by Rebecca Sloan
Maybe I was expecting Lizzie Borden or Lorena Bobbitt. Maybe that’s why I’m surprised by the girl sitting in front of me at the little rectangular table in the Hammet Hills Psychiatric Hospital visiting room. Even if her name’s been plastered across the front page of every Nashville-area newspaper for the past week, she doesn’t strike me as some crazy, creepy, voodoo-love kind of girl. You know what I mean—one of those Gothic chicks wearing purple lipstick and rings in her nose; reading Ouija boards and shuffling tarot cards.
I see plenty of girls like that when I teach my Journalism 101 class every Wednesday night at the university. They haunt the hallways with their darkly matched mates—evil-eyed boys clad in boxy, fray-bottomed pants and sporting spiky, midnight hair. Art majors. Every single one of them.
But this girl doesn’t ooze manic imbalance or Jerry Springer notoriety. Instead, she seems more like the sweet kid you’d ask to babysit your 3-year-old, or the senior class valedictorian who memorizes her commencement speech from start to finish.
And maybe that’s really who she is. I checked her background, and she came out squeaky clean. Middle class. Conservative Christian. A high school honor student who majored in mathematics at the university before graduating with honors. Heck, if she were running for office, she’d get my vote. Another thing worth noting is that she hasn’t been fighting for her five seconds of fame like lots of nuts do after they make the six o’clock news. Nope, as far as I know, she hasn’t called Star or sold her story to the National Enquirer. In fact, I’m the first reporter she’s agreed to speak with one-on-one. A few of the editors were surprised she agreed to spill her guts to a guy, but it must have been my stellar coverage of the Clisby case that has buoyed my recent reputation as the sensitive, caring journalist.
“Hi, Jamie,” I say, reaching out to shake her hand. “I’m Richard Merchant from The Daily Beacon.”
She meets my stare and her mouth twists into a painful smile. Without warning, tears well from her blue eyes and slide down her cheeks.
“I’m glad you came,” she quavers. “My mom said it’d be a good idea to talk to you. She says you always tell both sides of the story.”
“I do my best to present the facts fairly and objectively,” I say, sounding every inch the polished professional, thinking this will be easier than I thought—thinking she trusts me already. To seal the deal I add, “And I want you to feel comfortable about sharing your story with me, Jamie.”
She nods and looks away. Then she reaches for the tissues on the table and plucks one from the box. She wipes her eyes, blows her nose and situates herself in her chair. When she wads the used Kleenex in her palm and kneads it nervously between her slender fingers, she reminds me of my Journalism 101 students—the ones who get anxious on exam day.
According to my notes she’s 21, but she looks younger—17 or 18, maybe. She’s real attractive, though, even in the shapeless, white jumpsuit with her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and her eyes puffy from crying. Yeah, she looks pretty good for spending the past week in the psych ward.
“You’ve been here since Saturday,” I say, sitting down across from her and flipping open my notebook. Without missing a beat I ask, “Do you think you deserve to be here?”
She seems almost surprised by my get-down-to-business approach. She looks away again and another tear slides down her cheek.
“I guess—I don’t really know,” she falters. “I’ve never really done anything wrong—I’ve never even had a traffic ticket.” She meets my stare with desperate blue eyes, and her lip trembles. “I feel like this is happening to somebody else—like it must be a bad dream.”
“I understand,” I say, playing the father figure. “Do you have an attorney yet?”
Her mouth twists up again like she’s embarrassed, and more tears drop. She shakes her head and says, “My parents are going to get one for me. They told me it’s necessary even if Elijah doesn’t press charges. They said Serena is making all kinds of threats.”
“Who is Serena?”
“She plays mandolin and sings in Elijah’s band.”
I nod. “OK. We’ll talk about her, but why don’t you tell me about your husband first. How did you and Elijah meet?”
Jamie exhales and picks at the rumpled Kleenex.
“Well, we went to the same church,” she begins shyly. “My dad thought Li was really nice and said if I had to go out with some hormonal teen-aged boy, then I should go out with Elijah.”
“So your dad arranged a date?”
“No, not really. I wanted to go out with him. I thought he was really cute.”
I nod like I can totally appreciate the appeal of a cute, teen-aged boy.
