Naked, on the Edge (14 page)

None of this mattered to William Kemmler, however, nor to Danielle Boquet. With her charm and grace she had been able to gain welcome into the prison's main building, but had yet to be invited to enter the separate death house where her Alexandre awaited his execution. She had the power to kill the guards but did not have the power to force them to offer her entrance.

And so she waited. And she fretted. And Marie and Clarice tried to console her. She went back to the tenement flat in hopes she might find a clue, some bit of information to help her love escape yet another death by the great and humane justice-makers of the world, but there was nothing. She took the black Bible and kept it close in her skirt's pocket, but reading it clarified nothing. Explained nothing.

Danielle stayed by the exterior wall of the death chamber at night, and during the day slept in a closet of the prison's gasworks. Marie and Glance stayed with her, assuring her that it was not Alexandre and once he was dead she would come to her senses.

Witnesses arrived at the prison the evening of August 6th, twenty-five men, fourteen of them doctors, anxious and excited to see this new death that would not cause undue suffering.

The chamber itself was in the death house’s cellar, and Danielle lay in the steamy, bug-infested grass at one of the windows, staring through the steel bars and glass at the horrific scene playing out below. The witnesses walked in, clutching top hats and gloves, and most of them settled themselves on seats that had been arranged to face the electric chair. Other men stood. And then the warden and several guards entered, with Alexandre between them. A priest, looking bored and disinterested, followed behind in his robe, holding his Scriptures to his chest.

Alexandre glanced about the damp, stark room. His eyes were red-rimmed with lack of sleep and the terror what was ahead.

The guards nodded at the chair. He walked to it, but could not seem to sit down. A guard said, "You'll like this a lot better than the gallows, boy."

"I must get in," whispered Danielle to her Sisters behind her.

Marie and Glance, standing a few yards back, said, "You cannot. You’ve not been invited.”

Alexandre turned and lowered himself into the chair. Then he sprang up again. "I remember!" he shouted.

"Shut up and sit down," said the warden. "We'll break your arms to do it if we have to."

"No, no, hear me, I remember!" Alexandre's face twisted with dreadful knowledge. "Oh, God, I remember!"

The warden shoved Alexandre into the chair. Guards began securing the leather straps at his legs and arms. But Alexandre continued. "I remember the blade on my throat, the quick slash of the merciful Africans who said I was the first to die a civil death! I remember the blade of the guillotine, and the assurance that the execution would be painless. I remember now! But why? Why again and again?"

"He's crazed with fear," said one nervous doctor. "Let's have it done!"

"I know why! I am Sula! I am Alexandre! I am William!" cried Alexandre. "But I was Andrew first, my own words condemning me again and again to that which I would not allow the Lord! A fair and gentle death was what he’d been offered him. A courteous and mild demise! But I got the crowd to demand the dreadful death on the cross!"

A strap was quickly buckled at his waist and a leather harness with electrodes was shoved down on to his head. "Enough babbling!" said the warden. "Shut your mouth, criminal!"

Danielle pressed her forehead to the tiny slit of window and screamed, "Alexandre, then do you remember me?"

All faces spun towards the window. Alexandre stared, his mouth open.

"Alexandre! Let me in!"

Behind Danielle, Marie and Clarice gasped, "No, Danielle, let it be!"

Danielle banged on the steel bars. "Alexandre, please, let me in!"

"Are you my love from so long ago?” gasped Alexandre. “Sweet Danielle!” The guards fumbled with the chin strap, and drew the leather through the buckle. Before they could seal his jaws shut with the strap, he managed, "Dearest, come in!"

Marie grabbed Danielle's wrist from behind, and snarled at her, "Do not dare! They will see you for who you are. The priest has a crucifix. We will be done in, Sister!"

Danielle twisted violently, but Clarice took her other wrist and held it firmly. "We will not be destroyed by your carelessness!"

Danielle bit her Sisters, and clawed. She kicked and spun, and the bones of her wrists shattered, but they would not let go.

Inside the cellar, she saw the priest raise his hand for the sign of the cross. He stepped back. A guard nodded to a man at the back of the room.

“No!" Danielle screamed, and the witnesses crossed their arms and shifted in their seats, uneasy with the spectacle this had become.

"Now," said the guard.

"No!" cried Danielle. She kicked the bars and the pane of the window. The glass shattered and sprayed the cellar floor with shards.

There was the sound of a rushing trolley, a high-pitched and whining burr that caused the entire room to vibrate. Alexandre's body convulsed and strained at the leather straps. Smoke rose from his hair, and then the hair caught fire, crackling and popping in a tongue of orange and blue.

"Jesus," said one witness.

"I pray he's dead already," said another.

The body danced within the confines of the chair, a puppet on electric strings, until the warden nodded and the current was shut off.

Danielle could not move. She lay on her side in the grass, her fingernails dug into her forehead, her eyes staring, staring, taking it in and rejecting it at the same time.

Alexandre, dead again.

And then Alexandre moaned.

The witnesses gasped and put their hands to their mouths. The warden pointed urgently towards the man at the wall switch, who threw it again, and again Alexandre danced.

It was all done in six minutes. At last Alexandre was dead. Guards gingerly unstrapped him, complaining that he was boiling to the touch, and with coats over their hands for protection, they rolled the body on to a gurney that had waited at the side of the room. They covered it with a sheet.

But when a doctor attempted to examine the body, he could not remove the clothing for the heat. The warden escorted the ashen-faced men from the death chamber until the body cooled.

"Half-hour," the warden said. "Let it cool and let the air clear a bit. And get a guard to arrest those women in the yard!"

"I hate you," Danielle said to Marie and Clarice.

