But wait, Silverbell Rosenthal’s long hollow face is opening with a smile. Now laughing, too, a fearsome crowing, a hee-haw, a screech. Both persons teary and heaving and breathless, wiping their eyes.
Yes, yet another AP offering. Dateline: Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Shows a figure not blurry but motion-stirred, backing away from the camera as he pulls himself into the open door of a pickup truck. Eyes, one narrowed with white redneck HATE, the other raised open wide with LUNACY. Or so it would seem. Phrases in the one-column piece leap out. “Militia connections,” “wives of 40 governors” and “terrorized.”
Bruce Hummer separates the page from the rest of the paper and folds it preciously, as you would save news of a friend.
It is night, but I woke up. Nothing to do.
Today I saw a picture of Jeffrey, who we are going to visit in Texas. He is on the wall in the East Parlor. He is not a kid, but grown up. Age nineteen, I think. He is very quiet-looking in the picture. He is the color brown like my father, Damon, who I saw his picture, too, only a million times. This Jeffrey person is wearing a white outfit like in a hospital.
It would make you cry about Jeffrey. The government is going to KILLLL him in his jail. They will hold him and kill him. Gordie says the government guys are like hyeeenas with bad breath and big pink asses and that this shows the human race is not above. When Gordie gets upset about the human race he blows up with noise. Beth calls it rants.
I am just on my bed now, drawing Jeffrey like his real picture, only better. Pictures you make are good because you can make him get away. He can fly. And maybe get invisible while sneaking. I make yellow rays shoot out from him. And a smile. And in each hand he has presents with bows. And by his feet is presents with bows. And one present has a red heart. That one is from me.
Last spring when we did the OCEAN was when it all starts the Monarch terrarium we built in the empty shop. Call it the royal chamber. Next we went to a house of Claire’s friend of college. She does Monarch WAtch. It’s called MASS TAGGIng. Hundreds of people do it. This is how the way they do it seeing the Monarchs go thousands of miles like birds.
We sent off for books mapS PosTErs and pam-flits. It tells how THE South they call the Monarch King Billie which is a King whose colors were blAck and OrangE. He was in England and WANTED to OWN IriSH people Misty says. But the butterfLiEs were hERE. And some IRisH people went hEre.
We did skits on The Metim morfiss of MonaRcHS afTER eating taSTY Milk Weeds. Katy and Karma called the first one Noof. So Noof goes to Mexico and some humans here go to TEXAS to see JEFrey who the govinment is Going to murdEr.
A lady on the kitchen radio who says shE has a spy who knows THAT Place she means Settlement said you can’t call this stuff edUcation going to visiT death row and skits and Work. She said time to send in the ATHOR itties and police. Misty called this friteninG.
I wonder if when the friendship comitee is flying in the jet they might sEe ouT the winDowS Noof and other thousands of buTTerfies flapping Along on their WAy.
We will soon know this.
It is almost Texas. Our trip. They don’t really want me to go. I heard this: “Jane has enough prison visits in store with her mother, and this Death Row thing could get pretty heavy.” This is what the mothers said behind the door. With my secret agent hearts shapes glasses I can hear everything.
So then Bree, who is one of the grown-up girls and is very tall with red hair and a horror face that you get used to, let me be on the Death Row Friendship Committee and I told her how bad I wanted to meet Jeffrey. Bree said, “Sure.” But then the mothers all said, “No.” But Bree whispers to me very whisperishly, “Jane, never take no for an answer.” And me, I said back to her, “Exactly.”
Jeffrey is almost twenty years old. He has been on Death Row in Huntsville, Texas, for five years, waiting.
He has had appeals, he thinks, though he never sees a lawyer. A few times he got mail but he never sees articles, memos, or reports by the many Texas “state” lawyers who are in a panic about how they can’t deal with so many habeas corpus cases.
And so Jeffrey waits. He waits for whatever comes.
Today something is coming. Today. They are flying all the way here from Maine to see him and put their hands against the wire of his visiting cage. Fourteen children and seven adults. The rules are only two at a time and only an hour total. So he is interested in how this will work.
He keeps all their letters. Their letters are funny. He likes the jokes they send. Kind of twisted jokes. Gary Larson. Bugs who talk. Laboratory guys who invent things like a monster that has a lot of heads, the heads of the Brady Bunch. Yeah, that one, he gets it one hundred percent. And then the one where this hospital night watchman is doing secret experiments in static electricity by sticking all these really fat newborn babies on the ceiling. And then there are the homemade cartoons and jokes. Some ain’t bad. You have to believe the well-meantedness of some people for you to trust their sick humor.
These people from Maine are all coming to Texas JUST TO VISIT HIM. They are white kids, he’s pretty sure. His sometimes buddy Jeddy, a Panther, a Muslim, suspects they are Buddhists. Or Catholic Workers. Then Jeddy added with a snort, “Maybe they’re missionaries. They got a thing for the soul inside the dark face. You seen what they did to Queen Liliuokalani. First they save you, then they jail you.” He did his special laugh that sounds like haunted wind in eaves. “But you already here!!!” More haunted wind laugh.
Jeddy who is about forty is educated. He reads all the stuff about peoples of the world getting the shaft and others kicking the ass of the oppressor, which is inspiring. Jeddy doesn’t hoard his education. He’s like one of those who helps you cheat on a test by giving you the answers. Only there’s no test.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey likes to imagine his visitors won’t be anything like the ones who stole Hawaii or moved the Cherokees or firebombed the MOVE guys in Philly. His new friends will turn out to have stepped out of one of the Far Side cartoons: man-sized cockroaches or woman-sized flies pushing baby buggies with maggots in them, cows who walk on their hind legs and drink martinis until a car comes by, space aliens who rob chicken houses, puffy poodles who get engaged to junkyard dogs, lionesses who spit out tofudebeests, and sharks showing vacation slides of human legs dangling from inner tubes. What the hell, today he smiles.
At six a.m. Gate five, long before the sun spurts over bunchy many-roofed but flat South
