The priest was of no age Brett could determine: not young but not old, nor even middle-aged. He was short and broad-shouldered with spidery limbs and a nervous habit of stroking his hair-flat straw-hair combed across the hump of his head.
Always his greeting was a brisk handshake. How are you, Brett?
And he was sincere, he sincerely wanted to know.
Seven days a week at the prison the Catholic priest Father Fred Kranach was on call. Unlike the Protestant chaplain who came only when required for services and counseling and then it seemed, judging by his edgy smiles, reluctantly.
Why a Catholic priest is single and celibate. For a wife, children distract a man and drain his energies from his calling.
Why a Catholic priest when he is a good priest is an incarnation of Jesus Christ: the single one who is for all, who has died for all, who will dwell in the hearts of all if but beckoned.
The corporal had never known any Catholic priest in the past. He had not once stepped inside a Roman Catholic church though at the foot of Potsdam Street was old dour-red-brick St. Mary's, the oldest Catholic church in Beechum County, past which he'd often bicycled as a boy.
Strange that Father Kranach didn't seem to care that Brett Kincaid was not a Catholic.
Father Kranach did not question the corporal about his wartime experiences nor did he allude to the corporal's disabilities. Only obliquely did he allude to the fact that Brett had "served" in the Iraq War at a young age. More vehemently he spoke of the war-the wars-against terror: the crusade that would never end.
Like wishing to eradicate evil. But evil will never end.
In the prison Brett Kincaid rarely looked another inmate in the face. It is wisest not to make eye contact. Yet lifting his eyes to the priest almost shyly, in yearning seeing that Father Kranach was smiling at him seeing him.
Happy in knowing a secret. Like one who has died and has returned to help others.
He had thought it was a curse, the wreck of his body. Yet now he understood, God had allowed this wreck of a body to prevail, and to endure.
In other, earlier wars fought by American soldiers, such severe wounds would have meant death.
Feeling in the Church of the Good Thief not happiness but a cessation of grief, pain.
Cessation of guilt.
These were temporary and not permanent. Yet, his spirits were lifted.
For Father Kranach had explained to him, at his bequest, the principles of the Catholic confession.
Father Kranach instructed him in an abbreviated act of contrition O God I am heartily sorry for all my sins. Only enter my soul and my soul shall be healed.
In the fourth year of his incarceration, she came to see him.
Many times she'd requested permission from him to visit and always he'd told her no, not a good idea. Often he didn't reply to her letters at all.
Yet of course, Arlette Mayfield did not give up. She was a Christian woman for whom pride was a sort of shining cloth, expensive silk for instance, the value of which lies in trampling on it and allowing others to trample freely on it.
Until finally Brett said yes.
Though he didn't want to see Arlette Mayfield, did not ever want to see any of the Mayfields, or anyone from his life back there, yet he gave in, he wrote back to Mrs. Mayfield saying yes.
And immediately Arlette replied to him, saying she would drive to Dannemora the following Friday, stay overnight in a motel and arrive at the prison when visitors' hours began at 8 A.M.
For Arlette would be driving alone, it seemed. A lengthy drive following narrow circuitous routes through the foothills of the Adirondacks.
This was a relief. He could not bear to ever see Zeno Mayfield again.
Juliet's parents. So very close to having been his parents, too.
PROCEDURE WAS: visitors arrived at the front entrance of the prison, passed through security checkpoints, signed in and the prisoner whom they wished to visit was notified, and escorted to the visitors' room; no visitors were allowed into the visitors' room except by escort, after the prisoner had been brought there.
When the call came for him, his first instinct was to say no.
Steeling himself for seeing her after so many years. And the strangeness of having a visitor who knew him not as the Kincaid case but as Brett.
For Ethel had not made the trip-every month her health was worsening, such a damn long bus ride would kill her.
The visitors' room was a large bright-lit clamorous and inhospitable space. All of the inmates were men and most of the visitors were women.
Here and there in the large, open space were children, some very young. Brett felt the sharpness of his loss as he'd never quite felt it before-not only of his life as a man, a husband, but his potential life as a father, a man with a family.
All that, he'd thrown away.
Brett saw a tall thin woman with silvery-brown hair being led in his direction by a guard. She was smiling at him-was this Arlette Mayfield? He felt a faint shock-the faded woman, the bright smile.
There are the parents of your friends who are old, and there are the parents of your friends who are young-in the Mayfields' case, both Arlette and Zeno had been young, youthful. In jeans and pullover shirts, returning from a "run around the cemetery" in waterstained jogging shoes, Arlette Mayfield had seemed more like an older sister of Juliet's than her mother.
"Brett! Hello . . ."
Her eyes were larger than he recalled, in her thin face. Her hair was feathery-thin wisps. Her smiling mouth looked bracketed by pain.
Brett stammered a greeting. Thinking This is a mistake, I can't do this.
But somehow, Arlette Mayfield was seated across from him, at a table. Between them was a Plexiglas barrier. Through a grated opening in the barrier they could speak to each other; or rather, Arlette could speak to Brett who was shocked and stunned into silence.
Visits with prisoners were limited to a half hour. The corporal recalled from training that in a dangerous situation in which the immediate future is unpredictable you must slow time down by an act of will, you must separate and "own" each second, otherwise you will be seized and swept away.
It was not possible, what was happening now. That he was facing this woman whom he had avoided, for years. That she was speaking to him warmly and with emotion yet not at all reproachfully, even with respect-(he would recall this afterward, astonished: respect)-and he was able to respond if only crudely, awkwardly-yes, no, I think so, maybe . . .
He guessed that she'd been ill. Juliet's mother.
The thin, wispy-graying hair-female relatives of his had looked like this-had to be cancer, chemotherapy and the hair growing back but not as it had been.
