by R.J. Ellory
Easier that way.
Mr. West is another story. Some of the guys down here believe he was not born of human parents. Some of the guys down here believe he was spawned in a culture dish at M.I.T. or somesuch, an experiment in running a body without a heart or a soul or much of anything else at all. He is a dark man. He has things to hide, many things it seems, and where he hides them is in the shadows that lurk back of his eyes and behind his words, and in the arc of his arm as he brings down his billy across your head or your fingers or your back. He hides those things also in the way his shoes creak as he walks down the corridor, and in the way he peers through the grille and watches your every move. He hides those things in the insectile expression that flickers across his face when the mood takes him. And in leaving the lights on when you want to sleep. And in forgetting exercise time. In dropping your food as it is passed through the gate. In the sound of his breathing. In everything he is.
Before I came here, the brief time I'd spent in General Populace, a man called Robert Schembri had warned me of Mr. West, but what he'd said had been confused in among a great deal of things he'd told me.
No matter what had gone before, I could never have forgotten the first time we met, Mr. West and I. It went something like this:
'Gon' lose your hair there, boy. No hippy hair down here. What the fuck is this here? A ring? Take it off now 'fore we cut your goddam finger from your hand there.'
I remember nodding, saying nothing.
'Nothin' to say now, eh, boy? They got you by the C.O. Jones that's for sure. You done kill some nigger I hear, cut his goddam head clean off of his body and left it for the crows.'
That was the time I opened my mouth. The first and last.
His face was in mine. I remember the pressure of the floor behind my head, the feeling of that billy club across my throat like it would force my jaw up through my ears and into my brain. And then he was over me, right there in my face, and I could feel the words he spoke as he hissed so cruelly.
'You don't got nothin' to say, boy, you understand? You have no words, no name, no face, no identity down here. Here, you're just a poor dumb motherfucker who got fucked by the system whichever way you see it. You could be as innocent as the freakin' Lamb of God, as sweet as the cherubims and seraphims and all the Holy Angels rolled into one almighty bag of purity, but down here you are guilty - guilty as the black heart of the Devil himself. You understand that, you remember that, you don't ever forget that, an' you and me are gonna get along just fine. You are nothing, you have nothing, you never will be anything, and this is about as good as it's ever gonna get. Yo' gonna be here a long time before they fry your brain, and hell if I ain't gonna be here long after you're gone, so understand that when you're in my house you abide by my rules, you mind your manners and say your prayers. Are we on the same wavelength now?'
I was unable to move my head, barely able to breathe.
'I will take your silence as an expression of understanding and compliance,' Mr. West said, and then he gave one last vicious dig of the billy and released me.
I came up gasping, half-suffocated, my eyes bursting from my head, the pressure behind my ears like a freight train.
It was Mr. Timmons who helped me back to the cell, helped me to lie down, brought me some water which I was unable to drink for a good twenty minutes.
And it was Mr. Timmons who told me to watch Mr. West, that Mr. West was a hard man, hard but fair, and I knew in his tone, from the look in his eyes, that he was all but lying to himself. Mr. West was an emissary of Lucifer, and they all knew it.
And that was eleven years ago, best part of. Arrested in 1970. A year in Charleston Pen. while the first wave of protests erupted, died, erupted once more. And the appeals, the TV debates, the questions that no-one wanted to answer. And then to Sumter, a year or so in General Populace while legal wrangles went back and forth in futile and meaningless circles, and then to Death Row. And now it's 1982, summer of '82, and Nathan would have been thirty-six as well. We'd have been somewhere together. Blood brothers an' all that, you know?
Well, maybe that ain't so far from the truth. Because if Mr. Timmons is right, and God knows who's guilty and who's innocent, and if there is some place we all go where sins are called to account and judgement is fair and just and equitable, then me and Nathan Verney look set to see each other once more.
Nathan knows the truth, he most of all, and though he'll look me dead square in the eye and hold his head high, just as he always did, I know he'll carry a heavy heart. Nathan never meant for it to be this way, but then Nathan was caught up in this thing more than all of us together.
Some folks say the death penalty's too easy, too fast by far. Folks say as how those who commit murder should suffer the same. Well, believe me, they do. Folks forget the years people like me spend down here, two floors up from Hell. They don't know of people like Mr. West and the way he feels the punishment should befit the crime whether you did the crime or not. Folks really have no idea how it feels to know that you're gonna die, and after the first few years that day could be any day now. They know nothing of the raised hopes that fall so fast, the appeals that go round in circles until they disappear up their own tailpipe. They know nothing of discovering that Judge so-and-so has reviewed your case and denied the hearing that you've waited on for the best part of three years. These things are the penalty. Gets so as how when the time comes you're almost grateful, and you wish away the days, the hours, the minutes… wish they all would fold into one single, simple heartbeat and the lights would go out forever. People talk of a reason to live, a reason to fight, a reason to go on. Well, if you know in your heart of hearts that all you're fighting for is someone else's satisfaction as you die, then there seems little to fight for. It is ironic, but most times it's the guy who's being executed who wants to be executed the most.
