My behavior wasn’t exactly low-key, either. I was thrown out of class at least once a week for disturbing the peace in general. Part of the problem was that I was just so happy to be away from the hell of home. I mocked teachers, screamed out bizarre and nonsensical answers when they asked questions, and made a nuisance of myself in a variety of ways designed to drive authority figures mad with rage. One teacher even threatened to “slap that bird nest off of your head,” in reference to my haircut. I was delighted.
When I met Jason Baldwin, he was quite the opposite. I don’t recall hearing him ever speak during his first year of junior high. I was the immature pervert who liked to amuse himself by looking up vulgar words in the dictionary during study hall. I certainly wasn’t going to waste my time on such pointless exercises as homework. One day after exhausting my sexual vocabulary for the millionth time I slammed the dictionary shut and looked up with the intention of finding someone to bother.
Looking back at me was a skinny kid with a black eye and a long, blond mullet. He was wearing a Mötley Crüe T-shirt, and judging by the paper on his desk he’d been drawing and doodling to kill time. There was a backpack propped next to his feet that turned out not to contain a single book. Instead it held a large collection of cassette tapes—Metallica, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and every other hair band a young hoodlum could desire. He often brought a small Walkman with him and would pass me one of the earpieces during study hall or, months later, on the bus so we both could listen. I’d see him eating lunch every day in the cafeteria and would nod in greeting as I was walking out. I never did ask how he got the black eye.
Jason usually had the latest Metal Edge and Heavy Metal magazines, and I would look at them while he examined my Thrasher collection. All of our interactions took place during school, because I still lived in the shack far outside city limits and my mom drove my sister and me to school in a blue pickup truck. The only class we had together was study hall, so there was little or no talking. Most of our communication was through gestures—finger pointing, eyebrow raising, head shaking, and so on. This didn’t change until the day Nanny nearly died.
Nanny had already suffered one heart attack, so she knew the symptoms well. Luckily she had time to call 911 and then to call my mom when the second one hit her. It was late in the evening when my mother began to shout that we had to go. We moved as quickly as we could, but the ambulance still got there before we did. We arrived in Lakeshore to see the paramedics bringing my grandmother out on a stretcher.
It was surreal because it was late enough that the sun was down, but it wasn’t completely dark yet. The sky was a beautiful mix of dark blue and purple. There was a special, magickal feel in the air that I’ve felt only a few times in my life. It touches something in you and it’s so damned beautiful that you think you’ll die because it’s too much to take. A time like that isn’t part of any season. It’s not spring, summer, winter, or fall. It’s a day that stands alone, like a world unto itself.
There was something about the way the red ambulance lights flashed through the entire world without making a sound that hurt my mind. No loud siren, just that red light flashing. I knew my grandmother would be okay. Everyone is okay on an evening like that.
My mother jumped from the truck and explained who she was. They let her into the ambulance to ride with my grandmother, who was barely conscious. We followed behind. At the hospital she was quickly rushed to surgery, where her heart doctor was already waiting.
We sat in the waiting room flipping through magazines without seeing what was on the pages, pacing the halls, and staring blankly at the television screen perched high in the corner. When the doctor finally came out, after what seemed an eternity, he pulled my mother to the side and explained that he had done what he could, but that my grandmother wasn’t expected to live through the night. We slept in the waiting room, expecting to hear the worst every time a doctor passed through. The news didn’t come that night, or the next day, either.
That afternoon the doctor came to talk to my mother again. He said my grandmother was still alive, though in critical condition. The new problem was that she had developed blood clots in her leg, and it was going to have to be amputated. He had doubts about her making it through the surgery, but she would surely die without it.
We all lived in that hospital waiting room for nearly two weeks. I didn’t mind; it was more comfortable than home. The air was nice and cool, everything was spotlessly clean, and there was even cable television. Jack brought sandwiches from home to eat or, when he scraped up enough money, hamburgers from a fast-food place. We ate in the cafeteria only once, because the food was so expensive. Every so often I’d sneak down to grab a few handfuls of crackers or breadsticks from the salad bar when no one was watching. I loved the hospital food. I thought it was delicious.
When I was allowed to go in and see my grandmother, she was so high on morphine that she didn’t know what was going on around her. She weakly raised one hand to point at a mirror on the wall and asked me to change the channel. She called me a “little shit” and told a story about how we would become vampire hunters, because you could get a huge reward for bringing in a vampire egg. She started coming back to reality once the doctor gradually decreased the morphine dosage. She was going to survive after all, though now she would have only one leg.
A sixty-five-year-old amputee with two heart attacks under her belt, she was in no condition to take care of herself. She couldn’t be expected to move into our squalid palace, so we had to move into her trailer in Lakeshore.
I couldn’t pack my few belongings quickly enough, knowing that this was my last time in the shack. It seemed too good to be true; I was escaping hell. I’d never have to see this place again. I didn’t waste time taking a last look around, as there was nothing I wanted to say good-bye to. We didn’t own a great deal that was worth taking other than our clothes and a few appliances. The furniture was all ready for the trash.
