The White Road

5


L OOKING BACK , I see a pattern in all that took place: a strange joining of disparate occurrences, a series of links between seemingly unconnected events stretching back into the past. I recall the honeycomb created by the imperfect layering of history, the proximity of what has gone before to that which now pertains, and I begin to understand. We are trapped not only by our own history but by the histories of all those with whom we choose to share our lives. Angel and Louis brought their pasts with them, as did Elliot Norton, as did I, and so it should have come as no surprise that just as current lives became interwoven, impacting on one another, so too pasts began to exert their pull, dragging innocent and guilty alike down beneath the earth, drowning them in brackish water, tearing them apart among the swollen buttresses of the Congaree. And in Thomaston, the first link lay waiting to be uncovered.



The maximum security facility at Thomaston, Maine, looked reassuringly like a prison; at least, it looked reassuring as long as you weren’t a prisoner there. Anyone arriving in Thomaston with the prospect of long-term incarceration in his future was likely to feel his spirits sink at his first sight of the jail. It had high, imposing walls and the kind of solidity that came from being burned down and rebuilt a couple of times since it was first opened in the 1820s. Thomaston had been selected as the site for the state prison since it was roughly halfway up the coast and accessible by boat for the transportation of inmates, but it was now nearing the end of its working life. A Supermax facility known as the MCI, or Maine Correctional Institution, had been opened in Warren in 1992. It was designed to house the worst offenders in a state of near permanent lockdown, along with those prisoners with serious behavioral problems, and the new state prison would eventually be added on an adjoining tract of land. Until then, Thomaston was still home to about four hundred men, one of whom, since his suicide attempt, was now the preacher, Aaron Faulkner.

I recalled Rachel’s response when she heard that Faulkner had apparently tried to take his own life.

“It doesn’t fit,” she said. “He’s not that type.”

“So why did he do it? It’s hardly a cry for help.”

She chewed at her lip. “If he did it, he did it to further some aim. According to the newspaper reports, the wounds in his arms were deep, but not so deep that he was in immediate danger. He cut veins, not arteries. That’s not the action of a man who really wants to die. For some reason, he wanted out of Supermax. The question is, why?”

Now it seemed that I might have the opportunity to pose that question to the man himself. I drove up to Thomaston after Angel and Louis had left for New York. I parked in a visitor’s space outside the main gate, then entered the reception area and gave my name to the sergeant of the guards at the desk. Behind him, and beyond the metal detector, was a wall of tinted reinforced glass concealing the main control room for the prison, where alarms, video cameras, and visitors were constantly monitored. The control room looked down on the visitation room to which, under ordinary circumstances, I would have been led for a face-to-face meeting with any of the men incarcerated in the facility.

Except these were not ordinary circumstances, and the Reverend Aaron Faulkner was far from being an ordinary prisoner.

Another guard arrived to escort me. I passed through the metal detector, attached my pass to my jacket, and was led to the elevator and the administration level on the third floor. This section of the prison was termed “soft side”: no prisoners were permitted here without escort, and it was separated from “hard side” by a system of dual air-locking doors that could not be opened simultaneously, so that even if a prisoner managed to get through the first door, the second would remain closed.

The colonel of the guards and the prison warden were both waiting for me in the warden’s office. The prison had swung between various regimes over the past thirty years: from strict discipline, rigidly enforced, through an ill-fated campaign of liberalism, disliked by the longer-serving guards, until finally it had settled at a midpoint that erred on the side of conservatism. In other words, the prisoners no longer spit at visitors and it was safe to walk through the general population, which was fine by me.

A bugle call sounded, indicating the end of rec time, and through the windows I could see bluegarbed prisoners begin to move across the yards toward their cells. Thomaston enclosed an area of eight or nine acres, including Haller Field, the prison’s playing field, its walls carved out of sheer rock. Unmarked, in a far corner beneath the walls, was the old execution site. The warden offered me coffee, then played nervously with his own cup, spinning it around the table by its handle. The colonel of the guards, who was almost as imposing as the prison itself, remained standing and silent. If he was as uneasy as the warden, then he didn’t show it. His name was Joe Long and his face displayed all the emotion of a cigar store Indian.

“You understand that this is highly unusual, Mr. Parker,” the warden began. “Visits are usually conducted in the visiting area, not through the bars of a cell. And we rarely have the attorney general’s office calling to request that we facilitate alternative arrangements.” He stopped talking and waited for me to respond.

“The truth is, I’d prefer not to be here myself,” I said. “I don’t want to face Faulkner again, not until the trial.”

The two men exchanged a look. “Rumor is that this trial has all the makings of a disaster,” said the warden. He seemed tired and vaguely disgusted.

I didn’t answer, so he spoke to fill the silence.

“Which, I guess, is why the prosecutor is so anxious that you should talk to Faulkner,” he concluded. “You think he’ll give anything away?” The expression on his face told me that he already knew the answer but I gave him the echo he expected anyway.

“He’s too smart for that,” I said.

“Then why are you here, Mr. Parker?” asked the colonel.

