by Bev Marshall
She started to say more, but she was sick. I saw it coming on her and I jumped up and helped her down the hall to the bathroom. When she came out, I guided her to the couch and got a cold cloth for her forehead. She was so pale, I told her to rest a while, but she shook her head and said, “No. You’ve got to hear it all.”
I sat on the floor beside her and held her hand. “Go on then. I’m listening.”
“At first I wasn’t going to tell. There’s my boys, and Hugh’s mother; she’ll hate me, but I made my decision this morning.” She closed her eyes and said, “Rowena, there’s more. There was another time before this.” Then she opened her eyes and stared at the door as if she expected it to open, and I realized there was fear behind her words, which came faster now. “I had hired a colored girl for cleaning and cooking. She was good help, dependable, a treasure really, and then one day she just didn’t show up for work. I had this feeling something was wrong, and so I drove over to her house. When she answered the door, I saw that she had been badly beaten. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened; she just said she wasn’t ever coming back to our house and slammed the door in my face.”
Earlene struggled to sit up, and I moved over to the couch beside her. “Can I get you something?”
“No, I’m okay. I can go on. I have to.” She took a breath and began again. “I think I knew right away. You see, the boys and I hadn’t been home the day before, but Hugh had been home, and I’d asked him to drive the girl to her house when she finished her work. That night I noticed some scratches on his arms, one on his face, and he told me the cat had made those marks. But after I saw the girl, I knew what had really happened. I knew, but I never said a word about it. I didn’t have the courage to accuse him. I guess I didn’t want to know.” She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. “If only I had. If I’d said something, then maybe Sheila would be alive today.”
Now, understanding what torment she had been living with, my own eyes filled with tears. I searched for some words of comfort, but I knew that no matter what I said, Earlene’s guilt wasn’t going to leave her for the rest of her life.
She wiped her tears and stood up. “I talked to the girl last night, told her that I knew what Hugh had done and that I’d see to it that he paid for it. She cried and asked me not to give her name.” She fell silent then and took a few wobbly steps toward the door. “I’ve got to get home to my boys now.”
I asked her could she drive, and she nearly smiled when she said she’d been driving around in a trance ever since the night her husband had left. I helped her into her Buick, and before she turned the key she gripped the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. “I thought about her and poor Sheila all morning as I sat in the courtroom, listening to your husband’s testimony. I knew the pain that was going to come from it. For you, your husband, your daughter, too. If I had told what I knew, your family wouldn’t have had to suffer. And that’s why I came here. To ask for your forgiveness.”
I reached in the car and laid my hand on hers. “You have that. I’m so sorry for your own suffering.”
She lifted her hand and squeezed mine. “Pray for me to find the strength to do what I have to do.” She turned the key and the motor roared to life. She spoke louder over the noise of the engine. “My boys’ lives will be ruined, but I have no choice now. I’m going to call the prosecutor and tell him everything I’ve told you.”
I leaned my head in the window. I had to know, had to ask. “Earlene, did he, is Hugh the one who killed her?” I held my breath then, waiting for her answer.
Slowly, her head turned toward me. “No, he didn’t. It was Stoney. I heard him say it in our yard on the night he fought with Hugh. He said, “‘I kilt your seed, and I’m glad of it.’ ”
CHAPTER 36
LELAND
My next story ran a 10pt. double column down the front page of The Lexie Journal and began with the headline, Stoney Barnes Found Guilty of Murder. I was there in the courtroom three seats back from Kevin Landry’s table when the verdict was read. Each day I had taken copious notes on the parade of witnesses and their testimony. My best two pieces were about Lloyd Cotton’s testimony and Virgie Nell Jackson’s. Miss Jackson made her appearance in court dressed in an ill-fitting skirt that was stretched so tightly across her buttocks that one could clearly see the outline of her underwear. I suspected that she enjoyed telling about her affair with Cotton because when she was excused and told to step down from the witness box, she said, “Already? That’s all?” Of course, the other star in the case was Stoney, who aroused great sympathy in all of the women spectators. There was nearly a collective sigh from them when Stoney cried and said he couldn’t believe his “little sweetheart” was dead, and there were nods all around the room when he said that the man who had taken advantage of her and then killed her should be the one on trial for murder. I think most of us thought he’d get off at that point. But then came the bombshell, the headline every reporter dreams of.
