Who Named the Knife Read online

  I studied the jurors, especially the third alternate who had taken my seat. I thought of the heiau on the Big Island I had visited with my parents on their last trip. It’s called the City of Refuge because in old Hawaii a person could run there when they were about to be taken for sacrifice.

  When Stephen Hioki rose for his own summation, he told the jury that the defendant was presumed to be innocent even now. “Let me take you back to the time Mr. Acker was testifying,” he said quickly, as if he might be about to recite the entire case. “I was asking him details – where Larry was standing, etc. If you recall, Mr. Acker got defensive, abrasive – began to assert himself through the microphone – became a wiseacre on the stand with little respect for it.” He looked around the courtroom. “I had touched upon a nerve,” he concluded indignantly, raising his voice by a note.

  The case against Maryann Acker came down to two versions of a murder, and Hioki had tried to unravel only one of them. He had made William his adversary and never let us close to Maryann’s story. In the time it took the rest of us to eat lunch, the jury found her guilty of kidnapping, robbery, unauthorized control of a vehicle, burglary, and murder in the first degree.

  16

  When it was finally morning in Honolulu, I spoke to three women at the Hawaii Department of Public Safety. One was in charge of interstate inmates, one was in charge of dual-jurisdiction inmates, and one referred me to the other two. None of them knew about Maryann.

  Next, the Internet, where looking for her went like this:

  Maryann Acker = must have

  Murder = must have

  Hawaii = must have

  California = must have

  The Must Haves were because there may be other Maryann Ackers in the world, but it is unlikely she or they will have committed murder and, if so, unlikely that she or they will have committed it in both Hawaii and California. As I was typing, the computer underlined two words as wrong: Acker and murder.

  “Such a long time ago,” said a woman at the California Department of Corrections, which I called next. “But wait,” she said, looking through her own computer files. Then she told me that Maryann was still in prison. She was an inmate at the California Institution for Women (CIW) in Chino, about an hour out of L.A. Eighteen years after the trial in Honolulu, and twenty-two years after the crimes, she was still locked up not far from the place she’d been arrested in 1978.

  June 28, 2000

  Dear Maryann,

  I was on your jury in Hawaii, but I was dismissed. I’ve been reading a notebook I kept during your trial and I’m wondering how you are doing.

  Very sincerely,

  Linda Spalding

  I wrote the letter at our cottage in the country, where I was alone for three days. I had no car, no way to get out except by walking a mile to the highway and then maybe hitching a ride. There was nobody within shouting or even screaming distance. And I’d been waking up in the middle of the night with the familiar clutch – a feeling that everything was slipping away. Why imagine that a woman in prison for twenty-two years would read my letter with any interest in writing back? How, if she did answer, would I explain the part I had played in her life? If I had been there that morning, been there on time, you’d be free. Up there in the country the river sounds like an engine left running, like a buzz of static that is constant, rattling, each crash crashing into the next crash before the last one has finished. There are no commas, no apostrophes. Out beyond trees, spirits wander. The river was thrumming and I called my mother, who would soon be among the spirits. I called her in order to hear a human voice. She had been out to dinner with her friend. “She does so much for me,” my mother confessed. “It makes me feel dependent.”

  I said it was good for both of them; it works both ways.

  “How’s that? What can I ever do for her?”

  “You provide the comfort of need.”

  “She has family.”

  “It’s not the same.” I said this although, lately, I hung on my mother’s words as to a lifeline. I should have recorded her, but I knew I would never replay our conversations after she died. I actually have a record of my brother’s voice, but it would kill me to hear it. The dead are with me all the time. Day in. Day out. Only I miss the flesh.

  I grieved for my mother even as I talked to her, and little by little I gave her more of myself. “I think I have arthritis in my knee,” I said that night, trusting her with this small fear for the first time.

  “It’s not so bad,” she said. “I had it in my hands and it went away. It comes. It goes. Don’t worry too much about it.” Sensible and consoling words, which meant I still had a mother, thank God.