“Then I saw him play with his band, and I just fell in love,” she adds. “He was so talented.”
“Was he playing country music then?”
“No, it was always bluegrass. Actually they call it new grass. It’s like contemporary bluegrass for the younger generation, you know?”
I nod. She doesn’t know that I can’t stand country, bluegrass or anything with a twang.
“Your husband is 23 now,” I say, flipping through my notes. “How old was he when you met?”
“He was 18; I was 16.”
“And how old were you when you got married?”
“I was 19, and he was 21.”
“And you’ve been married for two years?”
She nods and looks at me like she’s worried all of the sudden. “Am I answering these questions wrong?”
“There’s no right or wrong, Jamie.”
Her mouth twists again, and she nods her head and says, “There’s just crazy and not crazy, right?” She stares at me, and her blue eyes glisten like two snowflakes about to melt. I lift my pen from my notepad and stare back at her.
“I want to tell your side of the story; not make you sound crazy,” I assure her.
Her brows furrow, and she drops her gaze to the tabletop. “My mom says you always do a good job,” she nods her head slightly while she’s saying it – like she’s trying to convince herself it’s the truth. “She read every story you wrote about Diana Clisby, that girl who shot her parents.”
I nod and think, Yep, it was the Clisby case. I oughta get an AP award for that one.
“My mom says you didn’t make the Clisby girl sound like she was nuts—that you explained what was in her head when she did it,” Jamie continues, blinking at me hopefully.
“And I’ll do the same for you,” I assure her. “Go ahead and tell me about Elijah. Tell me what it was like when you two met.”
She takes a breath and begins again.
“Well, Li’s family moved here six years ago so he could be closer to Nashville. His career was really taking off then, and he’d won a bunch of awards. He started playing when he was just a kid. Then when he was a teen and was getting really good, he got a record contract and got a band and started touring.”
“So when you met your husband, he was already touring and making the covers of magazines and all the rest?”
“Yes, but he was still a teen-ager. Sometimes he felt like he was missing out on a lot of things. I was his first serious girlfriend, but we didn’t need to date a lot of people to know we were meant for each other.”
“So when did things start to go wrong?”
Jamie sighs and picks at the Kleenex.
“Well, we always had our differences, you know. We were total opposites. We disagreed a lot, and we broke up a couple of times when we were dating. He’d forget things—like my birthday—or he wouldn’t call when he was supposed to. Or he’d say he was going to come over to my house, and then his band practice would run late, and he wouldn’t show up at all. Or he’d start working on a new song and lose track of the time, and I’d be sitting there waiting.”
“Would you get angry?”
“Yes, I’d get angry, but he was just so talented, you know, I couldn’t stay mad for long. He was just so amazing. He’s a genius, you know, he really is. People compare him to the great composers—they say he’s as talented as a young Mozart or Beethoven. He’s one of the best fiddle players in the world, and he can do any kind of music. He composes classical, too, not just bluegrass.”
I nod. She doesn’t know that I’m not a big fan of classical either—reminds me of a bunch of fairies dancing around in tutus.
“So what was it like after you got married?”
“Well, I guess I thought everything would just fall into place once we were husband and wife, but the differences only got worse. After the honeymoon, he went on tour and then I hardly saw him for six months. And there were the groupies, of course. . .” Jamie’s nostrils flare, and a dark cloud seems to slide over her face before she says, “All the typical stuff, you know, like girls hanging around after the shows. Girls asking him to give them the shirt off his back as a souvenir. Girls throwing their panties at him.” Her mouth turns sour.
“Panties on stage at a bluegrass show?” I blurt without thinking. The very idea seems ludicrous. I can’t help but picture the girls from Hee-Haw—the one with the missing tooth—or Minnie Pearl with the price tag hanging off her hat. I picture big, fat polka-dot drawers with ruffled elastic edges sailing over the heads of a couple of crusty, old banjo players, and I stifle the urge to snicker.
You have to understand that I wasn’t born and raised here in Tennessee with all these country bumpkins picking banjos on their front porches. I’m a Detroit boy.
Jamie looks impatient.
“I told you, it’s not like the old bluegrass with Bill Munroe and Flat and Scruggs and all that. It’s new grass—it’s for a younger generation. It’s hip. Most of the fans are college-aged kids. And Elijah and the band mix it up. They cover songs from other genres—some garage rock and alternative stuff.”
