Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (4 page)

Three

T
he year, the idea of a year, has become paper-thin. I can almost reach out and tear a hole through it with my fingernail. December is coming. I can feel it waking up. It brings me a haunted place to rest my head and a clearer vision of all I see. The whole world seems to be putting on its holiday trim, and every day that passes is another mile traveled through the ice-cold desert.

*  *  *

W
hen I was in second grade, a friend of Nanny’s decided to rent the tiny three-room brick building in her backyard to my family, because her Social Security check wasn’t quite enough for her to survive on. In hindsight it strikes me as incredibly odd that someone would have had such a structure in the backyard of a small suburban home. It was more like a bomb shelter.

Someone had wired the place for electricity, and the water worked well enough, but there was no heat. Sometimes it would get so cold in there that the toilet would have ice in it. To keep from freezing to death my mother would turn the oven on as high as it would go and leave the door open. We had a small cat who would hop up onto the oven door and make herself at home by curling into a ball and sleeping.

After a while my mother and father managed to borrow a small portable heater. My mother would stand my sister and me in front of it as we dressed for school in the morning, so that we wouldn’t shiver ourselves to pieces. One day as we were getting dressed, my sister backed into the heater. You could hear her shrieking all down the street, a loud, wordless wail of pain. I can still see my mother on her knees, clutching my sister and rocking back and forth as they both sobbed. After things calmed down my mother examined my sister, and nothing looked to be seriously wrong, so we were sent off to school.

As we walked back home that afternoon, the back of my sister’s shirt and pants were soaking wet. The parts of her that had touched the heater had blistered during the day, and all the blisters had broken open. When my mother saw it, she started crying again. That year was one of the poorest my family ever lived through.

There was much excitement one day about a week before Christmas when three older men in suits showed up at our door carrying boxes and bags of food. I think they were either Shriners or Masons, but I can’t remember. I do remember my mother hugging them all and thanking them over and over while my sister and I ran around their legs like hungry cats, anxious to see what treats were in those sacks. My mother was crying uncontrollably and kept hugging the men. They didn’t say much, just told her she was welcome and left as quickly as they came. This was our Christmas dinner. We received gifts from such groups more than once. Most often it was the Salvation Army.

My father was deeply ashamed for having to accept a handout. That’s something that gets drilled into the heads of white males in the South from the moment they can speak—never accept anything that you haven’t earned for yourself. Having to accept the handout deeply wounded my father in some way that pushed him close to the edge of an emotional cliff. I wasn’t old enough to really understand it; I just knew that my dad was acting strange, and that he was chewing his nails so viciously that sometimes it looked like he was going to put his whole hand in his mouth. Now I know it’s because a man who accepted a handout wasn’t really seen as being much of a man—especially by the man himself. Any man with two working arms and legs who signed up on welfare wasn’t seen very differently from a thief, a liar, or a rapist.

In the end I think that’s part of what caused my parents’ marriage to begin falling apart. The stress of poverty. I usually think of these things around Christmastime. Probably because there was a bag of hard candy in the sacks of food the men brought us, and my grandmother always called it “Christmas candy.”

As I grew older I learned to be ashamed of being poor, too. It became humiliating, something I’d do everything I could to hide from the rest of the world. I developed an overwhelming sense of being excluded from everything. Everywhere you look you see people with things that you do not have, and it has a profound mental effect. That’s mostly during the teenage years.

Later still, I developed a fierce sense of pride at having come from such situations and circumstances. I look at the people who have done horrible things to me, who have lied about me, abused me, and tried to take my life, and I know they would never have been able to rise above the things that I have. They would have died inside.

I’ve talked to some of the other guys on Death Row about our lives as children, and they laugh at my poor childhood. I laugh along with them. One guy will say he was poor because he grew up in the projects, and I become outraged. “Poor? You had water! You had heat! You were wearing shoes that cost a hundred dollars! That’s not poor! Let me tell you what we had. . . .” Everyone snickers when they hear that certain areas of the trailer park were considered to be where the “rich people” lived. Now that I can look back on it all, it’s funny to me, too. I didn’t always see the humor in it, though. It’s no laughing matter when you have to fight with the roaches to see who gets the cornflakes.

