The Fact of a Body Read online

  It’s not that I don’t believe them. Not exactly. But I wonder about the neatness of this advice. It echoes so perfectly, too perfectly, the silences I already know of my parents. The silence about my father’s rages. The silence that followed for years about my missing sister. It echoes—but we are not there yet—what happened to my sister’s body.

  For now, just understand this: They need to leave the past behind.

  So in my memory my grandfather is there, sitting like a lump in my throat, in the living room chair at the foot of the stairs. He is there at Christmas, he is there at Easter, he is there when it is just Sunday and my grandmother sits beside him and asks me to play a game of checkers with her, and I do not say that I am too old for checkers. He is there when I am thirteen and wearing my first grown-up dress, black velvet with a deep V-neck halter. He is there when I rise onto my tiptoes and twirl to make the crinoline skirt float up around me. It is his hot breath that leans into my neck and whispers how grown-up I look, how nicely my body fills out the dress. He is there when I am fifteen, and just starting to be angry.

  * * *

  When we left Lorilei she was sitting on the police station bench, her head in her hands, sobbing. She’s pregnant with the next child inside her, the boy who’ll grow up in his brother’s wake.

  In the months that follow Ricky’s arrest, she’ll walk a hard line between her grief and her rage. That one drink on the porch the first night the searchers were out for Jeremy—that will turn into months of drinking, months of drugs. She’ll fall back into her old ways and the past will flood out over the present. Inside her, the whole time, will grow the new life, but she won’t then be able to nurture it. It will just grow.

  One year later there’s a newspaper clipping that matches Lorilei’s address. Reading it, I see a woman (she refuses to identify herself, but her hair must still be the light brown shade that is often a childhood blond) walk from a house to meet the cops as they step out of their cruiser. She cradles a baby in her arms.

  “Y’all don’t need to come in,” she says.

  “Ma’am, we’re responding to a suspected domestic incident,” the cop says. “A neighbor called.”

  “Y’all don’t need to come in,” she repeats. She squints into the sun. Her left eye is already starting to swell. The baby in her arms begins to fuss and she shifts him tighter in to her chest. She’s named this boy Cole. He’ll have his father’s last name. “Look,” she says. “If he goes”—she nods back at the house—“I ain’t got no other way to pay my bills.”

  She looks at the cop hard now, in the eyes. “You have a good day,” she says firmly. Then she walks back to the house, carrying the baby in her arms.

  One more year later, when Ricky is finally sentenced for her son’s murder, she doesn’t go to the courtroom. She sits in a motel room across the road and waits. Her brother Richard is in the courtroom when the jury gives its decision. Three hours, they’ve deliberated. Ricky will die for Jeremy’s death.

  Richard crosses the street back to Lorilei. It’s over, he tells her. It’s done.

  * * *

  When I began writing this story I thought it was because of the man on the tape. I thought it was because of Ricky. In him I saw my grandfather. I wanted to understand.

  But I think now that I write because of Lorilei. Her story didn’t end the afternoon that Richard embraced her in the motel room while, across the road, Ricky was led away in handcuffs. Ten years after the first trial, Ricky’s death sentence was overturned. He was taken off death row and sent back to Calcasieu Parish to await another trial.

  That trial was in 2003. It was the trial that had ended just before I came to Louisiana. That it had just ended was the reason the lawyer showed me the tape.

  I have the transcript. Day two of the trial, the prosecution calls Lorilei to the stand. She tells the jury about handing Jeremy his BB gun. “That was the last time I saw him,” she says. She catches herself. “I mean—that was the last time I saw him alive.” She tells them about going to the Lawson house to search for him. About meeting Ricky. Using the phone.

  The prosecutor thanks her. The judge excuses her. She returns to her seat. The trial continues.

  But on day four, the defense calls her to the stand.

  The jurors must be so confused at this moment. She’s the dead boy’s mother. She’s already testified. They’ve been looking at pictures of Jeremy’s body for days. At one point a juror has broken down crying at the photographs of the body, and the judge has had to stop the trial. Why is the defense calling her?