I nod. I especially can’t stand that grungy rock crap.
“So there were a lot of women on the road. Was your husband unfaithful?” I ask, point blank.
Jamie seems flustered.
“I—I don’t think he ever was. He says he never was. He’s not really the kind of guy who would go around sleeping with a bunch of girls. He was raised in a good Christian home, like me, you know? His parents were really strict and they taught him morals and values. They home-schooled him and sent him to church camp. He never had a bunch of girlfriends. He was just never like that.”
I nod but I’m not buying it—not for a second. I mean, this case has crime of passion written all over it, and just because the kid went to church camp doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a dick. He’d have to be a monk to behave himself on the road, especially with those panty-tossing, hillbilly groupies throwing themselves at him. But I keep a straight face and ask, “So what happened wasn’t prompted by an affair with another woman?”
“No.” Jamie shakes her head decidedly and then looks at her hands. “But what people don’t understand is that there always was another woman. Music was the other woman. Elijah was always focused on his music and was kind of like the absent-minded professor, you know? He’d forget things, and he needed me to take care of things for him. I always made sure his clothes were washed and his appointment book was up-to-date. If he forgot to eat because he was working on a new song, then I’d cook him his favorite meal and coax him to the table. I was the one who kept things together for him. His mind was always on the music.”
I nod and jot down the words, “Mind always on the music,” as Jamie continues.
“For our second anniversary we were supposed to fly to Hawaii for a few days. I had been planning the trip for months. I like to plan things like that, you know. I’m a detail-oriented person. I like things to be on time. I like things to be straight. The night we were supposed to leave, I sat at the airport waiting for him for two hours. He was supposed to meet me there after this big important magazine interview, and he forgot all about me. You know where he was? He was at home! He went home instead of going to the airport. He got our plans mixed up. Then, while he was sitting there at home, he got the inspiration to write a new song. When I finally left the airport and went home and found him sleeping on the couch I just exploded. I just couldn’t believe it. He’d fallen asleep with two bags of frozen corn lying over his arms and all these composition sheets spread around him.”
“Frozen corn?” I stop writing and look at her.
Jamie waves her hand in agitation.
“Sometimes Elijah’s arms would ache from playing so much,” she explains hastily. “The ice maker on the fridge was broke, so he was using the frozen corn as substitutes for ice packs.”
My memory jogs back to the police report, and then I recall that it did say something about frozen corn.
Victim, Elijah Letson, 23, of 114 Tower Road, was asleep on the couch when his wife, Jamie Letson, 21, same address, arrived on the premises. Mrs. Letson says she found her husband asleep on the couch and became angry. Mrs. Letson admits to going into the garage and finding a sledgehammer. Mr. Letson’s left hand was lying out from his body, resting across the coffee table. Mrs. Letson admits to swinging the hammer onto her husband’s left hand and smashing his fingers before calling 911. Hammer’s impact crushed three of victim’s fingers and split coffee table. When police arrived, victim was found sitting in entry hall with his bloody hand wrapped in a towel and a bag of frozen corn.”
“So that’s the night it happened?” I ask.
She nods her head and gets quiet. “Yes.”
The room is dead silent except for the soft rattle of the conditioning unit.
Jamie looks down at the floor, and my eyes follow her gaze to the blue-green carpet. For some stupid reason, the green and blue swirls remind me of a painting Claire—my ex-wife—was working on right before we got divorced. I hated that painting. One night she stayed up until 3 a.m. working on that damn thing. The apartment was a pigsty and the laundry hadn’t been done in almost two weeks, and there she was painting all these green and blue blobs on this giant canvas.
I told her I was sick of always being the one to do all the cleaning, and she just kept on painting and said, “Well, then don’t do it, Richard.”
That was a couple nights before she dragged me to that art exhibit at the university. She kept insisting I go with her. She said the artist was one of her colleagues, and she was just raving about his work and how talented he was. So I went with her, and we walked around looking at all these paintings—most of them were of half-dressed women done in something called Art Nouveau style. I didn’t mind looking at all those naked girls, but some of the stuff was just plain weird. One chick had snakes crawling all over her. Another girl was covered with leaves and dirt and was rising up out of a pool of brown water littered with broken bottles and soda cans. The painting was titled “Birth of a 21st Century Venus.” But the most ridiculous one was this painting of a girl talking on a cell phone with a bunch of planets orbiting around her head.
