The Fires of Orc

Man cries, his tears dry up and run out.

So he becomes a devil,

reduced to a monster.

Kohta Hirano

On October 12, 2028, Camille Dunlap met with a reporter from the Washington Post. Prior to that day, she lived a quiet life in Nashville surrounded by friends and family. Recently retired from a career as a nurse with the Vanderbilt Hospital System, Dunlap was the mother of four with six grandchildren who were the light of her life. Widowed in her forties, she raised her family on her modest income and instructed them in the basics of good citizenship and devotion to hard work, the double foundation of her children’s success.

Camille Dunlap was a single back mother of four college graduates. She owned a small home in the Nashville suburbs and lived comfortably on Social Security and a private retirement account to which she contributed faithfully over a forty-year career. In her sixty-seventh year of life, she had beaten all the odds of her time and place and until that day she had never been seen in the media. She was, until then, utterly unknown outside her small circle. Her circle would suddenly expand to encompass an entire country. On October 13, her name and face appeared on every internet news outlet’s landing page. She was the only story on television, the talk of a nation consumed by its love of gossip and scandal.

One website put it more bluntly than all others with the headline, “I Aborted Smith’s Baby.”

In 1985, while Brandon Smith was a law student at Vanderbilt, Dunlap was in her first-year of employment at the hospital and taking night classes in healthcare administration at the Law School campus. As she told the reporter, she met Smith in the library one late night and, “It was just one of those things. We were attracted to each other immediately. I don’t know what we expected to come of it. Nothing, I suppose. We were both young and headed in different directions along different paths. But youth, you know …”

For nearly a year, as Dunlap recalled, she and Smith carried on a steamy romance. He kept his mid-town apartment near campus while she lived with roommates in East Nashville, but, as she put it, “I was almost never home. I’d come and go from his place just like it was my own. Nobody asked about my comings and goings. The doorman knew me and he knew to be discreet.”

“It was still a common thing in those days for mixed couples to keep their affairs on the down-low. Everyone knew Northern white boys had a penchant for Southern black charm. They had no resistance to our wiles. But Smith was different. He and I really had something.”

According to Dunlap’s account, she and the young Smith spent long nights stretching into the wee hours of the typical morning engrossed in discussion of public policy, needed reforms, justice and equity, distribution of wealth and other troubles of the time.

“I’d say we loved each other. There wasn’t anything indecent about it. Even in 1986 it still wasn’t common yet in the South for a white man and a black woman to run around in public. In fact, we didn’t get out hardly at all and when we did it was in my neighborhood where things like that didn’t draw so much attention.”

Dunlap claimed that she learned she was pregnant with Smith’s child a month before his graduation and planned return to Philadelphia.

“Before I got pregnant,” she claimed, “we had talked about me maybe gong back with him. There were plenty of opportunities in healthcare in Philadelphia, or at least that’s what he told me. I haven’t ever been to Philadelphia, not to this day.”

But with the news of her pregnancy, Dunlap said all such discussion ceased.

“I waited for him to come in one evening and I told him about the pregnancy in his apartment. He went silent. We didn’t talk about it really. Not for more than an hour. It hurt. I knew he’d be concerned but I didn’t expect him to be so, I don’t know, distant I guess. He was not happy about it. That’s for sure. And then finally he came to me in the bedroom. I was sitting on the floor where I’d been crying a little but mostly just lost in my own head. He said, ‘This won’t do. We have to get rid of it.’”

“That’s all we ever said about it, really. I mean, I guess we talked a few more times, but we never really discussed it. It was clear to me that having a baby at that time would have put his plans on hold, maybe forever. I tried not to think that it had anything to do with race. That’s not something I’ll accuse him of. In all the time I spent with him he never treated me any differently than he would any other woman – white, black or plaid. We were conscious of being a mixed-race couple but we weren’t ashamed.”

“I just think the notion of being a father in his twenties, straight out of law school with a wife who came from nothing and had nothing to offer his ambitions, all those things just couldn’t be part of his plan for life. So he had to put it all behind him.”

According to Dunlap, Smith accompanied her to the clinic where her pregnancy was terminated in its first trimester. “He was there and he took me home afterward, back to his place, that is. He paid for the procedure and he stayed in for a day while I recovered. He was a gentleman about it all.”

But then it seems Smith was ready to move on and put Nashville and Dunlap far behind. She told the reporter that she received a letter one day at her home officially breaking off their relationship and wishing her the best in her future life. Dunlap kept the letter, signed by Smith’s hand, the sort of detail reporters lust after.

“One day, not much later, I got another note,” she said, “with a check for twenty-five hundred dollars. The note said, ‘Please use this to do something nice for yourself. I’ll always care about you.’ I bought mutual funds with that check. I started an account that day that’s supporting me now. I sometimes still wonder how life would have turned out if he and I had stuck together. I have so much to be thankful for. I’ve never had any real regret and it’s been nice watching his success from a distance. He’s a hard-working, passionate man.”

