The Eighth Day (2 page)

Throne rooms! The gods are there, underground. “By the following year squaw bush and wild vines were covering the entrances to the underworld. The population of bats increased, emerging at first in whirling clouds above the valley.”

Wilder, called “tirelessly eclectic” by one critic, wove a number of borrowed ideas into
The Eighth Day.
The idea of the title, that we are entering a new week of Creation, though expressed by Coaltown's omniscient Dr. Gillies, was taken from Teilhard de Chardin. Quiet, unobtrusive John Ashley, “odd through a very lack of striking characteristics,” was meant to represent Kierkegaard's “knight of faith,” of whom the Danish philosopher writes in
Fear and Trembling
, “No heavenly glance or any other token of the incommensurable betrays him; if one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the congregation.”
*
Though it might be doubted that John Ashley's tranquil demeanor and kindly acts sufficiently distinguish him, the notion of a hidden elect, a cabal, a saving remnant, a secret masonry of virtue whose members recognize one another, was not just an idea to Wilder; it was a distinct sensation. In his first novel, the ancient gods struggle on, and in his superb fourth,
Heaven's My Destination
(1935), the knight of faith, twenty-three-year-old George Brush, affronts Depression-era America with his naive Christianity; when his faith and health fail, he is saved by a sign—the bequest of a spoon, with its apostolic associations—from another of the world's rare believers, Father Pasziewski of Kansas City. In
The Eighth Day
, the fugitive John Ashley encounters a succession of women—Mrs. Hodge, Maria Icaza, Mrs. Wickersham—who clairvoyantly protect him and pass him on. As he parts from the last, the narrator tells us, “The leave-takings of the children of faith are like first recognitions.”

Children of faith, poets and saints, dot the cruel world, and give Wilder's novels a reticular tension, the suspense of a hidden design about to emerge—“the unfoldment of God's plan for the world,” as John Ashley remembers his grandmother saying in prayer. In
The Eighth Day
, however, the traces of Providence are subsumed in a tracery of heritage, as the genealogies of the Ashleys and the Lansings are displayed, illustrative pieces of “that enormous tapestry” which is human history. As with the Wilder family, two common threads are celebrity and eccentricity—though the Wilders, as far as I know, did not share the Ashleys' tendency to big feet and prominent ears, nor the rich racial mix and mismatched eyes that Eustacia Sims brought to the blond Iowa Lansings. Fame and distinction come readily to these children of Coaltown when they leave their narrow sunless valley—heights of journalism, singing, acting, social activism are quickly reached. As he approaches seventy the author can scarcely imagine a life uncrowned by honors and high regard, such as a funeral “with military bands and statesmen in silk hats” or a flower from the Emperor of Japan.

But among these fictional children George Lansing is half-crazy and Sophie suffers an early breakdown, and a restless, jittery, nervous streak came with Thornton Wilder's inheritance. His mind was not just active but hyperactive; browsing through his journals, with their extravagant wealth of large ideas, is giddying. Aborted and frivolous projects litter his curriculum vitae; the concentration, economy, and solid calm of his best work were achieved, we feel, by a man determinedly holding himself fast to the earth. Like John Ashley in his own son's eyes, he was “high, high up”—he gravitated to the elevated view, portraying the human adventure as a planetary incident. By
The Skin of Our Teeth
(1942) he wears this cosmic scope as a comic confusion;
The Eighth Day
—his one real novel, he said, and much his longest—opens itself to the digression, the sermonette, the stray inspiration that might capture the simultaneous largeness and smallness of the human adventure. Untidily, self-delightingly, it brims with wonder and wisdom, and aspires to prophecy. We marvel at a novel of such spiritual ambition and benign flamboyance.

J
OHN
U
PDIKE
Beverly Farms, Massachusetts

In the early summer of 1902 John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small mining center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, also of Coaltown. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Five days later, at one in the morning of Tuesday, July 22, he escaped from his guards on the train that was carrying him to his execution.

