by Ninie Hammon
* * * * *
The guard named Talbot came around with Princess’s dinner tray a little after five o’clock.
“Food’s here,” she called out, and slid the tray through the slot in the door. She waited and called out again. “Prentiss, here’s your tray.”
There was still no response.
“Emily?”
The large black woman took the tray out of the slot and set it down on the floor, bent down, and looked through the opening. She could see Princess’s feet, sticking out beyond her bed, and the legs of the turned-over chair.
“She’s pitched a fit!” the guard said, and hurried down to the end of the passageway lined with cells to the guard station at the end.
Minutes later, another guard returned with her. The second guard had the key that fit the ancient lock on Princess’s cell. He inserted it, opened the door, and stood beside it while Talbot cautiously approached the body sprawled on the floor.
Talbot had been a guard on the Long Dark for more than seven years. She’d been present the day Princess had warned Rhonda Weatherby about her boyfriend, begged her not to go home. She wasn’t one to believe all the wild rumors about the scrawny little death-row inmate, but she did believe that. Wasn’t nothing to believe or not believe; she’s seen it with her own eyes.
The guard with the key was a rookie just learning the ropes, a stocky man in his late thirties named Hank Bradley whose face was twisted in a permanent scowl that matched his nasty disposition.
“She’s epileptic, ain’t she?” Bradley said from the door as Talbot approached the body. “Musta had a fit. Maybe she’s dead.”
Talbot knelt beside her. “I’ve seen her after she’s had a fit. She kinda foams at the mouth, if you know what I mean, and wets herself.” She examined the body. “She’s just lying here, staring at the ceiling.”
The guard passed her hand back and forth in front of Princess’s eyes.
“Prentiss,” she said. “Emily Prentiss. Can you hear me? Emily!”
Princess suddenly blinked two or three times and gave Talbot a blank look that gradually resolved into focus and recognition. She looked around, then suddenly sat up and scooted on her butt to the far wall of her cell, whimpering.
“Prentiss, you all right?”
“No, no,” Princess whined, shaking her head from side to side. “No, stay away!”
The guard stood, looked at the other guard and shrugged.
“Well, she ain’t hurt.” She sighed. “Just nuts. Guess I’d be nuts, too, if I knew I didn’t have but two days to live.” She gestured to the floor outside the cell. “Hand me that tray.”
Bradley picked up the tray, stepped into the cell with it and saw the candy bars.
“Wonder where she got candy?” he said, picking up the Butterfinger she’d unwrapped and taking a big bite out of it. “Always did like Butterfingers.” He dropped the remainder of the candy bar into his pocket and placed the tray on the table. Talbot stood looking at Princess for a moment longer, then shook her head and walked out.
The cell door banged shut, there was the grating sound of the key in the lock and then it was quiet. The only sound was Princess whimpering.
An hour later, the guards returned after Princess refused to hand the tray back out through the slot in the door. Princess was sitting just as they’d left her. They debated reporting the incident, but decided there was no point. They could see the inmate wasn’t hurt. And the warden certainly wasn’t going to delay her execution just because she’d lost it—or maybe was pretending to.
Before he left the cell, Bradley snitched the Baby Ruth bar as well. Shoot, Prentiss wasn’t eating it.
* * * * *
It was the deepest, darkest cavern of the night before Princess came back to herself. She was aware of the cold stone floor, aware that her butt was completely numb from sitting on it.
She got up slowly and carefully, looked down at her dress to see … no, she hadn’t wet herself. She hadn’t had no fit. But she already knew that. She knew what had happened.
After she went to the toilet in the corner of the cell and did her business, she came back and sat on the edge of her bed, her arms wrapped around her waist, rocking back and forth.
She’d seen. It had happened before, so she recognized it for what it was. She had looked at the world through the eyes of somebody else. This time it was the daughter of the preacher who had give her those candy bars.
