Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  Whit became a mother’s boy, shy, obedient and, on the surface, altogether lacking the normal, healthy aggressions of lads his age. For the most part he preferred his mother’s company to that of his playmates, and each day after school he and his mother took a long walk together, chatting happily. On one of these walks the sight of an injured sparrow filled Whit with such compassion and sadness he wept openly. With his mother’s permission, he took the bird home and nursed it back to health. When the sparrow had fully recovered, he and his mother released it.

  As soon as the bird was lost to their sight, Whit turned and looked up at his mother. “The sparrow’s gone, Mom,” he said sadly, “and it never once looked back.”

  • 5 •

  And Bent Still More

  Disaster senselessly singled out the little family and struck with the force of lightning that beautiful day a friend of Whit’s family drove his mother, himself and his Aunty Victoria to the city in the friend’s new Ford roadster.

  At a busy intersection their car was struck almost broadside at high speed by a much heavier car whose driver had ignored a stop sign. There was a screech of rending metal, a sickening instant when the world seemed to have exploded. Whit was catapulted from the rumble seat and thrown to the curb. The adults, seated three abreast in the front seat, did not fare so well. The Ford spun around, then rolled over. The family friend who was driving struck the steering wheel and was painfully but not critically injured. His aunt was thrown under the car; her skull smashed open like an egg. She died three days later without recovering consciousness. The force of the impact snapped vertebrae in his mother’s back. Her skull was fractured when her head struck the dashboard. When the Ford spun around she was spilled, broken and bleeding, to the street.

  Whit ran to comfort her. He remained with her during the siren-screaming ride in the ambulance to the hospital and while the nurses were waiting to wheel her into surgery. He furnished hospital personnel with their names and his father’s business address, not mentioning then how painful it was for him to speak. The next day, when his jaw and his nose had swollen badly, they learned both were fractured.

  Just before his mother was wheeled into surgery, the driver of the auto which had struck theirs, a tall, wild-looking woman with disheveled hair, somehow had managed to locate their whereabouts. Dashing by startled hospital attendants, she rushed belligerently to where his mother lay, half conscious, on a gurney. It was later learned that this woman belonged to a religious cult which denied, if the mind willed it, the existence of physical injury or disease. Herself then in a profound state of shock, she shouted hysterically at Whit’s mother:

  “Get up! Get up! You’re not fooling anybody. You’re not hurt. You’re just trying to pretend so you’ll get my husband’s money!”

  Whit ran at the woman and struck at her with his fists.

  Hallie, miraculously, did not die; yet she spent many, many weeks hospitalized. During several of those weeks, Whit’s busy, worried father boarded him with an old Scots couple whose good gentleness Whit never forgot.

  Once or more each week, Whit visited his mother at the hospital. Each time he had to fight back his tears at seeing her swathed in bandages and straitjacketed in a body cast. He talked to her eagerly of the good times they would have when she returned home to them, of the long walks they would take together. He told her he was doing fine and how well “Uncle Bob and Aunty Helen” were looking out for him.

  Whit learned from his dad that his mother would soon be coming home. His dad explained mat was why they were moving to a one-story house two blocks away. Whit was so overjoyed at the news he didn’t think anything about why they were moving. Yet he thought it strange when they brought his mother home in an ambulance. He was permitted to see her as soon as they had established her in her room. She was still in bed, a special bed with cranks, pulleys and other odd devices, propped up with pillows. He was troubled.

  “Gee, Mom,” he said, after she had embraced him warmly, “I’m sure glad to see you home, but how come you’re still in bed?”

  Hallie then signaled the others—his father, Pat, the special nurse, the friends present—to leave the room. Alone with her son, Hallie explained to him, as matter-of-factly as possible. Her back had been broken in the accident, leaving her completely paralyzed from the waist down. She could not walk as she had no control over her legs.

  “You mean—?” Whit asked, his eyes saucer large.

  His mother nodded affirmatively, sensing all her boy wanted to know.

  Whit cried, “But why, Mom? Why?”

  Hallie told him simply, giving the only answer she knew. “It’s God’s will, Whit.”

  If that were the case, Whit reasoned to himself, then perhaps God could be induced to change His mind. In his room that night, and on successive nights, the boy prayed fervently. “Please, God, let me take my mother’s place. Hurt me, not her. Please!”

  Weeks passed. His mother’s condition remained the same. In desperation, Whit sought out his dad. He told his father of the bargain he had tried to make with God and asked, in perfect earnestness, if there wasn’t some way God could be persuaded. Serl sadly pointed out to his son that God must have a reason for what He had done—a reason beyond their understanding—and that it was therefore probable the Creator would not allow Whit to take his mother’s place. Whit realized this, but still he was unable to bear the thought of his mother bedridden for life.

  “Then isn’t there something you can do, Dad?” he implored.

  Serl solemnly promised his son, “I’ll do everything I can.” And he did. He had specialist after specialist examine his wife. Always the verdict was the same: Hallie was a hopeless paralytic. But until the last dollar was spent and credit exhausted, Serl stubbornly refused to accept that verdict. Heroically he resisted it, seeking and praying for a miracle that would never come to pass.

