The Jack Finney Reader

by Jack Finney

  Yeah — Hank nodded slowly — things'll sure be different around here from now on.

  The two men stood for a time in silence. Then, at a sound behind Al, they turned to see Becky Mehan, her long, tanned legs flashing, stride from her living room to the gate in the fence at the side of the Mehans' house. Without a glance at the two men, she opened the gate, stepped out, then slipped through the tall hedge paralleling the Jessups' house. As she walked into the Jessups' little patio, Hilda, the skirt of her red robe billowing, came hurrying from her living room. The two women flung their arms about each other and burst into tears.

  The men, jaws slack, stood gaping. After a moment, Al vaulted the fence, and the two men walked toward the women, who turned to face them, smiling now, eyes blinking against the tears, arms tight around each other's waist.

  Look, Hank said slowly, I'm delighted. But for the sake of my sanity and my rapidly atrophying sense of reason, will you please tell me what happened?

  Hilda glanced at Becky, and they smiled — the wise, condescending little smiles of women in the presence of the perpetually limited comprehension of men.

  Then Hilda turned to Hank, a shoulder shrugging slightly, her arm tightening around Becky's waist. Why, I phoned Becky, she said. You don't think we'd each lose our best friend over a ridiculous thing like that?

  Hank glanced dumbly at Al. Then, as Becky spoke, both men turned to their wives.

  Of course not, Becky said scornfully, and squeezed Hilda's waist. Use common sense. She turned to Hilda. Come on, she said, let's see how the roast is doing.

  Good Housekeeping, June 1958, 146(6):78-79, 140, 142, 145-146, 148-149, 151

  Seven Days to Live

  There were three requests from Condemned Row on the warden's desk that Thursday, and he turned to them even before glancing at the morning mail. They might have very little time left, some of the men on the row, and the warden — a neatly dressed man in his forties, with dark thinning hair and a patient intelligent face — liked to grant their requests, if he could, just as quickly as possible.

  He smiled a little, shaking his head wonderingly, as he read the first of the requests, written, as they all were, on a pink slip of paper, in pencil. This man, a friendly engaging twenty-year-old who had killed a man in a knife fight, asked permission to buy a Ouija board, and have it mailed in to him. The warden stared across his office for a moment — it was a large, carpeted, quiet room, its many windows hung with Venetian blinds — to wonder where this boy had heard of such a thing. Then he scrawled an O.K. at the bottom of the sheet, and signed his initials.

  The second man, who had burned a building for the insurance, a man accidentally dying in the fire, asked that a name be added to his list of approved visitors. A nineteen-year-old girl, a stranger, had written his attorney asking that she be allowed to visit him; she had seen the attorney's name in a newspaper account of the condemned man's crime. The warden wrote Denied at the bottom of this slip.

  The third request was written in Spanish, and came from a young Mexican convicted of killing a Chinese grocer in a holdup. There are many Mexicans in the West, and a number of them, therefore, among its prison inmates; and so, years before, when he had first come here as a lieutenant, the warden had studied Spanish at the local college. He had learned to speak, read and write it well, and now he read the last of the three notes from the row.

  It was a request for oil paints, brushes, palette, charcoal, and other such supplies, and the warden sat back in his swivel chair, raising a knee to the edge of his beautifully carved prison-made desk to consider this request. The man was a good artist, he knew. A year ago he had made a pencil sketch soon after arriving at the prison. It was a street scene, the single dirt street of the village he had been born in. It was beautifully done, the best prison art the warden had ever seen, and he wondered why this man — Luis Perez — should have waited till now to draw or paint again.

  For Perez was within seven days of death. His sentence was automatically appealed under the law of the state, and it was technically possible that he might still receive a stay of execution or commutation to a lesser sentence. But out of his long experience the warden felt sure neither of these things would happen, and that Perez would die in the prison gas chamber a week from today, at eleven in the morning.