That was the “Ashley Case” that aroused considerable interest, indignation, and derision throughout the Middle West. No one doubted that Ashley shot Lansing, willfully or accidentally; but the trial was felt to have been bungled by a senile judge, an inept defense, and a prejudiced jury—the “Coalhole Case,” the “Coalbin Case.” When, to top it all, the convicted murderer escaped from a guard of five men and vanished into thin air—handcuffed, in prison garb, and with shaved head—the very State of Illinois was held up to ridicule. About five years later, the State's Attorney's office in Springfield announced that fresh evidence had been uncovered fully establishing Ashley's innocence.

So: there had been a miscarriage of justice in an unimportant case in a small Middlewestern town.

Ashley shot Lansing in the back of the head while the two men were engaged in their customary Sunday afternoon rifle practice on the lawn behind the Lansing house. Even the defense did not claim that the tragedy was the result of a mechanical accident. The rifle was repeatedly fired for the benefit of the jurors and was found to be in excellent condition. Ashley was known to have been a superior marksman. The victim was five yards to the front and left of Ashley. It was a little surprising that the bullet entered Lansing's skull above his left ear, but it was assumed that he had turned his head to catch the sounds issuing from a young people's picnic in the Memorial Park across the hedge. Ashley never wavered in his assurance that he was innocent in both intention and deed, laughable though the assertion was. The only witnesses were the wives of the accused and the victim. They were sitting under the butternut trees nearby making lemonade. Both testified that only one shot had been fired. The trial was unduly prolonged because of illness among members of the court, and even death among the jurors and their alternates. Reporters called attention to the delay occasioned by laughter, for a demon of contrariety hovered over the hall. There were frequent slips of the tongue. Witness followed witness in a confusion of names. Judge Crittenden's gavel broke. A St. Louis reporter called it the “Hyena Trial.”

It was the failure to establish a motive for the crime that aroused wide indignation. The prosecution advanced too many motives and no one of them convincing. Coaltown, however, was convinced that it knew why Ashley had killed Lansing and most of the members of the court were from Coaltown. Everyone knew it and no one mentioned it. Coaltown folk of the better sort do not talk to strangers. Ashley killed Lansing because Ashley was in love with Lansing's wife, and the jury sent him to his death, firmly and unanimously, with what a Chicago paper called “shameless calm.” Old Judge Crittenden's admonition to the jury on this point was particularly weighty; he enjoined them—with something approaching a wink of connivance—to perform their solemn duty, and they did. To out-of-town reporters the trial was a farce and it soon became a scandal in the upper Mississippi Valley. The defense raged, the newspapers sneered, telegrams rained upon the Governor's mansion in Springfield, but Coaltown knew what it knew. This silence about the guilty relations between John Ashley and Eustacia Lansing did not proceed from any chivalrous desire to protect a lady's good name; there was a solider foundation for silence than that. No witness ventured to voice the charge because no witness was in possession of the smallest evidence. Gossip had solidified into conviction as prejudice solidifies into self-evident truth.

Just at the moment when public outrage was at its height John Ashley escaped from his guards. Flight tends to be interpreted as an acknowledgment of guilt and questions concerning motive became irrelevant.

It is possible that the verdict might have been less severe if Ashley had behaved differently in court. He showed no signs of fear. He afforded no fascinating spectacle of mounting terror and remorse. He sat through the long trial listening serenely as though he expected the proceedings to satisfy his moderate curiosity as to who killed Breckenridge Lansing. But then, for Coaltown, he was an odd man. He was practically a foreigner—that is, he came from New York State and spoke in the way they speak there. His wife was German and spoke with a slight accent of her own. He seemed to have no ambition. He had worked for almost twenty years in the mines' office on a very small salary—as small as the second-best-paid clergyman's in town—in apparentment. He was odd through a very lack of striking characteristics. He was neither dark nor light, tall nor short, fat nor thin, bright nor dull. He had an agreeable enough presence, but one that seldom attracted a second glance. A Chicago reporter, at the beginning of the trial, repeatedly alluded to him as “our uninteresting hero.” (He changed his mind later—a man on trial for his life who exhibits no anxiety arouses interest.) Women liked Ashley, because he liked them and because he was an attentive listener; men—except for the foremen in the mine—paid him little attention, though something in his self-effacing silence aroused in them a constant attempt to impress him.

