Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates
It was Father Kranach who’d explained to the corporal that the Church had not canonized the Good Thief but the common belief was, Jesus had himself canonized the Good Thief in his agony on the cross.
Nor was the name “Dismas” to be found in the Scripture but only in common legend.
Meaning that Saint Dismas is outside the Church. An outlaw and a loser yet blessed of God.
And so it is, Father Kranach said, no one prays to Saint Dismas who is not an outlaw and a loser.
The corporal said, But your church is named for him, Father—the Church of the Good Thief!—for this seemed to the corporal very strange, and wonderful. And Father Kranach said, That is the wisdom of the Church. Saint Dismas is a rogue saint recognized as the only way to God for men like the most desperate inmates of Clinton Correctional, those who have committed unspeakable and unforgiveable acts and who are as far from God as the inhabitants of a cave are far from sunlight. Those men who would be ashamed to approach Jesus, for the evil in their hearts, yet are able to approach Saint Dismas for all that they know of him through legend.
But he isn’t a real saint?—in the Catholic Church?—the corporal seemed anxious to know; and Father Kranach said, If Dismas is a “real” saint or not is irrelevant, Brett. For all that matters is that men come to God through him, and find Jesus through him, who would otherwise be lost. That is enough sainthood.
WERE YOU COERCED into confessing he’d been asked repeatedly and always he said no, I was not.
Of his own free will he had confessed to the terrible crimes he’d committed even those he could not recall clearly through the mist of memory and when trying to recall, it was like trying to hear a small still voice amid a crazed clanking and clattering of heavy machinery.
There is something hurt in my brain the corporal told them. In a hoarse and numbed voice answering their questions for seven hours and his gray-ghost-figure and faltering words videotaped through the long night. Hoping he would be granted mercy, a death by firing squad which was a soldier’s proper death standing at attention in some remnant of pride despite the black hood over his head.
Informed then, such an execution would be only in Nevada.
He would sit on Death Row at Dannemora, they told him. For it was rare any prisoners were executed in New York State in recent memory.
And this was stunning to him, and a cause of dismay.
For he had pleaded guilty. To all charges, to any charges brought against him he had pleaded guilty for there was no yearning in the corporal greater than a yearning for expiation, and for annihilation.
Such a death then would be instantaneous and he could not but believe, his soul too would be annihilated.
Give up the ghost—he had wished for this release!
Yet somehow it happened despite his intentions, the corporal was not allowed to enter a plea of guilty to first-degree homicide after all.
The question was, where was the girl’s body? Without the girl’s body could the corporal be charged with murder? For the corporal’s confession was of no more intrinsic legal worth than the corporal’s denial of the crime would have been, in the absence of witnesses to the crime and “substantial” physical evidence.
So the corporal’s lawyer argued.
Yet, the prosecutor denied this vehemently.
The prosecutor argued that there is legal precedent for such charges. Verdicts of guilty have many times been brought against defendants in cases in which the bodies of the victims have not been found, having been hidden or destroyed by the defendants; and in this case, there was the defendant’s confession, the corroboration of several witnesses having seen the defendant with the missing girl earlier in the evening, and enough physical evidence to proceed to trial.
He’d led them to Sandhill Point in the Nautauga Preserve. Desperate to reveal to them the girl’s broken body. He’d told them of the shallow grave in which they had laid her—in which he had laid her—covered her with dirt and leaves, with their hands—the butts of their rifles—then it seemed to him this was a mistake for there had been no grave in this rocky soil but he’d staggered carrying her body that was still warm, limp and heavy for one so small he carried to the river to be swept away and lost where the Black Snake emptied into Lake Ontario miles away to the west. By this time exhausted and staggering and sick in his gut, terribly sick having to lean on a deputy’s arm and his wrists cuffed at his waist in front of his body yet still he was having difficulty keeping his balance. And the disgust for him in their faces, he could not bear to see. And worse yet the irritation, the impatience, as in a game among the more deft and skilled players there pass glances of derision aimed at those less deft and skilled, and these scarcely disguised from the objects of derision. And he was made to think I am not a man now. I am something less than a man. Some of the deputies had known Brett Kincaid as a quarterback on the Carthage High School varsity team two years running and one of those years a championship year in the Adirondack District, not so very long ago. And now to see Brett Kincaid in this state and to hear his shamed words was very hard for these men who’d known Graham Kincaid also.
Afterward too weak to stand he was taken to the Carthage hospital ER to be given IV fluids for “severe dehydration” and kept in the hospital overnight before being released to the Carthage jail still weak and uncertain on his feet and kept in isolation and under twenty-four-hour suicide watch it was believed for his own protection.
At all times under suicide-watch until finally he gave up all hope—for the present.
And then in the Beechum County Courthouse where he was taken in shackles. Here the large, first-floor courtroom was strangely crowded and the mood was agitated, excited. For there were strong feelings in this place—a strong bias against the corporal who had killed the nineteen-year-old girl and dumped her body in the river and a strong bias in favor of the corporal who was a wounded war-veteran believed to have possibly confessed to a crime he had not committed in order to shield certain of his friends, and suffering from “neurological impairment.”
