1.
The Tragic Death of Matthew Echota
Beginning of the winter, when frost covered the grass and icicles hung from tree branches after a recent ice storm, and still he walked away without even trying to hide as if he knew he was predestined to be caught and punished, which was inevitable in that dull, sleepy town called Old Dublan, where most of us were born and raised. When they brought him back, he told them that he simply needed to go for a walk to clear the bad thoughts from his head and adjust to the new thinking of the everyday people, that’s what he told them, that his mind was an enervating dissolution of severe anxiety and vulnerability prime for brainwashing. We were always a little uncertain as to whether Matthew was brilliant or a smidge eccentric, possibly even crazy, but we admired his courage. In his earlier punishments, for instance, he had avoided so many food restrictions, beatings, and deprivations, that it seemed almost sententious of him to prefer the long confinement of the Columbus House basement. Yet, as the days passed and the rest of us continued chopping wood and pulling weeds and loading piles of damn dirt in wheelbarrows, even the most impervious among us waited until we were back in the facility at night to share our predictions, such as that Matthew would emerge from confinement unable to speak, that his mind would become so disoriented from the isolation that he would no longer be able to recognize us, and that he would die down there by suicide. Only minutes after he was set free from the basement, the look on his face told us he was fine, that he had, in fact, preferred the confinement because he was able to find the books he had hidden behind a pile of wooden shelves when he was supposed to be sweeping and cleaning in there some time before. Confinement became a spiritual awakening for him as well because he grew closer to God, and soon he was listening to the laughter of angels and the distant laments of his ancestors that encouraged him to be strong in faith and not project his anger onto the everyday men whose foolish words and actions were cruel, and also that he speak very little and listen closely, which was why it was so difficult to get him to talk about those nights of punishment and solitude. Even the most incredulous of us listened to him describe the visions of fleeting stars that were enchanting enough to swoon the most beautiful people on this poor Earth.
Previously, during the extra free time on certain Christian holidays or on weekends, Matthew would shut himself in his room and read, write, and draw as much as he could, later telling us he actually missed that about our public school, reading and writing stories and taking art class, so certainly he devoured an immoderate number of books, reading them as often as he could and staying up late thinking about them, knowing he would be so tired the next day that his muscles would ache, yet he still stayed up late sketching faces and bodies and writing stories and poems in his journal with a pencil he had stolen and kept hidden. No one paid much attention to his journal until Nora told us he was writing about his own death in the future, and that he had, at the age of seven, predicted the exact date and manner of death of their paternal grandfather, whose throat was slashed by an intruder. His grandfather died face down with his left arm under his head as a pillow, three years after Matthew’s documented prediction. Matthew made other predictions listing the specific dates of world events that included bombings, mass shootings in the U.S., and a horrific deluge that killed over ten thousand people and wiped out an entire town—all proof, Nora told us, that Matthew held the crucial and compulsory predictions for what was to come for the facility, for the guards and drill sergeants who made our lives miserable, and for all of us. Yet, when we asked Matthew about these predictions, he had only written a story and all the events that passed were coincidental, but those of us who knew him understood he wasn’t being truthful, he invariably displayed peculiar behavior after the lights were out, some would see him with his ear placed to a window in the hall as if he were listening for something outside, others would say he wrote stories in his sleep, but nobody was ever certain who was lying and who was telling the truth despite how much we trusted one another and everything we had been through together, all the daily work and harsh punishment we had endured. Some said he preferred rewriting the fairy tales we had all heard as children.
We felt like we were in some flexuous jungle from one of the Indiana Jones films. Certainly, our journey could’ve been deadly, we feared, yet there was something alluring about existing in the fantasy that we were on the search for a stolen, priceless artifact. (I believe the best movies involve a search in the face of death, as in many of the James Bond films.) The path we took in the woods twisted around trees until we got lost, and for three hours we continued aprowl, calling his name, listening for anything we could, and despite the frustrations we pushed on until we noticed ahead a shadowy figure. The woods were filled with the little people who lived
there who captured children and ate them, so we turned down a different path. Back in the courtyard, behind the hedges where Matthew had passed out from anxiety on the same day some of us were beaten for stealing the green apples from the apple tree, were hidden the dead baby rats we kept for future revenge on our perpetrators once we figured out how to make the stench most effective. Maybe Matthew was out here dead, too, we thought. The air was now asphyxiating as we stared at the figure before us, unafraid, before heading down a different path among the pale brush where cobwebs stretched from branch to branch and where moths fluttered around our feet. Insects buzzed around us.