Ah, but I did find a treasure in that place before I left. A parting gift from the ghosts. There was only one closet in the house, and it hadn’t been opened in years. It was packed full of clothes that no one wore and other assorted trash that should have been thrown out years ago. My mother and Jack decided to go through it to make certain they weren’t leaving behind anything useful (yeah, right, like a pirate might have crept in and buried a treasure). Jack was pulling things out and tossing them on the floor while my mother looked on. At one point he climbed into the closet so he could reach an area that extended up to the ceiling. This was the area where the fire had started. He handed everything he found down to my mother, and she tossed it all onto the floor with her nose wrinkled in disgust.
Suddenly something dusty and black caught my eye. Until that point, I had no interest in anything they were doing. I was just eager to leave. Something about that dusty black bundle drew my attention, so I picked it up. It was a filthy, tattered, dry-rotted, moth-eaten trench coat. My heart skipped a beat because of its perfection. I had to have it.
“Whose is this?” I asked.
My mom said, “No one’s, it’s just trash.” I was slipping it on before she even finished speaking. “That’s filthy, you need to wash it,” she told me.
Jack, who had just climbed down, took one look and said, “It’ll probably come apart if you try to wash it.”
And that was how I came to own my very first trench coat. From then on, I was never without one. That seemed to be the one thing that people remembered about me more than anything else. Everyone who described me always began with “He wears a long, black coat.” It became the symbol that people associated with me. That particular coat would eventually disintegrate, but I would go on to find others. I would feel safe when wrapped in them, covered up and shielded. It was the greatest security blanket of all. I felt hidden when wearing it, as if bad things couldn’t find me. Without it, I felt exposed and vulnerable to the world. I was never self-conscious or a victim of self-doubt when draped in
all that black cloth. There’s no reason to fear anything when you float through the world like a dusty black ghost.
Seven
Once ensconced in my grandmother’s “Lakeshore Estate,” we had to build two ramps—one to get her into and out of the trailer, and one to bridge the slight drop between the kitchen and living room. It was next to impossible for her to navigate her wheelchair through the narrow hallway, so we put her bed in a corner of the living room. My mother and Jack took her old room, and at long last I had a room of my own. I rarely ventured outside that room while at home. It was small and dark since the lamplight was covered by a smoky glass globe. I had a black vinyl couch to sleep on and a small metal shelf to store my things. One entire wall was covered by a three-panel mirror. The closet had an odd folding door on it, and the floor was covered with short, brown carpet. I immediately covered the walls with pictures and posters of pro skaters and set up the cheap, secondhand stereo that had been my Christmas present. I made it my place.
I’ve heard many jokes about poor people living in trailer parks, but I no longer considered myself poor. I was now in the lap of luxury—I could take a shower whenever I wanted, there was central heat for the winter, and a window air conditioner for the summer. The toilet flushed, there were no crop dusters, and we had neighbors. It was heaven.
This narrative would not be complete without a word about Lakeshore itself. It was a pretty big place, as far as trailer parks go. It consisted of two hundred trailers, give or take a few. They were nearly all run-down and beat-up, having put their best days long behind them. Nearly every one of them had a small yard surrounded by a chain-link fence. The majority of those fences held dogs, which were the only form of “home security” we knew. Without a dog and a fence, it was just a matter of time before everything in your yard would be stolen and the gas sucked right out of the tank of your car. The latter was accomplished with nothing more than a piece of hose and a bucket. The residents and locals rarely had regular jobs, although some worked at a box factory nearby. People were more often self-employed thieves or scroungers—for scrap metal, copper, anything you could sell. Addiction of all forms—drinking and meth were the most popular—were daily recreational activities.
People who have seen it in the many years since I left have told me it’s changed quite a bit, that it’s no longer the same place. Now it’s clean, the residents plant flowers in their yards, and they wash their cars. People are neighborly and friendly, and even cops live there. Old people live there after they’ve retired. I suppose it would now be considered lower middle class. That’s a big difference from the days when I knew it. To hear of these changes saddens me, because I feel that the last vestiges of what I knew as home are now gone. The world has moved on while I’ve been behind these walls. I no longer feel as if I have any roots. It seems that there’s a whole new world out there, and I’ve become an old man in body and mind if not in years.
The heart of Lakeshore was indeed a lake. A lake so green and scummy that most fish no longer inhabited it, and you were strongly advised against swimming in it, because it would not be wise to swallow the water. The bottom of the lake was an old boneyard of newspaper machines, wheelbarrows, box springs and mattresses, rusted bicycles, tangled fishing line, busted tackle boxes, broken fishing poles, and anything else your mind could conceive of. Before we went on trial, the cops claimed they found a knife there that had been used in the murders. I don’t doubt that at all, and I would not be surprised if they found a dozen more. My attorneys thought it was most likely planted there to make me look bad, which could very well be true. I also believe it’s just as likely to have been thrown in there by one of the many people who used the lake as their own personal dumpster.
