Candlemoth Read online

  Candlemoth

  R J Ellory

  * * *

  * * *

  An Orion paperback

  First published in Great Britain in 2003

  by Orion

  This paperback edition published in 2004

  by Orion Books Ltd,

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  Copyright © Roger Jon Ellory 2003

  The right of Roger Jon Ellory to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

  in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

  permission of the copyright owner.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 0 75285 914 5

  Typeset by Deltatype Ltd, Birkenhead, Merseyside

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is dedicated to many people, all of whom contributed in their own way.

  To Lucy, for her perpetual sanity and friendship.

  To Whitman, Williams, Woodstein, to Kelly Joe Phelps, and all those who accompanied my thoughts.

  To my mother and grandmother, both long since dead, for their guidance and care.

  To a father I never knew, and more than likely never will.

  To Nick Sayers for his time, his patience, his encouragement.

  To Jenny Parrott and Mark Rusher for believing enough to find me a home.

  To Jon Wood, my editor at Orion - a man of passion and persistence. Without his direction, his input and his courage this book would never have been published.

  To all those who believed I would never amount to anything.

  Finally to my wife Victoria and my son Ryan… for all that's been, and all there is yet to come…

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  Chapter One

  Four times I've been betrayed - twice by women, once by a better friend than any man might wish for, and lastly by a nation. And perhaps, truth be known, I betrayed myself. So that makes five.

  But despite everything, all that happened back then, and all that is happening now, it was still a magic time.

  A magic time.

  I can recall it with a clarity and simplicity that surprises even myself. The names, the faces, the sounds, the smells.

  All of them.

  It seems almost unnatural to recall things with such a sharp level of perception, but then that is perhaps attributable to the present circumstances.

  Present a man with the end of his life, place him somewhere such as Death Row, and perhaps God blesses him with some small mercy.

  The mercy of remembrance.

  As if the Almighty says:

  Here, son, you done got yourself in one hell of a mess right now…

  You ain't stayin' long, an' that'd be the truth…

  You take a good look over all that's been an'gone, and you try an' figure out for yourself how you got yourself arrived where you are now…

  You take that time now, son, you take that time and make some sense of it before you have to answer up to me…

  Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  I have never believed myself to be anything other than a soul. A man is not an animal, not a physical thing, and where I go now I don't know.

  Perhaps it is the last vestige of mercy afforded me, but I am not afraid.

  No, I am not afraid.

  The people here, the people around me, they seem more afraid than I. Almost as if they know what they are doing, this lawful and sanctioned killing of men, and know also that they are doing wrong, and they fear the consequences: not for me, but for themselves.

  If they could perhaps convince themselves there is no God, or no hereafter, then they would be safe.

  But they know there is a God.

  They know there is something beyond.

  There is a spirit to this place. The spirit of the dead. Men here will tell you that once you've killed a man, once you've seen the light fade from his eyes, he will always walk with you. Your shadow. Perhaps he will never speak again, never move close to feel the warmth from your skin, but he is there. And those men walk the same gantries as us, they eat the same food, they watch the lights go down and dream the same fractured dreams.

  And then there are the sounds. Metal against metal, bolts sliding home, keys turning in locks… all reminders of the inevitability of eternity. Once you come down here you never come out. The corridors are wide enough for three abreast, a man in the middle, a warder on each side. These corridors are painted a vague shade between gray and green, and names and dates and final words are scratched through to the brickwork beneath. Here we're all innocent. Out of Vietnam into Hell. Tell M I love her. Other such things. Desperate thoughts from desperate men.

  And lastly the smell. Never leaves you, no matter how long you've walked the walk and talked the talk. Assaults your nostrils whenever you wake, as if for the very first time. There is Lysol and cheap detergent, the smell of rotting food, the odors of sweat and shit and semen and, somewhere beneath all of these things, the smell of fear. Of futility. Of men giving up and consigning themselves to the justice of a nation. Crushed inside the hand of fate.

