Yes, No. 44371 knows all there is to know, and now with the mask over his face it seems like he knows too much. He knows that despite more than one hundred years of practice, perfection in the art of judicial “electro-cution” remains elusive. And so, weighing heavily now on No. 44371’s mind as they clamp the cold electrodes to his shaved legs is the botched execution in the year nineteen ninety of Jesse Tafero in Florida. During the first two cycles, smoke and flames twelve inches long erupted from poor Jesse’s head. A funeral director with some experience in these matters opined that the charred area on the top left side of his skull, about the size of a man’s hand, was a third degree burn. But Jesse was dead, sure enough.
Also on No. 44371’s mind while he waits is the glowing torch made of Pedro Medina’s head a few years later in the same Florida Chair. Witnesses reported that smoke filled the death chamber again—although no one thought it impaired visibility—and argued over whether the smell was of burnt flesh or burnt sponge from the saline-soaked pad squeezed into the copper headpiece to promote conductivity. Pathologists found a third degree burn and some charred material on Pedro’s skull, but at least his eyebrows and lashes had not been singed the way the flames had scorched Jesse Tafero’s face.
The guards tug at the leather straps around No. 44371’s chest and waist, and now he starts to blink faster and swallow harder.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when for humane reasons, society no longer destroys even rabid dogs this way—and the Electric Chair in most states has already taken its place in the museum of horrors beside disembowelment, the rack, burning at the stake, the noose, and the guillotine—No. 44371 need not have faced execution in such a brutal manner. In fact, four years before his death sentence was issued, the governor of Pennsylvania signed a law making lethal injection the preferred method of execution in the Commonwealth. But death by “Old Sparky,” as some referred to the Chair, was the one condition No. 44371 insisted upon in his agreement with the district attorney to plead guilty to two counts of kidnapping and two counts of first degree murder and irrevocably waive all his rights to appeal. When his lawyers refused to assist him in striking such a deal, he fired them on the spot.
“Maybe an injection of drugs can dull society’s conscience of what it plans to do to me,” he boldly proclaimed to his fellow death row inmates, “but I won’t take ’em! I hope my body bursts into flames and burns the prison to the ground! I want history to remember what happened to me and to the Rabuns of Kamenz! I won’t deny my actions or my beliefs for anybody! Did the martyrs in the Colosseum deny their faith? Did Christ himself? Would the world remember any of them today if they were dealt a dreamy death with the prick of a needle? When humanity nailed Jesus to a cross, it nailed itself to the cross; and when humanity electrocutes me in the Chair, it will electrocute itself in the Chair!”
Such was the courage—or the madness—of No. 44371.
The district attorney was more than happy to seek a special order from the court to accommodate the unusual request in exchange for eliminating the risk of an acquittal by reason of insanity or the endless appeals that could delay an execution, by any means, for decades if not permanently. Yet even with the guilty plea entered in the docket and the special order signed, fifteen years had passed because neither No. 44371 nor the district attorney considered the possibility of collateral appeals being filed by opponents of the use of the Electric Chair.
Now, at long last, all those appeals have been overruled. The death warrant has been signed, Old Sparky has been removed from the museum of horrors and returned to the death chamber, the possibility of a stay of execution has passed, and No. 44371 is finally about to be granted his wish. But now he is having doubts. After all those years of studying judicial electrocutions, he cannot control his panic in these final, terrifying moments. The leather mask reeks with the vomit of dead men, the copper cap scratches into his naked scalp, the electrodes dig into his legs, and his waist and limbs are lashed too tightly against the rough wood. He imagines the current crashing into his skull, detonating his brain like a bomb before plunging down his spine and fusing his gut under the intense heat, imploding his bowels; he sees it leap from his legs like a crazed demon, carrying his soul down, down into the earth. Then nothing.
No. 44371 hears the heavy breathing of the guards, heavier now than even his own breath because his lungs are afraid to breathe because the next breath might be their last.
“Mount Nittany! Mount Nittany!” he mumbles despondently, trying desperately to conjure his last glimpse of the mountain from his cell window before they removed him to the isolation chamber yesterday; he had decided this view would calm him in the final moments. And, yes, yes, the paper! It’s still in his fingers, a single sheet sent by his father, to whom he had not spoken in so many years but whose last name would now be forever inked into the annals of the condemned. On the sheet is a passage from St. Luke.
