“The State’s Attorney,” she said, “has introduced Mr. Cochrane’s sworn testimony to the effect that the defendant had taken a snake out of the snake shed and was trying to get it to bite him while he was taking a nap … Now correct me if I’m wrong: You were the first to arrive on the scene after Sunny called your wife?”
“Yes.”
“And did Mr. Cochrane tell you what had happened?”
“Objection: hearsay.”
“Sustained.”
“You’ve heard Mr. Cochrane’s sworn testimony read aloud in this courtroom.”
“You mean what Fern read just now?”
“Were you familiar with this story before you heard it today?”
“Yes.”
“And you were at the scene?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Cochrane had been shot?”
“Yes.”
“And Sunny had been bitten on the thumb, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“According to Mr. Cochrane’s sworn testimony—testimony that you heard read aloud in this courtroom—she had brought a snake in the house and was trying to get it to bite him.”
“That’s what it said.”
“Would it be fair to say that you agree with Mr. Cochrane’s version of what happened?”
“Yes.”
Stella looked through some papers on the lectern and then looked up suddenly: “What happened to the snake?”
“What snake?”
“The snake that Sunny supposedly brought into the house.”
“I don’t know.”
Stella looked at the jury, took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, put her glasses back on. “How is that possible?”
“It could of got away.”
“Did you search for the snake?”
“No.”
“Did the police search for the snake when they arrived?”
“No.”
“Help me understand this situation. You believed that a venomous snake, a diamondback rattlesnake, was loose in the trailer, and you didn’t bother to search for it.”
“It probably got away. Snakes can get through about anything.”
“Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that you didn’t search the house for the snake because there was no snake?”
“There was snakes in the snake shed.”
“Did the police confirm that a snake was missing from the snake shed?”
“Not that I know.”
“No further questions.”
The courtroom was silent except for the sound of the court reporter tapping “No further questions” on the stenograph machine.
The prosecutor made a lame attempt to repair the damage, trying to get DX to give a plausible explanation of why they hadn’t searched for the snake, but Stella had made her point.
But so had the prosecutor.
In his closing argument the prosecutor drew a picture of me the way others saw me. At least some others: a woman who had shot her husband twice; a woman who had shot and killed a man who was a respected member of the church community; a woman who had killed a man people turned to for help; a woman who posed a much greater threat to him than he posed to her. She shot him twice, after all, on two different occasions, six years apart. A woman who had been convicted by a jury of her peers, seven years earlier, in September 1993, of shooting her husband in the shoulder with his own gun; a woman who got her boyfriend to buy her a gun because she was a convicted felon and couldn’t buy it herself; a woman who at the time she shot and killed her former husband had just canceled a long-planned trip to Paris with one man who was not her husband in order to go to Mexico with another man, who also was not her husband; a woman who brought this illegal weapon with her to Naqada intending to shoot her former husband. A woman who did in fact shoot and kill her former husband in his own home, though he was unarmed at the time. It was like one of the Bible stories we used to hear at church, like the stories about Jezebel or Tamar, and the prosecutor sounded just like a preacher, full of righteous indignation.
Stella told a story too, but her story was more like the stories we used to hear the grown-ups tell on the back porch when they got to talking after dark. She talked to the jury as if she were explaining something important to a bunch of friends. She drew a picture of me the way I wanted to see myself. It was the same story she started out with, but now she filled it out with some of the stories the jury had heard. This time she spent a lot of time on my “trial by ordeal” and on Earl’s prior testimony.
