Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant in Once Upon a Honeymoon. It was some kind of war movie. If she had the chance, this is the one she would see:
Together for the First Time.
“He kissed her all over the map.”
“She finished the man who started the war.”
Toni Jo wondered if the teasers referred to the characters’ actions in the film or to off-screen intrigues between Ginger and Grant. She asked Deer if he could take her to the movie. He said the holiday crowds would be large, and they couldn’t risk being seen.
Toni Jo wasn’t much disappointed when he said no. She hadn’t thought it likely.
“Well,” she said. “I guess this is it, then. We’ll never see each other again. At least, not in this life.” She tried to laugh.
Deer was silent for a time. In his mind, he played out a quick scenario. He would escape with Toni Jo and make a life elsewhere. But all of his meaning was in Lake Charles. He had never known anything else.
“I—,” he began. “As chief deputy, I have to supervise the . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.
Toni Jo helped him. “The execution.”
Deer nodded.
“Well, then,” his wife said. “I guess I’ll see you there.” The statement struck her as amusing, like saying to a friend, I’ll see you at the ballgame tonight.
* * *
Thanksgiving Day gave Toni Jo only one reason to be grateful. The traditional time for electric chair executions was Thursday, but hers had to be postponed until Saturday because of the holiday. On Friday, she thought: I could have been dead yesterday. By this time Sunday, I will have been dead twenty-four hours.
Her deathwatch started at noon on Friday, November 27. When asked about her last meal, all she requested was a Coca-Cola, in a small bottle so cold that frost would coat the green glass.
* * *
At 8 A.M., Toni Jo was awakened, then reminded they were shooting for 11:01.
Breakfast at 8:30.
At 9, a barber entered her cell with Warden White and a deputy. She had not been told about this. The barber cropped her hair close with a pair of scissors, then plugged in his shears and began to shave her.
“Is everyone shaved before an execution?” she wanted to know.
The deputy glanced at the warden, then back to Toni Jo.
“No,” he said. Red-faced and heavyset, he looked more frightened than Toni Jo. His pants fit badly and he was constantly hiking them up.
“Why not?” she asked.
The deputy looked at Warden White, who nodded a go-ahead. Toni Jo thought the deputy looked a mite slow-witted, but she quickly surmised that he was in charge of the chair.
“No need to shave someone about to be hung, but with the electric chair—.” He paused. “Ma’am, it reduces resistance to electricity. And minimizes singeing and burning, which leaves a bad smell.” He hitched his pants up and looked at his feet. “Plus, you wouldn’t want a fire in the jail.”
When the men had departed, Toni Jo picked up a mirror. She didn’t want to look, but she did. Her head resembled an egg with a face painted on. After being shorn of her identity, dying didn’t seem so bad.
At 10, Deputy Red-Face returned with a set of clothes and asked her to put them on. She slipped into the baggy outfit. It had no buttons or zippers. She didn’t have to ask. The metal would heat up. Burn her body. Wryly, she thought, Wouldn’t want that to happen.
She had one hour to live. What do you do in your final hour?
Toni Jo Henry turned on her radio.
At 10:30, she was told the execution would be delayed. A technical problem. The wires were too short to reach her cell. She would have to be executed in the corridor.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said.
“Oh!” she exclaimed as the red-faced deputy ambled down the hall after hitching his pants up. She had almost forgotten.
“Can I have my Coke?”
While waiting, Toni Jo picked up her diary and wrote,
November 28, 1942.
On the last day of my life,
She never finished the entry.
Her soft drink arrived at 10:45. She held the bottle in her hand. It was cold and damp. Had probably been covered with frost when the deputy retrieved it. She watched the tiny silver bubbles swimming up through the coffee-colored liquid along the neck. She tipped the soda up and drank deeply. The carbonation burned her throat, the sweet pain squeezing tears from her eyes. She looked at the bottle. There was something imminently sad about the familiar shape. Like a friend. The last pleasant thing she would ever see.
At 11, she was called from her cell to be weighed and photographed. She thought, They weren’t this interested in me while I was living. When she reached the documentation room, she thought, It’s 11:02. 1 should already have been dead, but I’m still alive. I can see and hear and taste and touch and smell.
Back in her cell by 11:15.
Clattering in the hallway of the cell block. She imagined the scene. Assistants setting up the chair. Directions whispered intently. Hurry. Be quiet.
The chair was tested at 11:30. The copper electrode connections were buffed clean of verdigris deposits, then moistened for better conduction.
The generator started with a low growl that reached a high wail, like the squall of a wildcat. She heard a living, dull thud as enormous electricity coursed through the wires. Her radio speaker crackled in response, her cell vibrated with the pure violence done to the innocent air. Then silence for fifteen minutes.
She had finished her Coke and was listening to a song she had never heard. Happy, upbeat. Her mouth, she suddenly realized, was dry. She reached for her purse and extracted a slice of gum. She chewed the wad in unison to the snappy rhythm of the song.
“Toni Jo?” Her heart jolted. She glanced up. Deputy Red-Face was looking at her through the barred square in the door. “It’s time.”
