He had always worked wood. During grade school, his father introduced him to tools and nails the way other men played sports with their kids. Clark took to it quickly, learning to read the grains, to plane, lathe, saw and carve. By his graduation from high school he knew wood in the same way a sommelier knows wine.
He was not much of a student: the two lines beneath his name in the yearbook read: “Crafts Club: II-IV” and Auto Shop: I-IV.” Though a fair athlete, he had no interest in organized sports. Besides shop, the only subject that he excelled in was math, with its diagrams, measurements and angles. The friends he had were good ones who stayed a major part of his life after high school.
He married Katy when he was twenty-two. She was two years older, a potter who had just opened her own studio. Clark had finished his cabinet-maker’s apprenticeship and was working steadily in construction. A year after their marriage, at Katy’s urging, they added a second room to her studio and Clark opened up a small woodworking business on the side. His work with intricate frames and carvings gave him relief from the broad scale of his daily work and extra income for their future.
It took them four years to build their house—the land had been a wedding gift from Katy’s parents. For six months they pored over different plans, taking bits from each, combining them into the house where they would live for the next twenty years, where they would raise their family. They spent vacations and weekends on the vacant lot, until it was no longer vacant. They moved in on their fifth anniversary. A year later, Katy was pregnant.
She was in her sixth month when the pickup ran her down. It was four in the afternoon and she was out for a walk. The truck turned the corner too sharply, jumped the curb and dragged her for over a hundred yards. She was dead before the truck came to a stop. The driver tried to flee the scene, but he stumbled as he ran, allowing two onlookers to catch up to him and hold him until the cops came.
Clark had trouble believing that the twisted, raw body on the morgue table was Katy. Or had been Katy. Fingerprints and dental records told his mind it was Katy, but his heart needed to see her face—and the asphalt and gravel had taken that away. The only clear evidence was that she wasn’t in her studio, or in their bed.
Clark took a leave from his job for the week of the trial, attending it every day. At night he went home, heated a frozen dinner, then went into Katy’s studio. Each night he would slice off a slab of clay, wet it and place it on the wheel. Then he would let his fingers float over the dampened, spinning clay, shaping nothing, digging grooves into the clay until his fingers wore through to the wheel.
The trial should have been a slam-dunk, but the driver’s father was connected and rich. And the first officer on the scene was a rookie, two weeks out of the academy. Jarred by the state of his first corpse, his procedures and tests were all open to the defense’s efficient probing. The jury debated three days before declaring itself hung. The public was outraged and the DA began immediate plans for a retrial, reassuring Clark that, now that they knew their weaknesses, the outcome would be different next time. In the meantime, Benny Taylor, the driver, would remain out on bail. And Clark went back to work.
“The trial was good for me,” he told Donna, his voice growing hoarse. “Up until the trial I wasn’t eating. Slept twenty hours a day or not at all for a week. The trial was what told me she was really dead.” The last few words came out roughened, cracked. “That many people don’t spend all that time on someone who’s still alive.”
Donna had watched him the whole time he talked, her eyes solemn. Silently she shifted, making room on the bed for him to sit down. At first he didn’t notice, his eyes out in the darkness. Then he blinked twice, looked down at her, and sat down on the bed. The two of them sat stiffly in the same posture, backs hard against the wall, legs straight out in front of them.
“I worked a lot, didn’t talk much to anyone. Put the house up for sale, had Katy’s folks clean all her stuff out one weekend while I was camping.” He shrugged. “Didn’t help. Nothing helped. When the house sold, I decided to move. If I stayed there, I knew I’d die. So I got ready to leave.”
A week before the second trial was to begin, Clark stopped in at a bar on his way home from work. He took a booth in the back and nursed his beer, in no hurry to get back to the house with the “SOLD” sign out front. It was as he was leaving a tip and getting to his feet, he noticed Benny Taylor at the far end of the bar. A beefy man in a plaid shirt and chinos, he was leaning against the bar trying to pick up a redheaded giggler. Clark sat back down. While Clark watched, Benny had two Scotches—the bartender later said these were his fourth and fifth—and his voice grew louder, his movements more exaggerated.
“I couldn’t believe what I saw seeing,” Clark told Donna. “I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t want this guy to ever have a life again. But here he was, trying to get laid, and Katy was barely in the ground. While I’m watching, he gets a little too grabby with the girl and she shuts him down. The group around him starts giving him grief, so he picks his money off the bar and leaves. Bumping his way down the bar as he goes, steadying himself in the doorway.” Clark got up from his seat and followed Benny outside.
He pursed his lips. “I couldn’t believe he was going to drive. Not after…But he pulls out his keys as he’s weaving across the lot and stops in front of a pickup. The same pickup.”
Witnesses said that Clark approached the man and started talking to him. At one point Clark made a move—unsuccessfully—to take the keys away from Taylor, who said something to him and started to climb into the truck. As Clark grabbed at him, Taylor whirled and swung at him. The punch had leverage and accuracy, catching Clark just above his left ear. He went down, his eyes watering badly. He lurched to his feet and balled both hands into a single fist. The punch caught Taylor at the base of his neck as he was climbing into the cab. He staggered backwards and fell onto Clark.