Kevin Landry stood and asked to call a witness who had just come forward with new evidence. No one was more surprised than I to see Earlene Barnes walk into the courtroom. I had been unsuccessful in erasing her from my memory, and now I felt heat rising to my face as I watched her glide past my seat. I sat mesmerized by her testimony, so engrossed in her soft voice, her lace-edged handkerchief, with which she daubed her eyes many times, her long legs crossed at the knee, her red hair I now decided was the color of a roan stallion’s I had once seen, I nearly forgot to take notes. Earlene Barnes maintained her dignity through all of the distasteful facts she was forced to tell the court. She held her shoulders erect, her chin lifted to the lawyers as they asked her question after question. She was on the stand longer than any other witness, nearly two hours, but time passed too quickly for me. When Earlene Barnes repeated the words Stoney had said in her yard that night, that he had killed Hugh’s seed, Bill Calloway objected, but the words had been spoken, and I knew then that Stoney’s fate was sealed. It was with regret that I watched Earlene, with head bowed, slowly make her way down the aisle toward the exit. The sobbing of Stoney’s mother was so loud at that point that I nearly didn’t hear Earlene’s soft, “I’m sorry,” as she passed by her mother-in-law.
It took the jury the rest of that Tuesday afternoon to come back in with the verdict, but by five o’clock, it was unanimous. It had to be in a capital murder case, but Mr. Calloway asked that the jury be polled anyway. One by one they stood and said the words, “Guilty, guilty, guilty.” Twelve times, and I couldn’t see Stoney Barnes’ face, but I saw his body jump with each pronouncement as if the words were lances sticking into his back. Earlene Barnes wasn’t there for the verdict, nor were any members of the Cotton family, but the Carruths were there, him with his large hands stretching out to Kevin Landry in a triumphant shake, her with tears streaming down her pale face. She looked like she might be carrying another child in her womb.
The next day the sentence was handed down, and I rushed back to The Journal offices to write the final copy on the murder of Sheila Carruth Barnes. My fingers trembled above the keys on my Underwood, but I took a breath and typed out the sentence. “Death in the electric chair.” It was done. The tragedy was complete. Our flawed hero would die. The gods sitting in the ugly Lexie County courtroom had decreed it. I had played my part in the tragedy, not as protagonist, nor antagonist. Only the minor role of commentator had been mine.
I sat at my desk for a few minutes staring at the black lines I had made on the cheap paper Mr. Elzey provided. Although my sense of relief was overwhelming, I experienced a sense of discomfiture that I could not explain. I typed “-30-,” left my desk and handed my copy to Mr. Elzey. Before I went home, I stopped at the Hamilton Hotel for a whiskey.
Mother was waiting for me at home in the foyer. She was beside herself with worry, said I was too pale, hadn’t I lost weight, shouldn’t I make an appointment with Doc Reynolds. After dinner she fretted that I hadn’t eaten my lamb chop, and that was
my favorite since I was eight years old. In the sitting room she grew quiet when I poured a large brandy for myself and ample sherry for her. We didn’t read that evening, sat in our chairs in the dark, pretending to listen to our radio programs. I vowed to put all thoughts of the boy and his dead wife behind me and so suggested to Mother that we might take a trip over to Natchez or perhaps take the Illinois Central down to New Orleans. She liked my idea, and by the time I left her to retire to my room, she was smiling again.
The next morning I learned that Mr. Elzey had another journey in mind for me.
