The Eighth Day Read Free

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

P ROLOGUE
    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