He said that the crucifixion of Tex Johnson was unconventional in several ways besides Texs being dead or nearly dead when they spiked him to timbers in the stable loft. He hadnt been whipped. There hadnt been a cross-beam for him to carry to his place of execution. There was no sign over his head saying what his crime was. And there was no spike in the upright, whose head would abrade his crotch and hindquarters as he turned this way and that in efforts to become more comfortable.
As I said at the beginning of this book, if I had been a professional soldier back then, I probably would have crucified people without thinking much about it, if ordered to do so.
Or I would have ordered underlings to do it, and told them how to do it, if I had been a high-ranking officer.
I might have taught recruits who had never had anything to do with crucifixions, who maybe had never even seen one before, a new word from the vocabulary of military science of that time. The word was crurifragium. I myself learned it from the Medical Examiner, and I found it so interesting that I went and got a pencil and wrote it down.
It is a Latin word for breaking the legs of a crucified person with an iron rod in order to shorten his time of suffering.¨ But that still didnt make crucifixion a country club.
What kind of an animal would do such a thing? The old me, I think.
The late unicyclist Professor Damon Stern asked me one time if I thought there would be a market for religious figures of Christ riding a unicycle instead of spiked to a cross. It was just a joke. He didnt want an answer, and I didnt give him one. Some other subject must have come up right away.
But I would tell him now, if he hadnt been killed while trying to save the horses, that the most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
But listen to this: While idly winnowing through old local newspapers here, I think I have discovered whom that probably Caucasian, surely young and female skull belonged to. I want to rush out into the prison yard, formerly the Quadrangle, shouting Eureka! Eureka!¨
My educated guess is that the skull belonged to Letitia Smiley, a reputedly beautiful, dyslexic Tarkington
senior who disappeared from the campus in 1922, after winning the traditional Womens Barefoot Race from the bell tower to the Presidents House and back again. Letitia Smiley was crowned Lilac Queen as her prize, and she burst into tears for reasons nobody could understand. Something obviously was bothering her. People were agreed, I learn from a newspaper of the time, that Letitia Smileys tears were not happy tears.
One suspicion had to be, although nobody said so for publication, that Miss Smiley was pregnantXpossibly by a member of the student body or faculty. I am playing detective now, with nothing but a skull and old newspapers to go on. But at least I have what the police were unable to find back then: what might be proof positive in the hands of a forensic cranial expert that Letitia Smiley was no longer among the living. The morning after she was crowned Lilac Queen, her bed was found to contain a dummy made of rolled-up bath towels. A souvenir football given to her by an admirer at Union College in Schenectady was the dummys head. On it was painted: Union 31, Hobart 3.¨
After that: thin air.
A dentist would be no help in identifying the skull, since whoever owned it never had so much as a single cavity to be filled. Whoever it was had perfect teeth. Who is alive today who could tell us whether or not Letitia Smiley, who herself would be 100 years old now, in the year 2001, had perfect teeth?
That was how a lot of the more mutilated bodies of soldiers in Vietnam were positively identified, by their imperfect teeth.
There is no statute of limitations on murder, the most terrible crime of all, they say. But how old would her killer be by now? If he was who I think he was, he would be 135. I think he was none other than Kensington Barber, the Provost of Tarkington College at the time. He would spend his last days in the State Hospital for the Insane up in Batavia. I think it was he, empowered to make bed checks in both the womens and the mens dormitories, who made the dummy whose head was a football.
I think Letitia Smiley was dead by then.
And it was a matter of public record that it was the Provost who found the dummy.
The medical examiner from the State Police said it was odd that there was no hair still stuck to the skull. He thought it might have been scalped or boiled before it was buried, to make it that much harder to identify. And what have I discovered? That Letitia was famous in her short life for her long golden hair. The newspaper description of the race she won goes on and on about her golden hair.
Yes, and the same story gives Kensington Barber as the sole source of the assertion that Letitia had been deeply troubled by a stormy romance with a much older man down in Scipio. The Provost wished that he or somebody knew the name of the man, so that the police could question him.
In another story, Barber told a reporter that he had planned to take his family to Europe that summer but would stay in Scipio instead, in order to do all he could to clear up the mystery of what had become of Letitia Smiley. Such dedication to duty!
He had a wife and 2 kids, and he sent them to Europe
without him. Since the campus was virtually deserted in the summertime, except for the maintenance staff, which took orders from him, he could easily have ensured his own privacy by sending the workmen to another part of the campus while he buried small parts of Letitia, possibly using a posthole digger.
I have to wonder, too, in light of my own experiences in public-relations hocus pocus and the recent history of my Government, if there werent a lot of people back in 1922 who could put 2 and 2 together as easily as I have now. For the sake of the reputation of what had become Scipios principal business, the college, there could have been a massive cover-up.
Kensington Barber would have a nervous breakdown at the end of the summer, and be committed, as Ive said, to Batavia. The President of Tarkington at that time, who was Herbert Van Arsdale, no relation to Whitey VanArsdale, the dishonest mechanic, ascribed the Provosts crackup to exhaustion brought on by his tireless efforts to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the golden-haired Lilac Queen.
25
M
y lawyer found only one thing really interesting in my theory about the Lilac Queen, and that was about the broad purple hair ribbons worn by all the girls in that footrace, right up to the last race before the prison break. The escaped convicts discovered spools and spools of that ribbon in a closet in the office of the Dean of Women. Alton Darwin had them cut it up into armbands as a sort of uniform, a quick way to tell friend from foe. Of course, skin color already did a pretty good job of that.
The significance of the purple armbands, my lawyer says, is that I never put one on. This would help to prove that I was truly neutral.
The convicts didnt create a new flag. They flew the Stars and Stripes from the bell tower. Alton Darwin said they werent against America. He said, We are America.¨
So 1 took my leave of Pamela Ford Hall on the afternoon Tarkington fired me. I would never see her again. The only real favor I ever did for her, I suppose, was to tell her to get a second opinion before letting Whitey VanArsdale sell her a new transmission. She did that, I heard, and it turned out that her old transmission was perfectly OK.
It and the rest of the car took her all the way down to Key West, where the former Writer in Residence Paul Slazinger had settled in, living well on his Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. I hadnt realized that he and she had been an item when they were both at Tarkington, but I guess they were. She certainly never told me about it. At any rate, when I was working over at Athena, I got an announcement of their impending wedding down there, forwarded from Scipio.
But evidently that fell through. I imagine her drinking and her insistence on pursuing an art career, even though she wasnt talented, frightened the old novelist.