by Ninie Hammon
One very fat woman held a stop sign with the words “Stop Executions Now!” printed on it. She was in a shouting match with a man on the other side of the road who held a sign that proclaimed “Murder Victims Had No Choice!” There was a group of half a dozen nuns in habits on the anti side, holding a banner that read: “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” And a small group of teenagers, likely the children of the older protesters, held a series of signs that, when read in order, said, “Kids. Against. Death. Penalty.” Mac wondered if protesting at an execution was considered an excused absence from school. Beside them was a tall, thin man whose sign charged that the state of Oklahoma should be executed for murder.
The people on the pro–death penalty side held signs, too. One said: “How would you feel if she’d killed your sister?” Another charged: “Don’t Do The Crime, If You Can’t Do The Time.”
Mac drove slowly through the crowd. Listening to the biggest group, the opponents of the death penalty chant:” No more killing! No more killing! No more killing.”
A smaller group on the other side was yelling, “Murderers deserve to die. Murderers deserve to die.”
Mac looked around for Sam Bartlett but didn’t spot him. The guard at the main gate security station was tense and edgy. Mac showed him his Shriners’ badge, but it took him a minute to find the two names on his day sheet. Mac had called Oran at home last night to secure clearance for Jonas.
“They just penciled in Jonas Cunningham this morning,” the guard said. “Can I see some identification, please?”
He looked at their proffered drivers licenses, asked them their dates of birth, and checked to see if what they said matched what was printed on the licenses. It was a far more thorough examination than Mac had been given on any other visit.
The guard at the inner security gate at the other end of the razor-wired tunnel was just as vigilant.
“You know where to go, right?” the guard asked. Mac nodded and headed for the parking lot in front of the administration building.
Another man was being processed through security at the check-in center there when they entered. They stood waiting as he emptied his pockets into a plastic tray. Both Mac and Jonas recognized him instantly. Standing before them was the Reverend Amos Jackson Prentiss.
Jackson looked at the guard in front of him and was filled with revulsion. A thick wad of snuff puffed out the guard’s lower lip and he was as black as a burnt stump. He reached over, picked up a paper cup, and spit brown juice into it. Then he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and raised his eyes to Jackson.
“I need you to hold your hands out to your sides,” the black ape said, and stepped around the counter.
Jackson stood as rigid as a flagpole.
“You aren’t planning on laying your hands on me, are you, boy?” he hissed softly, his lips pressed together in a tight line.
This is what it had come to, niggers telling white men what to do. Jackson had known America would end up like this the day he read that Supreme Court ruling back in 1954.
“Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children,” it had said, as if that was somehow a bad thing. The monkeys shouldn’t have been in school in the first place, should never have been allowed an education.
That’s why he’d run for the school board in Little Rock the next year, to fight for white rights! But the fools had elected a lily-livered coward and look what happened. Those nine nigger kids went waltzing into Central High School like they owned the place! Governor Faubus called up the National Guard to keep them out, but the President of the United States sent in the U.S. Army to protect them!
Jackson had orchestrated the opposition, stood out in front of the school every morning united with his white brothers and sisters, spitting on every one of those nigger brats as they walked past.
Just like he wanted to spit on this jigaboo, disrespecting a white man because some fool had let him out of his cage and taught him to read.
Jackson drew in a breath and stood tall and defiant. “There is no call for you to touch me,” he said.
“Ain’t but one way to get past me, Mister Prentiss,” the guard said. “Either I pat you down, or your can turn yourself around and go right back out that door you come in.”
“Well, well, well.” The ice in Jackson’s voice lowered the room temperature twenty degrees. “It appears to me we have ourselves an uppity nigger, here.” He looked to the two men standing behind him for a show of white solidarity. He didn’t get it.
“It appears to me you’re not going anywhere until you let this man search you,” said the red-headed, freckle-faced one.
Jackson turned back to the guard and growled, “We know what to do with your kind in Alabama.”