In recent months, when Sergeant Cash fell absent to visit a sick family member three counties away, we were told to take a break from our shoveling duties and instead spend the days sweeping, cleaning, and checking the facility greenhouse for the yellow jacket nest the drill sergeants said was in there somewhere due to the sudden appearance of yellow jackets, and those who dared to crawl on their knees to check around the bottoms of the polycarbonate panels among so much shrubbery were stung more than once; just imagine crawling in such a space and getting attacked by yellow jackets, which then buzzed around us because yellow jackets are so aggressive. We had endured enough misery and threat not to be afraid of the little people in the woods. We took the path without looking back to see whether the little person was following us, arriving soon enough at a gigantic black velvet curtain hanging nearly twenty feet high. We all wondered why: What was a black curtain doing hanging in the middle of the woods out here in rural Oklahoma? Then we heard frightened cries from people on the other side of the curtain, and we stood still for a few minutes contemplating whether we should turn and run back or else stay and look behind the curtain, and finally when we peeked around the corner of it we noticed the naked bodies of lepers whose faces were indistinguishable from their disease, those poor, suffering people, begging to lick the salt from our hands and necks, pleading for the salt to bring them healing and life everlasting, but we didn’t fall for their tricks because there were so many grim stories about the evil in the woods out there that we all knew and recognized, so we backed away from the lepers. “My brother used to talk about his nightmares of the moaning lepers,” Nora told us. “I remember the mourning souls of the dead who cried
out to him. There was a forest filled with poisoned fruit and blood-sucking ticks, remember, you remember he had seen and described them. Isn’t that weird how he knew we would see them?”
We told her, Yes, yes, yes, Nora, we remember his nightmare, of course we do, he told us all his nightmares and dreams and everything else, Nora. Those unprecedented decisions to speak out loud about what was going to happen to us, and how he remained so serene telling those of us, indifferent, with the slow inflection his father had infused in him due to his speech impediment, a stutter, so that he would blur the linear identity those people assumed we all possessed, because speaking costively and with such inflexible decorum was significantly different than the rest of us spoke, which was to say we rarely talked and whenever we did we tended to mumble or talk as little as possible, but the hope was that Matthew could communicate better with them and could drive the furious curse out of the everyday men who bore the insults and hatred and contemplated the beatings and punishments with the sick ardor of their ancestors, these men not even blinking, spitting tobacco, thinking they could rip away any culture, thought, and beliefs in order to brainwash us, so yes, Nora, we remembered the nightmare Matthew had because we had them, too. There were nightmares we hoped we never encountered such as the killings and stabbings by these men wearing masks to hide their identity and the protection they received from the police and government to keep us against our will and torture us until we either were eradicated from our identities or else we died, so we all shared the same nightmares, Nora, the difference is that Little Matthew’s has already happened and ours are still out there waiting to unfold.
Other than Nora, the people who commented on Matthew’s extraordinary profundity were two hydrocephalic male guards with crew cuts who resembled inbred peccaries (think of the two terrifying men from Deliverance, a movie that remains in my top ten comedic films). The guards noticed Matthew sitting in a wicker chair in the first floor’s living room enduring the drowsiness of a postlabor afternoon, after he had removed the worn shoes they had given him that were at least one size too small for his feet, his pants rolled up and his socks stained with dark red blood from scabs, when the girls were standing outside the window waving at him for his attention (Nora said they thought him the most handsome of us, which was absolutely not true, at least from this fool’s perspective), and with great celerity he would flutter
his hand like a bird, and the girls outside were all smiling while the guards took mental notes of everything miraculous, including, for instance, how the church bells in the cathedral would start ringing whenever he stuttered, “ch-ch-church bells,” which gave sheer pleasure to those of us toiling away, especially during hot days when Cash and the other damn towsers yammered on about how slowly we were working.
Sometimes Matthew blinked quickly when someone spoke directly to him, which gave the impression that he had the manner of someone deep in social anxiety, but truthfully, he was tormented by the idea that people talked about him at all. Copious attempts made to settle the rumors that he would be taken away from us and used for the benefit of the drill sergeants were useless; they discussed using him for financial and personal gain among themselves, which some of the girls overheard when they were mopping the administration building’s third-floor hallway and were caught listening and later subjected to punishments denying them meals for an entire day, but the tendentious guards and drill sergeants who were in that meeting claimed it wasn’t even discussed, that instead of talking about Matthew’s prodigious abilities they deliberated for three or four hours over how some of us would have to dig three separate graves all the way out at the cemetery due to the recent deaths of the three brothers who passed away from malnutrition; all three brothers died within hours of one another, and they were also some of the angriest and most rebellious of us, Spider and Brandon and Edgar, and as a result of their anger they were also the most severely punished, of course, how sad to think back on this, how we could hear their cries at night coming from their rooms, how we saw the broomsticks and all the bruises and blood in the toilet, and how the guards and pigs were faced with the debilitating problem of who was going to dig the three graves, and furthermore, how were they going to transport us out to the cemetery when we were all such flight risks, hell yes this was what they said they discussed for so long in the meeting, not Matthew, and they had the minutes in writing to prove it. Although he didn’t know of the rumors, Matthew told us he was certain something significant was about to happen in his life and that he would not be locked up for much longer, that sitting for long periods of time in the wicker chair helped him visualize this fatidic thought, which he described as looking like the slow development of a chess game, and he needed to understand how each decision affected the next, a
game he had learned to play from his grandfather only months before his grandfather passed away, and even then, at the age of seven, he understood there was an implication the game held him acutely susceptible to comprehending how much each decision affected the next, and how after he checkmated his grandfather he rushed into the bathroom and vomited, the crisis of a potential blame developing that his grandfather’s loss contributed to his death six months later and so rendered his glory bitter, and for the next seven years he took advantage of his solitude to reflect on that game and how each move represented a step leading toward death.