That lake was a monster. I miss it terribly. I now think of it as being beautiful in its own green, scummy way, although I can understand why those who lack my nostalgia would not. In my mind, that lake has become like the Ganges, capable of washing away the pain, fear, suffering, and misery caused by years of incarceration for something I didn’t even do. That lake has become a magickal thing to me now and has come to represent “home” more than the Mississippi itself.
* * *
When writing about your life, it’s impossible to include every detail, or even the most uneventful life would require several volumes to record. You have to look back over your life and ask yourself, “What really mattered? What were the big moments that shaped me and made me who I am?” For me, one of those big events was becoming a member of the Roman Catholic Church.
As far back as I can recall, I’ve always been extremely interested in religion, spirituality, and spiritualism. For me those words cover a wide range of topics, including clairvoyance, ESP, apparitions and hauntings, druids, reincarnation and rebirth, prophecy, and even attending Mass or praying, among others. Around the fourth grade I started to read books on Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, astral projection, and the healing properties of crystals and stones. If it was connected to spirituality in any way at all, then I was interested. I believe this may have somehow been in response to all the sermons about hate, fear, and the wrath of God that I’d been hearing. I suppose I needed something that would balance that.
One day, while looking through the stacks in the library, I encountered a shiny new book on Catholicism written for teens. It was intended to teach young Catholics the meaning behind each thing they’re supposed to do during Mass. I was about fourteen or fifteen when I found it, and I had never been to a Catholic church in my life.
I took the book home and sat up late into the night reading it. I took it to school with me and read it when I had a spare moment. I was absolutely entranced, and I fell in love with the Catholic Church. All my life I’d been forced to go to Protestant churches against my will. Now I wanted desperately to be allowed to go to a Catholic church. I wanted to see the things I was reading about; I wanted to experience them firsthand. Genuflecting, holy water, praying with a rosary, the Stations of the Cross, and especially receiving the Eucharist—I loved the idea of it all. This was Christianity the way I had never before seen it. The entire process from the moment you enter the door, genuflect, and bless yourself is about respect, and about a dignity of the spirit. It was beautiful.
At first I was afraid to tell Jack or my mother that I wanted to go to a Catholic church. There’s still a large amount of prejudice in the South when it comes to Catholicism. The word “Catholic” is often said in the same tone of voice one uses when issuing an insult. I once heard someone comment that a Saint Christopher medal was “satanic.” These days the South is the land of the Baptist Church, and it can be a cruel place for anyone not of that persuasion.
I knew Jack was the one who would have to agree to it, and I knew I had to tell him in a language he’d understand. So one day I informed him that I felt I had a “calling” from God, and that I needed to find the place I was supposed to be. In the type of churches he attended, to say one had a calling meant that you were directly hearing God’s voice or feeling His presence, and that He was compelling you to do something. A calling could be seen by the rest of the world as anything from intuition to a psychotic episode. Still, he understood. And if I felt God was telling me to do something, then Jack Echols would be the last to interfere. He may not respect me, but he would respect what he perceived to be God’s will.
When he asked where I wanted to go, I knew I couldn’t just blurt out, “The Catholic Church,” because he would have looked at that suspiciously. Instead I told him I thought it best if I went to different places, and that I’d know the right one when I found it. He nodded, and that was the end of the conversation.
There was only one Catholic church in West Memphis; it was called St. Michael’s. It was a small place when compared with the huge cathedral-like buildings that housed the local Baptist churches, but it was well taken care of and in pristine condition. There were stone benches outside, and a small statue of Saint Francis. The lawn was raked and there was no debris or e
ven a stray leaf to be found on the grounds. The word I keep coming back to over and over is “dignity.” The place had dignity, and it encouraged all who entered to have the same. The entire atmosphere announced that this was not a place where you would find people rolling on the floor and screaming.
I was dropped off and went inside to take a seat. I followed the lead of people around me and knelt on a padded bench to say a little “Hi, I’m here” to whatever power in the universe was listening. The place was completely silent—no screaming children or men in cheap suits bellowing obnoxious greetings to one another. Everyone quietly took their seats and waited. It was not an uncomfortable silence. On the contrary, it was very relaxing and peaceful; you could sit engaged in your own contemplations without fear of being disturbed. I felt very welcome there.
The organ began playing softly and everyone stood as the procession of the priest and altar boys made their way down the central aisle and to the front of the church. I couldn’t take my eyes off the small parade. The robes, the candles, the book held aloft—I was witnessing pure magick. I enjoyed every moment and savored the experience. After the opening ceremony the priest spoke for about thirty minutes in a calm, quiet voice about what he’d just read. There was no shouting, he didn’t beat his fist on the podium, and there was not one single word about the end of the world being at hand. I regretted having to leave once it was over, and would rather have spent the day there examining the scenes on the stained glass windows, admiring the statues that stood in the corners, or even watching the flickering of the votive candles.
That evening when Jack asked how it was, I told him that I’d found my place. When he asked how I knew, I said because it felt like home. He didn’t say another word, and dropped me off again a week later.
Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Page 8
