The real reality TV

For four years, Deborah managed to not think much about her brother. Then, when watching Rectify, it all flooded back.

Rectify is a compelling fiction, created by former Arkansas resident Ray McKinnon, that airs on the Sundance Channel. Set in small-town Georgia, it’s about Daniel Holden, who has just been released after spending 19 years on death row for the rape and murder of his teenage girlfriend. New DNA evidence has caused his sentence to be vacated. But the blessing is mixed-Daniel no longer knows the world or his family, including his sister Amantha, who wants to help but doesn’t know how.

Deborah identifies with Amantha. One day in 1984 the phone rang in her office in Little Rock, where she had moved a few years earlier from northern Ohio after graduating from college. It was her sister Marilyn, who told her their brother Nick-three years older than Deborah and three years younger than Marilyn-had been arrested for the murder of a longtime friend, a man who had been seeing Nick’s ex-wife.

Deborah understood Rectify’s premise before she turned it on. But we all know about TV shows and dramatic uses of violence and jurisprudence.

She didn’t expect to be affected. The emotional onslaught occasioned by the show took her by surprise. It was a gut punch.

In Rectify, young Daniel is portrayed as an odd kid, not one of the in-crowd, which worked against him in the chain of events that sent him to prison. That wasn’t the situation with Nick-a record-setting high school track star and motorcycle-riding tough guy who was popular because he was considered a bit dangerous.

“It wasn’t all that surprising this happened to Nick,” Deborah says, acknowledging that her brother-who spent less than a year attending a community college before becoming a well-paid card-carrying ironworker (thanks to an uncle with union connections)-had a tendency toward trouble making. “It’s that it happened to us-to me, to Marilyn, to Mom and Dad.”

Despite the fact that their barely middle-class family wasn’t far removed from lawbreakers-there were always bought-off-a-truck bottles of Scotch at holiday gatherings, quality tools for sale that had likely disappeared from a construction site, and new cars available at discounted prices through another uncle who was a Detroit auto worker-they didn’t know anything about arresting officers or bail bondsmen or hiring a lawyer or going to court. Or going to prison.

Scared and intimidated, the family hired a lawyer with ties to the ironworkers’ union. They dressed with care and quietly attended the trial every day. The trial went badly. Nick never took the stand. He never admitted guilt. His ex-wife, mother of his two young sons, testified against him. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He was 33 at the time.

What was Deborah’s involvement in all this? Unlike Amantha, who fights tirelessly to change her brother Daniel’s fate, Deborah did nothing. Zero. Except for making sympathetic noises when she heard from her sister, “I told myself that I was just a kid, that I lived 800 miles away, that I couldn’t get away from my job, that I didn’t know any more than the rest of my family about what to do,” she says.

And she never told her Arkansas friends or the guys she dated-most of them with better educations, better backgrounds, more opportunities and more money than those she left behind up north-or consulted with anybody who knew anything about trials and juries and judges. One of the reasons she’d moved to Arkansas was to get away from the second-generation Americans she grew up with, the friends who never made it past high school, the dead end clerical jobs that were all she could find despite being the first in her family to get a degree. She moved to Arkansas to reinvent herself. And she was glad she didn’t live in that cold industrial city any more.

But Deborah resolved to do better in regard to Nick. When the phone rang and it was a collect call from the prison, she accepted it, despite the inflated charges that would show up on her phone bill. When she saved up the plane fare for a yearly visit to see her family, they piled in the car and endured a gloomy five-hour drive to the maximum security facility where Nick was. Deborah went through the barrage of metal detectors, the purse searches, the cool appraisal of the prison guards. She controlled her anger as they subjected her fragile, ladylike mother to what she perceived as indignities. Then she sat at a table in a concrete-floored room and provided piles of change so everyone, including her little nephews, could get snacks from the vending machines while talking about nothing of relevance with Nick, who never said anything about what his life had become.

This became a pattern for these otherwise ordinary people. Their lives went on, darkened by middle of-the-night thoughts about how terrible, and how disastrous, and how wasteful, and how avoidable this was, and why did it have to happen to Nick? And to the rest of the family?

As the years went by, there were appeals and parole hearings at which Nick continued to insist upon his innocence. He got more restrictive about family visits, requiring that they get there first thing in the morning so as not to interrupt his scheduled time in the prison gym. “When I objected to having to leave at 3:30 a.m. to get to the prison by 8:30 a.m., my father practically threw me out of the house,” Deborah recalls. That was the end of her prison visits.

And when Nick finally admitted his guilt, the rest of the family eventually stopped going too, preferring to stay in touch with letters and phone calls and by showing they cared with contributions to Nick’s prison commissary fund.

After 25 years in prison, Nick was paroled. By then his mother had died, his boys had grown up, his ex-wife had remarried. It was decided that Nick would stay with his retired and now-elderly father upon his release. But it turns out that, as Rectify makes clear, you can’t always go home again. Not only did Nick not know how to live in the modern world-cable TV, text messages, satellite radio, internet, bad economy-he didn’t know how to live with anybody, let alone a stubborn, self-absorbed 90-year-old man who was used to doing whatever he pleased. The fighting commenced almost immediately, with each side complaining to Marilyn and Deborah about perceived wrongdoings.

Again, the sisters, who were living relatively agreeable lives with families of their own, didn’t know what to do.

“So we made soothing noises to each of them,” Deborah says. And they wrote checks to Nick to help get him back on his feet.

Nick spent those contributions on Lasik surgery to correct his vision and dental work to repair the lack thereof over all those years, then moved in with his older son. They didn’t get along too well either, but at least shared a love of motorcycles and the wilder side of life. Nick, as usual, soon acquired a girlfriend. His union came through with some work. He got his own apartment, a cell phone, and a new Harley. He and Deborah exchanged friendly letters.

In 2009, two years after getting out of prison, Nick died in a spectacular motorcycle accident a few blocks from his home. Deborah hadn’t found time to visit Nick since his release. Their father cried at the funeral. Nick’s befuddled sisters stood dutifully by, not knowing what to do.

That was four years ago. Rectify premiered April 22. Deborah intends to keep watching, if she can manage to deal with the past that rushes in while the TV plays on.