  The men that watch us are cold and removed and distant. They have to be. Figure once you attach you can't detach. So they say. Who knows what they see when the lights go down, lying there beside their wives, darkness pressing against their eyes and their children sleeping the sleep of innocents. And then the cool half light of nascent dawn when they wake and remember who they are, and what they do, and where they will go once breakfast is done and the kids have gone to school. They kiss their wives, and their wives look back at them, and in their eyes is that numb and indifferent awareness that the bread and cereal and eggs they ate were paid for by killing men. Guilty men perhaps, but men all the same. Justice of a nation. Hope they're right. Lord knows, they hope they're right.

  I watch Mr. Timmons. I watch him, and sometimes he sweats. He hides it, but I know he sweats. I see him watching me through the grille, his w
easel eyes, his narrow pinched mouth, and I believe his wife comforts him in his guilt by telling him that really he is doing the work of the Lord. She feeds him sweet apple fritters and a white sauce she makes with a little honey and lemon, and she comforts him. He brought the fritters once, brought them right here in a brown paper bag, spots of grease creeping out towards its corners. And he let me see them, even let me smell one, but he couldn't let me taste. Told me if I was an honest man then I would find all the sweet apple fritters I could eat in Heaven. I smiled and nodded and said Yessir, Mister Timmons, and I felt bad for him. Here was something else he would feel guilty about come dawn.

  But Clarence Timmons is not a bad man, not an evil man. He doesn't carry the blackened heart of Mr. West. Mr. West seems to be an emissary of Lucifer. Mr. West is unmarried, this in itself is no surprise, and the bitterness and hate he carries inside his skin seem enough to burst a man. And yet everything about him is tightened up. Don't know how else to word it. Tightened up like Sunday-best shoelaces. His manner, his words, his dress, everything is precise and detailed. His pants carry a crease that could cut paper. Look down at his shoes and you look back at yourself. The whiteness of his collar is unearthly, a heavenly white, as if he walks back through town each night and buys a new shirt and, once home, scrubs it until morning with Lysol and baking soda. Perhaps he believes the whiteness of his collar compensates for the blackness of his heart.

  First time I met Mr. West he spat at me. Spat right in my face. My hands were cuffed and shackled around my waist. My feet were shackled too. I couldn't even wipe my face. I could feel the warmth of his saliva as it hit my forehead, and then it started its slow progression over my eyelid and down my cheek. Later I could feel it drying, and it was as if I sensed the germs alive on my skin.

  Mr. West possessed a single, simple purpose. That purpose manifested itself in many colors - humiliation, degradation, violence, an impassioned cruelty. But the purpose was the same: to demonstrate authority.

  Here, in this place, Mr. West was God.

  Until the time came, until you walked the walk and danced the dance, until your bare feet did the soft-shoe shuffle on the linoleum floor, until you actually did meet your Maker, then Mr. West was God and Jesus and all the disciples rolled into one unholy mess of madness that could come raining down on you like a thunderstorm, provocation or not.

  Mr. West was Boss down here, and the other warders, despite their years of service, despite their experience and pledge of commitment to the United States government, the Federal Detention system and President Reagan, still acknowledged only one Boss.

  They all called one another by their given names. All except Mr. West. To everyone, the Prison Warden included, he had always been, would always be, Mr. West.

  If there was a Hell, well, that's where he'd come from, and that's where he'd return. I believed that. Had to believe that. To believe anything else would have tested my sanity.

  I am thirty-six now. Thirty-six years back of me, thirty-six years of love and loss and laughter. If I weigh everything up it has been good. There have been times I couldn't have asked for better. It is only now, the last ten years or so, that have been tough. Too easy to ask myself what I could possibly have done to have arrived at this point. If there is in fact a balance in all things, then I have found my balance here. Like Zen, karma, whatever this stuff calls itself. What goes around comes around: you get the idea.

  I feel sorry for the kids. The ones I never had. I feel sorry for Caroline Lanafeuille whom I loved from a distance for years, but never kissed enough, nor held for long enough. Sorry for the fact that I could not have been there for her through everything that happened with her father and how they left. And had I been there it perhaps would never have turned out the way it did. And for Linny Goldbourne, a girl I loved as much as ever I loved Caroline. Though in a different way. Sorry too for Sheryl Rose Bogazzi. She was too beautiful, too energetic and uninhibited, and had she never been crowned County Fair May Queen she would never have met the folks from San Francisco, and had she not met them she would never have believed she could captivate the world. But she was crowned, and she did meet them, and her mom let her go all the way out there to follow her star. A star which burned brightly then fell like a stone. Six months in San Francisco and she was dead from a methadone overdose in a filthy tenement room. She'd been pregnant too, no-one knew by whom. Apparently she'd fucked everyone on the block, and most of their relatives.

