by Ninie Hammon
It was eerie to watch her, her bald head shining in the dull light of the bulb high up in the ceiling. Her eyes moved, like people’s eyes moved when they dreamed, except she was awake. Or he assumed she was awake. He shot a glance at Jonas, who didn’t look good at all. His face was ashen.
Then, as abruptly as she froze, she gasped for a breath and then another. She slumped back into the chair, her eyes closed, her head fell forward and hung limp on her neck, and she sat there panting.
“Princess?” Mac said softly. “Are you all right?”
Her head came up and she looked confused, seemed to have trouble focusing, then understanding and comprehension lit her face and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh, Rev, she’s there again! Angel’s there right now with that monster woman!”
Angel. It was jarring to realize she was talking about Joy. And the monster woman again. Oh, boy.
“Princess, I don’t think—”
“Now you listen here to me, Rev!” The full force of that rumbling voice pinned him back in the chair the way John Glen had been slammed into his seat when that rocket took off for space. “I know you don’t believe me, but you got to believe me. You got to! Sometimes … sometimes I can see out Angel’s eyes. It’s happened to me a time or two over the years. One time, she was ridin’ a bicycle. It was a blue bicycle and it had them, oh, I don’t know what you call them things, little strings, colored strings on the ends of the handle bars.”
Mac stopped breathing and looked at Princess with wide, uncomprehending eyes. Joy had had a blue bicycle when she was a little girl, and it had streamers, red—
“Red, white and blue strings. I could see ’em a-flappin’ in the wind. And then she hit something in the sidewalk. It was where a tree root had growed and kinda broke up the concrete, and she went flying off the bike and landed in the dirt and she was hurt, her arm hurt and she was crying and—do you know when I’m talking about? Do you remember?”
“She was seven years old,” Mac said, his voice airless.
“Little Joy broke her arm a-fallin’ off that bike,” Jonas said, so soft Mac barely heard him.
“And another time, she was in the back floorboard of a car and you musta had a wreck or something ’cause she was all squished-up down there and then you picked her up and … that’s how come I knew you was a good man, ’cause you were smiling and crying at the same time that day. I seen you through her eyes.”
“When Joy was eleven, we were in a fender-bender. She flew into the back of the front seat and I was scared she was hurt. I jumped out of the car, opened the back door and lifted her …” his voice trailed off. He sat staring wide-eyed at Princess, stupefied.
“See! I ain’t lying, Rev! I ain’t makin’ this stuff up! I ain’t crazy.” She stopped. “Well, maybe I am crazy, I can’t speak to that. All’s I know is sometimes I can see what Angel sees. And I just did! Rev, it was awful, the terriblest thing. It was … I …”
She struggled for words.
Mac reached over and placed his trembling hand on top of hers. Her hand was soft and warm.
“Look at me,” he said. She turned her purple eyes on him and he fell into the depths of them. “Now tell me what you saw. Describe it to me, everything you saw.”
“Angel was a’lookin’ at that monster woman.”
“What do you mean by ‘monster woman?’” Jonas asked, sounding as shaken as Mac felt.
“The top part of her face, her eyes and nose, was normal. But the whole bottom part, it was all twisted up and smashed. Her jaw was caved in on one side, didn’t have no teeth there, and—”
“Wanda Ingram!” Mac bleated. “That’s … you just described Wanda Ingram!”
“You know the monster woman?” Princess gasped.
“No, she was a friend, well not a friend, she was somebody Melanie knew, was trying to help. I only saw her a couple of times.”
“Why would Angel be—?”
“No! Oh … no,” Mac gasped. His heart hammered in his chest so hard it hurt. It couldn’t be. But it was. It explained everything. He turned to Jonas. “The $100 from her savings, that’s why …”
“What’re you sayin’, son?”
Mac leaned back in the chair, looked up at the ceiling and pulled in gasps of air, trying hard not to sob.
“That woman, Wanda Ingram. Melanie thought, Melanie was sure she’d been … performing abortions.”
Princess squeaked out a little scream, covered her mouth with both hands and sat shaking her head no for a moment. Then she leaned across the table and spoke earnestly.