  But she rises and walks to the stand. She knows all about Ricky’s life now. She’s spent years learning. She sits down in the wooden box, smooths her dress over her hips, and turns in her seat to look at the jury.

  “Do you have anything you’d like to say to the jury?” the defense attorney asks. He’s a tall, slim Brit. He’s been defending Ricky for twenty years.

  “Yes,” she says. Her voice steady. “I do.”

  The room must be silent, everyone rapt. Lorilei readies herself. These are the words she’s practiced.

  “Even though I can hear my child’s death cry, I, too, can hear Ricky Langley cry for help.”

  It’s Ricky she testifies for. She tries to keep him alive.

  I read her words in the courtroom, and what I see is my father, as he folds his fingers around my grandfather’s hand. He feels the weight of my grandfather’s hand in his. He lifts, and helps hoist the old man into the car so he can bring him across the bridge. So he can bring him home to us.

  I want—I need—to understand.

  Part Two: Consequence

  Eleven

  Arizona and Louisiana, 1964–1965

  The year is 1964, and twenty-four-year-old Alcide Langley, the man who will be Ricky’s father, steers a station wagon along a highway in Red Rock, Arizona. Maybe to understand is to go back to the beginning, and for Ricky I must start here. I imagine the station wagon my parents had when I was a child, but that was the early 1980s, so subtract, now, the faux-wood paneling, the power steering. Give this family a smaller car, and in the back, five children crammed in, four across, with the baby balanced between her sisters’ kneecaps. The car’s trunk holds their belongings in cardboard boxes bound with twine; beneath the girls’ feet are smaller boxes that make their little legs stretch almost straight out. Beyond the car, out into the distance, rises the eponymous rock, blazing red and orange, more like fire than any horizon that Alcide, born a child of the Louisiana swamp, has ever known. The earth glows as though lit from within.

  As though it is scorched and barren. As Alcide drives, he aches for—he senses like a memory behind everything—the lush greens, the hopeful blues, of California. The sight of a palm tree silhouetted against the sky made even his life feel like a movie. He never wanted to leave. But his job at an auto plant, arranged for him by his uncle, was what had allowed him and Bessie to move just outside Los Angeles five years before. That job supported all of them: him, Bessie, and the five children she now turns around in her seat to shush. Alcide lost the job. Without it, there’s nothing for them in California.

  “Quit that!” Bessie says to Oscar. He’s teasing his little sister Darlene again, poking her until she squirms and laughs, and if he keeps it up she’ll drop Vicky, the baby balanced between Darlene’s and Francis’s knees. Oscar, the oldest, is a freckled boy of five, with hair Bessie cut with the aid of a mixing bowl and a gap-toothed, ready grin. Someday a lawyer will hold up his picture next to a photo of another little boy with that smile, and make a point about how similar they look, but not yet—it is still February 28, 1964, and for a few moments, at least, Oscar is still alive. He pokes Darlene one more time in the side, and she says “Mommy!” and the baby laughs. The baby, too, has only a few more minutes to live.

  Bessie ignores Darlene. The children will work it out; they always do. She’s not happy they’re going home, either, but it sure will be easier to have relatives around.

&
nbsp; They’ll settle in the small clot of towns around Lake Charles, Louisiana—Hecker, LeBleu, Iowa—where Bessie’s brother lives and where Alcide’s father is buried. Bessie and Alcide courted in these towns. Maybe they necked behind the pecan trees that ring the old graveyard, or laughed together in the gas station’s parking lot. They’d both left school after eighth grade, Alcide a local boy and Bessie new in town, from Indiana. He was seventeen, she was sixteen when they tied the knot. They married for love, not for need; Oscar wasn’t born until ten months later, the following April. When the local paper ran its annual May announcement of spring births, it listed Bessie and Alcide’s son as “Baby boy Langley.” They hadn’t settled on a name yet, that was how badly they wanted to get this new family right. Finally they chose the name Oscar for the history it had on both sides: Bessie’s father’s name and the name of the brother Alcide had lost when he was just a boy, dead in a car crash at eighteen. Alcide had been eight at the time. His brother was a god to him. Then a lost one.