Last week, they’d showed the niggers who was in charge! Those school kids marching in Birmingham—Jackson’s good friend Bull Conner had turned on the fire hoses, set the dogs on them!
“Case you didn’t notice, we in Oklahoma,” the guard said. “You playin’ in my patch, now.”
Jackson had to see Princess today! He slowly lifted his arms, his face a stone mask, his eyes aflame with raw hatred. The guard frisked him, pummeled his body so thoroughly the act resembled a restrained beating. Jackson stood proud and silent through it all.
“Have a seat over there,” the guard said with a gloating, black-toothed grin, and gestured to a row of chairs up against the wall. “I’ll call you when it’s your turn.” He spit into the cup again. “Hope you don’t mind waitin’, though. There’s two other visitors on the list ’head of you.”
“I’m the only kin Emily has,” Jackson said through clenched teeth. “Who else would want to see my Emmy?”
“I would,” said the man behind him, the coward who wouldn’t stand up to the black ape. The man stepped forward and extended his hand. “I’m David McIntosh and this is my father-in-law, Jonas Cunningham. I’m filling in for the prison chaplain.”
Mac didn’t really want to shake hands with Jackson Prentiss, but it was the polite thing to do under the circumstances. The man had aged considerably since the day Mac heard him speak in Little Rock, but time had been kind, had etched his face with distinguished lines and streaked white into his wine-colored hair at the temples. He was tall and thin, stood ramrod straight in an unwrinkled, three-piece suit. He had a presence now, too, but it was a calculated dignity—form, not substance.
Prentiss looked at Mac for a beat, then grasped his hand in an iron grip and shook it up and down, once—the bare minimum. He fastened a smile on his face that never reached his cold, vulture’s eyes.
“Pastor McIntosh,” he said, “I appreciate you coming to offer comfort to Emily in her final hours.”
Mac opened his mouth to speak but Prentiss wasn’t finished.
“… but I do hope you haven’t been so foolish as to hold out to her a false hope of glory. Of redemption or salvation. Emily is damned, Pastor McIntosh. Utterly and irrevocably damned.”
“Really? How do you figure that?”
“Our Lord himself passed down that judgment.” His voice took on the sing-song cadence of a sermon. “Jesus warned that it would be better for a man to have a millstone tied around his neck and be cast into the depths of the sea than to hurt one of his precious little ones.”
He leaned toward Mac, the aroma of his English Leather after-shave filling the air between them.
“Emily murdered a little child,” he growled, his voice rising in intensity and volume as he continued until he was almost shouting. “She beheaded an innocent babe. She committed the unforgivable sin and there will be justice! There will be retribution! The wrath of Almighty God will descend upon her and she will burn for all time in the bowels of eternal hell!”
With that, he turned on his heel and marched off toward the row of chairs. Mac took a step after him before Jonas touched his arm and shook his head.
“But that’s not what that verse means!” Mac sputtered.
“You think you’re gonna convince him of that?”
Jonas was right, of course. Mac let it go, though it rankled to hear someone twist the scriptures he knew so well to fit a private agenda. But what was the point in confusing a hate-monger with the facts?
When the two men were ushered into the envelope room a short time later, Mac noticed two things instantly. One, Princess’s dress wasn’t on wrong side out, and it was Thursday. And two, the sense of calm, the centeredness and stillness about her was gone. It had been replaced by a humming tension he could feel all the way across the room. Princess was a bullet in a chamber. The slightest move would send her hurling out at something. Or somebody.
“Princess, I’d like you to meet my father-in-law, Jonas Cunningham,” he said with as much cheer as he could muster. “It was kind of you to allow him to come along with me today.”
“I do gladly make your acquaintance, sir,” she said, and Mac saw Jonas was staring at Princess, a profoundly startled look on his face. He’d forgotten to warn him about her voice. She didn’t rise or offer her hand so Jonas merely nodded.