After about an hour wasted looking at these lame paintings and talking with all of Claire’s out-there art friends, we sat down and listened to the artist—Claire’s colleague—speak about his work.
The guy was a bona fide weirdo—big black trench coat, frizzy orange hair, pointy tortoise shell glasses. Foreign, too, with some kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger accent. He stood up in front of everyone and launched into this random monologue about art and the creative process.
“I do not think when I paint. It is purely instinct. All art comes from a force greater than the artist, and it is that force that prompts the artist to create. The gift filters through the artist, through his brain and down to the tips of his fingers like an electrical current. That is when he is most alive. Creating is what he was born to do. The artist often loses track of time and reality. But what is reality? Sometimes the artist needs someone else to remind him. This someone else is often very practical and economical—someone very balanced and grounded. This non-artist can see the art but often not understand it, and this non-artist can never understand what it is to make the art—to have the muse whispering ideas into the brain. The artist and the non-artist are brought together because of what is lacking in each other. It is the law of nature that opposites attract. But sadly, what draws the opposites together also keeps them apart, for they can never really understand one another. The gulf is too great. Only God can understand the workings of the artist’s mind. God and perhaps another artist.”
After the exhibit, Claire and I went home and got undressed for bed. I wanted to do it—can you blame me after looking at all those half-naked Art Nouveau chicks?—but Claire was pissed at me. I’d made some crack about one of the paintings (the Venus one), and Claire said I was afraid of anything creative, and she was sick of trying to get me to understand what was important to her. She told me I acted like an anally-retentive adolescent, if there is such a thing, and all I cared about was my next cup of coffee and my next big murder story and whether or not the apartment was clean. She also said she was sick of being alone all of the time inside her mind, or some crap like that. She even told me I wasn’t a real writer because real writers use their imaginations, and I don’t do anything but regurgitate facts for the scandal-hungry public. I retorted that I don’t write fairy stories. I write the news, and it takes more of a brain to investigate a story and get the facts straight than it does to invent some drivel and call it art.
Then she got completely livid and said, “Well, the facts are, Richard, that I am sick and tired of living with you, and we are just too different, and I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I want a divorce.”
A few days later I found out she was doing Mr. Art Nouveau Painter with his frizzy hair and tortoise shell glasses and Austrian accent. That sealed the deal.
Jamie faces me again with a gaze that’s far away as she tucks a piece of brown hair behind her ear.
I pause, my pen poised above the notepad, waiting for her to continue. I heard from one of my editors that a surgeon had to amputate two of her husband’s fingers. Dubbed a prodigy early on, Elijah Letson was national fiddling champion by age 8 and international champion by age 11. At 17, he made the covers of six prominent music magazines, including Rolling Stone.
I skimmed the Rolling Stone piece while I was preparing for Jamie’s interview. There was a big spread of Elijah inside—this young, good-looking blond kid wearing a tattered black suit and green Converse sneakers, sitting on a stool and hugging a fiddle to his heart. His chin was rough with stubble and his hair was messed up like he’d just crawled out of bed, but he sat in front of the photographer’s gray drop cloth just as serious as a heart attack. He had large, sensitive eyes—like a woman’s—and he stared into the camera like the lens was the portal to another world.
Elijah’s fans have labeled Jamie’s assault as “sick and disgraceful,” and Nashville Music Magazine deemed the damaging results as “a tragic and devastating loss to the music world.”
“I am really sorry for what I did, and I want people to know that,” Jamie whispers. “I guess I just wanted to be first, you know? I just got so tired of being second. But now I guess he’ll divorce me, and I won’t even be second anymore. My mom says he’s been spending a lot of time with Serena. . .”
She trails off and reaches for another Kleenex.
I bet he has, I think. Then I ask, “Has Elijah filed for divorce?”
“Not yet. We’re Christians, you know. We don’t really believe in divorce. We believe God can fix anything that’s broken.”
Just not smashed fingers, I can’t help but think.
“Has your minister been here to see you?”