  “I remember when you stopped knitting.”

  “Yes.”

  “And did it really hurt?”

  “Yes. But I did something. Heat, probably, because I like heat. And anyway it stopped. It doesn’t bother me now.”

  “But it makes me feel old.”

  “Well you aren’t.”

  What does old mean, I wondered, to a woman who buried her husband when he was fifty-nine, her son at fifty-seven, and she’s almost ninety? One day a few years ago, but after my brother had died in his plane, she went to the doctor for a checkup. I was visiting, sitting at the table when she came home and burst into tears. (I’ve seen her cry only three times.) “I’m absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with me!” Her collapsed face, her collapsed expression. Shame. Horror. To have survived.

  17

  July 16, 2000

  Dear Linda,

  I received your card today, and to say I was totally overwhelmed is the understatement of the year! You, of course, have no idea what’s been going on recently to cause my astonishment. I just found out last night that a Writ of Habeas Corpus on the Hawaii case was filed last week. Then, I got your card. Today! The timing is really incredible in my opinion. I have a feeling you might have made a difference! Were you an alternate juror? Is that why you were dismissed? There are so many things I would like to ask you, but I do want to thank you, from my heart, for writing to me.

  A few months after my original sentence in Hawaii, the Paroling Authority reset my minimum term. They increased it to 30 years. That’s why this writ is so important to me. I have been incarcerated for 22 years now. I was so insane naïve then, but feeling like I knew all there was to know and that I could handle the world. When we arrived in Hawaii he really turned my world upside down. In my trial, I testified very truthfully. I was terrified of William and in fear for my life. Today, I see so many things I could have done. But I guess that’s the big difference between being 18 and 40. I have grown so much, and learned so much about myself. Again, I sincerely thank you! I hope I will hear from you again, and please, feel free to ask me any questions you may have.

  Sincerely,

  Maryann

  It was August by the time I got this letter in Toronto, and I carried it back up to the cottage along with shorts and jeans and the yellow notebook. Driving east, I looked out at the summer countryside along the 401, where the corn was ripening under a silky sky. I’d moved to Canada when I was thirty-nine, coming to a place where I had no friends, no network of support, and where things with my newly constituted family were electric and complex. Overnight my children had shed their Hawaii childhoods like embarrassing skins, and within six months I hardly knew them or myself. I had been burning bridges forever but, as I looked out at Lake Ontario, stretched like a wall between my two countries, I saw Maryann as a link to my former life.

  Thirty years. The average sentence for a felony in Hawaii is four or five. Even syndicate killers don’t get more than twenty. That night I dreamed about her prison bed. It was iron, painted dark green. On it a coloured quilt, very bright, made by someone in her family, blues and red against stark white cotton. In the dream, I admired her for possessing such a quilt, and yet I was surprised, as if I assumed we could not have the same taste. Someone in her family had made it and she kept it in her othe
rwise undecorated cell. The quilt was a proclamation. The dream was about Maryann as part of a family, as part of my American past. When I woke up, I lay in bed drinking a cup of coffee and staring out at the rain, trying to remember if there had ever been a day when I woke with sufficient joy. All that came to mind were the few days of my childhood when my brother was home from college, mornings with an ecstatic murmur that wouldn’t be stilled, like romantic love without a premonition of sadness. Otherwise I look back on mornings when I loved getting up to my girls. They were tousled, beautiful, getting ready for a dance class or birthday party.

  Then I thought of my grandmother’s Kansas City house, which I visited for a two-week period every summer of my childhood. I thought of the lovely solitude of those lost summer days although they consist, now, in a series of images much like a dream that, when told, dissolves immediately. I suppose there was the liberation from my parents to take into account, although in all other ways the brief interlude with my grandmother was more constrained than the rest of my life. I should explain that my grandmother was deaf, that we learned, over the years, to move through our days and evenings in silent harmony, that she worked happily in her sewing room while I was left to my fantasies.