  There was renewed confusion within Whit. What had happened to his mother was simply not right. It was a cruel, bad thing. It was a terrible thing. But his mother did not complain, and that made it more complicated. She was always cheerful and it was not a counterfeit cheerfulness. When Whit appeared sad, his mother told him they should be thankful God had spared her life. And he agreed, for he was most thankful for this. Yet, if God were truly responsible, why had He caused or allowed this to happen to his mother? And if God were not responsible, who or what was? These were questions the boy was not prepared to answer; he didn’t want, then, to try to answer, for a suspicion lurked behind the questions, a frightening suspicion of what the answers might mean, and he desperately wanted to believe in God and good, and an ordered, controlled Reality. Such a Reality gave strength to those who lived within it; they had the assurance they dwelled in the dominion of One who was all-wise and strong. And so far as Whit then knew, the only alternative to this Reality, as a way of life, was a denial of it. But why deny what you needed? What object in denying meaning? Where did that lead?

  Whit wasn’t ready to defy and to deny. He still desperately wanted to serve a more significant master than his own mind. He wasn’t strong and he needed strength; he had been taught to believe it could be found in Faith—blind faith. Now there was doubt and doubt had spawned a conflict he had to resolve and could not.

  He had to wait. He continued to do well in school. He continued to play with his young friends. He remained close to his mother and father. He was, on the surface, a shy, bright, friendly boy.

  Within him, there had taken place a transmutation: a spiritual creative urge had become a psychologic compulsion. He must, somehow, win a way back to grace. Somehow he had been responsible, by his thoughts or acts or otherwise, for the position in which he presently found himself. He felt certain that once he had enjoyed favor and now he didn’t. That was wrong. What was right?

  Whit would come out of his shell and go back into it. For the next six years of his life he would continue to do that, and simultaneously he would be living in two worlds—the one around him and
a private, inner one of his own. More and more he roamed his beloved hills alone, and less and less did he feel a close emotional kinship to other people. He spent much of his time in this secret world, refusing to share it with anyone. Yet he never for an instant lost contact with the external world or denied the manifest reality of it. Indeed, the contrasting quality of his two worlds demonstrated beyond dispute the existence of the one without and the corresponding need for the one within.

  One sunny summer day he came down from the cabin high in his hills, B.B. gun in hand, and stood at the edge of a bank looking down at a car—and the three people in it—parked where the street ended at the foot of the hills. In the back seat of the car a nearly naked couple were engaging in a sex act. A tiny, crying girl stood on the front seat and called pitifully for mama. The woman kept shushing her child and all the while responding to the huge, hairy man. Then the tiny girl set up a more insistent wail for her mama and climbed up on the back of the front seat. With a curse, the man reached out and struck the girl down. While the child cowered and whimpered in the front seat, the mother and her lover proceeded to concentrate on the gratification of their lust. They didn’t proceed very far.

  In a flash, Whit raised, aimed and then squeezed the trigger of his B.B. gun. A moment later a bellow or. pain issued from the throat of the hairy individual and a surprising amount of activity, none of it coordinated, took place in the back seat of the car. Whit ran off down a trail; he didn’t want to see any more.

  Did the Devil make the hairy man and the mother do what they had been doing? Whit didn’t know; nor did he know whether Providence or chance had led him to the car. And which was more important, the fact that he had witnessed the event, or the event itself, witnessed or unwitnessed? Another paradox had put in an appearance in his thought world: the mere asking of questions, the bare fact of their formulation, was shaping him and influencing the direction he was to take. And the capacity to ask himself puzzling questions implied something more. Creative imagination, given the objective methodology, could lead one to the answers, as well as to the reasons that motivated one to ask the questions.

  Whit made his decision alone, and he kept it a secret. Not only would he believe in God, but he would find God. (His mind was made up; it was then simply a question of how.) Why should God stay in hiding? Why should God be unwilling to tell Whit why he had been made? . . . .

  Swamped with debts, confronted with the necessity of paying for nurses, regular doctors’ visits and medication for the bedridden Hal-lie, and determined to meet the other expenses of daily living and his son’s upbringing, Serl, during those dark, bleak depression years of the early and middle 1930’s, worked himself to exhaustion, and in doing so permanently undermined his health. Several of his business ventures flopped. The family savings and the substantial settlement received from the accident that had left Hallie paralyzed had soon been spent trying to give her back the use of her legs.

  The family was forced to move to another district where the rent was much cheaper. They were obliged to economize sharply on clothing and food. They faced a bitter fight for survival. Serl swallowed his pride and accepted relief from the county.

  The final blow fell when Whit, then fifteen, caught and almost died of diphtheria and the consequent heart strain, aggravated by his recurring asthmatic condition. He was released from the county hospital to his father’s care with a warning from one of the doctors that his heart had been seriously overtaxed. The doctor made it clear that if Whit did not have complete bed rest for many weeks, he might not live another six months. This was more than Serl could stand. He made up his mind fate would not be given another opportunity to torment his little family.

