The White Road

II

He gave no comfort, saved no one Adrift he moves by guilty moons…

– PINETOP SEVEN, “MISSION DISTRICT”

5

LOOKING BACK, I see a pattern in all that took place: a strange joining of disparate occurrences, a series of links between seemingly unco

And in Thomaston, the first link lay waiting to be uncovered.

The maximum security facility at Thomaston, Maine, looked reassuringly like a prison; at least, it looked reassuring as long as you weren’t a prisoner there. Anyone arriving in Thomaston with the prospect of long-term incarceration in his future was likely to feel his spirits sink at his first sight of the jail. It had high, imposing walls and the kind of solidity that came from being burned down and rebuilt a couple of times since it was first opened in the 1820s. Thomaston had been selected as the site for the state prison since it was roughly halfway up the coast and accessible by boat for the transportation of inmates, but it was now nearing the end of its working life. A Supermax facility known as the MCI, or Maine Correctional Institution, had been opened in Warren in 1992. It was designed to house the worst offenders in a state of near permanent lockdown, along with those prisoners with serious behavioral problems, and the new state prison would eventually be added on an adjoining tract of land. Until then, Thomaston was still home to about four hundred men, one of whom, since his suicide attempt, was now the preacher, Aaron Faulkner.

I recalled Rachel’s response when she heard that Faulkner had apparently tried to take his own life.

“It doesn’t fit,” she said. “He’s not that type.”

“So why did he do it? It’s hardly a cry for help.”

She chewed at her lip. “If he did it, he did it to further some aim. According to the newspaper reports, the wounds in his arms were deep, but not so deep that he was in immediate danger. He cut veins, not arteries. That’s not the action of a man who really wants to die. For some reason, he wanted out of Supermax. The question is, why?”

Now it seemed that I might have the opportunity to pose that question to the man himself.

I drove up to Thomaston after Angel and Louis had left for New York. I parked in a visitor’s space outside the main gate, then entered the reception area and gave my name to the sergeant of the guards at the desk. Behind him, and beyond the metal detector, was a wall of tinted reinforced glass concealing the main control room for the prison, where alarms, video cameras, and visitors were constantly monitored. The control room looked down on the visitation room to which, under ordinary circumstances, I would have been led for a face-to-face meeting with any of the men incarcerated in the facility.

Except these were not ordinary circumstances, and the Reverend Aaron Faulkner was far from being an ordinary prisoner.

Another guard arrived to escort me. I passed through the metal detector, attached my pass to my jacket, and was led to the elevator and the administration level on the third floor. This section of the prison was termed “soft side”: no prisoners were permitted here without escort, and it was separated from “hard side” by a system of dual air-locking doors that could not be opened simultaneously, so that even if a prisoner managed to get through the first door, the second would remain closed.

The colonel of the guards and the prison warden were both waiting for me in the warden’s office. The prison had swung between various regimes over the past thirty years: from strict discipline, rigidly enforced, through an ill-fated campaign of liberalism, disliked by the longer-serving guards, until finally it had settled at a midpoint that erred on the side of conservatism. In other words, the prisoners no longer spit at visitors and it was safe to walk through the general population, which was fine by me.

A bugle call sounded, indicating the end of rec time, and through the windows I could see blue-garbed prisoners begin to move across the yards toward their cells. Thomaston enclosed an area of eight or nine acres, including Haller Field, the prison’s playing field, its walls carved out of sheer rock. Unmarked, in a far corner beneath the walls, was the old execution site.

The warden offered me coffee, then played nervously with his own cup, spi

“You understand that this is highly unusual, Mr. Parker,” the warden began. “Visits are usually conducted in the visiting area, not through the bars of a cell. And we rarely have the attorney general’s office calling to request that we facilitate alternative arrangements.” He stopped talking and waited for me to respond.

“The truth is, I’d prefer not to be here myself,” I said. “I don’t want to face Faulkner again, not until the trial.”

The two men exchanged a look. “Rumor is that this trial has all the makings of a disaster,” said the warden. He seemed tired and vaguely disgusted.

I didn’t answer, so he spoke to fill the silence.

“Which, I guess, is why the prosecutor is so anxious that you should talk to Faulkner,” he concluded. “You think he’ll give anything away?” The expression on his face told me that he already knew the answer but I gave him the echo he expected anyway.

“He’s too smart for that,” I said.

“Then why are you here, Mr. Parker?” asked the colonel.

It was my turn to sigh.

“Frankly, colonel, I don’t know.”

The colonel didn’t speak as he, along with a sergeant, led me through 7 Dorm, past the infirmary where old men in wheel-chairs were given the drugs they needed to maximize their life sentences. The 5 and 7 Dorms housed the older, sicker prisoners, who shared multibed rooms decorated with hand-lettered signs (“Get Use To It,” “Ed’s Bed”). In the past, older special prisoners like Faulkner might have been housed here, or placed in administrative segregation in a cell among the general population, their movements restricted, until a decision was made about them. But the main segregation unit was now at the Supermax facility, which did not have the capacity to offer psychiatric services to prisoners, and Faulkner’s attempts to injure himself appeared to require some form of psychiatric investigation. A suggestion that Faulkner be transferred to the Augusta Mental Health Institute had been rejected by the attorney general’s office, which did not want to prejudice any future jurors into making a pretrial association between Faulkner and insanity, and by Faulkner’s own lawyers, who feared that the state might use the opportunity to discreetly place their client under more elaborate observation than was possible elsewhere. Since the state regarded the county jail as unsuitable for holding Faulkner, Thomaston became the compromise solution.