“Sunny had good reason to be deathly afraid of her former husband. You’ve heard her story, the story that she didn’t get to tell at her first trial. Her former husband forced her at gunpoint to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes. You’ve seen pictures of the snake shed; you’ve seen pictures of some of these snakes, and you have seen evidence of how much damage a rattlesnake bite can do. I want you to put yourselves in Sunny’s position. I want you to imagine what it would be like to have your own husband or wife hold a gun to your head and force you to put your arm into a box of rattlesnakes. I want you to imagine what it would be like to have your husband or your wife hold a gun to your head and tell you to get down on your knees and get right with the Lord before he puts you to the test, the rattlesnake test. If the rattlesnake bites you, it’s no more than you deserve; and if you don’t want to put your arm in the box, he’ll shove your head right down in it so the snake can bite you on your face, or in your eye. In the eye, that’s right.
“I want you to keep this picture in your mind when you consider the events that took place on the evening of Tuesday, June twentieth. Your flight from Mexico has been canceled and you’ve had to take a different flight, one that makes two stops, both with long layovers, and arrives in Chicago at four o’clock in the morning. You drive home—a four-hour trip—and when you get there, there’s a message on your answering machine. You’ve heard this message: ‘Your boyfriend’s been serpent bit. You better get down here.’
“So you call the hospital nearest to Naqada, in Rosiclare, to check on the supply of Crofab antivenin. You get some additional vials of antivenin from your own hospital. And you drive six hours from Colesville to Rosiclare. All this time you’re thinking that your fiancé has been taken to the hospital in Rosiclare. But when you get to the hospital you discover that he’s not there. You think, maybe it’s not so bad. But you drive to your ex-husband’s trailer and what do you discover? You discover that your ex-husband, the man who forced you to put your arm in a box of rattlesnakes, has refused to let the paramedics take your fiancé to the hospital. And you discover that your fiancé is in a coma. The prosecutor doesn’t want me to use that word because I’m not a doctor, so I’ll withdraw it and say, you discover that your fiancé is totally unconscious and that his arm has swelled up so that it’s bigger than his thigh, has swelled up so much that the skin is breaking.” Stella paused and wiped her face with a handkerchief, and then took a different tack.
“Now, you’ve heard insinuations that Sunny betrayed her fiancé by going off to Mexico with ‘another man.’ ‘Another man.’ As if this were a lovers’ tryst. The ‘other man’ to whom the prosecutor has referred was Sunny’s biology professor, who invited her—and another student —to go to a professional conference, the annual meeting of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, in Baja California, in Mexico—because of her research interest in snakes. Both these students have been involved in a long-term project translocating a unique population of rattlesnakes in central Illinois from one location, where they were threatened, to a new denning area. The suggestion that she somehow ‘betrayed’ her fiancé by attending this conference is one you should put out of your minds.
“But the real crux of the matter is this. Mr. Cochrane, Sunny’s ex-husband, was not simply exercising his freedom of religion, as the prosecution has suggested, by preventing Professor Jones from receiving medical attention. He crossed a line when he prevented the param
edics from taking Jackson to the hospital and prevented Sunny from calling for medical assistance. It’s hard, isn’t it, not to figure that he wanted Jackson to die. Wanted him to die because he couldn’t bear to see the woman he loved happy with another man. A woman he loved so much he forced her at gunpoint to put her arm in a box of deadly rattlesnakes. We know what kind of love that it. And it’s hard, isn’t it, not to figure that if Sunny hadn’t done what she had to do to protect her fiancé, it would be Mr. Earl Cochrane here in this courtroom on trial for first-degree murder.
“At the beginning of this trial I read to you from section seven-dash-one from Article Seven of the Illinois Penal Code regarding ‘Use of force in defense of a person.’ I won’t read it again, but I will remind you that your job is not to decide whether or not Sunny shot Mr. Cochrane. It’s your job to decide whether or not she was justified in shooting him. And I’ll remind you that the law is perfectly clear. Sunny had the right to shoot her ex-husband ‘in order to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to’ Professor Jones, who was in no position to defend himself because he’d been rendered unconscious by a rattlesnake bite.