  So he wanted to grant this request, but he hesitated, staring absently across his big quiet office at the framed photograph of the governor on the wall, and the big cabinet whose shelves were littered with handmade knives, ropes and other contraband taken from prisoners' cells. For the last sentence of Perez's request said that his proposed painting was to be a kind of mural, only not, however, precisely a mural. But it was to be a large painting, in any case, and would be painted on the wall of his cell. Still, it could always be scraped from the wall, once Perez had left his cell for the last time, the warden decided, and he scribbled his O.K. at the bottom of the pink sheet. Then he reached for his phone to send a prison employee to the nearby small town to buy the things Perez had asked for. If Perez was to complete his mural, he had no time to lose.

  So the painting was begun that morning on a blank wall of Perez's seven-by-eight cell. It was nothing but a rectangle at first, measuring something over a yard by about six and a half feet. Its longest dimension, however — and this puzzled the guards on the row — ran vertically, beginning just above the floor and rising toward the ceiling. In color it was drab, very little different in shade from the wall it was painted on. Actually, it was only sizing, a preparation of the surface to receive the paint, and at this point the guards were only mildly interested. When they asked what he was painting, Perez — a slim, rather handsome man, who looked younger than the twenty-five he said he was — replied in Spanish, shrugging helplessly and smiling in apology for his lack of English. The guards suspected, correctly, that he understood more English than he pretended, but were not curious enough to press their question.

  Anyway, it was answered by eleven the next morning. The cells of Condemned Row, twenty-eight of them, stood in a line running down the side of a large room. There was a line of barred windows in the wall opposite and a skylight above. As the ceilings of the cells were steel mesh, the light inside them was good, and Perez was up at dawn sketching in his painting with a charcoal stick in the first white daylight. His supplies arranged on the cot behind him, he worked rapidly and surely, standing in his blue prison denims and work shirt, completely concentrated on his work. He began by sketching a horizontal line across the long rectangle of sizing, about four inches from the top. A little below this line he drew another which paralleled the first.

  He drew a series of these double lines, spaced four or five inches apart, from the top of the panel clear down to the floor. At seven o'clock breakfast was brought to Perez in his cell, as it was to all the others, and he ate without interrupting his work, poking a forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth as he sketched. Breakfast over, the men came out of their cells if they chose, to watch the big television set at one end of the room, or play table tennis at one of the two tables set up between the cells and one wall, or to sit at small tables playing checkers, chess, dominoes or cards. Today a number of the men stood watching Perez, calling occasional questions or jokes to him; he was popular here. But he simply glanced out at them, smiling a little, never pausing in his work.

  The last of the horizontal lines sketched in, Perez drew a long vertical line near the panel's left edge and running from the top of the area to the bottom. About four inches to the right of this line, he drew another line parallel to the first. With the heel of his hand, he then smudged out all horizontal lines wherever they crossed this new vertical panel. Then he drew a duplicate of the vertical panel at the other side of his work area.

  Now Perez stopped to sharpen his charcoal to a fine point, using the little sandpaper board he had asked for among his supplies. Then, beginning in the topmost of the horizontal panels he had drawn, he began to sketch a series of gently undulating lines
, the men outside his cell watching. In some places, pressing hard on his charcoal stick, he carefully thickened these lines. In other places, he interrupted them, drawing the wavering line out to the finest line he could make, and then lifting the charcoal to resume the line an inch or so farther on. Once he stopped, near the center of a panel, to draw an irregular half-dollar-size circle. Then he resumed his sketching of the undulating lines, and as they approached this circle, he curved them around it, above and below.

  Presently the little group before his cell saw that while these lines had seemed to be haphazardly placed at first, they were not. They were forming a kind of pattern.

  Just before he finished the fourth of his horizontal panels they dropped into focus for one of the watching men before his cell door. Suddenly the man saw what these panels were, and he turned to murmur to the others. They were boards; on the wall of his cell Perez was sketching a series of roughly cut boards, complete with graining and occasional knotholes.

