Libby Day
NOW
So I was going to meet my brother, all grown up. After my beer with Lyle, I actually went home and looked at Barb Eichel’s copy of Your Prison Family: Get Past the Bars! After reading a few confusing chapters about the administration of the Florida State Penitentiary system, I flipped back through the foxed pages to the copyright: 1985. How not remotely useful. I worried about receiving more pointless bundles from Barb: pamphlets about defunct Alabama waterslide parks, brochures about smithereened Las Vegas hotels, warnings about the Y2K bug.
I ended up making Lyle handle all the arrangements. I told him I couldn’t get through to the right person, was overwhelmed by it all, but the truth was I just didn’t want to. I don’t have the stamina: press numbers, wait on hold, talk, wait on hold, then be real nice to some pissed-off woman with three kids and annual resolutions to go back to college, some woman just wiggling with the hope you’ll give her an excuse to pull the plug on you. She’s a bitch all right, but you can’t call her that or all of a sudden there you are, chutes-and-laddered back to the beginning. And that’s supposed to make you nicer when you phone back. Let Lyle deal with it.
Ben’s prison is right outside Kinnakee and was built in 1997 after another round of farm consolidations. Kinnakee is almost in the middle of Kansas, not so far from the Nebraska border, and it once claimed to be the geographic center of the forty-eight contiguous United States. The heart of America. It was a big deal back in the ’80s, when we were all patriotic. Other cities in Kansas made a grab for the title, but Kinnakeeans ignored them, stubbornly, proudly. It was the city’s only point of interest. The Chamber of Commerce sold posters and T-shirts with the town’s name cursived inside a heart. Every year Diane bought all us girls a new shirt, partly because we liked anything heart-shaped, and partly because Kinnakee is an old Indian word, which means Magical Little Woman. Diane always tried to get us to be feminists. My mom joked that she didn’t shave much and that was a start. I don’t remember her saying it but I remember Diane, broad and angry as she always was after the murders, smoking a cigarette in her trailer, drinking ice tea out of a plastic cup with her name written in log-cabin letters on the side, telling me the story.
Turns out we were wrong after all. Lebanon, Kansas, is the official center of the United States. Kinnakee was working from bad information.
I’D THOUGHT I’D have months before I got permission to see Ben, but it seems the Kinnakee Kansas State Penitentiary is quick with the visitor passes. (“It’s our belief that interaction with family and friends is a beneficial activity for inmates, helping them stay socialized and connected.”) Paperwork and bullshit and then I spent the few intervening days going over Lyle’s files, reading the transcript of Ben’s trial, which I’d never mustered enough courage to do.
It made me sweat. My testimony was a zigzag of confusing kid-memories (I think Ben brought a witch to the house and she killed us, I said, to which the prosecutor replied only, Mmmm, now let’s talk about what really happened”) and overly coached dialogue (I saw Ben as I was standing on the edge of my Mom’s room, he was threatening my Mom with our shotgun). As for Ben’s defense attorney, he might as well have wrapped me in tissue paper and set me on a feather bed, he was so delicate with me (Might you be a little confused about what you saw, Libby? Are you positive, positive it was your brother, Libby? Are you maybe telling us what you think we want to hear? To which I replied No Yes No.) By the end of the day, I answered I guess to every single question, my way of saying I was done.
Ben’s defense attorney had hammered at that bit of blood on Michelle’s bedspread, and the mysterious dress shoe that left a print in my family’s blood, but couldn’t come up with a convincing alternate theory. Maybe someone else had been there, but there were no footprints, no tire treads outside the house to prove it. The morning of January 3 brought a twenty-degree bump in the temperature, melting the snow and all its imprints to a springlike mush.
Besides my testimony, Ben had weighing against him: fingernail scratches across his face he couldn’t explain, a story about a bushy-haired man he initially claimed killed everyone—a story he quickly exchanged for the “out all night, don’t know nothing” defense—a large chunk of Michelle’s hair found on the floor of his room, and his general crazy demeanor that day. He’d dyed his hair black, which everyone deemed suspicious. He’d been spotted “sneaking” around school, several teachers testified. They wondered if he was perhaps trying to retrieve some of the animal remains that he’d kept in his locker (animal remains?) or if he was gathering other students’ personal items for a satanic mass. Later in the day he apparently went to some stoner hangout and bragged about his Devil sacrifices.