Marry or Burn

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ALSO BY VALERIE TRUEBLOOD

Marriage is the second music, and thereof we hear what we can bear. . . .

—John Berryman, “Canto Amor”

W
HEN SHE WAS twenty, Francie Madden shot and killed her husband Gary. He had joined the Seattle police force six months before, and she shot him with his service revolver. She aimed at his shoulder as he had shown her with the human silhouette at target practice, but she hit his neck and blew out an inch of the carotid artery.

Gary had roughed her up in the two years of their marriage, but this was not unusual in either of their families in 1975, or in fact around the south city limits where they had grown up. He had been a popular football player, known for the fights he got into after a few too many, as well as his liking for the upper hand with his girlfriends. At Francie's trial his own mother Sharla testified that when his dad left, Gary took over the TV, the car keys, and the correction of his little brothers.

In spite of that, a picture of Francie emerged that was worse. All her life she had had a violent temper, and the prosecutor saw to it that that came out: how she had pounded the head off a doll, how as a little thing she would shout at her brother during Mass. How they had to lock her in the basement when she got going, how in middle school she had chased her two-timing
boyfriend (the one before Gary) off a dock, and the poor kid, in front of his friends, had cannonballed into the lake fully dressed rather than let her catch him. These things were said by people with no particular grudge against Francie, said even in her defense. She wasn't mean; she was hotheaded. She came from a line of hotheads. Her father had been in the county jail for shooting out a picture window when the neighbors crossed him.

And she did not shoot in self-defense while Gary was wading over the furniture and sending the cat flying, or when he had her down. She got away. She grabbed his gun out of the closet and ran back to the room where he was picking a lamp up off the floor.

She went to prison for twenty years. Her lawyer said she had killed a cop and she could forget about parole, and that proved to be true.

The first year she spent reading. The library took up one wall of the lounge, a long room with a TV, orange chairs, and a world map from the donated stacks of
National Geographic
. Newcomers were surprised to hear the girl slumped there was the one who had killed her husband in a fury. That served as a kind of insurance; nobody called her a snitch or threw used tampons into her cell or said she was the cause of an inspection. She read through all the magazines, new and old, including the recipes and the ads for things she and Gary had been saving to buy—recliners and speakers and the new gas barbecues. Then in a trance of boredom she read books. She read the lives of female scientists. She read books about selling crafts from the home, books about beating alcohol and drugs, horror novels, historical novels mostly set in England, and books of poetry from a Christian press. From time to time new ones arrived in batches and she read those. She turned the pages of the law books, volumes decades old with sections torn out of them.

After the reading phase she went to work in the new wood-shop, making the tiered bases of sports trophies. She watched TV. They argued over the TV but they all agreed on things like the Olympics, and soap operas. They all objected as the soap operas veered into crime, the mob, even the occult. They laughed at young women in expensive outfits being drugged and held in underground suites and made to have amnesia. Eventually a VCR came in and you could earn movie time, but by then Francie was out of step with what showed up on the screen. She had lost interest in how people her age were talking and acting, and in how things panned out for them or anybody. In reality, time brought nothing to a noticeable close. Nothing drew its edges together or untangled itself. The real nature of a day, of time, was plainer than it would have been outside. It was not a road heading somewhere but a space that filled up, like a vacuum cleaner bag.

Most of the donated videos, and all of the popular ones, were comedies. Disputes went on as to what was and was not funny. They sat on the small orange chairs until the moment came for somebody to snap on the overhead lights as the tape jolted, reversed itself, and rewound with a dry rustle. There would be years of this. When it was Francie's turn she picked National Geographic tapes—hurricanes and tornados. She liked disasters. She thought there might be something she could do in a disaster setting, someday.

She did not remember the occasion of her crime with any exactness. A lot of them said the same thing: “Can't remember that shit. They said I did that shit.” A good number were in there for drugs anyway—that or accessory—and had been messed up at the time.

Among women who cursed, threatened, and fought, she didn't find anything to rile her. Where was her temper when somebody
decided to tease her as she stood in the shower line before dawn with her towel, stiff in the legs and unspeaking?