When he told me I wasn’t going on any vacation because I had to stay in Zebulon to cover the execution, we had our first major altercation, which ended with my saying I would resign. He then offered me a substantial raise. Against the protests of my inner voice that said nothing could possibly be worth having to view a man die, I took it. Fate played a hand in the decision; three nights before, I had received a long distance telephone call from Van Potter, my former roommate at university. Shortly after graduation, Van had taken a position with an antiques dealer in South Carolina, brokering paintings, furnishings, even an occasional automobile of exceptional quality. Van knew my passion for books, and he said that the war in Europe had been a boon for business; Americans were flooding out of every country on the continent, their arms laden with treasures the natives were eager to sell. He had come upon a first edition of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, which he knew I’d covet. The price, $85, was exorbitant, and I told him I couldn’t afford it. Then I asked him to hold onto it for a week or so while I tried to raise the funds. Now, here I was offered the means to buy that book. How ironic that my love of words would make me witness to a man’s execution.
I decided that the best way to handle my distasteful assignment was to lose myself in research. I hoped that learning abstract facts about executions would shield me from the reality of the one I was going to attend. So I immersed myself in fact-finding as though I were a scientist seeking a cure for a dreaded disease. My first discovery was a story I found in a Florida daily about the sheriff in the 1926 Williams execution in that state. Like Stoney, Williams was sentenced to die for killing his wife, but when he sat in “Old Sparky,” Florida’s electric chair, the sheriff had asked one of his deputies to pull the switch. Not one was willing to do so, nor the sheriff himself, and finally, after the terrified man had been sitting in the chair for over ten minutes listening to them argue, the sheriff unstrapped him and ordered him back to his cell. Years later Williams jumped from a prison truck and saved a woman and her baby from a mad bull, and for that heroic act, he was granted his freedom. I didn’t for a minute think Clyde Vairo incapable of pulling the switch, and a pardon was a pure pipe dream for Stoney Barnes.
Our Zebulon library was woefully inadequate, so I was forced to drive up to Jackson for further research. There I found a wealth of information. I sat at one of the long wooden tables in the reading room of the Jackson Public Library, engrossed. I learned that it was the competition between Westinghouse and Thomas Edison that led to the development of the electric chair. Edison hired people to kill scores of cats, dogs, calves, and even a horse to prove that death by electrocution was quick, efficient, and painless. But then I found an account in a New York newspaper of the 1890 execution of William Kemmler, the first convicted killer to be put to death in that state. Witnesses said he smoked and bled, and that the smell of his charred flesh filled the room. When high voltage enters the body, the temperature rises to 138 degrees, and the eyeballs may pop out, the sweat turn to blood, and the skin and hair may burst into flames. After I had taken all of the notes I’d need for my column, I went to the men’s room, where I doused my chalk-colored face with water, carelessly soaking the collar of my shirt.
On the drive back to Zebulon, I knew what I had to do. I couldn’t save Stoney Barnes from the monstrous chair that would be his last seat in this world, but I intended to write a piece that I hoped would prove to the citizens of our town that they had made a terrible mistake. I had heard many of them quote the Bible, “An eye for an eye,” but I would remind them that Jesus said, “Forgive them that persecute you.” I would write up these horrific accounts of botched executions, and I would show them that taking an eye for an eye could only lead to blindness.
By the time I returned to Zebulon, I was charged with my own kind of electricity, and I was determined to visit the Barnes boy in his cell. I needed to see his unharmed flesh, touch him, feel his blood flowing at a normal temperature through his body. I wanted a clear vision of him in my mind when I wrote my piece. But Clyde Vairo said I would have to sign up for an appointment.
“What? An appointment to see a prisoner?” I was standing in front of the sheriff’s desk, and he handed me a clipboard. I looked down at the paper attached and saw dates, times, and names scribbled in various shades of black and blue ink.
Sheriff Vairo grinned. “We got us a celebrity back there now. You wouldn’t believe how far some people have come to say good-bye to our condemned man. I reckon it’s you that’s responsible for a lot of them.”
“Me? What do you mean?”
The sheriff held up The Jackson Clarion-Ledger. “They’re covering the execution too. Your stories are getting picked up all over the state.”
“But who are these people visiting him?”