The reporter asked the obvious question: “If you bear him no ill will, why come forward with this story today, less than four weeks before an election, when surely you know it will affect people’s opinions of Smith?’

“I don’t want people to change their opinions of the man,” she said, “although that might be unavoidable. I thought long and hard about this. I’m paying a high price myself. I have friendships and my family and my own dignity to think about, you know. But for the last year, I have heard too much from him and his people that eats away at women’s reproductive rights.”

She went on, with eloquence, confidence and a bearing that made her impossible to ignore.

“You see,” she said, “I’ve spent my life in healthcare. I have raised four children to respect and understand the importance of managing your health and that of your family. I lost their father to diabetes, a death that could have been avoided with intervention and basic self-care. I don’t want my family to include any more statistics. That includes my girls and their girls and all other girls who sometimes have to make difficult choices. I want those choices to be made with the input of doctors and with the insights of good science and I don’t want them to have to fight for basic access to care, the kind of care rich women can buy no matter what the law allows.”

“I know that my life is what it is partly because of a choice I made forty-two years ago and I guarantee you the same is true for Brandon Smith. I don’t want to see him suffer from this revelation, but when I hear him running around the country trying to fan political flames, calling women’s choice ‘sanctioned infanticide,’ and all that, well I just felt like I had to say something. The parental notification laws he supports, the restrictions on clinics providing pregnancy services, all the attacks on women through their womb, it’s all so dangerous and I just think the world deserves to know it’s also hypocritical. Abortion was good enough for Brandon Smith when an unplanned pregnancy interfered with his plans, but he doesn’t want poor women to have the same choice he made so easily.”

For Smith it was a death blow and, as usual, the blow that got him was one he never saw coming. He couldn’t dodge the story; it was head-on, a direct frontal attack from which there was no path to either evasion or retreat. The best his camp could muster was an admission with the addendum that, “Senator Smith is not proud of his decision in 1986 and he hopes to create a society in which such choices are less easily made by young people who might regret them.” It was a hapless, flailing defense, reeking of sanctimony.

The Post reporter asked all the right questions and wrote the story of a career. But there was something the reporter couldn’t know, something unknown to anyone at the time except for Dunlap herself, her doctor Theowulf and me.

Three weeks before her interview, Camille Dunlap was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. She had perhaps a year to live. I learned of her diagnosis from Theowulf just two weeks after she learned it from her doctor. Two weeks after learning she would die, I sat in her East Nashville home while The Soldier waited on the porch. It was a rainy October night. The sound of heavy water sheeting off the slanting roof blended with the ticking of a grandfather clock inherited from her parents, a treasure that stood against the parlor wall surrounded by photographs of proud people reaching back nearly a century. The Dunlaps were handsome, strong people. Their story was that of America in microcosm – a struggle to gain acceptance, hard work to overcome disadvantages, investment in a more promising future, and courageous acceptance of new challenges that built a life full of chances for their descendants. The dignity of Camille Dunlap’s home and her own regal bearing made me ashamed of myself and the mean task I had come to perform.

“I have to assume you’re one of Bradley’s people,” she said.

“Ma’am, I hope you can understand I’m just not at liberty to address that.”

“Oh I know,” she told me. “It’s okay, son. Sometimes in life we all have a job to do that we wish didn’t need doing. I’m actually surprised it took them so long to send someone. I kind of figured this was coming. It’s not your doing. You’re just the one stuck with this bit. You can walk away from it when the doing’s done.”

How I wish that were true. When the doing was done, there was no link to Markus or to anyone in particular. But the insinuation was clear – Bradley, most likely, dug up some filth about Smith and both got smeared with it.

The morning after my meeting with Ms. Dunlap, a man no one knew appeared at a bank in Belize and opened four accounts, one in the name of each of Dunlap’s children, with deposits of two hundred fifty thousand dollars apiece to be dispersed in the event of her death.

“I’m not doing this because it’s the right thing to do,” she told me. “I’m doing it because my children deserve it.”

The consequences were immediate and, for Smith, fatal. He lost twelve percentage points in Texas. We picked up nine points, Bradley one, and the balance shifted to undecided. The polls in Texas on October 14, less than three weeks before election night, had Markus at thirty-eight percent, Smith thirty, and Bradley twenty-six, with only six percent undecided. We were in the clear with almost no time left for Smith to undo the damage done by the Dunlap revelation.

To be accurate, the campaign was in the clear. I was not.

Lydia stormed into the office with a newspaper stuffed in the side pocket of her tablet carrier. She yanked it from the bag and flung it on my desk.