“Pleasure’s mine, ma’am.”
Someone had added another chair to the fine décor of the room so Mac crossed and pulled it out for Jonas, then sat down across from Princess. She was literally bouncing on the edge of her seat like a little kid who needs to go to the bathroom.
“I see your dress is on right-side—”
“Ain’t no need to swap it now. You think I’d forget what today is?”
“S’pose not.” He opened his mouth to speak again, but the dam burst before he had a chance.
“I seen last night. Oh, Rev, I seen! It was the awfulest, terriblest thing I ever did see in all my days. Oh, Rev! Joy’s having truck with a … a monster. A witch! I seen it!”
“Princess, slow down and calm down. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“’Course you don’t. How you gonna know less’n I tell you? Joy’s got herself mixed up with a terrible woman, a monster. I seen her face. You ain’t never seen nothing so twisted up and ugly in your whole life!” She stood up, placed her palms on the table and leaned toward him. There was fire in her purple eyes. “It’s only happened to me a handful of other times in my life, but it happened last night.I seen out somebody else’s eyes, Joy’s eyes. I was sittin’ in my cell and then suddenly my eyes could see what Joy was a-lookin’ at right at that moment. And it was a monster.”
The power of her voice was astonishing. It was rumbling and hypnotic, filled up the room with its electric intensity.
“So you saw what Joy saw and what she saw was a monster? Am I getting this right?”
Princess sat back down abruptly. She didn’t speak, just looked at her hands in her lap.
“You’re humorin’ me again. I ain’t sayin’ I blame you. But I can’t help it if I sound all crazy like. I’m just tellin’ you what I saw.”
“And that was?”
“Joy was standin’ on a porch and a woman was at the door, with it open just a little. Joy give her a envelope.”
“Joy gave some woman an envelope?”
“It don’t matter if your girl give her a brass spittoon!” Princess burst out. “What matters is she wasn’t no plain old woman. She was a monster! And when you looked inside her …” Princess paused, gathered herself and continued. “Inside the monster was dead bodies.”
She looked up at Mac, took notice of Jonas for the first time and included him in her look.
“Joy’s just a child. She don’t know ’bout the world. She hadn’t ought to be havin’ dealings with nobody like that. You’re her people, all she’s got. You got to protect her.”
Mac reached out and took Princess’s hand. It was cold and clammy. She was trembling.
“Princess, look at me.”
She lifted her purple eyes and stared into his.
“I have a date for dinner tonight with my daughter. I’m going to sit her down and talk to her. Really talk to her. I’m going to get to the bottom of whatever it is that’s bothering her. Whatever is going on with her, I’ll find out tonight.”
She continued to stare into his eyes. And his heart.
“Princess, I’ll protect Joy. I won’t let anything hurt her. I promise. Okay?”
She let go the hold she had on his eyes and relaxed back into the chair.
“You say so, I believe you. Man like you don’t lie.”
Mac sat for a moment, didn’t quite know how to transition from such emotional intensity into normal conversation.
Normal conversation. With a woman who’s going to be dead in a little over twenty-four hours. Right.
Jonas broke the silence.
“Mac tells me he brought you some candy yesterday. How’d you like it?”
She looked up with a bright smile. Mac thought it would have been such a pretty smile if her teeth hadn’t been so stained.
“I worried it around in my head half the night tryin’ to figure out why they called that one a Butterfinger when it tasted like peanuts.”
“I always wondered the same thing myself,” Jonas said.
“And that Hershey bar, it was fine indeed.” Princess was beaming. She looked at Mac. “This is what it’s like! I finally found out.”
“What what’s like?”
“People just sittin’ around, talkin’. Remember I said I always wondered what in the world they found to say? This is it. A’tossin’ the ball one to the other. Conversation.”
She smiled at Jonas.
“I surely do thank you for coming to see me today, Mr. Cunningham. Conversation ain’t the same when there’s more’n two people. It’s harder, ain’t it?”