After months of deliberation there was to be no trial. In this, the citizens of Carthage were disappointed.
No trial, and no jury. For there was no protestation of innocence on the part of the defendant.
Judge Nathan Brede was presiding. In his late fifties Brede was the highest-ranked judge in Beechum County, a former prosecutor.
Impervious and unblinking Brede was a stranger to the corporal gazing down at the young man scarred and part-blind in the wreckage of his life.
And how do you plead, Mr. Kincaid?
Your Honor, my client pleads guilty to one count of voluntary manslaughter as charged and one count of illegal disposal of a body as charged.
Do you so plead, Mr. Kincaid?
Your Honor, my client so pleads.
Mr. Kincaid, do you understand the terms of this guilty plea? Do you understand the consequences?
In the courtroom there was quiet as the corporal seemed to summon himself from some distance, to lift his eyes to the calm-assessing eyes of Judge Brede.
As in a near-inaudible voice the corporal murmured Yes Your Honor.
You are pleading guilty to one count of voluntary manslaughter as charged and one count of illegal disposal of a body as charged?
Yes Your Honor.
Yes? Did you say yes, Mr. Kincaid?
Yes Your Honor.
Yet it was not so clear to him. All that he knew clearly was the word guilty.
And the sentence pronounced by the judge—fifteen to twenty years.
Fifteen to twenty years! He had been waiting to hear the death sentence.
Stunned and speechless standing shackled and waiting—and yet, the court had been adjourned with a strike of the judge’s gavel.
So abruptly, the sentencing was over.
So abruptly, the corporal’s fate had been determined.
Not to die but—to live?
Without a backward glance the judge had exited the court
At the front of the courtroom the corporal remained stunned and slow-blinking for he’d believed that he had confessed to the murder—murders—hadn’t the police officers predicted he would sit on Death Row for the remainder of his life? Yet, the charge seemed to have been reduced to voluntary manslaughter.
As if the corporal had not been of sufficient sound mind and body, to have committed a true murder.
And his lawyer confiding in him, in an undertone almost gloating, and repellent to the corporal, he’d be eligible for parole in just seven years.
Good behavior! Out in seven years, man.
He shrank from the man. This was not the original lawyer who had volunteered to represent Brett Kincaid but another, younger.
They knew they couldn’t win shit. Not without the body. They knew they were fucked. Man, seven years! Did you luck out.
Yet, the corporal had been sentenced. The corporal would be removed from the courtroom under restraint.
Shackled at his wrists and legs. Like a wild animal he’d been shackled to be brought into the courtroom to be seated at a table at the front of the room beneath the judge’s high bench where he might be observed by all in the courtroom, in pity and disgust.
For in the jail, the corporal had behaved unpredictably. The COs had deemed him a security-risk to himself as to others.
For it seemed that a sudden fury flared up in the corporal, at unpredictable times. As he could not control seizures of his upper body or paralyzing rushes of pain in his legs so he could not control these outbreaks of temper that ran their course within minutes, or seconds leaving onlookers frightened of him.
In the front row of seats his mother Ethel Kincaid continued weeping. Wailing loudly and bitterly like a TV female shameless in emotion to no purpose other than to make others uncomfortable and to rouse in them an acute wish to escape her company. For it seemed clear to Mrs. Kincaid that her son’s enemies in Carthage had campaigned against him, and had won; and in his physical state, a sentence of fifteen to twenty years at Dannemora was a death sentence, for he would never be released in his lifetime.
Bailiffs held back the distraught Mrs. Kincaid, who wanted to rush to her son to embrace him. As the corporal himself shrank from the excited woman and could not bring himself to face her.
Exiting the courtroom stiff-walked by bailiffs gripping each of his arms above the elbow. The awkward shackle-shuffle through a doorway at the rear which no one except courthouse employees and law enforcement officers could use as Mrs. Kincaid cried after them—Murderers! Murderers of my poor soldier-son!—and then to a corridor and another door outside which a van with barred back windows was waiting to transport Brett Kincaid immediately to the Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora, New York, to begin his indeterminate sentence fifteen to twenty years.
AT DANNEMORA, at the Canadian border—“Little Siberia.”
For much of the first year, in isolation.
For it was believed by the warden of the facility, K.O. Heike, that the corporal’s crime was such, the publicity had been such, some of the inmates would have the impression that Brett Kincaid had raped and murdered a child, and his life in the general population would be at risk.
BUT WHAT RELIEF THEN, in that other world.
Now he’d crossed over. Now he was imprisoned like a beast, and surrounded by beasts. And in the eyes of the COs—the guards—there was no ambiguity, he was not the corporal but only just a young-white-Caucasian-inmate B. Kincaid with medical disabilities who’d been designated security-risk at the time of his transfer.