  I feel sorry for my folks, even though they're not alive and weren't alive when all this happened. At least they were spared that much.

  Feel sorry for Nathan's folks, because their son is dead and he should not have died the way he did, and never for that reason. Nathan's father, a Baptist minister, is a powerful man, a man of faith and strength and endless forgiveness. He knows the truth, always has done, but there is nothing he can do. Said to me one time that he believed his hands had been tied by God. Didn't know why. Didn't question why. Knew enough to believe there was a reason for everything. But despite his faith, his trust, his passion, I still saw him cry. Cry like a child. Tears running down his broad, black, forgiving face, and the way his wife held his hand until I felt their fingers might fuse together and never be separated.

  And they stood there in the Commune Room, me behind the protective screen, my hands cuffed to the chain around my waist, and I saw Nathan's ma look at me, look right through me, and I knew she believed too.,' know you didn't kill Nathan, her eyes said. I know you didn't kill Nathan, and I know you shouldn't be here, and I know what they're doing to you is bad… but I can't help you now. No-one can help you now except the Governor or the Lord Jesus Himself.

  And I smiled and nodded at her, and I made it okay for her to feel she could do nothing more. They had done all they could, all they could dare to do, and I was grateful for that.

  Grateful for small mercies.

  It is hard to believe that all this time has passed since that day, but then again that day seems like yesterday, even Nathan's face, as alive in my mind now as if we had shared breakfast together. I recall the sounds and colors, the rush of noise, the emotion, the horror. Everything intact, like a glass jigsaw puzzle, each piece reflecting some other angle of the same design.

  It is hard to believe… well, just that. It is hard to believe.

  Sometimes I take a moment to imagine I am elsewhere, even someone else. Mr. Timmons came down the other day with a transistor radio that played a song, something by The Byrds called 'California Dreamin", and though his intent was nothing more than to lift my mood, to lighten my day a little with something different, it saddened me to hear such a song. I recall Hendrix and Janis and The Elevators and Mike Bloomfield playing the Fillmore. I remember Jerry Garcia, Tom Wolfe and Timothy Leary with The Merry Pranksters. I remember the Kool-Aid Acid Test. I remember talking with Nathan about Huddy Ledbetter and Mississippi Fred McDowell, and I remember the invasion from England of The Rolling Stones and The Animals… all of this as we perceived it then: a mad rush of passionate fury in our hands and heads and hearts.

  Mr. Timmons never understood the culture. He understood JFK. He understood why it was so important to reach the moon first. He understood why the Vietnam War started and how communism had to be prevented. He understood this until his own son was killed out there and then he didn't speak of it again. He was passionate about baseball and Chrysler cars, and he loved his wife and his daughter with a sense of duty and integrity and pride. He watched the Zapruder film, and he cried for the fallen King, and he prayed for Jackie Bouvier, and if truth be known he prayed a little for Marilyn Monroe, whom he loved from afar just as I had loved Caroline Lanafeuille and Linny Goldbourne. Just as I had loved Sheryl Rose Bogazzi in 9th grade. Perhaps Mr. Timmons believed that had he been there he could have saved Marilyn just as I believed I could have saved Sheryl Rose. We believe such small things, but believing them makes them important, and sometimes they have to be enough, carrying such things and believing perhaps tha
t they will in some way carry us.

  Mr. Timmons also believes I didn't kill Nathan Verney in North Carolina on some cool night in 1970. He believes this, but he would never say it. It is not Mr. Timmons' job to question such things, for there is the way of the law, the way of justice, the Federal and Circuit and State and Appellate Courts, and there are tall grave men with heavy books who look into such things in detail, and they make the laws, they are the law, and who is Mr. Timmons to question this?

  Mr. Timmons is a Death Row warder down near Sumter, and he does what he does, as he abides by the code, and he leaves such matters as innocence and guilt to the Governor and the baby Jesus. He is neither expected nor paid to make such decisions. And so he does not.