But the backhoe never brought up another bone.
Decapitation, alone, of course, could have done the job.
He wasn’t much interested. He judged from the patina on the skull that its owner had died long before we were born. He was here to examine the bodies of people who had been killed after the prison break, and to make educated guesses about how they had died, by gunshot or whatever.
He was especially fascinated by Tex Johnson’s body. He had seen almost everything in his line of work, he told me, but never a man who had been crucified, with spikes through the palms and feet and all.
I wanted him to talk more about the skull, but he changed the subject right back to crucifixion. He sure knew a lot about it.
He told me one thing I’d never realized: that the Jews, not just the Romans, also crucified their idea of criminals from time to time. Live and learn!
How come I’d never heard that?
Darius, King of Persia, he told me, crucified 3,000 people he thought were enemies in Babylon. After the Romans put down the slave revolt led by Spartacus, he said, they crucified 6,000 of the rebels on either side of the Appian Way!
He said that the crucifixion of Tex Johnson was unconventional in several ways besides Tex’s being dead or nearly dead when they spiked him to timbers in the stable loft. He hadn’t been whipped. There hadn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t want an answer, and I didn’t give him one. Some other subject must have come up right away.
But I would tell him now, if he hadn’t 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 Women’s Barefoot Race from the bell tower to the President’s 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 Smiley’s tears were not happy tears.
One suspicion had to be, although nobody said so for publication, that Miss Smiley was pregnant—possibly 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 dummy’s 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 women’s and the men’s 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 an-other 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 weren’t 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 Scipio’s 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 I’ve 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 Provost’s crackup to exhaustion brought on by his tireless efforts to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the golden-haired Lilac Queen.
25
My 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.