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Inhaltsangabe
Susan Musgrave’s bestselling third novel, Cargo of Orchids, examines the life of a woman on death row in the United States. Our narrator recalls what brought her to this place, where she awaits the last of her appeals. We learn that along with her cellmates, Frenchy and Rainy, this Mother Without a Heart, otherwise known as the Cocaine Queen, has been sentenced to death for the crime of killing her child.
Unlike the others, the narrator has not had a life marked by abuse and hardship. When her story begins, she is translating a book about the kidnapping of a woman connected to a drug cartel. At the book launch, she meets her husband-to-be, a lawyer. When their marriage fizzles out, she falls in love with one of his clients, Angel, a Colombian from a drug cartel family, imprisoned in British Columbia on a drug-smuggling charge. Pregnant, the narrator is taken hostage by Angel’s wife to a hot and squalid island off the coast of Colombia; in an atmosphere of extreme violence, she is fed drugs until she becomes addicted to cocaine and useless to her child. When she winds up on death row, it is because the evidence in her trial suggests she sacrificed her baby for drugs.
Her narrative – violent and bizarre, but also riveting and erotic – runs parallel to an account of life in “Death Clinic” at the Heaven Valley State Facility for Women. A moving story emerges of the friendship of three female inmates who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner. There is humour and emotion in their lives, however harsh their stories. When Musgrave was asked how humour finds its way into such an unlikely place, she replied, “It’s a survival technique. People make jokes when they survive tragedies – that’s how they deal with the world.”
In this novel about prison and drug culture, filled with brutality and injustices, the compassion we feel for the narrator lends the story a moral message: that nobody is so simply bad as to deserve the death sentence. As the Gazette commented, the book puts “a human face on convicted criminals,” makes us face squarely the issue of capital punishment and assess how we judge guilt, innocence and the ambiguous space in between. The Calgary Straight called the book “a love letter to those who are serving time and the families who serve with them.” It’s also a book about unconditional love and how far we will go for it, according to Musgrave, who spent eight years writing this novel and knows plenty about prison life, having met and married her husband Stephen Reid during his incarceration in the 1980s. She had just finished a draft of the novel when Reid was arrested again following a bank robbery in 1999, just months after the CBC aired a Life and Times documentary about the couple.
A brilliant mix of black humour, stark tragedy and poignant humanity, Cargo of Orchids is Musgrave’s first novel in over ten years. She has three times been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, once for fiction (The Charcoal Burners) and twice for poetry (A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury and Grave-Dirt and Selected Strawberries), and has published over twenty books. She likes novels with intense use of language and good plotting. “I want to give readers a harrowing ride,” she says. “I like to think of Cargo of Orchids as a suspense novel which is also an exploration of the heart.”
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Born in 1951 in California of Canadian parents, Susan has lived by the sea on Vancouver Island in British Columbia for most of her life, with sojourns in the west of Ireland and South America. She lives with her two daughters and is now surrounded by a community of friends who are writers and parents; earlier, her friends were “gardeners and criminals and all sorts of other things that interested me.” She is easily recognized around Vancouver Island in her car, Toy Karma, covered with hundreds of glued-on plastic toys. She is open, candid and whimsical; happily “on the fringe,” yet rooted in family life.
In Grade 8 she won her first poetry competition, with a poem in rhyming couplets about Jackie Kennedy visiting her husband's grave by moonlight; her prize was a copy of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. But she left school at fourteen, her life in emotional turmoil; she was regularly experimenting with LSD and was hospitalized for depression. The poet Robin Skelton helped her out of the psychiatric ward, telling her, “You’re not mad, you’re a poet.” Musgrave published her first poems in the Malahat Review at sixteen. Her first book of poems, Songs of the Sea-Witch, drew comparison with Sylvia Plath. Susan describes poetry as “a way of dredging up the confusion and the chaos and trying to articulate it through transforming language.” It has been her solace, and her way of keeping balanced: “Writing saved me always, from probably going to prison or killing myself. This is how I transform experience. It’s a great safety valve.”
Her first novel, The Charcoal Burners, was a finalist for both the Seal First Novel Competition and the Governor General’s Award. Saturday Night magazine put the book in the company of works by Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Laurence and Malcolm Lowry, and the Globe and Mail called it “a riskier novel than Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, more ambitious and visionary.” She continues to be celebrated for her fiction, poetry and non-fiction. She has won the CBC/Saturday Night Literary Contest and a National Magazine Award. Her Toronto Star columns have been collected in two volumes, one of which was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. Dreams Are More Real Than Bathtubs, a children’s book, was selected by the Canadian Children's Book Centre for Our Choice 1999-2000. Her work has been in several anthologies including Desire in Seven Voices; Best American Poetry; Without a Guide: Contemporary Women’s Travel Adventures and the Great Big Book of Canadian Humour.