She looked up, glanced at the table. It was already after lights-out, but there was enough moonlight coming in to see. Only the Hershey bar remained. She went to the table, picked it up, tore the paper off and ate it ravenously. She barely tasted the sticky sweetness as it went down.
How in the world was she going to tell the Rev ’bout that monster? And it was a monster, sure. Princess had seen more than the hideous exterior. She’d looked into those eyes. She’d seen the madness there.
She shuddered. What she’d seen defied description. There was piles of dead babies behind the monster’s eyes. All of them bloody and tore up, missing arms and legs. Piles of them! Only the thing was, they was cryin’. Ever’ last one of them was wailin’, making the awfulest racket you ever did hear.
What had Joy McIntosh got herself into that she’d truck with a witch like that? How would she ever make the Rev believe that his pretty little red-haired girl was a’danglin’ by a thread over a black hole and down at the bottom of it was all sharp rocks and moanin,’ dyin’ babies?
And that woman wasn’t the only monster that had suddenly reared its ugly head in Princess’s few remaining hours on this earth.
Jackson was coming tomorrow.
She shuddered again, the power of the revulsion wracking her body like she was throwin’ a fit. She’d see him, all right. She’d look him square in the eye this time. ’Cause she’d won!
* * * * *
Even after his father-in-law had finally given in and hired someone to stay with Maggie parts of the day, Jonas still wasn’t able to give the farm the time and energy it needed. So Mac had volunteered to help. He was strong, but “agriculturally challenged.” After he and Melanie married, He’d taken a little country church just outside Seagram, in the mountains of southwestern Arkansas, and had done some farm work there to make ends meet on his paltry pastor’s salary. That had been before they called up his reserve unit and packed him off to Korea. But over the past couple of summers, Mac had learned a lot about farming. Given the plan he intended to outline for Jonas this afternoon, it was a good thing the older man had been a patient teacher.
Mac drove into Graham from the prison but didn’t stop, just drove all the way through and west on US 270, then south on Seminole Road to Jonas and Maggie’s farm about six miles southwest of town. His mind was still spinning, just as it had every day after he met with Princess.
Jonas was mending a fence where the sheep had broken out of the pen; Mac quickly slipped into work boots, overalls, and a John Deere cap and hurried out to help him. The rain earlier in the afternoon had been gentle and most of it had soaked in, so the ground was soft but not muddy.
The two men worked hard for over an hour, Mac slamming the posthole digger into the ground and pulling out moist dirt, Jonas lining up the posts and stringing the wire. When they were finished, Mac pointed to the puddle of shade under an apple tree and invited Jonas to “sit for a spell.” Without any preamble, he dived right in.
“I’ve been meaning to say something about this for quite awhile now,” he began.
“I’s wonderin’ when you was finally goin’ to get to it.”
Mac was startled.
Jonas smiled. “Son, you’re easier to read than a large-print Bible.” He reached over and patted his son-in-law on the knee. “I don’t mean nothing by that. It’s plain somethin’s eatin’ at you. What is it?”
“I’m done. I’m quitting.”
“Quittin’ the church?”
“I'll tender my resignation to the congregation on Sunday. But I pla
n to commit professional suicide at the board of elders meeting on Friday night. See, I'm not just leaving this church, I’m leaving the ministry.”
Jonas said nothing. Just watched a chicken hawk circle high in the sky above them.
“You’re not going to ask why?”
“Do you know?”
“If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
“That ain’t necessarily the case.”
Mac pulled up a stem of grass and stuck it in his mouth. “I know I have to leave the ministry. I don’t believe it anymore. Maybe I never did.”
“Oh, you did. I imagine you still do,” Jonas tapped Mac’s chest, “somewhere way down in there.”
“No, it’s gone.” He looked into Jonas’s eyes. “It died with Melanie.”
Jonas was ashamed then, as he had been repeatedly in the past twenty years, that he’d ever had misgivings about Mac. He’d even told Maggie once he didn’t think Melanie ought to marry him.
