Candlemoth (3 page)
Nathan
knows the truth, he most of all, and though he'll look me dead square in the
eye and hold his head high, just as he always did, I know he'll carry a heavy
heart. Nathan never meant for it to be this way, but then Nathan was caught up
in this thing more than all of us together.
Some
folks say the death penalty's too easy, too fast by far. Folks say as how those
who commit murder should suffer the same. Well, believe me, they do. Folks
forget the years people like me spend down here, two floors up from Hell. They
don't know of people like Mr. West and the way he feels the punishment should
befit the crime whether you did the crime or not. Folks really have no idea how
it feels to know that you're gonna die, and after the first few years that day
could be any day now. They know nothing of the raised hopes that fall so fast,
the appeals that go round in circles until they disappear up their own
tailpipe. They know nothing of discovering that Judge so-and-so has reviewed
your case and denied the hearing that you've waited on for the best part of
three years. These things are the penalty. Gets so as how when the time comes
you're almost grateful, and you wish away the days, the hours, the minutes…
wish they all would fold into one single, simple heartbeat and the lights would
go out forever. People talk of a reason to live, a reason to fight, a reason to
go on. Well, if you know in your heart of hearts that all you're fighting for
is someone else's satisfaction as you die, then there seems little to fight
for. It is ironic, but most times it's the guy who's being executed who wants
to be executed the most.
Mr.
Timmons understands this, and he cares as best he can.
Mr.
West understands this too, but the emotion he feels is one of gratification.
Mr.
West wants us to die, wants to see us walk the long walk, wants to see us sit
in the big chair. Knows that once one has gone another will come to take his
place, and there's nothing that pleases him more than
fresh meat.
Spend
six months here and he calls you
dead meat.
Calls it out as you walk
from your cell to the yard, or to the washroom, or to the gate.
Dead
meat walking,
he shouts, and even Mr. Timmons turns cool and loose inside.
How
Mr. West ended up this way I can only guess from what I was told, what was
inferred. I don't know, but seems to me he's the most dangerous and crazy of us
all.
Down
two cells from me there's a guy called Lyman Greeve. Shot his wife's lover and
then cut out the woman's tongue so she couldn't go sweet-talking any more
fellas. Crazy boy. Crazy, crazy boy. But hell, compared to Mr. West Lyman
Greeve is the Archangel Gabriel come down with his trumpet to announce the Second
Coming. Lyman told me Mr. West was a Federal agent in the Thirties and Forties,
did the whole Prohibition thing, busting 'shiners and whores and bathtub
gin-makers. Said as how he came up to Charleston when Prohibition was lifted
and was employed by the government to keep track of the black movements, that
he was down there in Montgomery and Birmingham for the Freedom Rides, cracked a
few black skulls, instigated a few riots. Another day Lyman told me Mr. West
raped a black girl, found out she got pregnant, so he went back down there and
cut her throat and buried her in a field. No-one ever found her, or so he said,
and I listened to the story with a sense of wonder and curiosity.
Seemed
everyone had invented their own history for Mr. West. To me, well, to me he was
just a mean, sadistic son- of-a-bitch who got his revs beating on some poor
bastard who couldn't beat back. Few years before I came here someone made a
noise about him, some kid called Frank Rayburn. Twenty-two years old, down here
for killing a man for eighteen dollars in Myrtle Beach. Frank made a noise,
people from the Penitentiary Review & Regulatory Board made a visit, asked
questions, made some more noise, and then Frank withdrew his complaint and fell
silent. Month later Frank hanged himself. Somehow he obtained a rope, a real
honest-to-God rope, and he tied it up across the grille eleven and a half foot
high. The bed was eight inches off the ground. Frank was five three. You do the
math.
No-one
had a mind to complain again it seemed.
And
then there's Max Myers, seventy-eight years old, a trustee. Been here at Sumter
for fifty-two years. Jailed in 1930 for robbing a liquor store. Liquor store
guy had a heart attack the following day. That made the charge manslaughter.
Max came here when he was twenty-six years old, same as me, and on his
thirty-second birthday in 1936 he got a cake from his wife. Someone stole Max
Myers' cake, stole it right out of his cell, and Max got mad, real mad. He
argued with someone on the gantry, there was a scuffle, a man got pushed, fell,
landed forty feet below like a watermelon on the sidewalk. Max got a First
Degree. For the manslaughter he would've been out around 1950, would've seen
another thirty years of American history unfold. But he got the real deal, the
no-hope-of-parole beat, and here he was, pushing a broom along Death Row,
delivering magazines once a week. When he was jailed his wife had been
pregnant. She had borne a son, a bright and beautiful kid called Warren. Warren
grew up only ever seeing his father through a plate glass window. They had
never touched, never held each other, never spoken to one another save through
a telephone.
Max's
son went into the Army in 1952, got himself a wife and a home, a cat called
Chuck and a dog called Indiana. Went to Vietnam in '65, was one of the first US
soldiers killed out there. Killed in his third week. Warren Myers was buried in
a small plot somewhere in Minnesota. Max was not permitted to attend.
Max's
wife took two handfuls of sleepers and drank a bottle of Jack Daniels six
months following. Max was all that was left of the Myers family line. He pushed
his broom, he passed messages, he could get you a copy of
Playboy
for
thirty cigarettes. He was part of Sumter, always had been, always would be, and
he was the only inmate who had been here before Mr. West.
