The Eighth Day Read Free Page B

“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.
    An additional odd fact about the Ashleys came to light during the trial: no relative of either John or Beata arrived in town to aid or comfort them.
    In time the story entered legend and was retold more