Oh, he was a nice enough young man, and the way he’d been smitten with Mel, hanging around her like a puppy since the third grade, was downright comical to watch. But Jonas wasn’t at all convinced it was a good idea for his daughter to marry a minister. It wasn’t that he didn’t hold with preaching; he just hadn’t ever met a preacher he could stand. Meddlin’, interfering, sanctimonious busybodies, ever’ last one of them.
He’d never shared that sentiment with Maggie, of course. She’d have bopped him in the head with a frying pan if he had.
Jonas figured that a man’s business with God was between the two of them. It was private. Preachers never saw it that way.
But Mac was different. He didn’t concern himself a whole lot with folks’ behavior. When he preached, he opened up the Bible and told stories about Jesus; said if you knew God, everything else would work itself out in the end.
Jonas’s own grandfather would likely have agreed with that. He talked a lot about what he called “top-button truth.” If you get the top button on your shirt right, the old man used to tell the boy, then all the rest of the buttons will fall into place behind it. But get the top button wrong, and no matter how hard you try, nothing will ever line up like it’s supposed to.
Nothing had lined up right in Jonas’s life in a long, long time. Hadn’t in Mac’s either. But Jonas didn’t believe it had a thing to do with the top button. The problem was that there were buttons missing. Important buttons. Those buttons had been ripped off their shirts and it was a waste of time to try to get the rest of the buttons to line up without them.
He looked kindly at Mac, then shook his head, turned and squinted into the setting sun. “If you’re looking to me to talk you out of quittin’, son, you come to the wrong man.”
The two sat without speaking, their shared pain a silent bond.
Mac suddenly realized that he’d been so self absorbed he hadn’t even considered how hard things had been in the past months for Jonas.
“How are you doing?” He asked quietly.
“Not worth a diddly dang!” Jonas said, then looked uncomfortable, like he hadn’t meant for that to slip out. He was a private man. Stoic. Mac respected that.
The older man cleared his throat and changed the subject. “You quit the church, what are you gonna do?”
Mac took the stem of grass out of his mouth and tossed it away. “Since Mel and I both worked, Bill down at the Farm Bureau Insurance office convinced us to take out mortgage insurance when we bought the house—the kind that pays it off if either one dies. With no house payment, I won’t have to make much to live.”
He reached down and plucked another stem of grass.
“So I was thinking I’d work as a farm hand this summer—for you and anybody else needs it.”
“Summertime you won’t have no trouble finding work.”
“Shoveling manure is strenuous but mindless.” Mac grinned. “That’s the kind of work I need—for awhile.”
“And then?”
“Maybe I could teach.”
“Maggie sure loved it.”
“I’d never aspire to be as good as she was. I was thinking history, maybe science, do a little coaching—baseball, track.”
“You told Joy yet?”
“Nope.”
“If you’re plannin’ to jump ship on Sunday, might be a plan to give her a heads-up beforehand.”
Jonas was right, of course. But after her reaction when he forgot to say grace the other night, Mac had become concerned about what her response might be. The kid’s life had been safe and predictable until the unthinkable happened. Her mother’s death had devastated her; it had shattered her sense of security, too. Would her father leaving the ministry set her totally adrift, without anything solid to cling to?
Mac picked up a clod of dirt and pitched it at a stinkbug ambling by the tip of his boot.
“Been waiting for the weekend. I’m going to talk to her on Saturday so she’ll have the whole day to … work through it. But I am not looking forward to the conversation. I can’t talk to her about anything these days. She’s all closed up. Princess keeps telling me there’s something wrong with her—besides the obvious—and I’m beginning to think she may be right.”
“Princess?”
“The woman at the prison I’ve been going to visit.”
“You ain’t talking about that Prentiss woman, are you? The one they’re fixing to execute Friday? How does she know anything about Joy?”
“You just asked the $64,000 Question.” He turned and looked at his father-in-law. “I don’t know how Princess knows what she knows, but then, neither does she.” He stopped, shrugged. Now he understood how Oran had felt trying to tell him about Princess. She was a phenomenon you had to experience to understand. “You want to meet her?”