Mr. Timmons understands this, and he cares as best he can.
Mr. West understands this too, but the emotion he feels is one of gratification.
Mr. West wants us to die, wants to see us walk the long walk, wants to see us sit in the big chair. Knows that once one has gone another will come to take his place, and there's nothing that pleases him more than fresh meat. Spend six months here and he calls you dead meat. Calls it out as you walk from your cell to the yard, or to the washroom, or to the gate.
Dead meat walking, he shouts, and even Mr. Timmons turns cool and loose inside.
How Mr. West ended up this way I can only guess from what I was told, what was inferred. I don't know, but seems to me he's the most dangerous and crazy of us all.
Down two cells from me there's a guy called Lyman Greeve. Shot his wife's lover and then cut out the woman's tongue so she couldn't go sweet-talking any more fellas. Crazy boy. Crazy, crazy boy. But hell, compared to Mr. West Lyman Greeve is the Archangel Gabriel come down with his trumpet to announce the Second Coming. Lyman told me Mr. West was a Federal agent in the Thirties and Forties, did the whole Prohibition thing, busting 'shiners and whores and bathtub gin-makers. Said as how he came up to Charleston when Prohibition was lifted and was employed by the government to keep track of the black movements, that he was down there in Montgomery and Birmingham for the Freedom Rides, cracked a few black skulls, instigated a few riots. Another day Lyman told me Mr. West raped a black girl, found out she got pregnant, so he went back down there and cut her throat and buried her in a field. No-one ever found her, or so he said, and I listened to the story with a sense of wonder and curiosity.
Seemed everyone had invented their own history for Mr. West. To me, well, to me he was just a mean, sadistic son- of-a-bitch who got his revs beating on some poor bastard who couldn't beat back. Few years before I came here someone made a noise about him, some kid called Frank Rayburn. Twenty-two years old, down here for killing a man for eighteen dollars in Myrtle Beach. Frank made a noise, people from the Penitentiary Review & Regulatory Board made a visit, asked questions, made some more noise, and then Frank withdrew
his complaint and fell silent. Month later Frank hanged himself. Somehow he obtained a rope, a real honest-to-God rope, and he tied it up across the grille eleven and a half foot high. The bed was eight inches off the ground. Frank was five three. You do the math.
No-one had a mind to complain again it seemed.
And then there's Max Myers, seventy-eight years old, a trustee. Been here at Sumter for fifty-two years. Jailed in 1930 for robbing a liquor store. Liquor store guy had a heart attack the following day. That made the charge manslaughter. Max came here when he was twenty-six years old, same as me, and on his thirty-second birthday in 1936 he got a cake from his wife. Someone stole Max Myers' cake, stole it right out of his cell, and Max got mad, real mad. He argued with someone on the gantry, there was a scuffle, a man got pushed, fell, landed forty feet below like a watermelon on the sidewalk. Max got a First Degree. For the manslaughter he would've been out around 1950, would've seen another thirty years of American history unfold. But he got the real deal, the no-hope-of-parole beat, and here he was, pushing a broom along Death Row, delivering magazines once a week. When he was jailed his wife had been pregnant. She had borne a son, a bright and beautiful kid called Warren. Warren grew up only ever seeing his father through a plate glass window. They had never touched, never held each other, never spoken to one another save through a telephone.
Max's son went into the Army in 1952, got himself a wife and a home, a cat called Chuck and a dog called Indiana. Went to Vietnam in '65, was one of the first US soldiers killed out there. Killed in his third week. Warren Myers was buried in a small plot somewhere in Minnesota. Max was not permitted to attend.
Max's wife took two handfuls of sleepers and drank a bottle of Jack Daniels six months following. Max was all that was left of the Myers family line. He pushed his broom, he passed messages, he could get you a copy of Playboy for thirty cigarettes. He was part of Sumter, always had been, always would be, and he was the only inmate who had been here before Mr. West.
Penitentiary Warden John Hadfield was a politician, nothing more nor less than that. Hadfield had eyes on the Mayor's Office, on Congress, maybe even on the Senate. He did what was needed, he said what was required, he kissed ass and talked the talk and colored inside the lines. Hadfield ran the regular wings, the A, B and C Blocks, but D-Block, Death Row, he left that to Mr. West. Even Hadfield called him Mr. West. No-one, not even Max Myers, knew Mr. West's given name.
When there was trouble Mr. West would go see Warden Hadfield. The meeting would be short and sour, cut and dried, all business. Mr. West would leave having satisfied Warden Hadfield completely, and Hadfield - if required - would publish a statement that kept the Penitentiary Review & Regulatory Board happy. Sumter was a community, its own world within a world, and even those who lived in the town itself believed that Penitentiary business was Penitentiary business. There had been a prison here since the War of Secession, there probably would always be a prison here, and as long as inmates weren't off escaping and raping some nice folks' daughter, then that was just fine. Folks here believed people like Mr. West were a required element of society, for without discipline there would be no society at all. See no evil, hear no evil, 'cept if it's done to you, and then… well, then there's folks like Mr. West who take care of business.