Following a winding path against a sea of troubles, we managed to see through the slanted stream of sunlight the three brothers, Spider and Brandon and Edgar, sleeping in the branches with their arms hanging down, and when we called out to them, they opened their eyes and glared down at us, shaking the tree limbs so that leaves and twigs fell, laughing like devils, and then they climbed down and said, “Do not follow the path because it leads to evil things.”
Waving away the flying ants, Nora asked, “How do you know?”
They told us to sit and listen, so we sat down in the dirt and they told us about the children who ran away from home and were mutilated to pieces and eaten by the little people who roamed the woods; they tore into the children and ate them alive, each prowling out from behind the trees and pouncing on the children before any of them even had a chance to run or help one another, and the three brothers said, “Listen to us, we speak the truth to you, beware of these little people and the moaning lepers begging to lick the salt from your hands, and instead follow us because you know us, look at us, you recognize our faces,” and then all three brothers lowered their heads to avoid looking directly at us. We abandoned ourselves to their story, trembling with the rage of knowing how the others before us had died, but we were wiser and more solicitous than they suspected because we quickly realized these three were actually tricksters veiled in the illusory cloak of Spider and Brandon and Edgar, and Nora was the first to lash out at them and call them liars, we won’t fall for your tricks; she told them, “If you think you can fool us you’re wrong—we can find him without any help.”
We decided to keep walking and not talk to anyone else. The distractions were meant to throw us off course, but the bigger question that still loomed was whether Matthew was even alive, and if so, was he hiding in
those woods? It was all a mystery to us, and we could see that the sunlight had shifted in the trees and was now jagged all around us, and Nora was staring into the shards of light when she told us that Matthew believed the less people understood about him the less afraid they would be, which was why he remained so elusive, quiet, and removed from everyone, and why he wrote in his journal about staring out the foggy window of his room where one night he swore he saw arrive in front of the detention building a horse and carriage with the hooded image of Death driving, which he’d read about from the famous Emily Dickinson poem, something that frightened him particularly when he spotted the figure of Death leaning forward from the carriage to look up at the building, as if looking directly at him sitting by the window, but the night was cold with a light mist falling, and the gray horses shook their manes, and Death stepped out of the carriage and started walking—Matthew had described the figure to Nora as a “shadowy thing with a limp”—but at that moment Matthew pulled the window curtain closed and spent the remainder of the night sitting cross-legged on his bed with the light on and the door locked. He wrote in his journal then, describing what he had seen, worried for not only his own life but for the lives of everyone at the detention center, because children had already died (the three brothers, for example) and now Death was back for more.
unlike the rest of us, on one of the days he was serving his punishment in the Columbus House basement, and that he also spotted gorged vultures and ghosts hanging in the moonlit sky, dogs spooring around in the garbage bins behind the cafeteria where the stench of dead animals hung in the air, the shadows of the sergeants in the windows of their building, where they cast evil spells in the middle of the night, and the nimbuses of the dead moving from one building to the next and smelling like their rotting bodies which lay in putrefaction down in the graves we all had dug. “Is he alive?” Nora asked us, in hysterics, as if the thought suddenly hit her, “what if he’s dead like the others?” Maybe we were all dying slowly, one by one, our minds corrupted and brainwashed, our bodies poisoned. Whole nations are disappearing, we thought, they’re slowly killing us, driving us into extinction and torturing us before we die. Nora was breathing with difficulty in the thin air, feeling herself lean into her friend, until she was able to calm down as we all comforted her, telling her we understood how frightened she must be because we were frightened, too, that we were all in this together no matter what happened, and soon enough Nora was able to continue with us as we walked down the path for a ways, though too quickly a figure up ahead of us appeared who was standing beside a tree. We recognized the figure was Sergeant Ambrose, broad-shouldered and hands authoritatively on his hips, shouting for us to “keep looking for Matthew,” and when we told him we were looking, he stomped his foot and rattled on about the importance of the will to live, “Strength is mental and physical,” he said, citing examples from names we’d never heard of and didn’t care about anyway, and then he spewed on and on about how little we’d learned and changed from the months we’d been there.
Sergeant Ambrose was as iniquitous as Sergeants Jackson and Lee, talking so much they often lost track of what they were saying, staring cataleptically into the distance, ...
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