Susan Musgrave enjoys giving speeches and readings, always putting the audience at ease with humorous anecdotes. She has been labelled everything from sea-witch to stand-up comedian and social/political commentator, from anti-feminist to eco-feminist. She was once even named the “enfant terrible of Canadian letters,” (like Martin Amis, who has been called the enfant terrible of British letters, she worried that they would drop the enfant part when she turned forty). Famously, she posed nude for Saturday Night magazine. Poet Al Purdy used to say she had a genius for publicity – others say it’s simply her personality not to hold anything back. “When you’re a poet you don’t make a lot of money. But one thing you do need to do is keep your name out there, because that will help you get work. Publicity is a necessary function to keep everything rolling. I don’t go out looking for it, but when it comes to me, I try to see it in a practical way.”
Cargo of Orchids draws on Musgrave’s experiences on the periphery of the legal system. Her first marriage was to a criminal lawyer, her second to a man he successfully defended in court for drug smuggling, with whom she lived in Colombia and Panama. She finally met Stephen Reid while she was writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo and he was serving a sentence for bank robbery in Millhaven Penitentiary. Reid had been a leader of the Stopwatch Gang, once on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for a string of high-profile heists. She edited the manuscript he sent to her (it became the acclaimed Jackrabbit Parole), visiting him in jail over four years and gradually falling in love, initially through the main character in his book, whom she found funny and exciting. Reid was granted parole and became an author and a family man; he and Susan had a daughter together, and he eventually became best friend and role model to the daughter she already had.
Sadly, however, Stephen continued to battle a drug addiction that has haunted him since his teen years (Susan has written about the addiction in her poem collection Things That Keep and Do Not Change). When Stephen overdosed, Susan feared for his life. After a two-year “clean-and-dry period” during which the couple read from their private letters at a PEN Canada benefit and the CBC documentary The Poet and the Bandit aired, Stephen succumbed again to his addiction and was arrested for bank robbery. He is now serving an eighteen-year sentence. Susan wrote in Saturday Night in September 1999: “Stephen and I were married in prison, in 1986, when he was serving a twenty-year sentence . . . . He was paroled a few months after we took our vows, twelve years ago almost to this day. But prison is not an easy place to escape, even if they release you.” She sees addiction as a sickness, and misses Stephen as a father, a husband, and her first reader. “He’s only been the perfect husband that all my friends wanted. Except for his addiction.” She is editing a book of their 1984—87 correspondence.
Life for this writer and mother has become harder, but she continues to apply herself wholeheartedly to all her work, and sometimes the roles overlap. In addition to writing several books for children, she has worked with over a thousand high-school students across Canada through the Writers In Electronic Residence program, and for the NWT Literacy Council, conducting workshops in youth custody and correctional centres. She has written two scripts for the NFB’s Teenagers at Risk series, and recently edited the anthology Nerves Out Loud: Critical Moments in the Lives of Seven Teen Girls.
In 1999, she and Stephen began building a house on the Queen Charlotte Islands, where her first novel was set. It’s her favourite place. “There's no phone, no deadline, no schedule - only a transistor radio, the CBC. When the batteries run out we lie on our backs and listen to the stars burn out. This may be the one kind place on Earth.”
Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
Editor’s Note
Though this story is true, some names have been changed. Otherwise there have been few alterations.
The writer intended both the Spanish and her translations into English to be included in the text, but in most cases the Spanish has been dropped for the sake of expediency. A few words and phrases and colloquialisms have been retained for flavour, and she would like to thank Paul Oscar Nelson for his input. Also Gustavo Gomez, for his fine-tuning. It is the writer’s wish that her name appear nowhere in the book.
Part One / Valentine’s Day in Jail
Stop and imagine for an instant a world where someone is grateful for something.
–Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Chapter One
Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women
If you are a new inmate only recently sentenced by the courts, this will probably be an entirely new experience for you. –Inmate Information Handbook
When you find yourself listening to their keys and owning none, you will come close to understanding the white terror of the soul that comes with being banished from all commerce with mankind. –Pat Conroy, Prince of Tides
When a reporter asked Rainy to compare being given the death sentence to being hit by a train, she said, “The train was quicker, the train was softer.”
I’ve lived next door to Rainy for ten years, on the Condemned Row. They call it the Death Clinic–as if it’s a place you go to get treatment for a terminal disease. You can’t cure death, but while you wait for it, they make life impossible.