The two men rolled onto the parking lot gravel. Taylor dug his fingers into Clark’s mouth and ripped, tearing his cheek into a flapping wound. Blood filling his mouth, Clark whipped a forearm into Taylor’s throat. As Taylor’s hands flew up to belatedly protect his throat, Clark grabbed his head and slammed it into the pavement. Then again. This time Taylor’s head made a soft, crushing sound and went limp. Clark kept pushing the motionless head into the gravel and asphalt, working it like he had the clay on Katy’s wheel.
It was the weariness in his arms, rather than the onlooking crowd, that stopped him. All he could think of, as he waited for the police, was how much Benny Taylor looked like his last image of Katy.
“There had to be a trial. I knew that. But once they understood the circumstances…” His attorney let him take the stand and testify. And he made a good witness, calm and in control as he narrated the evening’s events, including how he had pleaded with Taylor. The district attorney had the same sympathetic expression as the judge and jury as he walked Clark through the attack, including Taylor’s head going slack and his activities after that.
He was convicted of second-degree murder. Seven to ten. Stunned, Clark looked back and forth from the judge to the jury; the compassion was still there.
His mouth shut at that moment and stayed shut thereafter. Born of disbelief, fueled by outrage and confusion, it became a matter of habit, then comfort, keeping him aloof from prison alliances and battles. Finally, it was just mental rust: his lips and tongue forgot that they had any purpose other than to eat and drink.
The prison had no problem with his silence: they’d seen stranger cases. Every so often a well-meaning social worker or psychologist would try to bring him out, but none of them lasted a month. During his fourth year, though, a new counselor came to San Tomas. This one didn’t ingratiate himself with the inmates or ask intrusive questions: in fact, for his first month there, he was almost as quiet as Clark.
After Josh had been there for six months, he sat down with Clark and asked him, “Do you want to be here?” Clark stared back at him for a moment, then shook his head. “Do you think you deserve to be here?” Another shake, this one more definite.
The next day Clark gave him a thick spiral-bound notebook. “Use this. Take your time. Write about yourself, who you were before, what you’ve learned here—if anything. What you’d do if you were out.” It took Clark three months to fill it up. The next one he completed in less than a month.
Josh took the books, wrote out a report, and sat down with the parole board. They refused the first attempt, since Clark was unwilling to take part in the hearing. The next hearing came as Josh was launching his work-release program in the logging camp, which gave the board an easy out.
They had been sitting together in the early morning dark and silence for over an hour. Clark’s eyes were closed, his face tired and drawn. His hand rested easily over Donna’s, patting it occasionally. Donna sat beside him, her head now on his shoulder.
“It hurts so deep,” she said.
“I know.” His hand tightened on hers.
She eased her hand from his and hugged herself. “I’m so afraid. Afraid that if I let myself really feel what has happened, I’ll lose what little there still is of me.”
“It’s good, if that’s what it takes to bring you back. To yourself. To us. But in the meantime you’ll hurt so deep that it will feel like it’s burning through to your backbone.”
“I don’t know if I can do it,” she said. Her eyes reached up to his and her voice softened. “I don’t know if I want to.”
“It’s worth it,” he said. “They locked me up so quick I didn’t have the chance to kill myself. After that, I went on living only because I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of me dying behind bars. But in the end…” his arm went up around her shoulder and pulled her to him, “it’s worth it. I’ve seen a lot of forest since Katy died. And I worked a lot of wood and drunk a lot of beer. And I met Josh and the boys.” He swallowed. “And I met you and Pete and Harry.”
She almost leapt at him, burying her face in his neck. A sharp, rattling sound filled the room, then a series of muffled sobs. Her tremors moved from her shoulders to the rest of her body, an uncontrollable shaking.
The left side of Clark’s shirt was completely soaked by late morning. He waved off the visitors who came by. Throughout the afternoon Donna would cry, stop for a minute, her body sagging. Then it would stiffen with a new memory and she would start anew. Clark sat there, stroking her hair lightly, nothing more. As the camp started to darken, her breathing evened out and her eyes and throat took a rest.
Clark waited until her sleep was deep. Then he lifted his arms and got to his feet. He eased Donna down so that she was lying down and placed a blanket over her. He walked carefully to the door, eased it opened and stepped into the waning afternoon. He walked to his cabin, fed Zeke, changed his shirt, then he went up to the L. He nodded to Carol and Lucky, who were starting dinner, fixed two plates of food, and headed back to Donna’s cabin.
Coming back from his run the afternoon, the setting sun over his shoulder, Josh stopped by Donna’s cabin. He raised his hand to knock when he heard Donna’s voice, followed by a voice he’d never heard before. He frowned for a moment, but as he did so Zeke, who’d left the porch to relieve himself, trotted around the corner and took up his post. He accepted Josh’s hand under his chin and leaned into his leg. Josh kept his ear to the door for another moment. Then he looked down at Zeke and smiled.