prison, passed through security checkpoints, signed in and the prisoner whom they wished to visit was notified, and escorted to the visitors’ room; no visitors were allowed into the visitors’ room except by escort, after the prisoner had been brought there.

  When the call came for him, his first instinct was to say no.

  Steeling himself for seeing her after so many years. And the strangeness of having a visitor who knew him not as the Kincaid case but as Brett.

  For Ethel had not made the trip—every month her health was worsening, such a damn long bus ride would
kill her.

  The visitors’ room was a large bright-lit clamorous and inhospitable space. All of the inmates were men and most of the visitors were women.

  Here and there in the large, open space were children, some very young. Brett felt the sharpness of his loss as he’d never quite felt it before—not only of his life as a man, a husband, but his potential life as a father, a man with a family.

  All that, he’d thrown away.

  Brett saw a tall thin woman with silvery-brown hair being led in his direction by a guard. She was smiling at him—was this Arlette Mayfield? He felt a faint shock—the faded woman, the bright smile.

  There are the parents of your friends who are old, and there are the parents of your friends who are young—in the Mayfields’ case, both Arlette and Zeno had been young, youthful. In jeans and pullover shirts, returning from a “run around the cemetery” in waterstained jogging shoes, Arlette Mayfield had seemed more like an older sister of Juliet’s than her mother.

  “Brett! Hello . . .”

  Her eyes were larger than he recalled, in her thin face. Her hair was feathery-thin wisps. Her smiling mouth looked bracketed by pain.

  Brett stammered a greeting. Thinking This is a mistake, I can’t do this.

  But somehow, Arlette Mayfield was seated across from him, at a table. Between them was a Plexiglas barrier. Through a grated opening in the barrier they could speak to each other; or rather, Arlette could speak to Brett who was shocked and stunned into silence.

  Visits with prisoners were limited to a half hour. The corporal recalled from training that in a dangerous situation in which the immediate future is unpredictable you must slow time down by an act of will, you must separate and “own” each second, otherwise you will be seized and swept away.

  It was not possible, what was happening now. That he was facing this woman whom he had avoided, for years. That she was speaking to him warmly and with emotion yet not at all reproachfully, even with respect—(he would recall this afterward, astonished: respect)—and he was able to respond if only crudely, awkwardly—yes, no, I think so, maybe . . .