“Maybe,” wrote his father, “it will be of some comfort to you.”
But what did it say? The words! What were the words? No. 44371 has forgotten them already.
“Doug! Doug!” he cries out.
“I’m right here,” says the guard, attempting to sound reassuring while trying to steady his own nerves and bear his own fear and guilt. In these final moments there is compassion even between inmate and jailer. They’ve known each other for so long that they wonder how they’ll be able to get along without each other; but they know too there’s a job to be done and each man must play his part. There are no hard feelings.
“Doug, I can’t read it. Read it to me, Doug.”
No. 44371, whose arms are strapped to the chair, is trying to wave the sheet with his fingers and nod his head in its direction, but he’s strapped too tightly and can’t move.
“Just a second,” the guard says, turning toward the narrow slit in the wall where the executioner stands. “I think... Yeah, it looks like they’re ready now,” he says.
“Wait!” No. 44371 pleads. “Please, Doug. I can’t remember the words. I haven’t given you any trouble.”
“Okay, okay,” Doug says, “I’ve got to take it from you now, anyway.” The guard retrieves the paper and says to the executioner, “Just a second.”
“Read it, Doug,” No. 44371 cries. “Read it.”
Doug wipes away a small tear from his eye. “Okay, here’s what it says:
And there were also two other, malefactors, led with him to be put to death. And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.... And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.
But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss. And he said unto Jesus, ‘Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.’
And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.
No. 44371 takes a deep breath and smiles beneath his mask.
“Thanks, Doug,” he says gratefully. “I remember now. You’ll put it in my pocket when it’s over, right, like you promised?”
“Sure, Ott,” Doug replies, relieved now that the prisoner seems calmer. “Sure, just like I promised. We gotta get started now. It’s almost ten past.”
“Okay. Goodbye, Doug.”
“Goodbye, Ott.”
34
* * *
In life and in death, Nana Bellini kept lush pots of pink and white vinca, impatiens, marigolds, ferns, and a dozen other varieties on the front porch of her house. She planted ivy and wisteria vines in an apron around the perimeter and allowed them to pull themselves up the balustrade like children at play. The flowers perfumed the air, attracting hummingbirds and bumblebees that tormented the cats napping in the shade. Like the garden behind the ho
use, the front porch was its own little ecosystem and parable of life.
That all changed when Nana left Shemaya, leaving me alone to take care of the place. By the time Luas had come to find me after my meeting with Ott Bowles, which on earth would have been equivalent to sixty years later, everything had withered and died. Only raw piles of dirt filled the pots now, littered with fragments of dried stems and roots; the banister sagged and swayed dangerously in gusts of wind created by a thunderhead that stalked the four seasons of the valley day and night like a homicidal lover; the window panes of the house were broken, and paint peeled from the mullions and frames. The place looked as if it hadn’t been lived in for decades. There were no cats or birds, and there was no color, just a monochromatic frame. My Shemaya had turned to shades of gray.
I hadn’t seen Luas or been out of the house since the day the spirit of Otto Bowles entered my office and infected my soul. I had staggered from my office in a daze, down the long corridor, through the great hall, the vestibule, the woods, up the steps of the porch, into the house. There I stayed, behind closed doors, reliving his life again and again, horrified and fascinated. My body aged with the house over those sixty earth years; I would have been ninety-one. My hair turned gray, thin, and coarse. My face contracted into the frightened expression of an old woman, barely more than skeleton with absurd knobs of bone protruding from my chin, jaws, and forehead; and my lips disappearing into the toothless crater of a mouth without definition or color, shriveled and hardened like an earthworm baked in the sun. I slept during the day and woke in the night wet and aching all over, my bladder unable to contain fluids and my joints brittle and inflamed with arthritis. This is the way I might have looked and felt had my life not been cut short, at the age of thirty-one. Maybe Ott Bowles had done me a favor. I knew it would be Luas when I heard the knock on the door; there had been no visitors during all those years. He would be coming to say I could no longer delay the presentation: Ott Bowles was waiting in the train shed for his case to be called, and God was waiting in the Urartu Chamber to judge his soul.
Luas said nothing about the change in my appearance when I opened the door. He only smiled—that knowing grandfather’s smile of his, the way he smiled at me when I arrived in Shemaya, as if to say: Yes, my daughter, you have suffered, and it is difficult, but I would only make it worse by noticing. I offered him a seat on the porch, too embarrassed to let him in and see how run down I had allowed the house to become.