“That’s why I could see … dead babies in the monster woman’s eyes!”
Mac did sob then, just one bleat before he sucked in a breath and regained control.
“Rev, it’s worse’n you think. That woman’s crazy.”
“Melanie said she was losing it. Mel thought she was psychotic. She wanted to get her admitted to—”
“She’s gonna kill Angel.” Princess’s voice hummed with a deeper power than Mac had ever heard. “I seen it in her eyes. She ain’t gonna take her baby. She’s got it all planned out, all thought through. Rev, she’s gonna kill Angel! And then she’s gonna kill herself!”
Terror dumped a bucket of adrenaline into Mac’s veins. There was no hint of doubt anymore. He couldn’t explain how Princess knew, but that didn’t matter anymore. She knew!
“You got to stop her! You got to go right now!”
But he couldn’t. If he left now ...
“The warden, Princess. I have to show him the handwriting … in a little over an hour, you’re going to—
“Die. That’s right, I’m gonna die. Just like I been a-fixin’ to do for fourteen years. But if you don’t go now, that woman’s gonna kill Angel! You only got time to save one of us. You promised you’d protect her!”
Mac glanced at Jonas, but knew before he even formed the words that the old farmer would never be able to convince Oran to postpone the execution. He put his elbows on the wooden table and his head into his hands. Then he lifted his head and looked at Princess, pleaded with her to make it different, to change reality somehow with her strange power. To do something.
“You’re that little girl’s daddy. There ain’t no decidin’ to be done here, and you and me both know it!” She reached out and took his hand. “You got to let me do this, Rev. You got to let me go.”
His eyes filled with tears. He couldn’t speak. Time dragged out; dangling lives by a sewing thread.
“All right,” he gasped.
“Yes,” she said, her voice hushed.
Then the concentrated intensity returned, a power surge hummed around her and she turned to include Jonas in what she said.
“I know a big part of you still thinks I’m off in the head. But I’m ‘bout to say somethin’ and you got to just trust me. You got to believe me and do what I say.”
“What is it?” Jonas asked.
“You got to run, both of you. Run fast as you can. South!” She glanced out the window at the black clouds bubbling over the Iron House, and her deep voice was hushed. “The Big Ugly’s a-comin’.”
Both men were native Oklahomans; neither needed her to explain what she meant.
Jonas looked suddenly stricken.
“Maggie!” he said, his eyes huge, and he leapt to his feet. “She’s at home, just her and Lupe.”
“Go!” Mac told him. The old man turned without a backward glance and banged on the door. He almost knocked down the eight-by-ten-glossy guard and was gone.
“Hurry up,” Princess said to Mac. “You gotta go, too!”
He got to his feet, then pleaded in a ragged voice, “Can’t I do something?”
“Yeah, you can. You can give me them pictures of Joy.” She paused and a bright smile lit her scarred face below her dark purple eyes. “Pictures of my Angel! They’ll give ’em back to you. You know, after ... I just want to hold ’em, so hers is the last face I see.”
Mac jammed his hand down i
nto his pocket, snatched out his billfold, opened it to the picture holder and emptied the contents onto the table. Four faces, the same yet different, smiled up at them.
“Anything else?” His voice was so thick he could barely speak.
“Just give me a hug, Rev. That’s all. I ain’t had a hug in years. Hug me goodbye.”
Mac crossed to her side of the table, put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her to her feet. Then he put his arms around her and cradled her there, tight against his chest. She felt so fragile. He rocked slowly back and forth and patted her back. She made a sound, like a low moan in her throat. His tears fell onto the top of her bald head.
She suddenly pulled away from him, a look of terror on her face.
“You got to go now. Right now! Hurry, or it’s gonna be too late!”
“But—”
“Just go!”
He turned toward the door and saw that the guard was already on his way in. Mac turned back to speak to Princess, but didn’t. She was holding the pictures of her little girl in her hands, staring lovingly down at them.
“Bye, Princess,” he whispered.