Penitentiary
Warden John Hadfield was a politician, nothing more nor less than that.
Hadfield had eyes on the Mayor's Office, on Congress, maybe even on the Senate.
He did what was needed, he said what was required, he kissed ass and talked the
talk and colored inside the lines. Hadfield ran the regular wings, the A, B and
C Blocks, but D-Block, Death Row, he left that to Mr. West. Even Hadfield
called him Mr. West. No-one, not even Max Myers, knew Mr. West's given name.
When
there was trouble Mr. West would go see Warden Hadfield. The meeting would be
short and sour, cut and dried, all business. Mr. West would leave having satisfied
Warden Hadfield completely, and Hadfield - if required - would publish a
statement that kept the Penitentiary Review & Regulatory Board happy.
Sumter was a community, its own world within a world, and even those who lived
in the town itself believed that Penitentiary business was Penitentiary
business. There had been a prison here since the War of Secession, there
probably would always be a prison here, and as long as inmates weren't off
escaping and raping some nice folks' daughter, then that was just fine. Folks
here believed people like Mr. West were a required element of society, for
without discipline there would be no society at all. See no evil, hear no evil,
'cept if it's done to you, and then… well, then there's folks like Mr. West who
take care of business.
But
these things are now, and there is more than ample time to talk of now.
We
were speaking of a magic time, back before all of this, back before everything
soured like a bruised watermelon.
A
thousand summers and winters and springs and falls, and they all fold out
behind me like a patchwork quilt, and beneath this quilt are the lives we led,
the people we were, and the reasons we came to be here.
Thirty-six
years old, and there are days when I still feel like a child.
The
child I was when I met Nathan Verney at the edge of Lake Marion outside of
Greenleaf, North Carolina.
Walk
with me now, for though I walk slowly I do not care to walk alone.
For
me, at least for me, these oh-so-quiet steps will be the longest and the last.
Best
as I can recall it all started with a baked ham.
I was
six years old, it was summer and out there near the edge of Lake Marion the
smell of the breeze off of the water was the most magical smell ever. Inside of
that smell were the flowers and the fish and the trees, and summer mimosa down
near Nine Mile Road, and something like pecan pie and vanilla soda all wrapped
up in a basket of new-mown grass. It was all those things, and the feeling that
came with them. A feeling of warmth and security and everything that was
childhood in North Carolina.
I'd
walk down there most every day, walk down there to the edge of the water, and
sit and wait and watch the world. My ma would make sandwiches, roll them up in
a piece of linen, and inside those sandwiches was the finest baked ham this
side of the Georgia state line.
The
little black kid that came down that Friday afternoon was the funniest kid I
ever saw. Ears like jug handles, eyes like traffic lights, and a mouth that ran
from ear to ear with no rest in between. He spoke first. I remember that
vividly.
'What
yo' doin'?' he asked.
'Mindin'
my own business,' I replied, and turned away to look in another direction.
'What
yo' eatin'?' the kid asked.
'Baked
ham,' I said.
'Baked
what?'
The
kid was near me now, could've reached out and touched him.
'Baked
ham,' I repeated.
Kid
was so stupid he could've been run down by a parked car.
'Let
me have some,' he said, and I turned, my eyes wide, so shocked he'd asked I
couldn't get my breath.
'Shit
me, you got some problem?' I said.
'Problem?'
the kid said. 'What problem would that be then?'
I
maneuvered myself off of the fallen tree where I'd been sitting and stood
facing him. I clutched my sandwich in my hand.
'You don't
just go up to folk who's eatin' an' ask for some of their food,' I said.
The
funny-looking kid frowned. 'How come?'
"S
bad manners,' I said.
'Hell,
's bad manners not to be sharin' your dinner with someone who's hungry,' the
kid replied.
I
shook my head. 'That'd be fine,' I replied. 'Be just fine if we weren't
strangers.'
The
funny-looking kid smiled, held out his hand. 'Nathan Verney,' he said.
I
looked at him askance. He had one hell of a nerve, this boy.
'Nathan
Verney,' he repeated. 'Please to meet you…'
'Daniel
Ford,' I said, and even as I said it I wondered why I was telling him.
'So
now we're not strangers no more you can gimme some sandwich.'
I
shook my head. 'Knowing your name don't make us family,' I said.
Nathan
Verney shrugged his shoulders. 'Fine,' he said. 'You go on eat your stoopid
sandwich… sure it tastes like bad sowbelly anyhows.'
'Does
not,' I replied. 'My ma makes the best baked ham in North Carolina.'
Nathan
Verney laughed. 'And my ma sleeps with her eyes open and catches flies with her
tongue.'
"Tis
the best,' I said, defensive, irritated by this invasion of my lake.
Nathan
Verney shook his head, and then he turned his mouth down at the sides in an
expression of distaste. 'That there baked ham more 'an likely tastes like the
sole of someone's shoe.'
And
so he got the sandwich, more than half of it, because somehow he worked me on a
gradient. He took a bite, he seemed non-committal, undecided, and so he took
another, and then a third, and by the time he had his fourth bite of my baked
ham sandwich we were both laughing, and the funny-looking black kid couldn't
keep his mouth closed and he nearly choked.
Later,
an hour, maybe two, he said something that would hold us together for the rest
of our lives.
Six
years old, ears like jug handles, eyes like traffic lights, mouth that ran from
one ear to the other with no rest in between.