Now I believe my parents just weren’t meant to be together. Perhaps they weren’t meant to be with anyone, as my father has now been married and divorced several times, and my mother follows closely behind in her number of failed relationships. The trouble between them began when I was in second grade.

Nanny had gotten remarried to a respectable man named Ivan Haynes. He’s the one I always remember as being my grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. He could be a real asshole sometimes. I could always expect to hear his amused chuckle anytime he witnessed my pain and misfortune. Upon hearing tales of my childhood, some people have speculated that perhaps he didn’t like me so much. I don’t believe that. There was much love between him and me; he was just doing what comes naturally to members of my family. Laughing and teasing others helps take your mind off your own troubles.

I remember one sunny afternoon when I was about seven years old, and Ivan was sitting on our front porch in a lawn chair, drinking a can of beer. I saw him drink only once or twice a year, and he never consumed anything stronger than Budweiser. For some reason he always dumped a couple spoons of salt into the can before he drank it. He once gave me a tiny sip from his can, and I could taste nothing but salt.

I was playing out in the front yard wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. I was open for attack. “Hey, boy,” Ivan called out, blinking like a cat in the sunshine. “Bring me that board over there.” He pointed to a piece of plywood lying across the road.

I picked it up unsuspectingly and started to make my way back to the front porch. When the pain came, it seemed to inflame every part of my body at once. I began to shriek and flail about wildly. The pain was so intense that it short-circuited my logic. I spun in circles, slapping myself and stomping my feet, giving voice to one unending scream. The board had been sitting atop a nest of fire ants. This wasn’t the first time I’d been bitten, nor would it be the last, although it was the worst and most painful.

What was my grandfather doing while I was going into a frenzy? Sipping his beer and watching me in a half-interested way. My mother came running out of the house and grabbed me up. She already knew what the problem was, and she carried me in to the bathtub to pour cold water over me. As we crossed the porch and passed my grandfather, I heard him chuckle.

I heard that maddening chuckle again after one of his trips to an auction, which he loved. He would go through people’s garbage, show up bright and early at every garage sale listed in the local paper, and bid on ungodly amounts of junk at auctions all over the state. He took this rubbish and fixed it up, then sold it at his booth in the flea market.

One day he came home with a box of odds and ends that contained a pair of swim fins, or swimming flippers. They weren’t pliant and flexible the way professional-quality fins are. These were as hard as bricks, like petrified frog feet. They would have broken before they bent. My grandfather tossed them to me and said, “Put ’em on and try ’em out.”

I carried them out into the backyard, where a four-foot-deep pool had sat for a couple of years. It had never been drained or cleaned since its initial setup, so the water was dark green and disturbing. Odd-looking bugs skimmed along the surface, looking for someone to bite. I did not relish the thought of having to splash about in that muck.

I sat on the rickety ladder and attached the flippers tightly to my feet. Standing on the ladder, I launched myself out into the middle of the pool and began kicking. My efforts were futile, and I quickly found myself thrashing around on the bottom. I began to wonder if perhaps these flippers were made for imaginary swimming and not intended for actual water wear. Whatever the case, I thought,
To hell with this,
and decided to get out. The problem was that I couldn’t stand up. The rock-hard plastic flippers made it impossible for me to get my feet under me. Frantic, I managed to get my head above the water one time for what I believed to be my final gasp of air. What sight did I behold as I was drowning? My grandfather, hands on hips, chuckling. Next to him stood my sister, also giggling, as she squinted against the sun. My terror evaporated in the face of the rage that swept through my small body, and I managed to get a hand on the ladder and pull myself up.

For a few moments I could do nothing but cough, sputter, and try to expel the water from my nose, which was making the inside of my head burn like fire. When I could speak, I snatched off the flippers and began to shriek in outrage, putting the finger of accusation on them both. “Stupid! You’re both stupid! I’m telling Mom!” I shot into the house like a scalded cat, my grandfather shouting after me, “Don’t you drip that water on the rug!”

