Russell Banks - Relation of My Imprisonment

They told me straight out that my wife had died, calling her that, my wife rather than their stepmother. This was due, I am sure, solely to the fact that I had not recognized them at first when they had come in to me and thus I might not have known to whom they were referring if they had said only that their stepmother had died. I asked them if she had died without great pain, and they answered that she had died with eagerness, and I expressed my relief at that, for she had lived with great pain for many years, and they said that their knowledge of her life confirmed this observation.

The older of the two was the spokesman, it seemed, for his younger brother remained mostly silent throughout our interview, except now and again to interject a word or two for emphasis or clarification, such as, when the older brother had told me that the physician attending my wife had pronounced her dead of a congenitally distressed heart exacerbated by the depredations of poverty and a life of stress, the younger added the information that this was also how my first wife had died. That was how he referred to her, as my first wife, rather than as his mother, again doubtless because I had not recognized them when they had first appeared to me and thus I might not know who he was talking about if he had said, My mother.

Here a slight misunderstanding between us arose, for we were as yet unused to each other’s company and our respective ways of expressing ourselves. I wished to know if my wife had died in her coffin, which of course is one of the rites which would have characterized her life and would have lent it meaning, if it had been followed properly, and which thereby would have provided us, her survivors in life, with the greater occasion to praise her, thus lending to our lives also a quantity of meaning they otherwise would lack. This circle is crucial to the maintenance of faith, as are all the rites, for no practice can evolve successfully into the sacred function of rite if it cannot stand the test of circularity. My sons, still boys, of course, probably had not yet arrived at the kind of informed worship of the dead (the faith that sustains itself by knowing itself) that would have let them know immediately my purpose in asking so quickly after being informed of her death if my wife had died in her coffin, because the older of the boys upbraided me with considerable feeling for my lack of feeling, as he saw it, and his brother grew stern.

But I was able to calm and smooth over their bristled words and glowerings against me by elaborating on the texts of several scriptural passages which prescribe the meaningful use of coffins during our life times, such as The Book of Discipline, xxxii, 12: Let the coffin serve up wisdom to the foolish, let it be a buckler for the timorous. For wise is the man who lies down in his coffin early in the day of his life time, and victorious is he who arms himself thereby. Also, xxiii, 4–5: This doth the dead hate, that a man come unto them naked and pretending like a babe that he was surprised by death.

My sons seemed pleased and enlarged by my explication and also by the rigor of my application of the said texts to the particularities of the death of my wife, their stepmother, so that in a short while we were all three quite at ease and hearty together in our praise of the dead, for they had admired their stepmother, my wife, quite as much as I, and it took no puffing up of our imaginations and language for us to tender mercy unto her. I was greatly relieved, needless to say, that my sons were able to give such abundant evidence of my wife’s intellectual capacity and her dauntless energy for teaching them the basic articles of our faith, despite their lack of adult comprehension, for in the modern world where children are so cleverly and constantly cajoled into seeking transient pleasures and relations, it is not an easy or simple thing to drive them to the path of righteousness and meaning, and having got them there, to keep them from wandering off that path and getting all lost among the living.

HERE I shall enter into a description of certain afflictions which have characterized my recent months and have sorely tested me in divers ways. Know, however, that it has not been my belief in the worth of worshipping the dead and the eternal benefits that accrue thereby that has been tested, but my old decision, described early in this relation, not to resist life. I refer to my atonement for having failed my first jailor, John Bethel, so that he went unto death in my stead and bore with him my own coffin. He had not fully comprehended my teachings, even though he had become converted by me to my faith in certain of its aspects, and for that he had willed himself to sacrifice himself for the living, not yet realizing that the only worthwhile and meaningful sacrifice of one’s life is for the dead. (II Carol. iv, 34–35.) In atonement for the cursoriness of my instruction and the stupidity of my plan to alter the court calendar, thus incriminating another in my crime, I had made over to my jailor my own coffin, and as he wished, he was executed while in it, praise the dead. But that was not yet sufficient atonement, I felt, and so I determined to sacrifice myself also. But because of the nature of my offense, and my desire not to make my sacrifice a way of life, which would have been reprehensible to the dead, for my penance thus would have been eternal, as was John

Bethel’s sacrifice of himself, I chose instead to limit my penance by a certain measure of time, the which was the natural extension of my life time. Therefore, I moved henceforward to avoid all such activities and practices that could lead me into a fatal encounter with death. It meant that I should not deny myself any sustenance, any food, rest or medication or other physical comfort that in whatsoever way contributed to the further resistence of death. To be sure, I would not chase obsequiously after these substances like some life-clinging wretch, but I could not permit myself to deny them when they were necessary or when they were imposed on me.

For many years this penance was easily made. Prison food and prison medication, required only rarely, were more than adequate, and my cell and few furnishings therein provided me with adequate comfort, and on the few occasions when my life was threatened by the violence of certain prisoners, my cowardice, though it shamed me, also made it so that I was making my penance, for it kept me from foolhardiness and forms of reckless behavior. Too, I was rarely ill during the early years of my imprisonment, partly because of my constitution and partly because of the generally benign physical conditions of the prison. Also, until her death, I was tenderly looked after by my wife, despite her own failing health, so that whenever I showed any slight sign of illness, no matter how insignificant, she would hurry to me with medications and kindness and would quickly cure me.

After her death, however, and following hard upon the visit from my sons, there commenced my period of illness. It introduced itself to me modestly enough, so that, unawares, I did not protect myself against it, because, as yet a man of time is inevitably inclined, I saw each new affliction as separate and independent from the other and saw not at all any sequence or heaping up, and surely I did not suspect that I was entering upon a whole and lengthy period of illness. Therefore, when there came into the corners of my mouth and upon the bridge of my nose a small number of boils and hard chancres, I was not alarmed or even especially discomfited by them, and so I merely waited for them to leave as they had come, silently and in the night and without apparent cause.

They did not leave, however, although individual boils and chancres did sometimes soften so that the pus beneath could break through and drain from the sore, which sore, when it had fled, would seem to reappear in another part of my mouth or nose. During this time I also contracted the disease called favus, which is characterized by small yellowish crusts on the scalp with raised edges and depressed centers. The crusts have a peculiar odor, like that of a mouse nest, and the hairs in the encrusted areas become brittle, loosen, break and fall out, so that when the inflammation has passed, there are left blotches of baldness across the scalp. This condition did not seem to me a disease at the time, for while I had the disease I was aware only of the itching, which was irregular, and I did not discover the bald patches until sometime later. The peculiar odor, because it was indeed so like unto that of a mouse nest, I simply attributed to the presence in my cell somewhere of a mouse nest. Furthermore, I was also then suffering for the first time from a condition known as dry seborrhea, which affects the foreskin of the penis and is characterized by itching caused by an accumulation of a cheesy material consisting of body oils mixed with dead cells and other tissue debris, and thus I was somewhat distracted from the favus infection on my scalp.