Breckenridge Lansing was big and blond. He crushed everyone's hand in genial friendship. He laughed loudly; he did not restrain himself when he was in a rage. He was gregarious; he belonged to every lodge, fraternal order, and association that the town afforded. He loved the rituals: tears came to his eyes—manly tears; he wasn't ashamed of them—when he swore for the hundredth time to “maintain friendship with the brothers until death” and “to live under God in virtue and to be prepared to lay down his life for his country.” It's vows like that, by golly, that give meaning to a man's life. He had his little weaknesses. He spent many an evening at those taverns up the River Road, not returning home until morning. This was not the behavior of an exemplary family man and Mrs. Lansing might have had some reason to resent it. But in public places—at the volunteer firemen's picnic, at the school's graduation exercises—he showered her with attentions, he broadly displayed his pride in her. It was generally known that he was incompetent as resident manager at the mines and that he seldom showed up there before eleven. As a father he had certainly failed in the rearing of two of his three children. George was held to be a “rowdy” and a “terror.” Anne was a winning child who won by tantrums and rudeness. But these little failings were understandable. Several of them were shared by the most esteemed citizens in town. Lansing was a likable man and good company. What a splendid trial it would have been if Lansing had shot Ashley! What a performance he would have put on! The town would have seen to it that he was first thoroughly frightened—cowering—and then acquitted him.

This unimportant case in a small town in southern Illinois might have been forgotten even sooner had it not been for the mysterious circumstances surrounding the convict's escape. He did not raise a finger. He was rescued. Six men—dressed as railway porters, their faces blackened with burnt cork—entered the locked car. They smashed the hanging lanterns; without firing a shot or uttering a word they overcame the guards and carried the prisoner out of the train. Two of the guards fired once, but dared not continue for fear of killing one of their own number in the darkness. Who were these men who risked their lives to save John Ashley's? Paid hirelings? Mrs. Ashley declared repeatedly to the representatives of the State's Attorney's office—the furious, humiliated police—that she had no idea who they were. Everything about the rescue was awe-inspiring—the strength, the skill, the precision, but above all the silence and the fact that the rescuers were unarmed. It was eerie; it was unearthly.

John Ashley's trial and escape brought ridicule on the State of Illinois. Up to the time of the First World War—which started Americans moving about all over the country and changing their residences on a whim—every man, woman, and child believed that he or she lived in the best town in the best state in the best country in the world. This conviction filled them with a certain strength. It was reinforced by an unremitting depreciation of any neighboring town, state, or country. This pride in place was inculcated in children and the prides and humiliations of childhood are tenacious. Children applied the principle to the very streets on which they lived. You could hear them as they returned from school: “If I had to live on Oak Street, I'd die!” “Well, everybody knows that anybody who lives on Elm Street is craze-e-e, so there!” Colonel Stotz, the State's Attorney for Illinois, was a leading citizen of the greatest state in the world's greatest country. The dome of the State House (Abraham Lincoln's State House) in which he held office was the visible symbol of justice, dignity, and order. The contempt poured upon Illinois as a result of the Ashley Case during his fourth and last term of office darkened his day at noon and opened a crack in the ground beneath his feet. He hated the name of Ashley and resolved to pursue the convict to the farthest corners of the earth.

From the Monday morning after Lansing's death the Ashley children were withdrawn from school, much to the disappointment of their classmates. Only Sophia circulated in town, doing the shopping for her mother. Ella Gates spat in her face on the post office steps. Ashley forbade his daughters to attend the trial. Day after day, Roger—seventeen and a half—sat beside his mother in court, also frustrating his fellow townsmen of any spectacle of fear. As Roger said later, “Mama's at her best when things are going badly.” She sat a few yards from the prisoner's bench. It distressed her to realize that sleeplessness was robbing her cheeks of color. At eight-thirty every morning she scrubbed them long and roughly to induce a semblance of well-being and of unshakable confidence.