  One summer it was hotter than the ordinary hundred-plus degrees and we created a space in her unfinished basement where we spent all our waking hours. Without her sewing machine, my grandmother embroidered or crocheted. I was embroidering something myself – a flannelette baby smock – but I painted pictures too, and wrote stories. I filled the pages of my diary. It was harder to live in my imagination down there, with my watchful grandmother so close, but she was a woman who had lived alone for so many years that she considered it no affront to sit in silent companionship. The smock was for my brother’s first child, who was yet to be born and whose short life was to be my first tragedy. But that summer, as long as I didn’t move from my wicker chair, I was safe.

  Under a window of the country house, I had been making a garden – a vanity among all the pine trees and birches, all the grass and stone and water. Children grown and the decisive acts of my life behind me, I had been trying to believe I was in the summer of my life. The garden, small as it was, had been a laying of claim and a slight breaking of the stern rules we adopted on taking over the land. Only to perch, not to civilize. When we first came up here it was just a year after Maryann’s trial and this house, with its broken deck and pointy roof and stilts, was as precarious as we felt.

  18

  Her letters were handwritten. “You say that you are oddly connected to my story. Do you remember the circumstances of why you were replaced on the jury?” When I received mail from Maryann, I read the lines and then I read between the lines because the words were so perfectly formed and spelled and punctuated. “I was so young when I got arrested. I had only been out on my own for a few months before my fateful meeting with William. There is so much I’ve never experienced. In some ways I feel that, emotionally, I’m still stuck at 18.” Yes. Her letters reminded me of the girl I was when I met Philip.

  “I would have done the same thing if it came to a sick animal,” Maryann wrote when I finally told her why I’d been thrown off her jury. “But darn that vet for at least not keeping him til the end of the day! All of that, however, is water under the bridge. One thing I have learned over the years is to learn from the past but not to dwell on all the ‘what ifs.’ That doesn’t really serve any constructive purpose.”

  Constructive purpose? I sent a postcard that said: “I can’t remember what was wrong with the dog. It must have been more or less serious … but really! It wasn’t worth thirty years of your life.”

  I was interested in that prison life but what I wanted to hear about was her life before. I wanted to dwell on all the what-ifs. What the poet Tomas Tranströmer calls a book that can only be read in the dark. I asked her if she could describe the house where she grew up, but she told me about the jobs she had held at CIW. She told me about the degree she had earned and her hobbies and the organizations she belonged to. She said she had served her full sentence in California, but they were still holding her because of Hawaii. “If Hawaii grants the Writ of Habeas Corpus, the prosecutor will have to decide whether to re-try me. If not, my commitment on the other Hawaii charges will be completed in October, 2001.”

  Since the trial, Maryann had been out of her prison only once, when she was driven into L.A. for a dental appointment. By then, she was nervous about going out. She was nervous about being shackled. She was nervous about seeing a strange dentist. In the van, she peered through small, barred windows to look at cars, shops, and houses. What she saw was the freeway, a long slice of the present tense.

  Late that summer, I drove back to Toronto in order to do something I had delayed, along with my guilt about Maryann, for eighteen years. I’d been living in a country I had no claim to, dividing my time between a house in downtown Toronto and one that stretches between a dirt road and a river. But finally, I had applied for Canadian citizenship. All my life, I had excused myself from membership. I had lived without affiliation or ceremony. Even my wedding to Philip was an elopement. But now, I wanted something more, unlike Maryann, who would emerge from prison without attachment to anything.