“If any one of you believes that Sunny was justified in saving the life of her fiancé by shooting a man whose violent behavior is on record, a man she had good reason to fear because he once forced her to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes, then it is your duty to hang on to that belief and not let anyone bully you into changing it.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the last opportunity I will have to address you. Let me thank you for your time and your patience and the care that you will bring to your deliberations.”
Stella sat down.
The prosecutor had a chance to rebut Stella’s closing argument. There were no disagreements about the physical evidence, no disagreements about who had done what to whom. What he did was attack my snake-shed story, a story that I had told so many times it had become central to who I was. Where was the evidence? he wanted to know. I had been tried and convicted in a court of law that had accepted Earl’s testimony, under oath, that I’d gotten a snake out of the shed and had been trying to get it to bite him …
But you know the story. My defense depended on my deathly fear of Earl, and my deathly fear of Earl was based on this story. No story, no deathly fear. No deathly fear, no justification for taking the pistol to Naqada.
The prosecutor stumbled around trying to account for the missing snake that no one had searched for, and I think that was a mistake. He should have left well enough alone.
It really came down to what I believed in my heart of hearts, or what the members of the jury believed in their hearts of hearts about what I believed in mine. And the funny thing was, I knew in my heart of hearts that in some ways the prosecutor was closer to the truth than Stella, and he, the prosecutor, didn’t even know the half of it. After DX I’d gone with all kinds of men, and sometimes Earl would slap me around a little, and I’d figure I deserved it, but he always forgave me. He said I had a sex demon, and we’d get down on our knees and pray about it, and he’d lay his hands on me and call that demon to come out, and I’d be all right for a while, but it was like I was caught in a big net, just like a fish in a landing net, and was struggling to escape. Nothing I could do except twist around in the net. Earl told everybody I didn’t want to live right anymore. Maybe so. I didn’t know what I wanted except that I wanted out of the net, wanted to swim in the river. Wanted to experience everything. Wanted to see everything, feel everything. But there I was caught in the net. And then in prison I pulled myself together, and when I got out I chose to change my name and be a certain kind of person. Happy, hard-working, full of fun, kind, loving, and faithful, not living under any man’s thumb. And then Jackson came along, and it didn’t take any effort to be with him, to love him, which is what I called it now. I didn’t have to be afraid of him, the way I was always afraid of Earl. I thought I’d figured out something about myself, enough so I wouldn’t be practicing the same mistakes over and over again, like practicing a drum roll the wrong way over and over again. That’s why the worst of the stories about me that I had to listen to was the story of backing out of the trip to Paris. It wasn’t that I’d been naughty and deserved a whupping, it wasn’t that I’d committed a sin and needed to be forgiven; it was … I had trouble figuring out just what it was, and then an old song that Warren used to sing jumped into my mind. I was sitting next to Stella at the defense table, along with Peter Franklin, and the judge was instructing the jury, and it was like somebody switching on the radio:
I could have loved you better, I didn’t mean to be unkind,
You know that was the last thing on my mind.
I started to cry. Stella put her arm around me. It was the first time she’d touched me. And I figured maybe everything was going to turn out all right.
23
Paris
In Claire’s new novel, Kiss of Death, the feisty, spunky, sassy, tough-talking, snake-handling heroine and her lover go to Paris in the last chapter to celebrate a decisive victory over the forces of evil. He proposes to her in the Café Anglais, and she says yes, but it’s a difficult yes. She’s too independent; they both are; they have too many issues to work out, and so on. But they love each other, and …
In real life I went to Paris with Claire, the summer after Jackson left, a month before the ASIH meetings, which were going to be held in University Park, Pennsylvania. Six months after I was found not guilty by a jury of my peers in the courthouse in Allensboro.
This is what happened. After the trial Jackson and Claire and I went back to Colesville and picked up the pieces of our lives. Cramer helped me work out a plan for my classes so that I’d be able to graduate in four years. I threw myself into my studies, preparing to take an overload in the spring semester, and sometimes in the evenings I helped Jackson with Claude’s notebooks. I couldn’t read the difficult French, but I was better than Jackson at deciphering Claude’s handwriting.