Jamie nods and says, “He’s been here every day to pray with me. He says God will forgive me if I just repent, which I have. We had a long talk, and he says the trouble was that I was putting too much emphasis on Elijah’s love and not enough emphasis on the love of the Lord. I was too obsessed with Elijah. I was forgetting God and making Elijah my God. I guess my pastor’s right, but I love Li so much. He’s just so gifted. There’s just no one like him. Or at least there wasn’t.”
Jamie’s face contorts, and she starts crying again, really hard this time. The tendons in her neck stick out and her pale cheeks redden. “I’ve ruined everything for him. It’s all over and done with now.”
She talks like her husband’s dead, not missing a few fingers. I stop taking notes and stare at her.
“Your husband will never play again?” I ask, thinking of prosthetics and the marvels of modern medicine—wondering if some medical miracle is a possibility.
She shakes her head “no” and dabs her fresh flood of tears.
“And you don’t think he can live a full life if he doesn’t?” I prod.
“No,” she says, her blue eyes meeting mine with desperate clarity. “Don’t you see that I’ve ruined him? Without his music, he might as well be dead. Music was his gift. Now God can’t speak through him anymore.”
After the Jamie Letson interview, I go back to the newsroom and sit down at my desk with a cup of coffee. It’s after hours, and no one else is around. I feel kind of shitty, but I don’t know why. I take a swig of coffee and stare at the blank computer screen in front of me.
One of the editors left an Elijah Letson CD on my desk, and I take it out of the case and slip it into the disc player. The first song is some sentimental new grass ballad called “Flying Away,” and I’m glad none of the other guys are around to hear me listening to it. The lyrics ring in my head:
You say that you love me but how can you mean it
When you don’t understand me at all
It’s four in the morning, the clock’s slowly ticking
You’re asleep in our bed down the hall
While you count all the minutes and straighten the curtains
My mind flies like a bird from its cage
Up where the mists swirl, up where the stars burn
Down to these words on the page
Oh, my heart is all wild, all ripe and all wanting
Why can’t you be the one to unchain me?
Oh, my mind is a beautiful prize, pure and aching
Now speak and say something to claim me
We could hang up the pictures
All night and all morning
But I don’t think you’d see them at all
In the end you’d be wanting the clouds I can’t paint you
And the dream castles, they would soon fall
But I don’t want the ticking to stop when the dawn breaks
When I hold you, it still feels so right
But the pieces won’t bend with these edges worn ragged
So I’m flying away at first light
My divorce from Claire was final four weeks ago, and that evening after work me and a couple of the guys went out for drinks. I got completely and totally sauced. I don’t think I’d done so many shots since I was a freshman in college. One of my Journalism 101 students was at the bar, and she walked up to me and started flirting—started coming on really strong. It was bad judgment, I know, but I took her home with me. Now she’s been hanging around, bugging me after class, acting like we’re an item. The thing is, she’s barely legal and I’ll be 34 in December, and she’s just too young. But even if she wasn’t too young, I still wouldn’t want a relationship with her. She’s not my type. She’s just so . . . predictable.
I hate to admit it, but if I were going to go after one of my students (which I’m not), I’d go for this girl who always sits in the back of the class near the door. Michelle is her name, and she wears this black leather jacket and has this long, burgundy hair and always has this really intense, kind of pissed off look in her eyes. She’s minoring in photography, and one day she brought some of her work to class to show to one of her friends. I happened to take a glance at some of it, and the pictures were actually pretty good. Black and white. Edgy. In your face.
I couldn’t help thinking about Claire and how she used to like to take photos when she wasn’t painting. Once she took some of me in the nude. I kept telling her I couldn’t believe she’d talked me into it. She made me take off my glasses and pose with these feathery, white angel wings strapped to my back. She even talked me into skipping my habitual four-week trim so my hair would look long and shaggy for the shots instead of short and neat the way I like it.
“Jesus hair.” That’s what she called it. “I want you to have Jesus hair for the pictures, Richard. Your have such nice curls when you let it grow. Why do you always have to cut it so short?” Then she ran her fingers through it and messed it up.
I thought the whole thing was utterly ridiculous, but after she developed the film, I have to admit, the pictures looked kind of cool. I was always amazed at how she could dream up things like that. She always kept me guessing. I haven’t talked to her in ages. Last I heard, she was shacking up with Mr. Art Nouveau. Hope she burned those damned pictures.