“Can I finish listening to this new song? It’s so with it. It’s called ‘Jingle Jangle Jingle,’ by Glenn Miller. Do you know it?”
The man turned his ear toward the cell and listened.
I got spurs . . . that jingle jangle jingle
As I go riii—ding merrily along.
And they sing, oh, ain’t you glad you’re single,
And that sooong . . . ain’t so very far from wrong.
“Can’t say as I do.” He listened a moment longer. “You really must come along now.”
Toni Jo turned the knob on her Philco and the song faded.
As if by magic, the door opened invitingly.
Down the short corridor, she saw a conglomeration of people standing around like they had been served bad hors d’oeuvres at a garden party. Coming in from the window, the drone of an electric motor provided background music.
For some inexplicable reason, an advertising slogan popped into Toni Jo’s head:
Drink Coca-Cola
♦
Enjoy
Cooling Refreshment
The crowd parted as if she were the guest of honor. Thick black cables coiled from a window down to a high-backed chair with black straps flopped about like tentacles.
A large book was open on a podium. A Bible, she thought. She was stopped while each of the guests signed the book. It was a register. One after another, she watched them write in the log and politely step around each other in the crowded hallway. Two doctors, the sheriff, and two deputies—one, her husband. Then Cal Sonnier and her attorneys, Levine and Prudhomme, who nodded at her with glum courtesy. Then Judge Page, District Attorney Avario, and Father Jacob.
Seeing the twelfth witness, almost a whole woman, she thought, So Sonnier got his wish.
Supported on either side, the sightless nun was led to the podium, a pen put in her hand, her hand placed on the page. All she had to do was write Sister Mary Catherine.
The woman who had attended Toni Jo’s wedding and childbirth would blindly witness her death.
After the signing,
everyone turned to the condemned as if she were a bride coming up the aisle. She reached the chair, turned, and sat. She reached up to flip her hair, a nervous, feminine gesture, and found she had none left. The chair was made of heavy, dark oak and reminded her of a throne. Someone, a man with children perhaps, had made the chair especially for this purpose, put the care of his hands into the wood, and still it was uncomfortable. As the belts were hastily secured, she had time to think, No one would have wanted to sit in something like this for very long anyway.
The whirring of the dynamo grew louder.
Then it seemed as if everyone had a question for her.
Father Jacob: “Would you like extreme unction?”
She frowned at him.
“The last rites,” he said.
“Oh.” She thought for a moment. “No. Thank you all the same.”
They started at her ankles. The right pantleg of her uniform was raised and pinned beneath her knee with a strap, exposing her slender calf.
Something was wrong. Deputy Sheriff Slim Deer wasn’t able to finish his task with the buckle. A choked sob escaped from his mouth as he stood from his stooped position, hurried down the corridor, and disappeared around the corner. Sheriff Mule Deer was left to complete his son’s job.
Toni Jo was furious. Abandoned again. Herald Nevers.
That son-of-a-bitching swine.
Someone shook her arm. They had buckled down her waist and were working on her wrists and forearms. She felt like she was being strapped in for a roller coaster ride. The Zephyr. She chewed her gum frantically. Her heart pounded with primitive terror as her forehead was pressed against the chairback and strapped down.
“—your effects?” she heard.
“What?” she said, her reverie broken.
“What would you like us to do with your effects?” Sheriff Abraham Deer posed the question. She looked at the faces looking at hers.
“It doesn’t matter.” She came to the face of Sister Mary Catherine, bordered by the black and white wimple, her eyes focused on eternity, and remembered the baby in her care. “Could—?” she began.
“Yes?” Sheriff Deer said. “What is it?”
Toni Jo reached to point at the Sister and found her arm constrained. She looked at it strapped tightly to the arm of the chair.
“My things,” she said. “Could you keep them?” She was looking at the nun, who was unaware she was being spoken to.
“Sister?” Father Jacob said.
The nun serenely tilted her head toward the priest.
“Will you keep her personal effects?”
The Sister gave a barely detectable nod.
Cal Sonnier wrote furiously on a narrow pad as the electrode at the end of a black cable was attached to Toni Jo’s exposed right leg just above the ankle strap. Next, a cap resembling a metal bowl was placed on her head and then connected to the second cable, which dangled menacingly above the chair.
Sheriff Deer turned to his red-faced deputy.
“The time?”
He looked at his watch.
“Twelve minutes after noon.”
Sheriff Deer reached towards the mouth of his charge.
“Please,” he said. Toni Jo was chewing her gum wildly. “Open,” the sheriff said.
Toni Jo finally understood. She opened her mouth and the gum was taken from her tongue.
Sheriff Deer looked at her. His eyes were grey-blue and steady. “Do you have any final statements?”
She tried to shake her head no. Then, an afterthought, “Give my baby a good home.”
All the witnesses thought she was demented. All but three.
A heavy dark-brown leather mask was fitted against Toni Jo’s face and secured to the chair with laces. There was an opening for her nose. She could see light through the aperture. The barn-like smell of leather and decay filled her nostrils.
“Are we ready?”
She recognized the sheriff’s voice.
She didn’t know how much time she had.
She tried quickly to think of her life.
