“There are two ways I know of to access these records. The first is to request documents appearing on the case docket, which you can do by contacting the clerk’s office in Skagit County, Washington. The second is to file a request under the Freedom of Information Act. While these sorts of requests are most often made by journalists, the law here does not limit access to information falling under the purview of the Freedom of Information Act only to them. It’s available to anyone who makes a request—in this case, again, with Skagit County. In all of this I might well be saying what you already know but, erring on the side of caution, and just in case, I’m writing to you about it.

  “I’m also writing because I want to say, and feel driven to say, that I’m bereft, maddened, and appalled by what happened to Abeba Temesgen. I feel it is wrong that the country of which I’m a citizen allowed Delvin and Betsy Harvey to adopt her. I wouldn’t blame you for taking a dim view of us in light of what happened. We have regulatory work to do here with regard to international adoption and some of it can happen at the state level. We can make the adoption agencies licensed within our state borders do a better job. When this case is over, I plan to look into that.”

  * * *

  —

  I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and in this manner gained access to interviews, affidavits, investigation records, incident reports, lab results, witness statements, suspect statements, medical records, declarations of intent—in short, all manner of documents of relative interest, but none so much as a copy of one of Abeba Temesgen’s homeschooling assignments. Its title was “Something I Remember from Ethiopia,” and it read:

  When I lived in Ethiopia, one time, I saw hyenas eat a cow. I thought Satan was present. In Ethiopia some children like me believe that at night certain people turn into hyenas and go around stealing chickens and things like that. And I was scared. I thought they ate children. That’s what people said. They said there were hyenas who ran on two feet like people and eat children. They said hyena people go into the cemetery and take the graves apart at night if they can’t find children. They said the hyena people say prayers to Satan. They said they knock down fences and open barns and eat the goats. At night I used to hear hyena people laughing. They barked like dogs do sometimes, but they also laughed. I remember that. The way they laughed. They sounded like people. Exactly like people outside the wall of my house. The same way people do right now in this country. But here, it’s through a closet door.

  * * *

  —

  With regard to the Harveys, the State of Washington started over: it wasn’t done with them just because my father had passed away. I had felt more than curious about what would become of Betsy and Delvin Harvey for a long time, and had kept myself apprised of developments, such as they were, by regularly referring to their online case dockets until, in the spring, a retrial date was set, and then I waited until the inevitable guilty verdicts had been announced and went up to Mount Vernon for the sentencings. It was windy in Skagit County, where, according to news reports, the annual tulip frenzy was winding down prematurely because the weather had been warmer than is optimum for their longevity; sure enough, the famous flowers had that flagging look and had begun to wither in the wide expanses of the delta. The stark, flat, and treeless qualities of the terrain yielded to a vast gray sky that blurred at the horizon. It was distressing and calming at the same time.

  At the Skagit County Courthouse, I waited my turn at the apparatuses of security, and was put in mind of certain comical moments with my father there wherein he daily felt fated to be called out and frisked, since it was true that he often set off alarms, bells, whistles, and buzzers for inexplicable reasons, as if the walk-through metal detector had it in for him especially. The posted officer would tell my father that he didn’t have to remove his shoes or belt but that he did need to empty his pockets into the bowl she pushed toward him, and, having done so, he would gather himself and try to bolt through as if speed might make a difference, and then a second officer would pull him over to one side and maneuver a wand in perfunctory fashion along his limbs, while my father stood with his arms horizontal and reminded him, “This all started after 9/11.”

  In the gallery, there was no Georgette, but there was, I noted, a sizable contingent of courtroom familiars, including the Ethiopian women in their white and gauzy garb, and including a man I ended up sitting beside, a man I’d often seen but never spoken with the previous summer, a man who attended regularly with his wife, a ruddy-looking man in his late sixties who, as we waited for the morning’s proceedings to begin, introduced himself, and said that he was retired from a career as an architect during which he’d been inclined toward symmetry, that he had consistently sought to bring symmetry to his designs and had fought battles on its behalf with engineers and clients, and that during the trial last summer he’d taken notice, with pleasure, of this courtroom’s many symmetries, its formal balance and order, all lending to the place, he said, a necessary dignity, without which the effort toward justice would be lesser, he felt, since he believed, strongly, in the psychological impact of symmetry. But one thing bothered him. The jury box sat on one side only, the side closest to the prosecutor’s table; why not half the jurors on one side and half on the other? At this, his wife, sitting to his right, leaned in and changed the subject abruptly. She said that she’d been reading about Ethiopia, having become curious about the country after last summer’s event, and that in the course of her reading she’d come across what she called “the mystery of the two calendars.” On top of the fact that there were thirteen months in Ethiopia, she said, and that New Year’s Day there came in our September, and that the year in Ethiopia was, at the moment, our year minus seven, on top of all of that, she explained, the day in Ethiopia began at dawn and not at midnight. The day began at what we would call 6:00 a.m., which made sense, she told us, because in Ethiopia, which is near the equator, the sun comes up at about the same time every day; Ethiopians had a regularity in that respect that they could count on, whereas we, no. (This was her theory.) And so, she went on, converting between the Ethiopian and Western clocks was a matter, first, of using military time—meaning “zero one hundred hours” for one o’clock in the morning and “thirteen hundred hours” for one o’clock in the afternoon—and then of adding six hours. So, she explained, if you were in Ethiopia and someone said to you, “It’s eight,” you would do your adding and mentally think, “For me, that’s zero eight hundred hours plus six, or fourteen hundred hours military time,” and from there you would do your conversion to civilian time, the result being 2:00 p.m., which, she said, was the time when her husband took siestas.