"No., you don't," said Marie.

"Oh, but I do," said Danielle. The hands loosened on her wrists, and she was at last able to transform herself to mist to move through the window and into the cellar. Her friends, uninvited, watched through the window, shaking their heads.

Danielle reformed and then stood, the stench of red-hot dead whirling around her. She was silent for a moment and then said, "I'm cursed as much as he is."

"We are not cursed, Danielle," said Clarice from the window, "we are blessed."

"What is a curse, then? That which you do not want, which you never asked for, yet which will not let you be!"

"It isn't Alexandre," Marie said again. "Come with us now. Come out with us."

"You don't know anything," said Danielle. And she did not go with them.

She stepped to the gurney and lifted away the sheet. Her love lay there, his sweet face charred half away, his hair blackened and crisp. His beautiful hands cooked into claws. She held one hand and kissed it and cried her tears on to it.

"I would remove your curse if I could," she whispered. She bent to the scorched neck and bit there. The blood had the flavor of charcoal.

She heard the men's voices coming towards the chamber. Footsteps pounding the cement of the hall floor. She would go. But she would find him again. She would be keen and sharp, she would have her wits always awake and would be ready. She would follow him and perhaps, next time, save him. Save him for what, she wasn't certain. Save him into what, she couldn't know. But she would find him.

She touched her skirt's pocket. The Bible was gone. It had gone ahead, to follow her love once more.

"Until later, dearest,' she said.

On still-lingering tendrils of smoke, she left the cellar. Marie and Clarice were not to be found. She knew she would never see them again. That was all right. She did not want to burden them. She would do this alone.

S
he bought a red-eye flight ticket to Virginia from Illinois. She'd heard rumors that the Department of Corrections had decided to allow inmates on Death Row to choose the electric chair or the new, less violent and certainly more civil and humane method of death by lethal injection.

She did not know if Alexandre was in Virginia. He might be the one scheduled to die first with this new technology. Or he might be the first scheduled to die this way in any of the other states as they accepted the new method over electrocution or the firing squad.

She would not know his face or his name. But she would know him by his hands.

She pushed up the plastic window curtain and stared at the moon. The moon was the same, year after year, century after century. Was it cursed, too?

"I come, Alexandre," she said to the night.

And if she failed, she would only have to wait and try again. She would save him. She would rescue him. Someday.

She had all the time there was. All the time there would ever be.

A
cross the kitchen table from Chloe sat Nannie, her right hand holding a melamine cup full of hot tea, her gnarled left hand trembling on the surface of the table, stirring grains of salt and sugar into miniature whirlwinds. Afternoon sunlight strained through the dusty window, and June bugs hummed a relentless tune in the woods beyond the side yard. Nannie lifted the cup to her lips, the nubs of the missing two fingers of her right hand beating the air. The bandage on her left elbow had begun to ooze again. Brown and red stains bubbled up beneath the gauze.

The rotary fan on top of the refrigerator rattled as it moved back and forth. Nannie's smell wafted back and forth with the moving air.

"Stony say it's gonna make tumors," Chloe said. She held a cup of tea as well, although her cup was a fine piece of blue china, inherited from her mother. The steam drew a pink glow from her face. Although only seventeen, her hair was bound up and back like her grandmother's. A handmade ragdoll sat in Chloe's big lap, its face flopped over. "Stony say you gotta stop."

Nannie swallowed, then looked at Chloe. There was kindness in her eyes. There was even kindness in her reprimand. "You do the embroidery?" Nannie asked. Chloe shook her head. "You do the needlepoint, and the dolls? Honey, you'll just never understand this. We won't never be rich, but we don't care. We make enough from the people that come and see. You seem to be eating fine. You's getting to be such a big girl."

Chloe's fingers played across her pudgy face, and then dropped to her big stomach.

"You're my girl," Nannie went on. "We'll be all right. Enough talk of Stony."

There was a click beetle on the floor beside Chloe's foot, and Chloe stepped on it with her toe. She held the doll's head down for it to see. "Bad old bug," she said. Then she said, "Nannie, Stony said you being bad."

"Child," said Nannie. She put her cup down and swiped her lips. Some of the drips were wiped away, many were left. A small string of spit followed the hand down to the table. "You's simple, but I love you. Trust me. Them boys'll never have the best of me long as I live. You'll always be my girl who needs me and I'll do right by you."

Chloe was silent. She watched her grandmother pull herself up from the table to put the cups away. There was no telling Nannie what to do. Stony, Chloe's older brother, was always trying. He would continue to come over once a week after a day at the turkey plant and try to scold some sense into the old woman. It did no good. Nannie would tell Stony to go home to his wife and son and take care of them because she would be all right. Then Nannie would take the knife to her side again.

At the sink, Nannie braced herself and rinsed out the cups. It was hard for her to walk. She hadn't gotten used to hopping on one foot yet. One cup clattered as it slipped from Nannies grasp. Chloe flinched, and grabbed the straps of her sleeveless sundress, her forearms coming up over her breasts. She said, "Break, Nannie?"

"Nah," Nannie said. "It was my cup. Plastic don't break like glass, honey."

"Oh," said Chloe.

"Goin' to the porch?" asked Nannie.

Chloe nodded and helped her grandmother out of the kitchen and down the short hail to the barren living room at the front of the house. The doll went, too, crammed under Chloe's unshaved armpit. A breeze blew through the screened door, lifting the stench of Nannie's wounds and making Chloe rub her nose with her free hand. Out on the porch, the fresh air made sitting next to Nannie more tolerable. Nannie settled down on her chair, the wood barely giving under her wasted body. Chloe's own chair creaked mightily under the girl’s weight.