Jackson and I spent Christmas Eve with Claire and her family, including Claire’s parents, at the rectory. Claire had sold her novel and she and Father Ray were in very high spirits, and their high spirits were contagious. Neither one of them could sit still, and I couldn’t either. Claire danced with Ray and she danced with Jackson, and she danced with her father, and she danced with me. I danced with Ray and with Claire’s father, and with Jackson, and Claire’s father danced with Claire’s mother. The children watched wide-eyed. The rectory was truly beautiful, not designer beautiful, but homey beautiful, filled with family photos and pictures drawn by the children, Alan and Natalie, and ornaments and decorations and candles from Ray’s parents and some from Claire’s. Half-melted snow-people candles skated on a mirror pond. Tarnished bronze angels circled around and around a candle flame, dinging little bells on their way. A beautiful Italian crèche was full of Italian cows and sheep and donkeys and other four-footed animals. All the ornaments on the tree were homemade, some of them dating back to Claire’s childhood. Jackson and I went along to midnight mass at Grace Episcopal—it was the first time Claire had gotten me into church—and then we went home. Standing on the church steps after the mass, Claire had begged us to go to dinner the next day. Christmas Day. Her father had brought two butterflied legs of lamb from Gepperth’s on North Halsted, so there’d be plenty to eat. She was going to serve them with white beans.
If we’d accepted this invitation, would things have turned out differently? Probably not. But sometimes I wonder.
We spent Christmas Day by ourselves. Jackson had put up a tree, and we’d bought presents for each other. We drank kir royale while I fixed Chicken Marengo with frozen crawfish and little fried eggs, and after dinner, about four o’clock, we went for a walk in the woods, and Jackson told me he was going back to Africa. We walked farther into the woods. His daughter, he said, had come to him while he was in the coma. It was time for her elima, time for her to become a woman. She wanted him to be there.
It had started
to snow, and we wandered off the path—an old logging road—into the woods and walked all the way to the back of the property, which butted onto a corn field. The wind was blowing from the north and the snow was coming at us almost horizontally, and we kept our heads down and stumbled on into a stand of evergreens that provided a little pocket in the storm where we could almost imagine being warm. This was where we had cut our Christmas tree the year before. This was where I had stuck a shovel into Jackson’s Indian burial mound, which was now covered with snow.
He asked me to go with him, and we talked about this possibility for about an hour, standing in the snow, stomping our feet, until it started to get dark. It was an exciting prospect, more exciting than Paris: the Mountains of the Moon, the source of the Nile, the Garden of Eden. But by the time we got back to the house I had realized that Jackson wasn’t talking about taking a year off; he wasn’t coming back, and I knew I couldn’t go with him. I thought I could have followed him to Africa, but he was on another journey too, one that led him not just out of the safe harbor provided by the university, but out beyond the defensive virtues that I was just starting to master: prudence, thrift, caution. He was sailing out into a wider sea of courage, risk, adventure, letting go of the self and of the world. I’d caught a glimpse of this sea in my own life, growing up in the Church of the Burning Bush. And I’d even glimpsed it in Earl, but maybe I hadn’t recognized it at the time for what it was: Earl, who gave away all his money, who considered the lilies of the field and never bought insurance. I’d gotten tired of living that way then, and I couldn’t live that way now. I didn’t want to leave the safe harbor of the university, where I could practice my new virtues, my knowledge of the world: how to manage my time and my money, what was left of it after the collapse of ShoppingKart.com and after I’d paid Stella. (Though I knew now that Claire and Jackson had paid more than half the bill, if not more. Claire said she owed me for sharing my snake stories. I didn’t protest too much.) Maybe this was an example of knowledge of the world. I wanted to do well in school. I wanted success. I wanted to go to graduate school. And that’s what happened. Not right away, but eventually.