She looked up at him. “You won’t never tell nobody—promise me that, Rev, and I’ll die happy.”
“I promise.”
“Yes,” she said. The hushed tone, the sighed amen.
Chapter 25
The guard stood in the doorway for a moment after the preacher brushed past him and went tearing down the hallway like his pants were on fire. Then he backed out quickly, slammed the door shut behind him and leaned against it, breathing hard. He had broken a rule, an important rule, the kind that’d get you fired. Meetings between an inmate and a minister were strictly private. And Larry Patterson had been listening.
But it wasn’t like he was a prison guard as a career choice. He was a twenty-eight-year-old country music singer who had to put food on the table until he could get a shot at the Grand Ole Opry. So he’d taken this job at the Iron House, drove here from Hansford, thirty miles away, and hated every day of it, felt like he was putting in his time same as the inmates, waiting to be set free.
As the low man in seniority, he’d been the one got picked to wait outside a door for hours every day staring in a little window while “the mystic” talked to the preacher. He’d been seriously ticked off about it, but come to find out, he’d hit the jackpot. Standing right here in this hallway yesterday afternoon, he got to meet Jackson Prentiss, the Jackson Prentiss. Larry had hero-worshiped the reverend for years, so smooth and polished, standing up tall and proud for a white man’s rights.
Why, he’d seen the man on television just last week. It was such a big story they’d shown it at the beginning of the CBS Evening News and again at the end, right before Walter Cronkite said, “And that’s the way it is, Friday, May 3, 1963.”
A bunch of niggers in Birmingham—it looked to him like they were mostly teenagers—had been protesting something, marching down the street with signs, and the police had blasted them with fire hoses, set dogs on ’em, hit them with clubs. Larry had wanted to cheer! It was about time somebody grew a backbone and stopped letting the NAACP push ’em around! And when they’d interviewed the man done it—his first name was Bull, Larry remembered that—Jackson Prentiss was standing right next to him, smiling and nodding.
Prentiss had given Larry a good, firm handshake when he’d stammered a self-introduction. Looked him in the eye and told him, “Good job, son,” then patted him on the shoulder before he walked away. Larry’d been so stoked about it he could hardly sleep last night. Meeting Jackson Prentiss was better than meeting the whole tribe of them Kennedys who’d taken over the whole da-gone country.
Now that he knew there was somebody as important as Jackson Prentiss’s daughter in the room, Larry wanted to know all about her. So today—just for the entertainment value, mind you, he didn’t mean nothin’ by it—he’d cracked the door open just enough that he could listen in on the conversation. He couldn’t hear it all, of course, had to close the door every time somebody walked down the hall, and the hall was full of people today, there being an execution and all. But he heard enough to piece it together, and the whole of it was more than a person could wrap his mind around.
That woman in there had only pretended to kill Jackson Prentiss’s baby girl. Gave her to that preacher to raise instead. Kept Prentiss away from his own daughter for fourteen years with her lies! Larry was a divorced father so he knew what that was like, how a woman could twist things so you couldn’t even spend time with your own flesh and blood. Prentiss had missed every minute of his little girl’s growing up, and that woman in there was about to be executed for killing somebody who wasn’t dead. Well, it served her right for what she did!
Larry had heard the mystic make that preacher swear he’d never tell a soul, but he was under no such obligation. And soon as they got the inmate back into her cell, he was going to go find Jackson Prentiss and tell him the whole story!
* * * * *
Like wind through wheat, word spread in the prison complex that Princess was being taken from the lawyer conference room to the Long Dark for the last time. An eerie hush fell over buildings one and two, the cell blocks she would pass through on her way: an expectant silence, broken only by the rattling of keys in the ancient locks of the cell block doors, followed by the metal-on-metal clanging when the two guards escorting her banged the doors shut behind them.
The small, bald woman made no sound at all, just padded on bare feet on the cold concrete between the rows of cells. But the moment the first inmate caught sight of her, the whole building erupted in sound. Prisoners banged tin cups on the bars of their cells, yelled obscenities, and whistled. Some laughed and jeered; others applauded.
