Habeas Corpus, excerpt
Posted on November 6, 2007
Filed Under marriage, writings, Habeas corpus |
I’ve been trying to finish the novel I started early last year. It is slow going but some progress, between raking leaves, walking the dog, volunteering in the classroom, painting the dining room and reading your blog, has been made. Since I haven’t had time to write a unique post today but did get some words on the creative page, I thought I’d share a recent excerpt from Habeas Corpus. It’s a passage torn right from the middle of the story. Feel free to read or just check back tomorrow when I will try to post something less demanding of your time.
I stay in Northfield shuttling the boxes of clothing and old shoes and ashtrays to the Salvation Army drop box, cooking meals in the evening for Mom and I to share. I crack cookbooks I’ve never seen my mother open. The Silver Palette, License to Grill - I’m not sure why she even owns these books. I try recipes for mustard dill salmon and salad nicoise; meals Dad would have deemed pansy food. I tackle projects that have been abandoned since my father left for good, stripping and sanding and painting the back porch that has begun to suffer dry rot. I spend hours trying to save that porch.
I call up to Grafton to check on Goliath who has been living in the Bowen’s barn, awaiting my return.
Mary Bowen assures me, “He’s no bother, really, none at all. He just lies around the all day looking for a warm spot, shifting with the sun. When are you planning to come back, honey,” she asks. And I can’t say for sure. I can’t fathom returning to the loneliness that is my version of Grafton.
“You’re sure missing all the excitement,” she says. “Michael Conrad was arrested last week.”
I know she must be torn, relieved that the whole thing might finally be put to rest and somehow sad, having always claimed that Conrad reminded her of her only son, lost in a hunting accident back in ‘95.
I sit forward in the arm chair, perched right on the edge. She reads uncertainty into my silence. While I try to catch my breath, she fills the void with awkward chatter.
“Straight from the horse’s mouth, Claire. Mike lives with Adam Miner, the boy who works the calves. Adam’s got all the details. It’s kind of sad. Judge set bail at $50,000 last Tuesday. He’s got no family to post that kind of cash. He’ll stay in the county jail until the thing goes to trial.”
“What about his lawyer. Isn’t there a lawyer to help him out,” I ask.
“Public defendant,” Mary corrects me, concern and surprise and more than a little curiosity, mounting in her voice.
I think I might be sick, dialing information and jotting down the number for Jared Wright, Office of the Defender General, State of Vermont.
I reach his voice mail and hang up. Trying again every thirty minutes until he answers his phone.
“Yes, I am assigned counsel for a Michael Conrad,” he says, clipped and professional as one might expect of a state employee. But after a few minutes of talking, his voice begins to tremble and pitch with the excitement. He begins to speak a sort of legalese, about testimonies and reasonable doubt and undermining the prosecution.
According to Jared Wright, Mike cannot take the stand as his own reliable witness because he was deep in the whiskey that night and his recollection of things have a certain unpolished, hazy quality to them. Mike remembers that he and Lacy had walked out to the end of Anna’s drive to sit at the fence line behind a small swale, gathering privacy from the loud party that had sparked after Tyler’s had closed. He has vague memories of her unzipping his fly, drawing aside her panties so she could straddle him in the yard. He’ll even admit that her efforts were largely useless, his having gone limp and unresponsive from the alcohol. Disappointed, disgusted even, she climbed over him and out onto the road to begin her walk home. He shouted to her to let him give her a ride and she’d laughed and said, “That’s what I was hoping for, Whiskey Dick,” and continued down Horse Farm Lane and out onto Rt. 100.
“That was the last thing she said to anyone in this whole wide world?” I ask Wright when he finishes the telling.
“Guess so. Kind of sad when you think about it.”
I imagine Lacy must have felt she was exercising some new defiance by straddling Conrad out there in the yard on a hot summer’s night towards the end of her adolescence. Even then, with half a liter of Wild Turkey under his belt, Michael Conrad must have had the alluring presence of someone who believes that the particular life they are leading is enough.
Wright explains that Conrad is trying to comply with the prosecution, having voluntarily given blood samples and turned over the boots he was wearing the night Lacy was killed. He has even walked out Rt. 100 with Detective Foley, showing him the spot where he had littered the empty pint of Wild Turkey, the source of some serious drunkenness and now the sole focus of his innocence; that one discarded bottle the only bit of evidence tying him to her death.
Wright and I agree to meet the following afternoon. I will make the reverse drive beneath the leaded sky of late November through the steep canyons of rock, blown apart by dynamite, allowing us flat-landers access to the hill country. There is never traffic, only Brake for Moose and Grooved Shoulders signage, underscoring the inherent danger of driving the mountain passes in slippery weather or mating season.
One of the first things I learned from Grafton locals, unlike deer or raccoons or just about any other animal you’re apt to encounter when driving in the Green Mountains, moose do not have reflective retinas. There is no green glow or glaring yellow flicker to warn a driver, allowing them to slow for the massive creature in the road. So many lives lost, both animal and human, as the great creatures are all but invisible in the dark.
I hang up and cradle the phone in my lap, rocking slightly to the realization that my Dad’s death isn’t the end of anything at all but, rather the beginning of hope for Michael Conrad, just 33, who lives out past Anna Cowley’s when he isn’t driving a ten wheeler down to Louisiana and back.
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