The terms of his incarceration were so much a part of his official identity, it was as if fifteen to twenty years had been tattooed on his forehead.
Manslaughter, voluntary. Fifteen to twenty years.
As soon as a man was incarcerated at Dannemora, he would think of how much time he must “do” before being released. How much time before he might apply for parole.
Except if his sentence was life-without-parole. Except if his sentence was death.
Often, the corporal forgot, and thought—Am I on Death Row?
For in even his lucid moments the corporal did not truly believe that he would ever be freed from the isolation unit, from a confinement of a few discolored walls, floors and ceilings, and bars, let alone from Dannemora—(of which he had but the vaguest impression having seen the astonishing long sixty-foot-high concrete wall of the color of old, soiled bones when he’d been first brought to the facility in shackles to begin his sentence as prescribed by law); he did not truly believe that time was continuing to pass like a stream bearing him along as in his younger, former life but rather, time had become a molten substance very sluggishly moving and it was against this movement, against the current and not with it, he had to struggle just to stay afloat and keep from drowning.
This effort, this exertion—most days, it required all of his strength.
Except for a shifting team of volunteer-lawyers, most of them newly graduated from upstate law schools—Albany, Cornell, Buffalo—he had few visitors.
He had few callers.
And sometimes, if a call came for B. Kincaid, he refused to speak to the caller.
His throat closed up, as if a fist had been shoved down it.
The Kincaid case as it was called had generated controversy in legal circles, in upstate New York. But this controversy did not involve the corporal who refused to give thought to what his life had become as a case.
God did not think of a man as a case. For a case is to be solved—and a man cannot be solved.
Still it was known to him, for he’d received letters on the subject from numerous parties, that in Beechum County where the search for the missing girl had prevailed for months there remained outrage in some quarters that Brett Kincaid’s sentence was so “light” and that he would be eligible for parole in so few years; and there remained outrage in other quarters, that Brett Kincaid had been incarcerated at all, and in the notorious maximum-security prison at Dannemora, for the prevailing belief in these quarters was that the wounded Iraq War veteran was not the man responsible for the disappearance of Cressida Mayfield; or, if he was the man, he hadn’t been legally responsible for his actions and if he’d been institutionalized at all, he should have been sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.
Defense funds had been established, to “bring justice” to Brett Kincaid. Who these individuals were, calling for funds on the Internet, what connection they had with one another or with Corporal Kincaid or any of the volunteer-lawyers officially attached to his case the corporal had no idea. Father Kranach was concerned, none of these strangers was accountable for money sent to them in Brett Kincaid’s name but Brett Kincaid himself seemed scarcely to care.
Saying to the priest, “Anywhere I am is Death Row. And where I am, I belong.”
ILLUMINATION ROUNDS—WHITE PHOSPHORUS—STREAMING onto the enemy.
Deafening roar of attack helicopters, he woke cringing and whimpering in his sleep and the interior of his mouth and lungs coated with sand.
Both his legs were gone. Yet, the pain remained.
His hands, his arms to the elbow. Blown off, and the stark white bone shining through the blood bright as ridiculous false blood of a child’s TV horror film.
Screaming he’d heard his name, one of his friends screaming his name he was hearing this now but could not see where.
Fuck they deserved some fucking fun, the guys said. If you survived and had not been blown up or shrapnel in your guts or heads you deserved some fucking fun shooting at civilians like rats freaking in terror, cutting off a finger, an ear, a teeny dick, ni
See it’s like some warrior-custom, Muksie was saying. Pouches made of enemy-faces and actual scalps to wear on your head but prob’ly you’d had to cure the damn things—like “taxidermy”—so they wouldn’t rot and stink on your head.
THOSE WHO TELEPHONED Brett Kincaid in Clinton Correctional Facility were few. And all were female, from Carthage.
Of these the most persistent was Brett’s mother Ethel Kincaid. For Ethel in her shrewdness had found a way to make calls to her incarcerated son at taxpayers’ expense through a county family-services “emergency” fund.
As Ethel in her shrewdness and something very like a subversive sense of humor had found a way to keep alive her son’s case in the Carthage press and TV news by announcing “fresh clues”—“new witnesses”—“exculpatory evidence”—at regular intervals, calling such local-media figures as Evvie Estes of WCTG-TV and Hal Roche of the Carthage Post-Journal and when they failed to respond to her phone messages approaching them on the street, stalking them to their very homes secure in the knowledge that probably, certainly, no one in Carthage would dare to summon the police to arrest her, Ethel Kincaid the grieving mother of the wrongly persecuted, wrongly convicted and incarcerated Iraq War hero Corporal Brett Kincaid.
Since the late summer of 2005 virtually every lawyer in Beechum County including those long retired and elderly had been contacted by Mrs. Kincaid to aid in the campaign to free her son and had learned to avoid the grieving mother.
Even individuals convinced that Corporal Kincaid was unjustly convicted and willing to contribute money to his “defense fund” had learned to avoid the grieving mother.