It was my turn to sigh.

“Frankly, colonel, I don’t know.”

The colonel didn’t speak as he, along with a sergeant, led me through 7 Dorm, past the infirmary where old men in wheel-chairs were given the drugs they needed to maximize their life sentences. The 5 and 7 Dorms housed the older, sicker prisoners, who shared multibed rooms decorated with hand-lettered signs (“Get Use To It,” “Ed’s Bed”). In the past, older special prisoners like Faulkner might have been housed here, or placed in administrative segregation in a cell among the general population, their movements restricted, until a decision was made about them. But the main segregation unit was now at the Supermax facility, which did not have the capacity to offer psychiatric services to prisoners, and Faulkner’s attempts to injure himself appeared to require some form of psychiatric investigation. A suggestion that Faulkner be transferred to the Augusta Mental Health Institute had been rejected by the attorney general’s office, which did not want to prejudice any future jurors into making a pretrial association between Faulkner and insanity, and by Faulkner’s own lawyers, who feared that the state might use the opportunity to discreetly place their client under more elaborate observation than was possible elsewhere. Since the state regarded the county jail as unsuitable for holding Faulkner, Thomaston became the compromise solution.

Faulkner had attempted to cut his wrists with a slim ceramic blade that he had concealed in the spine of his Bible before his transfer to the MCI. He had kept it, unused, until almost three months into his incarceration. A guard on routine night rounds had spotted him and called for help just as Faulkner appeared to be losing consciousness. The result was Faulkner’s transfer to the Mental Health Stabilization Unit at the western end of Thomaston prison, where he was initially placed in the acute corridor. His clothing was taken away and he was given instead a nylon smock. He was placed under constant camera watch, as well as being monitored by a prison guard who noted any movement or conversation in a logbook. In addition, all communication was recorded electronically. After five days in acute, Faulkner was transferred to sub-acute, where he was allowed state blues to replace his smock, hygiene products (but no razors), hot meals, showers, and access to a telephone. He had commenced one-on-one counseling with a prison psychologist and had been examined by psychiatrists nominated by his legal team, but had remained unresponsive. Then he had demanded a telephone call, contacted his lawyers and asked that he be allowed to speak to me. His request that the interview should be conducted from his cell was, perhaps surprisingly, met with approval. When I arrived in the MHSU, the guards were finishing off some chicken burgers left over from the prisoners’ lunches. In the unit’s main recreation area, the inmates stopped what they were doing and stared at me. One, a stocky, hunched man, barely five feet tall with lank dark hair, approached the bars and appraised me silently. I caught his eye, didn’t like what I felt, then looked away again. The colonel and the sergeant sat on the edge of a desk and watched as one of the unit’s guards led me down the corridor to Faulkner’s cell.

I felt the chill while I was still ten feet away from him. At first, I thought it was brought on by my own reluctance to face the old man, until I felt the guard beside me shiver slightly.

“What happened to the heating?” I asked.

“Heating’s on full blast,” he replied. “This place leaks heat like it’s blowing through a sieve, but never like this.”

He stopped while we were still out of sight of the cell’s occupant, and his voice dropped. “It’s him. The preacher. His cell is freezing. We’ve tried installing two heaters outside, but they short out every time.” He shifted uneasily on his feet. “It’s something to do with Faulkner. He just brings the temperature right down somehow. His lawyers are screaming a blue fit about the conditions, but there’s nothing we can do.”

As he concluded, something white moved to my right. The bars of the cell were almost flush with my line of sight, so that the hand that emerged appeared to have passed through a solid wall of steel. The long white fingers probed at the air, twitching and turning, as if they were gifted with the sense not only of touch, but of sight and sound as well. And then the voice came, like iron filings falling on paper.

“Parker,” it said. “You’ve come.”

Slowly, I walked toward the cell and saw the moisture on the walls. The droplets glittered in the artificial light, gleaming like thousands of small silver eyes. A smell of damp arose from the cell and from the man who stood before me.

He was smaller than I remembered him, and his long white hair had been cut back close to his skull, but the eyes still burned with that same strange intensity. He remained horribly thin: he had not put on weight, as some inmates do when they switch to a diet of prison food. It took me a moment to realize why.

Despite the cold in the cell, Faulkner was giving off waves of heat. He should have been burning up, his face feverish, his body wracked with tremors, but instead there was no trace of sweat on his face, and no sign of discomfort. His skin was dry as paper, so that it seemed he was on the verge of igniting from within, and the flames that emerged would consume him and leave him as burned ash.

“Come closer,” he said.

Beside me, the guard shook his head.

“I’m good,” I replied.

“Are you afraid of me, sinner?”

“Not unless you can pass through steel.” My words brought back that image of the hand seemingly materializing in the air and I heard myself swallow hard.

“No,” said the old man. “I have no need of parlor tricks. I’ll be out of here, soon enough.”

“You think?”

He leaned forward and pressed his face against the cold bars.

“I know.”

He smiled and his pale tongue emerged from his mouth and licked at his dry lips.

“What do you want?”