But these things are now, and there is more than ample time to talk of now.
We were speaking of a magic time, back before all of this, back before everything soured like a bruised watermelon.
A thousand summers and winters and springs and falls, and they all fold out behind me like a patchwork quilt, and beneath this quilt are the lives we led, the people we were, and the reasons we came to be here.
Thirty-six years old, and there are days when I still feel like a child.
The child I was when I met Nathan Verney at the edge of Lake Marion outside of Greenleaf, North Carolina.
Walk with me now, for though I walk slowly I do not care to walk alone.
For me, at least for me, these oh-so-quiet steps will be the longest and the last.
* * *
Chapter Two
Best as I can recall it all started with a baked ham.
I was six years old, it was summer and out there near the edge of Lake Marion the smell of the breeze off of the water was the most magical smell ever. Inside of that smell were the flowers and the fish and the trees, and summer mimosa down near Nine Mile Road, and something like pecan pie and vanilla soda all wrapped up in a basket of new-mown grass. It was all those things, and the feeling that came with them. A feeling of warmth and security and everything that was childhood in North Carolina.
I'd walk down there most every day, walk down there to the edge of the water, and sit and wait and watch the world. My ma would make sandwiches, roll them up in a piece of linen, and inside those sandwiches was the finest baked ham this side of the Georgia state line.
The little black kid that came down that Friday afternoon was the funniest kid I ever saw. Ears like jug handles, eyes like traffic lights, and a mouth that ran from ear to ear with no rest in between. He spoke first. I remember that vividly.
'What yo' doin'?' he asked.
'Mindin' my own business,' I replied, and turned away to look in another direction.
'What yo' eatin'?' the kid asked.
'Baked ham,' I said.
'Baked what?'
The kid was near me now, could've reached out and touched him.
'Baked ham,' I repeated.
Kid was so stupid he could've been run down by a parked car.
'Let me have some,' he said, and I turned, my eyes wide, so shocked he'd asked I couldn't get my breath.
'Shit me, you got some problem?' I said.
'Problem?' the kid said. 'What problem would that be then?'
I maneuvered myself off of the fallen tree where I'd been sitting and stood facing him. I clutched my sandwich in my hand.
'You don't just go up to folk who's eatin' an' ask for some of their food,' I said.
The funny-looking kid frowned. 'How come?'
"S bad manners,' I said.
'Hell, 's bad manners not to be sharin' your dinner with someone who's hungry,' the kid replied.
I shook my head. 'That'd be fine,' I replied. 'Be just fine if we weren't strangers.'
The funny-looking kid smiled, held out his hand. 'Nathan Verney,' he said.
I looked at him askance. He had one hell of a nerve, this boy.
'Nathan Verney,' he repeated. 'Please to meet you…'
'Daniel Ford,' I said, and even as I said it I wondered why I was telling him.
'So now we're not strangers no more you can gimme some sandwich.'
I shook my head. 'Knowing your name don't make us family,' I said.
Nathan Verney shrugged his shoulders. 'Fine,' he said. 'You go on eat your stoopid sandwich… sure it tastes like bad sowbelly anyhows.'
'Does not,' I replied. 'My ma makes the best baked ham in North Carolina.'
Nathan Verney laughed. 'And my ma sleeps with her eyes open and catches flies with her tongue.'
"Tis the best,' I said, defensive, irritated by this invasion of my lake.
Nathan Verney shook his head, and then he turned his mouth down at the sides in an expression of distaste. 'That there baked ham more 'an likely tastes like the sole of someone's shoe.'
And so he got the sandwich, more than half of it, because somehow he worked me on a gradient. He took a bite, he seemed non-committal, undecided, and so he took another, and then a third, and by the time he had his fourth bite of my baked ham sandwich we were both laughing, and the funny-looking black kid couldn't keep his mouth closed and he nearly choked.
Later, an hour, maybe two, he said something that would hold us together for the rest of our lives.
Six years old, ears like jug handles, eyes like traffic lights, mouth that ran from one ear to the other with no rest in between.
'Reckon yo' ma makes the best baked ham in North Carolina,' he said.
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And I knew, I really knew, that me and Nathan Verney had connected on some crucial childlike wavelength where baked ham and Lake Marion and the smell of mimosa from Nine Mile Road were the greatest things in the world.
It was 1952, a year that would see many things that were beyond our ability to reason or comprehend, things that we would only barely understand years later. Truman was President, and in June of that year Congress would override his veto and pass the Immigration Bill. A man from Illinois called Adlai Stevenson would run as the Democratic candidate and promise equal employment rights for blacks if he was elected. Marlon Brando would mesmerize the nation as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. America was growing up, and in her growing pains she would feel the threat of riot and revolt skittering somewhere in the shadows, out there along the horizon like a storm on its way.