“Some are reporters from other towns, but a lot of them is just good-looking women who saw his picture.” He nodded to Sam, the deputy, who was coming through the door leading to the cells. “Sam, here, says he wants to get arrested hisself so he can share some of them cakes, pies, and cobblers all the ladies have been toting back there.”
I backed away from the desk and sat on the chair beside the door. I needed to collect my thoughts on all this new information. “How does Stoney feel about all of this? Has he said anything to you?”
The sheriff tilted back in his chair, crossed his arms behind his head. “He ain’t said much, but he sure is enjoying hisself back there. I hear him telling the ladies he ain’t never ate so good, that he appreciates their visits. He’s been pestering me to let him have his guitar so he can serenade his visitors.”
I stood up to leave. The charred flesh, the eyeballs, the flames rising from his head, all receded from my mind. “Sounds like he should be asking for an organ and a monkey instead,” I said. I don’t know why I felt shame, but my ears grew hot, and I wanted to cry like a child. As I got back into my Pontiac, lines from Thoreau came to me: “Even the death of friends will inspire us as much as their lives.” Maybe there was some sense in it all, but I had yet to understand it.
I understood even less the convicted man himself. When Clyde Vairo got word that Calvin Nunnery would be bringing the chair two days before Thanksgiving, he telephoned me and told me that when he informed Stoney of the date, he said, “Well, I reckon Ma will have to cook her turkey early this year.”
“What else did he say?” I asked. Surely, there was more to his reaction that he had only three days left to walk on this earth.
Sheriff Vairo chuckled. “Asked if he could have his guitar and be allowed out of his cell to play for all the folks that have been so nice to him.”
I was glad the sheriff couldn’t see my face. My jaw had gone slack. “You’re not going to allow it, are you?”
“I’m thinking on it. Seems like a small thing to want before you die.”
The small request turned into a colossal event. The word about the concert spread so rapidly that, by seven o’clock on the evening before Stoney was to be executed at six the next morning, I couldn’t find a parking place within a quarter-mile of the jail.
November had been mild, but now the weather had changed, and as I was putting on my topcoat in the front hall, Mother caught me by my sleeve and begged me not to go; she said it would be barbaric to look upon the face of a man who was about to die, but I told her there was no escaping my responsibilities as a reporter. Then she had pressed her lips together the way she does when
Alberta overcooks the standing rib roasts. When she left for her room, she said I needed to think about changing careers.
Now I meandered through the crowd toward the jailhouse steps where Stoney was to perform. I didn’t recognize many of the people that stood in small groups on the moonlit lawn and sidewalk, but I came upon the Barnes family, the mother, father, and the two youngest brothers. I took out my pad, thought better of it, and moved on toward Gavin MacNamara, who had been the jury foreman. “Evening,” I said. He frowned, nodded to me, but turned aside to speak to another man. Incredibly, a few people had brought their children, and they ran zigzagging in between the adults.
At 7:06 Stoney Barnes, Clyde Vairo, and his deputy, Sam, appeared on the narrow stoop in front of the jailhouse. Sam cradled his rifle while the sheriff handed Stoney’s guitar to him after he took his seat on the top step. In the dim light I jotted fast notes as best I could. “Light oak-colored guitar, dark blue jeans, checked green shirt.” All that was absent was a handkerchief around his neck, and he could be Roy Rogers singing to Dale. He bowed his head over his instrument, tuning it, turning the keys with slow, but deft fingers. Then, he lifted his head to survey his fans who fell so silent I could hear the rustle of leaves blowing across the street. Stoney strummed a few bars and then sang, “Lil Liza Jane,” which seemed an odd choice, but I later learned from the Cotton girl that this had been one of Sheila Barnes’ favorites. When the last note died, there was a scattering of applause, and a slow smile spread across Stoney’s face. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m kinda rusty, but I’ll try a few more.” He chose “Amazing Grace” and “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” changing the lyrics of the chorus to “Jesus, grant my humble plea. Daily walking close to Thee. Set me free, Dear Lord, set me free.”