In many cases death-row inmates are not allowed to write anything longer than a one-page letter, double-spaced. That they permit me to write this story is not a right, they remind me every chance they get, it’s a privilege. If I write gossip, to spread rumours that might end up embarrassing the staff, this privilege will be revoked. So I do as I am told, and “confine all writings to inside the lines.” If you ignore the lines, you are considered “out of bounds without authorization and subject to disciplinary action.”
When I write the word lines, I think of cocaine. My care and treatment counsellor, Mrs. Dykstra, would say the word lines is a trigger, a connection to my former “drug-seeking ways.” Not to mention connection.
La Reina de la Cocaína is what they called me in the papers after my arrest: the Cocaine Queen. They gave me other names, too. La Madre Sin Corazón. The Mother without a Heart. When I told one reporter I wished I’d been called Oriana Fallachi, a name that sounds like you’re having sex without doing it, he said he could understand why a woman like me would want to change her identity.
Rainy says I shouldn’t take it personally, what they say about me in the press. They always end up bad-mouthing mothers who kill their kids.
***
Frenchy, my only other neighbour at the moment, is suing the railway. When the train passes the prison at 2:16 every afternoon, it whistles and wakes her up.
Rainy says, what does she expect? She sleeps all day.
Every day is a gift, I say. Who can blame her for not wanting to get out of bed?
***
Each Christmas Eve we are issued a new calendar so we can start X-ing off the days – until next Christmas or our date certain, whichever comes first. But aside from the barbed-wire sculpture meant to symbolize a Christmas tree in one corner of the chow hall, and the matron who has a “negativity scene”–what Rainy calls it–on her desk, Christmas is like any other day on the Condemned Row. The Salvation Army used to donate a poinsettia for our common room, until one year a girl made a salad out of the leaves.
This morning in the shower, Rainy started singing, “Deck the halls with marijuana, fa-la-la-la-la-la la la la.” She would have gone on, but Frenchy, who doesn’t have the Christmas spirit, told her to shut up. The rule here is that if someone asks you to shut up, you shut up. Because they’re not asking for a debate, and they’re not asking again.
Rainy says she and Frenchy are the two best friends I could “hope to never have.” She also insists that if anyone reads this book, they will want to know what my best friends look like; she doesn’t understand when I tell her I don’t care about appearances. Rainy’s expressions, actions and thoughts count for more in this story than the fact that she is so thin her elbows and knees look like they’re going to slice through her clothing, or that her eyes are empty because she’s cried all the colour away, or that she has no chest at all and a mouth that turns down from the way things have gone.
Despite the freight of anger she carries, Rainy seems so frail it is hard to imagine her giving birth to anything heavier than tears. Rainy gave birth to twins, and six months later left them on the railway tracks. She claims it prejudiced the jury. If she’d smothered them or driven them off a pier, it would have been more socially acceptable. She might have been able to cut a deal, had her sentence commuted to life. She could have gone on “Oprah” and become a celebrity, maybe even a role model for women who are child-free by choice.
The train was quicker, the train was softer. But abandoning your kids on the tracks wasn’t in fashion. She wishes now she’d gone out drinking for the evening instead, but she didn’t have enough money to hire a babysitter and pay for the beer.
I can hear Rainy singing, under her breath as she leaves the shower room, “’Tis the season to be jolly.” In prison, time does not progress, it goes round and round in a spiral of endless pain. I want to say, Rainy, there are no seasons in prison–only time.
***
Frenchy has a little peacock-like crest of hair shooting from the white bandanna she says she wears “to keep my brains wrapped up in.” There’s a male heaviness about her face: her broad nose, brown eyes, a mouth made for smiling and for grief. Her most distinguishing feature, though, is the white, heart-shaped mark, shining like a beauty spot in reverse, on her cheek. Frenchy calls it her “ugly spot.”
Frenchy’s here because she killed her sixteen-year-old son. “The two of us was just fooling around, you know. Robbing a bank. I’ve made a few mistakes in life I probably shouldn’t have made. And we was doing more drinking than we probably should have, considering we was both on probation. And I was high at the time. So I think I might have overpanicked when those alarms went off, but I don’t recall shooting anyone on purpose.
“We got away from the bank, even though he couldn’t run fast and had to drop most of the money and got blood all over the rest. I was pretty hot about that. I left him by the river, thinking I could go back and find a doctor when things cooled off. The whole town was looking for us, so I stayed at Laverne’s getting high for a week. When Laverne and me went back for him, some animals had eaten on him and there was bugs everywhere, and Laverne shot his teeth out. She told me she done it so that his dental records couldn’t be used against me. That’s what I loved best about Laverne–you could count on her to take care of the details.
“The shooting his mouth part, that made it look bad, but I kept my own mouth shut and never gave up Laverne to the cops, even though I could have got a deal if I did.” Frenchy’s got a few good qualities like...
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