  When finally they were all finished, Perez went back over them; thickening portions of the knothole outlines until suddenly they had depth; shading the edges of the boards to give them thickness. At ten-fifteen — one of the watching guards called over another at this point — Perez began sketching two huge ornate hinges at the left-hand edge of his panel, and when they were finished he drew a latch on the opposite side. At eleven o'clock he put down his charcoal, and stood — extending and contracting his fingers, working the stiffness from them — studying what he had done; and outside his cell door the watching men were silent and no longer smiling. On the wall of his cell, this condemned man — it was suddenly unmistakable — had drawn a door.

  Word reached the warden before noon. A runner, a minimum-custody inmate, stopped in the office of the warden's assistant to pick up his outgoing mail, and told him, grinning, what Perez was doing. The warden's assistant, stepping to the door of his office, repeated this news to one of the warden's secretaries. Next time the warden rang for her, she went in and told him what Perez was doing.

  By noon every man in the prison yard, the five great cell blocks, the furniture and denim factories, the prison farm a mile to the west, and even the single unguarded inmate manning the salt-water pump half a mile outside the main prison gate, knew what Perez was doing. And because prison humor is largely elemental, the news was accepted as a huge joke.

  About twelve-twenty, the warden walked to the employees' dining room just outside the prison's main gate, and there he listened, smiling a little, to each of the elaborations of this joke offered him by guards, other employees, and inmate waiters. But although he smiled, the warden wasn't amused at the knowledge that a man who was to die in a week had suddenly and frantically begun to paint a door on the wall of his cell.

  He left the dining room and was passed, by the guards there, through the double admittance gates of the prison's walled area. Then he walked toward the north cell block, passing through the great asphalt-paved yard thronged with prisoners, nodding and speaking to those inmates he knew, of whom there were many. In the north cell block, he rode to the top floor in the little elevator, greeted the guards there, and signed the register, as everyone entering this part of the prison had to do upon entering or leaving it. A lieutenant unlocked the mesh-covered barred gate opening onto Condemned Row, and the warden stepped in, and walked down the row to Perez's cell. Buenos días, he said, as he stopped, and Perez glanced up, smiling.

  Buenos días, he answered, but did not stop working. Brush and palette in his hands now, he was painting the topmost of his charcoal-sketched boards. The colors squeezed onto his palette were a large blob of gray, and smaller dabs of green, brown, yellow and white. And under his steadily moving brush the sketched-in board on the wall of his cell was turning into the likeness of wood, touched and handled and worn down through the years by many human hands. It looked absolutely real.

  It took Perez four hours to finish this one board; the warden had stood silently watching him for five minutes, then turned and left. At just before three, when he finished, Perez stopped to clench and unclench his stiffened fingers into suppleness again. Then he rolled a cigarette of prison tobacco which he lighted and left in his mouth and began work on the second board from the top. By seven o'clock that evening, Perez working rapidly in the fading daylight, the second board was finished.

  It took him four more days, working from five-thirty each morning until after seven each night, passing up all his exercise periods, to complete the door. On Tuesday, a little past four in the afternoon — working on his knees now, his face nearly touching the concrete floor — he finished the last board. He stood up then, immediately cleaned his brushes in turpentine, then scraped his palette clean and scrubbed its surface with a turpentine-soaked rag. He squeezed new colors onto it — black, with small dabs each of dark green, purple and white — and resumed work at once, painting the big hinges at the side of his door.

  At first they were dead black; silhouettes. But then, at the upper edges of the topmost hinge, he began working in tiny streaks and flecks of dark green, purple, and here and there, almost invisible lines of white; and suddenly the hinge had depth. When he finished, it was no longer a silhouette of paint, but a strap of heavy black metal supporting the weight of the wooden door. Tonight he worked until seven-twenty, for the days were getting longer.

  By nine-thirty the next morning, Wednesday — he hadn't touched his breakfast — both hinges were completed, and now they were completely real. They had depth and weight, and their surfaces were studded with rounded bolt heads, the crowns flattened from hammer blows. The hinges were pitted by the rounded peen of the mallet that had forged them, and they and the bolt heads were streaked with old rust. Shortly before noon he completed the latch.