Her mind raced from her earliest memory, her mother’s face and the smell of baby powder, forward until it hit up against the man who had brought her here.
“Everything!” she shouted unexpectedly, surprising even herself. “You took everything from me!” She felt her neck muscles straining against the strap on her forehead. “I’m not done with you yet, Herald Nevers. I’m coming to get you, you son-of-a-bitch!”
The red-faced deputy yelled outside the window, trying to make his voice heard above the angry whine of the dynamo.
“Pull the lever! Pull the switch, for God’s sake!”
The man in the back of the truck looked at a dial, then, cupping his hands around his mouth, faced the window. “We’re below threshold!” he bellowed as the motor was winding to the high-pitched wail before the squall of deadly energy.
Toni Jo struggled in the chair as if she wanted to rip the straps off and get to Nevers.
“Pull it!” the deputy screamed again, competing with the engine. “For God’s sake, man, do it!”
Do it—the phrase triggered the sickening memory of what Nevers had made her say in bed.
“Yes!” she screamed. A manic frenzy possessed her. “Pull it. I want to get at him as fast as I can. Do it! Do it!” She laughed a hideous laugh. “I’m coming for you. I’m going to get you, you son-of-a-bitch. Here I come! I’m
PART THREE
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Chapter 20
1953–1961
I saw Sheriff Lambert Deer for the first time when I was ten years old. He wore a khaki uniform pressed into knife-like creases, a gold badge shining impressively over his heart. He had come to the Episcopal Girls’ School to talk about traffic safety, and I sat on the front row, close enough to watch sweat droplets appear over his top lip like a mustache of glistening beads. Later, when I was thirteen or fourteen, Mother told me at supper one evening why Sheriff (by then, Mayor) Deer campaigned for traffic safety. In 1947, his bride of less than a year had been killed by a drunk driver while carrying his first child. I was touched by the fact that he had remained a childless widower ever since.
Never imagining I would know him personally one day, I heard about him now and again—in newspapers, on the radio, or from girls who moaned and mock-swooned over his uniformed good looks. My younger brother, Bobby, who had recently joined Junior Deputies, came home one afternoon yammering about the Sheriff letting him shoot his pistol. I hated admitting to myself that I was actually jealous. After that, I started searching out the Sheriff’s pictures in the newspaper to cut them out and paste in my scrapbook. I didn’t think it was any big deal back then. Lots of my girlfriends did stuff like that.
“They used to call him Slim,” Mother said when he was running for mayor in 1954. She saw me sprawled on the den floor gawking at his picture in the paper. It was hard to believe he had ever been skinny. Now he was built like a heavyweight boxer. In bold black letters that seemed to hover and shimmy over an orange background, his campaign signs confidently taunted the electorate:
VOTE
Sheriff Lambert A. “Lamb” Deer
for Mayor
IS THERE ANY OTHER CHOICE?
Throughout the day, big white cars draped with patriotic banners drove slowly around the neighborhoods blaring slogans from their rooftop bullhorns. These images came back to me years later. But first I put the Mayor, my real-life idol, aside for a while, replacing him with reproductions of signed movie-star photographs and then real boys, pimpled and shyly eager, who took me to school dances or met me at “make-out” parties in friends’ garages.
In 1959, near the beginning of my senior year at LaGrange High School, my father ran for a seat on the City Council. Quite unnaturally, he won. I say unnaturally because Dad was the quietest man I ever knew: passive, yet concerned;
a bookkeeper for PPG; the last man you’d imagine running for public office. The main image I have of Daddy is him reading the newspaper in a beat-up armchair he rarely stirred from after his long days at work. When Bobby and I, or my older sister Maureen and I, went to Daddy, expecting him to settle our childish arguments, he listened carefully, waited a few seconds, then spoke deliberately. Daddy even mowed the grass slowly, moving methodically across the lawn as if chewing the cud himself. He was the tortoise to lay your money on—if he ever entered the race.
It was strange to see our name on the political advertisements: William “Billy Bird” Bienvenu. In red, white, and blue, with stars above and below his name. On weekends, he canvassed the neighborhoods with at least one member of his family. I would stand still as Daddy introduced himself and spoke a few words about his views. Then, when he introduced me, I would step forward with a smile, feeling like a Sunday-school girl showing off her new dress, bashful and proud. My father never seemed very crafty to me, but it was obvious he knew all the tricks that mattered. Three months later, we had a public servant in the family.
Which was good and bad. Before, I had been neither particularly reserved nor outgoing. Now, I was visible. A mark. Previously, I could sit inconspicuously in class and take notes, looking ignorant but interested. Now, my government and history teachers called on me with questions whose answers I hadn’t a clue about. Walking down the halls, on the beach, at ball games, people I didn’t know cast furtive glances my way and whispered to friends and spouses behind their hands. Sometimes, I heard them.
“That’s Billy Bird’s daughter.”
“Maureen?”
“No, the younger one. Leigh I think’s her name.”
“Mmm-huh. He’s a good man.”
“Yep. The rest of that crowd, I wouldn’t give you a wooden nickel for the whole bunch of ‘em.”
A Savage Wisdom Page 26