“You did this, didn’t you?” she demanded.

“What are you talking about?” I countered.

“Don’t give me that,” she seethed. “Just admit it. You did it. You splattered that poor woman’s business all over the world. You did exactly what I pleaded with you not to do.”

“I did no such thing,” I contended.

“Oh my god, you’re going to hide behind some despicable oath, from me, like that gives you cover. What do you think, if you do it for the right reasons and keep the boss’s secrets that makes it all okay?”

“Look,” I shouted, “I don’t know who did what but about the story that’s got you so upset, I’m glad it’s out. That woman’s a hero. She shared very personal details of her life opening herself up to judgment in order to reveal the hypocrisy of a powerful man. I admire what she did. And if Smith’s a hypocrite voters deserve to know it.”

Lydia looked at me with complete astonishment. “You really don’t get it. You’re worse than I thought.”

“What’s your problem anyway?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you what my problem is,” she said tight-lipped. “My problem is knowing that I spent a year of my life giving everything I’ve got to a campaign that’s as much a lie as the opponents’. You just ruined everything we’ve tried to do. You took an honest, clean campaign that had a real shot and you dragged it through the sewer to shore up your chances. It destroys everything – our integrity, our principles, everything we stand for.”

“You’re out of your mind,” I told her. “This must be some hormone thing. You’re not even making sense.”

“How sensible is this, you monster? You’re a cynical, underhanded cheat and your candidate is a weak man who, tested, came up short. Neither of you could put your faith in people’s judgment, so you appealed to their base opinions. You resorted to a dirty trick because you were afraid to trust in human goodness.”

“Human goodness?” I protested. “I read the story and I think that woman’s a shining example of human goodness. Can’t you even consider her side? She’s the epitome of human goodness. She told the truth in a very revealing way, opening herself to scrutiny so people could know the truth. I think that’s human goodness on display right there.”

“But this isn’t about her,” argued Lydia. “And it’s not about Smith. He is what he is. So what? This is supposed to be about the people.”

“What about the people?” I asked. “You want the people to have the information they need to make an informed choice. You said as much. You want their votes to count and you want those votes to be based on solid information.”

“Yes I do,” she said, “and you just made that impossible.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “You asked me not to.”

“We both know you did this. This has you written all over it. What you did was take away the one chance the people had to cast a vote for the right reason. You took that away and in its place you left a reason to vote that appeals to their crudest inclinations.”

“Oh come on,” I pleaded. “What if I did do whatever it is you think I did? I’m not the bad guy here. Ms. Dunlap clearly wanted her story to get out. Why is it me and not her, not the Washington Post, not Smith himself who’s to blame?”

“In not concerned with Ms. Dunlap,” she said. “This whole thing stinks of money. I’m sure she’ll be just fine.”

“Ms. Dunlap will be just fine alright,” I attested. “So what’s the problem? Smith’s a bad guy. You know that.”

“Yes he is,” she replied, “but you gave people the wrong reason to vote against him, Brandon Smith stands for corporate interest, he stands against individual liberties, he stands for everything bad for the common voter including voters in Texas.”

“Right, and now he’s losing in Texas,” I said.

“But don’t you see? Those aren’t the reasons he’s losing. He’s losing because you appealed to the very elements in this country that continue to tear us apart rather than bring us together. In the tail end of election season you used race and gender as wedge issues. You turned to the old crude weapons of our enemies.”

“And just how do you suggest I did that?” I asked.

“By going to the South and calling a Yankee a race traitor.”

I swelled at the accusation. “I did no such thing.”

“Yes you did,” she continued. “You might as well have stood on the church steps in Downtown Dallas and call Brandon Smith a nigger-loving baby killer.”

“Oh get real…”

“No you get real. It’s not bad enough that you did what you did, now you want to defend it by acting like it was all for some higher purpose.”

“But it is for a higher purpose,” I insisted. “Don’t you see that? Even if I am what you say, even if my tactics are no nobler than those of our enemies, at least I did what I did for a candidate worth voting for.”

“I used to think he was worth voting for,” she sighed. “Now I think he had a chance to prove that and he failed. If he’s willing to win at any cost he’s no better than any of them.”

“That’s absurd,” I challenged. “How you win isn’t half as important as that you win. If he wins this race all those voters who voted for the wrong reason will have a better president than they deserve. If he loses, it’s more of the same.”

“You go ahead and console yourself with that idea,” she said. “But I’m not going to excuse you. I’m not excusing him either and I don’t think I can continue working on this campaign.”

“Lydia, come on already…”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t even try. I’m leaving. You’ll have my final decision soon.”

She turned and left. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I didn’t think she would want to get within sight of the finish line and just walk away but she was deadly serious, more serious than I had ever seen her. She was gone at that moment. I feared she was gone for good.