  Lincoln Stevens entered, and then Pam Burris with her client, Delvin Harvey, and then Betsy Harvey accompanied by her new attorney, a woman named Angela Mullins who was, I thought, in the vicinity of forty, and looked to me dour. That said, I knew myself to have no objectivity about her; she was, for me, primarily and conspicuously the person who had replaced my father in this scene, and therefore she presented to me as an astonishment and a sadness instead of as a person. And as for Delvin and Betsy Harvey, they looked about the same to my eyes, though both had lost a bit of weight, and both had the jaundiced pallor of those who rarely see the light of day.

  By the time proceedings convened, at 9:00 a.m., there was a full gallery—every bench tightly filled, and still more people standing at the back, all of us poised to hear what Judge Mary Ann Rasmussen had to say about this horrendously sorrowful and infuriating case. And what she said, over the tops of her glasses, was: “I think at some point in this trial each and every one of us sat stunned and speechless without the slightest hope of making any sense of this whatsoever. I am at a complete loss when it comes to understanding it. This was not about mental illness or drug abuse or alcohol or any of those factors I more commonly see associated with homicide by abuse. This is something else. This is a form of evil, in my book—evil dressed up as a higher morality, as a superior or even supreme morality. Delvin and Betsy Harvey, you are not the victims here, you are the perpetrators. And yet I haven’t seen a whit of remorse from you. Not one whit. Only more certainty. In your heads, you’re still right. You remain right and will always be right. It doesn’t matter what happened, you’re forever right. I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to tell you what this sentencing isn’t about. Number one, it isn’t about deterrence. Not at all. No one is going to be deterred from your kind of evil by the sentences I’m about to hand down. Nope, there will still be people who think they’re right in the way that both of you think you’re right, and they will go right on doing evil things because of it. Number two, it’s not about rehabilitation, because I don’t believe that either of you can be rehabilitated. You’re too sure of yourselves for that. You have one-hundred-percent confidence that you didn’t commit a crime and that the legal system and the sheriff’s office and CPS and everybody else is joined in a great conspiracy designed for the purpose of bringing you down. That’s how you see it and will always see it. You will always look out onto a world that is misguided and in error because it doesn’t agree with you, and that’s no basis for rehabilitation. So, then, what is this sentencing about? This sentencing, Betsy and Delvin Harvey, is a denunciation. It is an expression of a common ethos that you, with your actions, have defied and denied. You are being denounced here. The society you live in is sending you a message, and also sending a message to itself, reminding itself of its rules of conduct, and confirming its vision. So you are being denounced here, and at the same time, equally important, I am acknowledging, with your sentences, that the life of your victim very much mattered and was equal to every life in value, and that it cannot be taken without society stepping in to say, ‘Absolutely not, and if you do, you must pay.’ And so you will pay. I sentence you, Delvin Harvey, to thirty-seven years to be served in a Washington State correctional facility before you can be released, and I sentence you, Betsy Harvey, also to thirty-seven years to be served in a Washington State correctional facility before you can be released. That is the maximum sentence available to me, and I have availed myself of it.”

  * * *

  —

  One of the things I liked about fiction writing was that its harder emotions could be lived at a remove. I was making things up, none of it was happening, if someone suffered they didn’t really suffer, if someone died they weren’t really dead. What happened, happened only in my head. What happened didn’t matter in the end. If a character fell from a cliff while sitting for a portrait, lived twenty years with unrequited love, succumbed to a stroke on the third floor of a courthouse, or died in the cold after being starved and lashed, if any of these things happened on a page I’d invented, the consequences in painful emotion were felt only at a distance. I’m not saying that I never felt emotion while making things up and setting them on paper; I’m saying that what I felt lacked the force of things I didn’t make up. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” someone famous supposedly said, but that brand of tears, however integral to life, is foreign to it, too—tears of a different order, so to speak, that fall cathartically in the main, allowing us an out (or so it’s been argued), and granting false cleansing. And as for my own tears, as I shed them over the years while fictionalizing, they were shed, it should be noted, obvious as it may be, in the midst of fabulation. How could it be otherwise? My tears fell amid world-conjuring machinations. There I mediated between considerations. There I arbitrated and ruled from the sidelines. I took what came and surrendered it again. I patched, scraped, glazed, and filled. No, it wasn’t always volitional. Strains from within found their way to my pages. Largely, though, I was an engineer. I calculated stresses and analyzed spans. There was no Abeba Temesgen. Or if there was, it was only a character named Abeba Temesgen, whom, in the end, I kept to a script.

