Russell Yates: The man who wasn't there

In a Time Magazine photograph, Russell Yates stands alone. Hands drooping by his sides, legs apart, back straight: a solitary Russell superimposed behind a dry-erase board that never will be used again. Overlooking his right shoulder is a small American flag, the stars and stripes drooping like Rusty's face, which looks away from the camera, lips locked straight, eyes glazed as if possessed by bitter nostalgia, watching the water-logged ghosts of his five children studying, reading, writing. Two markers lie on the floor beside Rusty's feet; looking at the image, we wonder whether it was Noah, John, Paul, Luke or Mary who dropped them there, which of the five dead children was the last to have his or her hands around the black marker, the red one. The caption below the picture reads "Empty house: Rusty in the kids' home-school room" and yet the house is not the only thing that's empty.

We've seen the pictures of Andrea Yates, Russell's wife. We've seen her looking like a drowned rat, bug-eyed behind large glasses, thin and wasted away. We've seen her in portraits with her children, first one, then two, and then five; with each new child that crowds the frame like a grinning dumpling we see Andrea's smile straining and straining, a grisly foreshadowing of the events for which she's been found guilty. And yet Russell remains oblivious, a frozen image of bliss that severely contradicts his latest photograph. In these early photos, he is not the lonely man we know now but the man immersed in family life, a man whose alleged emotional and supportive absence may have aided in his wife's downfall.

If Andrea Yates was insane during the final baptism of her five children (and regardless of the court's ruling, the debate will continue for years) then the responsibility, by societal consensus, lies not behind those lifeless eyes but inside the equally lifeless ones of Russell Yates. As the patriarch of the Yates family, he has failed not only his five children and his wife, but himself as well. Russell Yates failed to see the signs of his wife's mental deterioration when they were right in front of his face. Andrea holding a knife to her throat and threatening to kill herself, a family history of depression and mental illness, a potpourri of mental breakdowns, Andrea's dreams of stabbing someone; these were the blatant signs which Russell ignored to the point where, after Andrea was diagnosed with postpartum depression, the couple quickly got off birth control and had another child. There is an obvious connection between mental illness and the denial of loved ones, but how long can Russell claim denial and shrug off the responsibility he had as a father to protect his kids? When do we stop blaming problems on abstractions like depression, denial, confusion and start taking responsibility for our existences and actions like the autonomous creatures we are?

When one considers the buildup behind the events of June 20, 2001, it comes as a surprise that Russell Yates did not stop what could have been avoided. While the subject of mental illness is as complicated as an M.C. Escher image, the subject of child endangerment is fairly straightforward: any obstacle threatening to harm your child should be removed as quickly as possible, even if the obstacle in question turns out to be the mother herself. Common sense would tell most of us that if our wife were found clawing bald spots into her head and under constant duress because of a fundamental obsession with the Bible and subjects of sin, salvation and damnation that something was wrong, that she needed help. And yet Russell stood by his woman, speaking for her in the face of doctors who questioned her mental health, and he stands by her now, after a jury of anonymities decided she will be injected with medication in a mental institution instead of poison in a Texas death house. Since was decided on March 15 that she should serve a life sentence rather than suffer the death penalty.

Maybe what goes through Russell Yates' head as he stands in the lifeless school room are not memories but questions. Does he realize all the mistakes he made in the past, does he realize that he is paying the the price of irresponsibility for all of us with or without children, or is he as oblivious as he was before, shrugging off mental illness as if it were an enflamed mosquito bite that would heal in a few days? That many refuse to blame Andrea Yates for her actions on the basis of mental instability only worsens the weight on Russell's shoulders. He is a portrait of a man who has made one mistake too many; a man who now pays for his obliviousness and ignorance with every single breath his five children will never take. Notions of "putting the past behind you" mean nothing to this man who lives every second of his life mourning those he lost. Would Andrea, in all her religious fervor, consider her husband, the tragically flawed "Rusty," a messenger? Would she consider him a prophet for the contemporary American family sent to show us all the results of our inattentiveness? Is he a tool, an invisible man duped by cosmic powers, the Fool to Andrea's King Lear, a bullhorn to reverberate some hidden lesson we should glean from all this mess?

"I'm a fool to do your dirty work oh yeah, I don't wanna do your dirty work no more" sings Steely Dan as Russell Yates, America's dirty worker, sponges up the mess of a horrible crime. Whatever fate awaits Andrea Yates in prison, whether the murder of her children was an act of clouded judgment or crystalline awareness, Russell Yates wanders lifelessly through the streets of his suburban nightmare, poisoned with the hindsight of what could have been and blessed with the promise of what might be.

Zak Salih is a sophomore SMAD and English double major.