“You’re gonna fry, baby killer!”
“Hope you suffer like that kid you chopped up with an ax.”
“About time they give you what you got comin’.”
A couple of inmates spat at her. One got her right in the face. Princess flinched reflexively but she didn’t lift her handcuffed hands to wipe her cheek, just kept her head down and her eyes on the floor.
A number of the inmates refused to participate in the scorn and derision, though, the ones who believed she was special somehow, even if they didn’t understand how. They watched her pass by in silence.
Once she reached the Long Dark, the four inmates locked behind solid cell doors there couldn’t watch her pass, could only hear the guards’ heavy tread and the little shuffling sound of Princess’s manacle chain dragging on the floor. They didn’t denounce and revile her, though. The next time the guards took Princess out of her cell, she wouldn’t be coming back, and they knew they’d be taking that same walk themselves before long.
After the heavy metal door slammed shut behind her with a loud clanking sound, Princess reached up and wiped the wet spot off her cheek with the hand not clutching her precious pictures. Then she rubbed her sticky fingers on the blanket on her bed, sat down at the table, and spread the pictures out on it so she could see them all at once.
It was profoundly quiet in her cell, but inside Princess’s head, it was so noisy she wanted to stand up on a chair and holler “Stop!”
There was a big clock going, “Tick! Tick! Tick!” counting down the minutes she had left. It was four o’clock, they’d said. An hour: sixty minutes and it would be over.
And there was the rumbling deep in the darkest recesses, the hollow, scary places in her head where she wouldn’t go. It was coming. The Big Ugly was coming to eat up the world.
On top of the ticking and the rumbling was a tangled jumble of thoughts. She had way too many things to think about and not nearly enough time to think them. Her mind was too full.
Trumping everything, of course, was her fear for Angel. Her child in danger sucked all the air out of her chest, blew a hole the size of Dallas in her belly. Angel was there—right now!—with the monster woman who meant to kill—
She cut the thought short; sh
e had to let it go. She’d give it over to the Rev and he’d do everything any human being could do to save his baby girl. Couldn’t do no better than that. She took a deep, shaky breath. She had to let that be.
But she didn’t know at all how to think about her little girl bein’ pregnant. There was nowhere in her mind to put an astonishing thing like that. How could it possibly have happened? A sudden, sickening thought pulled a little squeak of a scream from her lips. Had some man done to Angel what Jackson had done to her?
“No!” she cried out loud, shaking her head back and forth in horror. “Please, please no!” What if …?
Again, she cut the thought short; Princess didn’t do what-ifs. Never had. Swore she never would. It was nothing but pure foolishness to go around second-guessing reality. Whatever happened, happened, and that was the truth of it. It was just as likely Angel fell for a good-lookin’ boy as it was that some man had fooled with her ’gainst her will. Wasn’t nothing to be gained by fretting about how the girl come to be in a family way. The point was, Angel was pregnant. Angel was a-carryin’ life inside her. A baby. Princess was gripped by a sudden wave of achingly tender longing. Why, she was going to be a grandmother. She giggled. A granny at twenty-nine years old!
But the Rev said Angel got tangled up with that witch woman ’cause she was trying to get rid of it! To kill the life in her belly. Princess’s heart ached for her child. Why, the poor thing had just listened to scared, that was all. Can’t never listen to scared. It’ll lie to you ever’ time. With the Rev all tore up over his wife and her having no mama, Angel didn’t have nobody to talk to who’d set her right. When there ain’t no lovin’ voices in your ears, fear comes a’ whisperin’ and first thing you know, you start to listen and believe.
The Rev would love her through it once he found her. If Princess knew anything in the world, she knew that. Angel’d have a tough row to hoe, for sure, being pregnant and not married at sixteen. Whew! That was a powerful heavy load. Folks would judge her, scorn her, and whisper ’bout her. It broke Princess’s heart to think of the pain all that would cause her precious daughter. But there was worse things than scorn. Angel come from tough stock; she’d make it. And then she’d have her own angel to love! Wasn’t nothin’ in life that even come close to the joy of lovin’ a child!