  A year later, Bessie was pregnant again. This time the baby was a girl and the name Francis came more easily. Darlene the year after that. Then Alcide had finally gotten it in his head that maybe they could try their luck in Los Angeles. Bessie had always wanted to go—she was used to the idea that the sprawl of a country was something you could cross. No more living amid his parents and eight brothers and sisters and their families, roots so strong they bound you. A new life. New adventure.

  But it turned out to be harder than they had thought. Lonelier, too. And now there’s no choice but to go home with no money, no prospects, Alcide driving the whole way back like a dog with his tail between his legs. For seven hours now, on unrelenting highway, Alcide has been driving. For twenty hours still, he will. Beside him, Bessie rests, and if her seat has a lap belt (which in 1964 has only begun to come standard in the front decks of cars, and are rarely in the back) she has left it undone.

  Almost thirty years from now, when the lawyers tell this story at the murder trial of Bessie and Alcide’s unborn son, they will move what happens next to the pitch-black middle of the night, as though it is unthinkable in bright midday light. But in 1964 it is two o’clock in the afternoon, and Alcide sweats in the sun. There is no air conditioning, and the air outside the rolled-down windows blows as hot as a heater. Under the windshield, the sun’s heat must concentrate and beat down on Alcide. The children need food; the children need clothing; the children need. He cannot give the children what they need. Maybe now the sweat stings his eyes and he reaches one hand up to wipe the sweat away, and this—just this instant, when his hand cups his eyes, when his eyes are not on the road and his hand is not on the wheel—maybe this is how it happens. At the trials, the lawyers will question whether Alcide in this moment was drunk. Does he now have a flask hidden under his seat, a flask that holds liquor he must balance the wheel to gulp down, but that makes all the long hours of giving up—of steering his family right toward giving up—possible? For some acts the heart must be steeled. But as he is about to lose so much, I must find a kinder way to tell this story. Alcide sweats in the heat.

  He does not see the bridge abutment.

  The car slides off the road and into the abutment. The windshield shatters, throwing the family into the air. Oscar, the only boy, the beloved boy—his head is severed clear off. The baby girl dies. The middle sisters—Francis, Darlene, and Judy—live. Alcide lives; the sisters will have a father. And Bessie, who right now lies unconscious at the bottom of a concrete ditch, is falling into a coma that will keep her in a dark sleep for days to come—but she, too, will live. The sisters will have a mother.

  Her hips are smashed. Her pelvis, smashed. In the years to come, she will endure thirty operations on her right leg before the doctors give up and amputate it. Now, while Bessie lies in a coma in an Arizona hospital, Alcide arranges to take the girls back to Louisiana. The same local paper that announced Oscar’s birth runs a notice of the crash and a service to be held at a cemetery, ringed in pecan trees, in Jefferson Davis Parish.

  At Hebert Cemetery, Alcide buries Oscar and the baby in an unmarked grave at the foot of his father’s stone, leaving space for when he dies, and beside him, a space for Bessie. As he stands at the grave and watches his children go into the ground, he must wonder how soon she’ll need it. He must square his shoulders and wipe at his eyes and pray to keep the family he’s been left with. Then he and the girls move in with Bessie’s brother Lyle and his wife, Luann. Lyle and Luann are strict Pentecostal. They don’t have indoor plumbing, and decades from now, at the time of the trials, they still won’t. They don’t play music. They take in children who need help, they’re kind like that—but sometimes, with Luann’s sternness and the way they keep taking in children even when the cupboards are bare, you never can tell if it’s generosity or if it’s that God won’t give them enough suffering to prove their faith to him, and so they’ll arrange privation themselves.