I found my mother inside folding clothes. In a rush I spit out the entire sordid story, my bare foot stomping in fury. After hearing that my sister and grandfather had stood by laughing as I nearly drowned, she simply continued to fold clothes. Brow furrowed, she lit a cigarette and expelled a stream of noxious gray smoke into the air before suggesting, “Don’t put the flippers back on, then.” I was dumbfounded and my feelings were hurt. I had expected to be fussed over. Instead, no one took my trauma seriously.

Sometimes my grandfather would pass on bits of strange and highly suspect information to me, often involving the nature of feet. He had lots of time to think on these mysteries, as he spent most of his days sitting quietly in the flea market, waiting for someone to come and offer him a deal on some of his wares. He once obtained several large boxes of socks, which he proceeded to put on display. I hated those socks. There was nothing even remotely interesting about them. I strolled through the flea market inspecting all the other booths, which always held strange and fantastical devices. When you came to my grandfather’s booth there was nothing but a bunch of boring socks.

I was eating my usual summertime lunch of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and washing it down with a Scramble soda, when I started to suspect that all white people were as disdainful of those socks as I was. Every white person who approached the booth seemed to show no interest in the socks, and would almost turn their nose up if my grandfather attempted to draw their attention to his discount hosiery. I also noticed that almost every black person who happened past would buy at least one pair, sometimes several. This struck me as highly peculiar.

“How come only black people are buying the socks?” I asked Ivan in between bites of sandwich. He eyed me over the rim of his cup as he took a sip of coffee. “Because they don’t want their feet to get cold,” he answered eventually. There seemed to be some deep mystery to me here. Was there some special reason they were being protective of their feet? Did white people not care if their feet got cold? I know that I myself was opposed to cold feet, yet I had no desire to purchase flea market socks.

“Why?” I blurted in frustration. “Why don’t they want their feet to get cold?” He looked at me as if I had gone insane, frowned, and shook his head before answering with “Because if their feet get cold they die.” This was a stunning revelation. Now I was getting to the bottom of this thing. I was amazed, and wondered why no one had bothered to teach me this fact of life in school. I had one last question. “Will white people die if their feet get cold?” He chuckled, turned his back to me, and went about the business of trying to draw more customers. This conversation stuck with me for many years. I even told a guy on Death Row about it, and it became a running joke. When he was getting ready to go out into the yard on cold winter mornings, I’d yell over and remind him, “Make sure you’ve got your socks on. You know what happens when your feet get cold.” He’d laugh and say, “You and your old racist granddaddy ain’t going to trick me.”

There was one other incident in my youth that involved my grandfather and socks. For some reason I couldn’t sleep without socks on. It just didn’t feel right. I would put on my pajama bottoms and tuck them into my socks. The socks had to be pulled up almost to my knees so that it looked like a bizarre superhero’s costume. The problem was that I often didn’t change the socks for three or four days at a time. I would howl in outrage if anyone caught me and forcibly pulled them off.

This changed when my grandfather told me that sleeping with my socks on could cause my feet to burst open, because they weren’t getting any air. In my head I saw my toes exploding like kernels of popcorn. It actually caused me to have bad dreams, all of which contained bursting feet. He was always telling me something crazy, and seeming to believe it himself. I now tell my sister’s children bizarre tales, which they swear by. At least I can say I’m not sending them into a den of fire ants. Ivan was a nice man, in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. There’s not a hell of a lot more to say about him, other than that I grew to love him over time and cried like a baby when he died a few years later.

After the wedding Nanny moved from her apartment to Ivan’s house, which was in the nicer, middle-class section of West Memphis. They hadn’t been living together long when we moved in with them. By “we,” I mean me, my parents, and my sister. It was supposed to be a short-term arrangement while my father found us another place. We had hopped from place to place, and for roughly two years we lived in six states before finally crashing to a halt with my grandparents.