“How about the other one, the Baby Ruth?” Mac asked.
“Well …” she said. She ducked her head and looked up at him through her lashes. “You know, I knew I’d be sorry I promised I’d tell you the truth. Knew that was gonna come back to bite my backside.”
“How’s that?”
“Cause I got to tell you I didn’t eat but one of them candies—the Hershey bar one.”
“What happened to the others. Are you saving them?”
For what? She’s going to be dead tomorrow!
Mac gritted his teeth and forced himself to stay in the moment.
“No, I ain’t savin’ them. They’s just gone. They was on the table … and then they wasn’t. I don’t know what in the world could have happened to ’em.”
“Tell you what—how about I bring you some more tomorrow?”
“I don’t reckon I’m gonna want candy tomorrow. They done asked me what I wanted for my last meal. I figure my stomach’s gonna be tied in a knot so tight tomorrow I couldn’t shove so much as a walnut down into it.”
Mac sat up straight. “About tomorrow …” This was a dying woman and he was a minister. As long as he held that title he was obligated to offer spiritual comfort, whether he personally believed what he was saying or not. If it came down to it, Mac would just have to break his promise not to lie.
“They’re gonna cut all my hair off. You know that?”
“I didn’t know that.” It sounded positively barbaric.
All at once, Princess was off again. Like a flat rock skipping across the smooth surface of a lake, her mind somehow managed to remain above the deep, murky waters and the cold dark of the depths.
“Angel had the prettiest hair you ever did see—the color of a rusty nail. And long—oh, my goodness. I washed it when I’d give her a bath of a night.” Her scarred face was alive; her purple eyes saw another reality.
“We had this washtub, see. And I’d heat up water on the stove and fill it ’bout half way up, then pour in cold well water the rest of the way—so’s it’d just be warm. Oh, how she loved to sit in that water, splashed it all over the floor, had to take a mop to it to clean up the mess.”
“I used to give my kids a bath in a washtub,” Jonas said. Mac looked at him.
“You did? Melanie took a bath in
a washtub?”
“No, by the time she came along, we had a proper bathtub. But the older kids, yeah. We used a washtub.”
“A washtub’s all we had,” Princess said. “Angel would stand up in it and squeeze her eyes shut and I’d pour water over her head out of a cookin’ pot. When her hair was wet, it hung down to her butt. All the way down to that birthmark.”
Princess grinned. “Angel had this birthmark on her right butt cheek. It was a red spot with three lines comin’ out from it. Looked just like a fallin’ star. The last time I washed her hair …” She paused, the animation drained out of her posture. Mac watched her face rearrange itself in cold, hard lines.
“Jackson come in the kitchen then and—” Now that he’d met the man face to face, Mac had no trouble understanding the undertone in her voice when she spoke of him. “
She didn’t continue, just sat there.
“And what?” Mac prodded.
“I got soap in Angel’s eyes and she commenced to screamin’ and carryin’ on and I like to never got her to stop.” She hopped up, darted to the window and looked out longingly.
“I would powerfully like to see that movie set, Laramie Junction, up there on that hill. It sure looks real, don’t it?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not,” Mac said.
Princess turned her back to the window and leaned against the sill.
“I know what’s real. And I know you don’t think I got any idea. It’s real that you’re going to come back and see me tomorrow. And after you leave …” She turned back and looked out the window again. “I’m going to die.”
Jonas cleared his throat. He’d been sitting there for the past couple of minutes with an odd look on his face. Mac was suddenly sorry he’d brought the old man. This was pretty deep stuff here.
“Look, if you’d like to talk to Mac privately now, I’d be glad to—” Jonas started to rise.
“No, sit back down Mr. Cunningham. I don’t have nothin’ to say you can’t hear.”
“Do you want to talk about that—what happens tomorrow?” Mac asked. “Do you want to talk about dying?”