  But they’re there when Alcide needs them. Soon he has a new job, a long-haul trucking company that will keep him on the road for days at a time. I imagine him that first morning. He rises early and stands outside, ready to go, just after dawn. He’ll walk the mile to the pickup spot. It’s October; the grass is wet and jungle-wild in the morning dew, the earth more pungently alive than it was even in California. He feels that new smell like a clot of earth in his throat. He could choke on all that’s new. Darlene and Judy follow him outside and stand in front of the house, silent, wide-eyed, watching him the way they’ve been all morning. Darlene’s almost four now and has said little in the past few weeks. Judy’s two and keeps asking, Where’s Oscar, where’s Mama, I want baby.

  “You girls mind Luann and I’ll be back soon,” Alcide says. He doesn’t say home.

  Darlene’s face twists like she’s about to cry.

  “Aw, honey, you’ll be all right,” he says. He rubs at his neck where the collar itches. He’s had the flannel shirt for years, but Luann insisted on mending the elbow and starching the collar, and its stiffness is irritating him. In one hand he folds the brim of a new white hat with the trucking company’s logo. Flattens it, works it with his fingers, crushes it in a fist, opens it again. “You’ll be all right,” he repeats.

  Then he goes.

  * * *

  To see him standing there on the grass, the sun beating on his broad face, the sweat settling into the folds of his forehead, I work from the picture the local newspaper ran of him and Bessie on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. His face is square, his skin rough, his eyes behind thick glasses are heavy-lidded with age. I try to scrub off time from the picture, erase all that the decades have brought.

  But there are parts of the story where the record is so forceful, where what happens is so striking, that the facts overwhelm my imagination.

  Such as what happens to Bessie. When she wakes from the coma, she’s transferred to Charity Hospital in New Orleans, a three-hour drive from where the girls live with Luann and Lyle in Hecker. It’s too far to be close to her babies and too close to be the kind of freeing far that carried her and Alcide to California. It’s just stuck, just waiting. In-between time.

  There, in the state Bessie wanted so badly to leave, the doctors construct a cast to hold her body. They lay wet strips of plaster in rows from her ankles to the top of her chest, until all of her is imprisoned in stiff white. A hole over her genitals allows waste to exit. Her legs they fix splayed open, with a metal bar running between her ankles that the hospital orderlies will yank to move her. Only her arms are free, and when Luann takes Darlene to see her in the hospital—Darlene is just a child now, but someday she will be the one who rises and walks to the front of the courtroom to tell the story of her family—Bessie is able to lift her arms. “Mama,” Darlene says, and Bessie pulls Darlene to her and starts to weep. Darlene will remember that hug forever: the familiar pull of the familiar arms, her mother’s familiar love, the alarming tears falling wet on her mother’s face and, instead of the soft f
amiliar lap, the cast.

  Months pass as Bessie lies in the hospital. One month, two months, three. On her back, in the plaster cast, she stares up at the ceiling. What kind of in-body suffering is she doing alone in this place? What will she have to carry with her later? She stares at the ceiling for so many hours she must start to see patterns in the tiles. The tiles are cracked and have water damage. Sometimes the spindly rust-colored lines must look to her like a clawed hand, sometimes like the striated jasper rocks she used to pick out of the riverbank when she was a child. She loved those rocks when they were wet, when they shined and sparkled in the sunlight. But they always turned dull as they dried.

  Encircled by a curtain that hangs on a track around her bed, Bessie is alone. But beyond the curtain the room is full of unseen women. Wards meant for twenty hold forty. Only their moans reach her, seeping through the thin fabric of the curtain.

  And the smells. The way rot wheedles in, the awareness of nearby death that creeps up your nostrils, crawls over your skin. Infections pass through, too. Decades from now, a doctor will remember a night eight women died on just one ward, and give thanks that those times are over. But now Bessie is in the middle of them. She can do nothing but lie in her white cocoon and wait. Try not to listen. Try not to smell. In the months she lies here, guards from Angola regularly bring inmates to the hospital. Angola, where her son will someday be an inmate. A buyout scheme: The guards and the technicians and doctors who treat the inmates have been paid to look the other way while they escape. At least once, while Bessie lies in her bed, an inmate is discovered gunfire rings through the hospital. Through the curtain, she must listen.