She was not homesick. If she missed anyone, it was Sharla, Gary's mother. At the beginning she wrote to Sharla, but she didn't hear back. She could see that. Sharla had let herself be called by the defense, and right after the trial with its publicity she had reported a prowler and the cops had not responded. She had two more boys coming along; she wouldn't want to be on the bad side of the PD. She would want all that behind her. Who could blame her for that?

All through high school Francie had half lived at Sharla's. Her yearbook photo hung with Gary's on the wall of the cubicle where Sharla cut her hair for free. They talked to each other in the mirror. “If you were my daughter, I'd get that tooth fixed.” Francie had a BB scar on her bottom lip and a bluish tooth behind it. “A beautiful girl like you. Those great big eyes, that hair.”

Sharla had sewed her wedding dress and veil, pumping away at the treadle as the needle pounded and jammed. “Look at this old thing. Never did get to sew on it like I would have.”

Somewhere in between Gary and his little brothers, Sharla had lost a little girl. “The ambulance got her to the hospital but it was meningitis and they couldn't do a thing,” she explained every so often, as if Francie might speak up and defend the daughter's right to have received something more. But Francie didn't argue, because she was in high school and at that time a person's life seemed cut and dried to her. Whatever happened was halfway done with before it even got started. No point in contradicting yourself, as Sharla did as often as she told the story, by adding, What if she had been able to talk, and tell me? The daughter had come only so far as standing up on her fat baby legs
.
Here, Gary would get to his feet. “OK, Mom, that's fine, we gotta go.” He was tired of those legs. So Francie was too. And she couldn't sit there
too much longer, or Gary would pick her up off the couch and carry her out of the room. He liked to do that. She would just stay a minute while Sharla wound up the story. That seemed to be enough for Sharla.

She had stories of her own for Sharla, when they were off by themselves. Her father still took a belt to her brother and to her too. Sometimes he cut switches from the neighbor's willow tree. This had brought on the row in which he shot out the window. Sharla said not to let her father get her mad, even though with her shrieks, her clawing, she was his match when she was mad.

No sense trying to get back at him. That was Sharla's view. He wasn't the worst.

Smoking on the steps of the beauty shop with tape on her bangs, smiling in her bright makeup that was somehow beyond the matter of looks altogether: Sharla was easier to picture than Gary. Gary's big-armed, hot-skinned body was beginning to lose its outlines; Francie had a hard time assembling his features around the grin. His voice, high for a man, like the voice Neil Young sang in, no longer rebounded from some stairwell as it had done more than once when she first got there, setting off that flash of relief: “Gary! Where has he been? Gary's coming!”

 

AFTER FIVE OR six years a woman named Dale Bowie started in running a weekly group called Gather in the Spirit. She was not exactly a chaplain because nobody had ordained her; she came from one of the new programs in the Catholic university that allowed people to go back to school in middle age.

Dale wore rubber-soled shoes—“so's she can run if we gang up on her,” said Maxine, who had been there the longest—and her shirts were always blue, or a print with blue in it, as if she were harking back to some constant. “The Nun,” they called her,
but she was not a nun and never had been. She had on a wedding ring; it took her a while to say she was married to a priest. An ex-priest. A priest was what she had wanted to be. She had considered the convent, but convents were deserted now, or they were serving as retreats for guests with a week to spend in a mirrorless dormitory. So these guests had time, they had money to pay for sharing a bathroom and being hushed if they spoke out in the halls. Dale had nothing against that kind of person but she wanted to be in the world.

Francie raised her hand. “This is the world?” she said. This was a period when she had come out of her daze and had a reputation as a smart-mouth, though she got along with everybody.

Dale began on one of her long answers. She interrupted herself to ask Francie, “How old are you?”

“Twenty-four,” Francie said. “Or no, that would be twenty-five.” Because of a particular guard, Paloma, they were all in the habit of talking that way that year. “Where would you be going?” “Who in here would be the Miss Clean took all the soap?” Before Paloma came, none of them had liked anybody thin, the exceptions being those who were sick or who couldn't help it and ate everything without gaining weight. But they all liked the bony Paloma, who pretended to threaten them and had a flat way of talking out of the side of her mouth that would have been sarcastic if she had had any meanness. Paloma had a baby boy, Rafael. She was Mexican as well as black, but she couldn't understand the Spanish-speakers because her black grandmother had raised her. She had a girlfriend, and never spoke of how Rafael, whose pictures she showed around, had come to be.