  Late one night, when Hallie and Whit were fast asleep, Serl went to the kitchen and turned on the gas in the oven. With a prayer for forgiveness, he thrust his head near the burner and inhaled deeply. When he lost consciousness he fell to the floor. The sound of his falling awakened Hallie and the sound of the escaping gas told her immediately what had happened.

  “Oh my God!” she gasped, and jerked open a window within reach of her bed. She forced her voice to be calm when she called to her son.

  “Yes, Mother?” Whit answered.

  “I think your father has had an accident in the kitchen,” she said. “Can you make it back there and turn off the gas and then get help?”

  “I think so, Mom. I’ll try.”

  Whit crawled to the kitchen and turned off the gas. Then he crawled to the back porch and shouted to a neighbor. His dad quickly revived and immediately regretted his act (although he made a second attempt hardly more than a year later). If anything, the incident brought Hallie, Serl and Whit closer together. They sat up the rest of the night and made brave plans for the future. Whit then told his parents of his decision to learn to walk again as soon as possible. He said he was certain the doctors were wrong about his heart and gently brushed aside their entreaties that he return to bed.

  He had been in bed so long that learning to walk was a slow and painful process. An attack of asthma interrupted his progress—but only for a day. Within a week he had regained a shaky use of his legs; within two weeks, he was helping around the house.

  Not long after the kitchen incident, two friends happened to be at Whit’s home when his dad returned with foodstuffs doled out to those on relief. The packages were plainly marked NOT FOR SALE and one of his friends, Joey, recognized their source from the markings.

  “Gosh,” Joey remarked, “you sure must be awful poor to have to eat that stuff. I feel sorry for you.”

  Joey’s words stung. A trigger, they set off something dangerous inside Whit. That night he told his parents he had arranged to take over his old paper route again, beginning at once. He assured them he felt strong enough. At four o’clock the following morning he rode off on his bicycle. The paper route, however, was a fiction.

  Whit pedaled to a grocery store a couple of miles from where he lived. In the past he had watched truck drivers leave at the back of the store, before it opened, milk, vegetables and bakery goods. He knew of other stores, too, where this practice was followed. Once at the store, he made certain he was not being watched; then he filled his newspaper bag with two loaves of bread, two coffee cakes, two quarts of milk, a pint of cream and three cantaloupes. After that he rode off to a nearby park and waited out the time it would have taken him to deliver his old route. Returning home, he explained the food by saying his boss on the paper route had given him an advance. The family had a hearty breakfast that morning. Whit refused to regret what he had done.

  He continued to steal and he kept a detailed list of each theft. To hide what he was doing, he actually got another early morning paper route. He committed minor burglaries, he purchased food with forged personal checks and got, in addition to the food, a dollar or two back in cash. In subsequent weeks, he grew increasingly more ingenious at inventing plausible stories to account for the source of the money he used to “buy” food, medicine, a little present for his mother or some other item his family needed. His thievery, added up, amounted to very little, perhaps at most four or five hundred dollars, yet without it to augment the family income, his family would have gone hungry. And with it life was still grim and hard for them.

  Whit had taken no pleasure in the success of his deception or in having become a sneak thief. But had he truthfully told his mother and father the food and other items he had been bringing home were stolen, he knew his parents would have made him return them; he knew they would have preferred to go hungry and do without other necessities. He had made up his mind the choice should not be theirs. He had determined they should never know the truth.

  For the first time in his life Whit was helping his parents when they needed help most. He desperately wanted and needed to do that, even when the price he paid was to become a thief and a liar. He believed, when he bargained to pay that price, that he did not have long to live. He was willing—yes, and anxious—God should punish him in a
ny way He saw fit after death. He believed he deserved to be punished—even sent to Hell—for what he was doing. But he prayed this deserved punishment be withheld until death closed his eyes forever; he prayed that his parents should never know the truth, that they would remember him as a good and loving son who, during his last days, had been helpful to them. He failed to realize that he was asking too much.

  Whit concealed his fright as best he could the day he became violently ill with stomach cramps and, believing his hour of reckoning to be at hand, insisted upon kissing his mother goodbye before he allowed his father to drive him to the doctor. Although nauseated and terrified beyond belief at what he thought lay before him, and with his conscience demanding he blurt out the whole story to his dad, Whit still held his tongue, determined not to betray himself. It was too late, he told himself, to cry out tor help or to beg his dad or his Maker for another chance.

  • 6 •

  Fear!

  In the doctor’s office Whit began to retch. Presently a quantity of partially digested green peaches was deposited on the office floor.

  Whit was given something to soothe his outraged stomach. In a matter of minutes, he was much improved and asked his father to take him home. After becoming ill, he had forgotten completely the peaches he had eaten, and had thought himself about to die. Confusion and embarrassment restored the color to his face and made him stutter.

  Serl, knowing nothing of his son’s thoughts and not fully recovered from the scare he had had, asked the doctor to give the boy a complete physical examination, “to be on the safe side.”