  The door was finished at noon, then, the day before Perez was to die; and again, after lunch the warden went up to look at it. There it stood, a door of old, warped, unevenly cut wood; the eye knew it was wood. In absolute realness it stood there on the wall of the cell, and the warden's eyes said that a finger tip sliding along the smooth-worn graining of one of the planks would actually drop into the first knothole or crack it encountered, and bump into the concrete which pressed against the door on its other side.

  People feel a mystery about old places in which intense and prolonged emotions have been experienced. And so superstition lives in old prisons, because through generations men have hanged themselves there, gone insane, and in general lived in agonies most human beings never know. They are places where strange unexplainable things sometimes happen. The warden at this particular prison, at this particular time, was an intelligent and sensitive man; too much so not to be affected, too, by the nameless superstitious dread that sometimes moved through the prison — with and without cause — like actual currents of air. And now, standing at the bars of Perez's cell, he did not like this door painted on its wall. For the primary function of a warden's job is to prevent escape. These aren't his prisoners but the state's. It is his job to keep them, and the condemned man must not escape execution by death, or the confined man escape past the walls. Everything else is secondary to that, and the lurking fear of escape is always with the warden.

  So now, against all reason, the warden was afraid of this door. It seemed to him, staring at it now — Perez was cleaning his brushes, occasionally glancing up at the warden to smile — that possibly this door was a masterpiece. Perhaps not, but at least it was a masterpiece of realism, and the impulse to order it scraped from the wall rose up strongly in the warden's mind. But he didn't seriously consider giving this order. Reason and common sense aren't lightly abandoned; this was a door made of paint squeezed out of tubes. So once again, presently, the warden turned and walked away.

  An hour later he was notified by phone from the north cell block that Perez had rigged up a blanket in his cell. A corner of it, the lieutenant explained, was jammed into a ventilator grill just below the ceiling and above the painting; another corner was tied to a hook
on the opposite wall. The effect of this — the hanging blanket angling out from the wall — was to conceal the painting, and Perez was now at work behind the blanket; what were the warden's orders?

  After only a moment or two of silence the warden answered. Leave Perez and his blanket alone, he said. But in those few moments of silence, his mind had moved rapidly through a long train of thought. To order a guard to go in and pull Perez's blanket down, his first quick thought, was an immediate and easy answer to the lieutenant; but an important matter of policy was involved. The warden was — always outwardly, and usually inwardly — a composed man, and his invariable appearance of lack of apprehension was important. For in case of trouble, a riot, for example, the prison staff took its cue from the warden. And if his seeming calm, then, was to be accepted as real, he could not be known to be a man who was ruffled by trifles. He wished he knew what Perez was doing behind that blanket, but he smiled, and making his voice casual, he ordered the lieutenant to leave Perez alone.

  At six o'clock he rode up in the elevator to the row again. It was usual for him to visit a man the night before his execution, and now after allowing Perez's blanket to go unchallenged all afternoon, he could visit him without risking comment or speculation. I've come to see you, Luis, he said in Spanish, standing before the cell; a guard was selecting the proper key from among a large brass ringful of keys in his hand.

  I am busy; I do not wish to be disturbed, Perez answered from behind his blanket.

  Bueno! the warden said, nodding at the guard as though he had been cordially welcomed, and the guard unlocked the cell door, pulled it open, and the warden stepped inside. Hearing the barred door locked behind him, the warden felt an impulse to yank down Perez's blanket here and now. But that would betray worry and doubt, and he knew he was also irrationally afraid of what the guard might see on the wall.

  The warden lifted an edge of the blanket just enough to stoop and step under it, then let it fall into place again. Perez stood painting — with furious speed, the tip of his brush darting from palette to wall, and back again. He didn't pause to glance up at the warden; he was filling in the wide cracks and knotholes of his door, and he had already reached the middle of his painting.