  Sometimes now, when I think of my father—and after having written all of this—I think of King Lear, the character and the play both. “How does my royal lord?” his daughter asks him toward his end, to which he replies, “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave: / thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound / upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / do scald like moulten lead,” before telling her, “You do not love me.”

  On the last page of his memoir Patrimony—subtitled A True Story—Philip Roth dreams that his recently deceased father, Herman, has returned from the grave to rebuke his son for having dressed him “for eternity in the wrong clothes.” Roth’s interpretation, on waking in the morning, is that clothes = Patrimony. He can’t think of Patrimony, stuffed as it is with painful, naked incursions into Herman’s mind, body, and—if you will—soul, without hearing, once again, the age-old paternal reprimand, and without a prick, even more, to his conscience. It’s debatable whether the son has wronged the father by making a spectacle of his aging and death, but it’s not debatable that Roth has articulated, for his readers, guilt about it. And yet his guilt is mitigated, he implies, because in Patrimony, Herman is sustained. Herman’s light remains; it’s not entirely extinguished. Even as a shade, the father goes on haunting the son—not just the son’s dreams but his texts.

  * * *

  —

  One night, shortly after we’d gotten into bed together—and while a steady wind beat against our house, rattling our framed wedding photo on its hook—Alison showed me a book she’d come across called Japanese Death Poems (subtitled Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death), and, cat-eye readers low on her nose, read a few aloud, finishing with, “ ‘I long for people—then again I loathe them: end of autumn.’ ”

  She plucked off her readers. “I long for people, then again I loathe them,” she said. “That makes a kind of sense, I guess. But it surprises me as a death poem.”

  In the golden glow of the lamp beside our bed, she swooped her readers on once more and turned some pages. “Listen to this,” she said. “ ‘My whole life long I’ve sharpened my sword and now, face to face with death, I unsheathe it, and lo—the blade is broken—alas!’ ”

  She turned out the lamp. “That’s a good one,” she observed. “So many of those death poems are about cherry blossoms or plum trees. And then there’s this guy, who just decides to say, at the end, alas, I spent my whole life getting ready for this, and now my sword’s broken.”

  We laughed. Then Alison said things of the sort that are sometimes said on the cusp of sleep. “Your dad kept his sword sharp right to the end,” she said. Alison has a beautiful voice. “But now he’s gone, and so are my parents, and your mother, I don’t know, maybe she’s wide awake right now in bed by herself with the wind blowing outside.”

  I turned toward her. We were close in the dark. “We can love people,” whispered Alison. “What else is there?”

  Acknowledgments

  While working on this book, I was the recipient of so much goodwill, kindness, and support that, looking back, it astonishes me. Thanks especially to Eleni, Elsa, Sister Lutgarda, Sister Tsige Mariam, Eyo, Betty, Mulu, Metti, Membe, Elsabet, Hanna, the Barnts family, Cara, Jacob, Kristen, Joe, Leslie, Roseanne, Tizita, Zenebech, Yalew, Kassaye, Haimanot, Abel, Kassech, Kalkidan, William, Alex, Richard, Del, Gabriel, Thomas, Patrick, Raegen, Bob F., Bob M., Steven, Peter, Chris, Mary, Lisa, Sharon, Danielle, Melinda, Marianne, Kathryn, Molly, Julia, Melissa, Habtamu, Maureen, So-Can, Leanne, Cori, Tara, Monja, Yemisrach, Cliff, Eileen, Anke, Helga, Gay, Beza, Suzanna, Delilah, Stu, Joyce, Shelley, Dagnachew, Sasha, Lydia, Ezra, Addisu, Danielle, Jennifer, Derek, Nancy, Rita, Maxima, Jeanne, Endanchy, Jane, John, Mark, Adam, Diana, Georges, Anne, and Robin.

  Finally, Audra Jo Yoder’s highly illuminating essay “Myth and Memory in Russian Tea Culture” (Studies in Slavic Culture, Issue VIII, August 2009) provides the source material for the fictional thesis on tea and Russian literature paraphrased in this book.

  A Note About the Author

  David Guterson is the author of the novel Snow Falling on Cedars, recipient of the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award, the Martin Beck Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and the American Booksellers Book of the Year Award. His other works of fiction include Our Lady of the Forest, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; East of the Mountains; The Other; Ed King; Problems with People; and The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind. He lives in Washington State.

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  David Guterson, The Final Case

 

 

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