  Sitting across from me in the waiting room at the Department of Immigration was a young woman nursing a baby, breasts full of promise. I watched her. I was the only American in the room. After a time, when we had to line up and show ourselves with a picture ID, a Muslim woman was taken to a corner, where her veil was lifted while official eyes flicked over her and checked her photograph. Two men who had come with her glared and clenched their fists. Finally we were ushered into the room where we were to make an oath of allegiance to the Queen. The doors were locked behind us. A skinny clerk in a black robe went through an hour of instructions – when to stand up, sit down. This was followed by thirty brief minutes of ceremony during which a tape deck punched out “O Canada!,” though not without static. There were small conversations among those of us who were alternately sitting and standing: Where were you born? How long here? Could you take my picture, please, when I go up? If it is possible to be moved by the sight of a tape deck on a table, I was, though a glance at the photo of a young Queen Elizabeth made me, momentarily, wish to bolt. What would my father think of my desire to be taken in by Loyalists?

  I had called my mother, having told her nothing through the process of application but suddenly wanting her to understand what I was doing as if, like a secret marriage, it would otherwise be null and void. She said it was wonderful to become a citizen of Canada, where I lived, and that I had lost nothing and gained something I valued. It was not the response I had expected, but in losing her short-term memory, most of her long-term friends, and her husband and son, she had lost her bitterness and become the mother of my dreams.

  Back at the cottage, my big orange lilies were nodding by the east wall of the house. The yellow daisies were bowing. The delphiniums were blue to a fault and petunias pushed against the rocks. It was this, exactly, that I wanted to be: fully in bloom, evident and engaged. I wanted to belong here, where I had sprinkled the ashes of my brother and his wife, where we had buried our cat and dog, where we measure our lives. The stretch of house is at right angles to the water, so that only the end where we sleep has any view of it. And the river itself makes a right-angle turn in front of us, rushing down a set of rapids, pouring over rocks and pieces of the Shield that make portaging so difficult and walking such joy.

  19

  Maryann grew up in Phoenix, where her family was closely connected to the church. They were devout. Believers. These are the facts I was given over the next few months. It all sounded regular. Her sister, Penne, was nine years older. Everything, in fact, had already happened to this family long before Maryann was born: two brothers had died, one as an infant, one at the age of fourteen. But when I asked Maryann about her childhood, I got happy snapshots: learning to whistle when she was six months old,
when she was two, getting a rocking chair. “I was born accident-prone. There’s a picture of me sitting in that rocking chair with a black eye.” At three, it was a tricycle, which she rode into her sister’s room one Christmas morning before anyone else was up.

  There is also this: until she was four, only two men were allowed to carry her. When anyone else tried, she’d scream.

  Her mother was a housewife, although she once worked as a cashier in the Phoenix Gazette building. “I was still young, so I’m not sure why she went to work. Whether she just wanted to or if it was financially necessary.” Whatever the reason, Gladys Bray didn’t work for long. She went back to baking, washing, tending her family, and serving the church community like an acolyte.

  Bert was the easygoing parent. Quick to laugh, he seemed to like everyone and kept his job as a salesman for McKesson & Robbins for thirty years. Born a Baptist in Texas, he converted to Mormonism when the first baby died.

  Death. Maryann gave me the facts as if she had given them a hundred times. The baby had swallowed a paper clip. The other son had died of an asthma attack. I could imagine Gladys with baby Maryann, jealously guarding her every step. I could imagine her shaking her head, saying no and no and no, making too many rules for a child of Maryann’s temperament. Because, according to the Mormon Church – or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – rules are the most important part of life. All this because Joseph Smith discovered twelve gold tablets in a cave under a hill in New York State. Young Joseph had been told about the tablets by an angel named Moroni, and he deciphered them by reading through a peep stone in a hat. The book that resulted – The Book of Mormon – is said to be as divine as the New Testament. “Obedience is the first law of heaven,” preaches this church. Obedience to the law of the church rather than the law of the state. Obedience as explained by living prophets. I know about this because of that great-grandmother who joined the Saints when one of her children died. The story is that they promised to reunite the family after death and in a fervour of hope, she moved the family out of Brown County, Kansas, where they owned thousands of acres of the richest wheat land in the world, to Independence, Missouri, where the early Saints had built their version of Zion. The move defined my future, but that is the story of the world.