He could not ask her. He could not ask her a single question about herself.
You can call me Mom-soon!
She'd joked with him. Part of the joke was, Arlette Mayfield was so very young, funny and playful as a girl, quicker to joke than Juliet in fact.
Calling Mrs. Mayfield Mom. Brett had laughed.
His own mother was no Mom. That was part of the joke.
But he had to acknowledge: Arlette was not Mom.
Never his mother-in-law. Rather, the mother of the girl he'd murdered.
(Strange: he rarely recalled that girl's name. An eccentric name, he'd never heard the name before, possibly he'd resented her for this, for such "special" qualities, her air of knowing herself "special" in the very presence of her older sister whom everyone adored as they did not adore her. And what right had she, this plain, fierce sister, making a claim upon him!) (Though they'd been friends, initially. There'd been an understanding between them. A secret, he'd helped her when she'd had a bicycle accident on Waterman Street by the river. Just a girl at the time-so young.) Feelings rushed through him leaving him sick, stunned.
As if it weren't enough that he had killed the girl, and thrown her body into the river to destroy the evidence of his crime. Not enough, but that he must hate her also.
Arlette leaned forward. On this wintry-autumn day she was wearing a cable-knit sweater-coat of the hue of burnt leaves. Her wrist bones were knobby, too thin. Brett had a sudden sensation of such terrible loss, he felt faint.
"Brett? It isn't so bad-is it?"
Arlette was smiling. A wistful sort of joke.
Seeing the mother of the girl you'd murdered-it isn't so very bad is it? How brave you are!
"I think it must be something very simple-God wants us to be together, like this. No other purpose than to be together."
Arlette spoke softly, matter-of-factly. It was difficult to hear her amid the noise of the visitors' room.
The corporal had not often been in the visitors' room for during the years of his incarceration the lawyers who'd come to see him had met with him in small, private rooms without the presence of guards.
The Kincaid case. Manslaughter conviction on the basis of confession, circumstantial evidence. Victim's body never found.
"It had come to me after-you'd been taken away . . . That we were still a family and it didn't matter if something had happened to make a rupture in our family. It came to me as long ago as then but I-I didn't understand at the time. I was-wasn't-so strong, then."
Arlette spoke slowly. Lifting her right hand to press the palm against the Plexiglas barrier in a gesture of appeal.
A small hand, thin fingers. With a pang Brett saw that there were no rings on Arlette's fingers.
"If Jesus is with us, He is with us all. Those who are living and those who are-not living."
Voices lifted in another part of the visitors' room. At once a guard stepped forward speaking sharply Quiet there! Stay seated.
Brett steeled himself for louder shouts, for an earsplitting alarm.
Here was a place of hallucinations. Myriad anonymous dreams mixed together crudely, jeeringly.
Lifting his hand he placed it shyly against Arlette's hand on the other side of the barrier: a larger hand, a man's hand, the fingernails blunt and stubbed.
"She is with us. She is happier now, knowing we love her."
In this way wordless and obscurely comforted they remained together until a bell rang rudely awakening them and signaling the termination of the visit.
EVERY SEVERAL MONTHS Arlette returned.
She stayed overnight in a motel in Dannemora, visited the prison early and drove back to Carthage alone.
Rarely did she speak of Zeno, or of Juliet. Rarely even of Carthage.
Their visits together were primarily silence. Seeing them in the visiting area you might have thought they were mother and son bound by a singular grief.
The silence between them was deeply comforting to Brett, in retrospect. Like a medication so powerful it can't be absorbed into the bloodstream at once but must be released slowly over a period of hours, days.
Now he ceased hating himself, so virulently.
Now he thought I have a friend. Two friends.
He thought If I am a shit that is not all that I am. I am-something more.
Inside the sixty-foot-high encircling wall the corporal's damaged reputation gradually healed. By default Kincaid was a favorite of the COs who saw in him a person like themselves: his personality, his intelligence, integrity, sanity.
He volunteered to help teach literacy classes in the facility. Again as an orderly in the prison infirmary, and in the mental unit of the hospice. Though he wasn't a Catholic and didn't take communion at mass yet he was Father Kranach's most diligent assistant in the maintenance of the Church of the Good Thief: sweeping, mopping, polishing the Appalachian red oak pews, repairing broken steps, washing the stained glass windows and keeping clean the sculpted figure of Saint Dismas crucified.
Enter my soul and my soul shall be healed.
He began to assist Father Kranach at the priest's group-therapy sessions that met several times a week in the church. (Father Fred Kranach, the most popular therapist/counselor in the prison, had a degree in clinical psychology from Notre Dame, in addition to his seminary degree.) He passed out materials, he helped Father Kranach counsel the men. It was thrilling to him when others looked at him with gratitude and not with suspicion; that he could encourage others if not himself.
Father Kranach spoke of a "career" for Brett Kincaid, in social work, counseling, when he was released.
Released! The term seemed strange to him, mocking. If he served his full sentence he wouldn't be released until sometime in 2027; he'd be forty-six years old.
IN THE SIXTH YEAR of his incarceration in mid-March 2012 there came a summons for the corporal.
Father Kranach had been dispatched to bring Brett Kincaid to the warden's office.
"I think this is good news, Brett. I believe it is. You must prepare yourself."
There was a strange agitation in the priest's face. Brett had not ever seen his friend so-intense.
Good news. It would not be his mother, then-his mother's death.
In Warden Heike's office he was told several times to sit down.
Never in the warden's office were inmates invited to sit down.
FIFTEEN.
The Father March 2012 HE KNEW: she was alive.
He knew: if he persevered, if he did not despair, he would find her.