I sip my coffee, loosen my tie, tap my pen against my desk and then, just for fun, dream up some outrageous headlines for the Elijah Letson story.
“Wife bashes musically gifted mate so his magic fingers can never fondle the fiddle again,” and “Champion fiddler’s wife swings a mighty sledge to forever silence musically-talented hubby.”
I smirk and type another one.
“Anal, non-artist wife mutilates musical genius husband. Claims she was tired of being second fiddle to the muse.”
Ha. I kind of like that one. Too bad I can’t really use it.
I take another swig of coffee and get to work on the story.
The next day the piece has top billing on A-1, and when I walk into the newsroom, everyone’s talking about how great it is.
“You nailed it, Richard.” That’s what my crusty, old editor tells me, and coming from him, you know it’s got to be good.
I’m thinking I deserve a freakin’ Pulitzer for this one, but then as soon as I sit down at my desk, the phone rings and the shit hits the fan.
The female on the other end of the line introduces herself as Serena Murphy—the chick who plays mandolin in Elijah Letson’s band—and right away I can tell she’s fuming pissed.
Without delay she informs me that my article is total garbage, and the fact that it was published at all just goes to show how screwed up our country is. Why, she wants to know, should a psychotic bitch who has maimed one of the most brilliant young musicians of our time be presented by the media as some poor, helpless wife pushed over the edge by a neglectful, absent-minded husband? Why the hell should the public feel sorry for a neurotic criminal?
“And that’s exactly what she is! A selfish, jealous little criminal who couldn’t stand that her husband loved anything more than her! You have no idea what Elijah has gone through since this happened to him! He’s practically lost his will to live. He’s the one who deserves sympathy! Why don’t you call him and get his side of the story? You reporters will do anything just to sell your trashy newspapers. You’re the scum of the earth, and someday you’ll pay for the way you twist the truth around!”
Click. Serena slams down the phone.
I shrug it off. I’m a journalist. I’m used to tirades and rants. What irks me about Serena’s call is whether or not she might have a point.
I scratch my head and adjust my glasses.
Did I lose my objectivity? Did I let something personal get in the way? Did I identify a little too strongly with what it feels like to be second to the muse?
For a second I wonder. Then I drop it.
Why waste my time with self-depreciating doubt or dime store psycho analysis? The facts are the facts, and that’s what I’ll stick to. I told Jamie’s side of the story, and I told it objectively.
And I’m over Claire, anyway. Really, I am. She can have her Art Nouveau boy toy and take photos of him buck naked with devil horns on his head for all I care. The next time I get involved, it won’t be with some out-there artist, you can count on that. In fact, the next time I catch myself looking at that chick in the back of my journalism 101 class—the one with the cherry-colored hair and kick-ass photography—I’ll just remind myself what really happens after the honeymoon’s over and Mr. and Mrs. Polar Opposite try to cohabitate.
Yeah, I’ll just remind myself of what really happens next.
Lonely nights. Forgotten anniversaries. Bags of frozen corn on smashed fingers. Messy apartments with paint tubes scattered all over the floor. Laundry that hasn’t been washed in weeks. Nothing to eat for dinner ‘cause the muse has come calling and can’t be ignored. Mr. Art Nouveau’s number on the caller I.D. Divorce court. Attorney bills. Law suits. Psych wards. Anger. Resentment. Infidelity. Rage. Nice Christian girls swinging sledge hammers and going berserk like Lizzie Borden or Lorena Bobbitt. Hacking things to pieces and throwing amputated penises out the car window. .
Christ! I’m glad I’ll know better next time.
Interpret it however you want, but that’s how it really is.
End of story.
Rebecca Nieminen Sloan is an award-winning journalist with a bachelor’s in Professional Writing and Editing and a master’s in English, both from YSU. For more than a decade she has penned news, features and columns for The Vindicator. Her features and poetry have also appeared in The Finnish American Reporter and The Penguin Review. In 2007 she contributed to a collaborative nonfiction book titled My Father Spoke Finglish at Work: Finnish Americans in Northeast Ohio, which was published by Kent State University Press. Rebecca has completed two unpublished novels and a short story collection and is working on a third novel. She teaches freshmen composition at YSU and enjoys photography.