Princess had acted like Mac had brought her bars of gold when he gave her candy. How might she respond if he brought her somebody else to talk to besides the boring Reverend McIntosh?
“Now, why in the world would I want to meet a murderer?”
Mac suddenly realized he didn’t think of Princess as a murderer anymore. He’d called her attorney nuts for refusing to believe she’d committed the crime she’d confessed to; apparently he had contracted the same mental illness.
“She’s not like you’re imagining, Jonas, but if I told you about her, you wouldn’t believe me.” Truth was, Princess disturbed him, unsettled him on a gut level like nobody he’d ever met. He was losing all perspective about her, and his father-in-law’s presence might just add a much-needed ballast. He wondered what affect she’d have on a man like Jonas, a man with both feet planted firmly on terra firma. “Guadalupe will be with Maggie tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you come see for yourself?”
“Think I’ll pass. I don’t fancy meeting a woman who took the life of somebody who couldn’t defend … ” He stopped abruptly and studied the apple tree leaf he’d been rolling and unrolling as he talked. Then he looked up and nodded. “Okay, guess I’ll tag along, you don’t mind.”
When Mac got home, there was a note from Joy stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet. “Daddy, I’m at Shirley’s house. That American history project we’re doing together, the one where we’re building the Jamestown Colony out of sugar cubes, it’s due in the morning, first period. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to spend the night. We’re going to be working LATE. See you tomorrow. Love, Joy.”
Was she dodging him, deliberately staying away so they’d have no time to talk?
He picked up the note and added his own words in big print on the bottom.
“Sweetheart, we have a date tonight. You and me. A casserole dinner. NO EXCUSES.”
He put it back on the refrigerator door where she couldn’t miss it when she walked through the kitchen after school tomorrow. Then he opened the door and stared at the covered dishes inside, lined up like corpses in a morgue.
Thursday
May 9, 1963
Chapter 17
Jonas parked his pickup truck
in Mac’s driveway right after lunch on Thursday, full of questions about Princes and her case. Mac told him everything he knew about it as they drove east on US 270 toward the Iron House.
“They never found anything for the family to bury? Nothing?”
“Nope, but you got to figure the Three Forks is a big river, runs through Arkansas, Oklahoma, and into Texas. How’d you ever drag a river that size looking for … well, I don’t know if they dragged it or not. I just know what that reporter—” Mac had just turned off the highway onto the road leading to the prison. “Speaking of reporters …”
Like mushrooms after a summer rain, a crowd of seventy-five, maybe a hundred people had sprung up on the prairie in front of the prison gate. The media was out in force. He saw vehicles parked off the road with “Channel 11 News First,” and “OKC’s News Source—KOKA” emblazoned on their sides. The ABC, CBS, and NBC news affiliates had all shown up; looked like every radio and television station in Oklahoma City was there.
But the majority of the people standing on the prairie were protesters, held in check by a small army of Oklahoma Highway Patrol troopers.
“Where in the world did all these people come from?” Jonas wondered aloud.
“Don’t go looking for familiar faces,” Mac said. “These folks aren’t local. I think they travel the country, protesting at executions in prisons all over. Least that’s what Oran said.”
Mac glanced to his left, to the side of the prison that faced the Indian Bluffs. “And it looks like he’s managed to keep the multitudes congregated out front like he wanted.” Mac decided not to tell Jonas what Oran said he’d like to save up and throw at the protesters.
Troopers had stretched out yellow “Police Line” tape on both sides of the road leading to the main gate and had corralled the crowd behind the lines. Mac hadn’t realized there’d be people protesting both ways, but there was a group of anti-death penalty protesters on one side of the road and death penalty proponents on the other. The antis had the pros outnumbered three to one.
Both sides carried signs and they hurled slogans and insults across the road at each other as Mac drove slowly down between the opposing sides.