“I’d pull the switch again,” I said, in the graveled, quivering voice of an old woman, weak but defiant. “Until there was nothing left of him but ash.”
The dark anvil of the thundercloud crossed the sky. I imagined how it would feel to be pulled hot from a fire and hammered against its flank.
“Nero Claudius committed suicide,” Luas said, his face pinching into a wince while his hands groped through his pockets to find matches for his pipe. “Unlike Mr. Bowles, he cheated the world of its opportunity for justice.”
“Yes,” I said, “but did it hurt when he had you decapitated? I didn’t die right away. I can still feel the bullets tearing through my body.”
“You’ve got me there,” Luas said. “I didn’t feel a thing when the blade came down.” He struck a match, and it flared bright orange in the shadows.
“So God has a sense of humor after all,” I said. “Satan is a lawyer and carries a briefcase. What did we do to deserve all this?”
The white smoke from Luas’ pipe bubbled over the sides, too weak to rise into the wind. “I did cheer when they stoned Saint Stephen to death,” Luas said, “so I guess I had it coming. But this isn’t hell, Brek. The Urartu Chamber must be certain of our fidelity and self control. If we are impartial when presenting the souls we most despise, then the Chamber can be certain we will present all postulants with dispassion. Our motives must be pure when we enter the Chamber—we can show no favoritism or emotion. The judgment is Yahweh’s; He alone determines how Otto Bowles and Nero Claudius spend eternity.”
A blue bolt of lightning flashed across the valley, followed by a loud clap of thunder. A doe and her fawn, tiptoeing through the band of deep white snow covering the meadow, lifted their ears toward the sky, confused by the sound of thunder on such a cold day in their part of Shemaya.
Oh, take care, I wished the doe with all my heart, one mother to another. It’s not safe here. They’re after your baby, and they’re after you. Trust no one. Assume nothing. Run. Run!
“Did you know that the word justice appears more than one hundred times in the books of the Old Testament, but only four times in all of the New Testament?” Luas asked.
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“The Messiah tried to do away with justice,” Luas said. “He claimed love is the only law, and when we’re wronged, we should not seek justice against our enemies but turn the other cheek instead. It came as no surprise, of course, that he died a victim of injustice, crucified by his own words.”
“That’s why Jews make the best lawyers,” I said. “That’s not a bigoted comment, by the way; it’s a matter of theology and philosophy.”
“As a Jewish lawyer myself,” Luas said, “I completely agree. In fact, I did everything I could to bring the Messiah’s supporters to justice; but then one day I found myself blinded by his ideas, I don’t know how it happened. In the darkness, I convinced myself he was right. Oh, it was quite a conversion: I started preaching this to the people and criticizing them for appealing to the law courts.”
“You misled a lot of people,” I said.
“Yes, I did,” Luas agreed. “I first realized that when I met Elymas. He was a stubborn old Jew like me, thirsty for justice. When he opposed me, I couldn’t just turn the other cheek. I blinded him just as I had been blinded—he still carries a grudge about it even though I’ve apologized a thousand times. I went back to the old law of an eye for an eye, Brek, and I can’t tell you how good it felt. But by that point, the rabbis worried that I was becoming too dangerous and had gone too far, so they convinced the Romans to imprison me as an enemy of the state, just as they did with Jesus. I wasn’t about to give up without a fight the way he did; I demanded my right to a trial as a Roman citizen. When it looked like I couldn’t get a fair trial, I appealed to Nero Claudius. He had a good reputation in those days; nobody knew he would turn out to be such a sadistic killer. You know the rest. Nero and I meet again here every day in the afterlife. And so we happily find that even mighty emperors are brought to justice. Jesus was wrong. Justice is the only law, not love, and justice exists only when the law courts and the lawyers thrive. The Urartu Chamber is the final proof of that. The Messiah was entitled to make at least one mistake.”
The storm clouds cleared, revealing four moons in the nighttime sky: a quarter moon, a half moon, a three-quarter moon and a full moon, each set against the constellations appropriate to its season, hashing the sky into astronomical gibberish. The air cooled and I wrapped one of Nana’s shawls closer around me for warmth. Bats flickered above the trees after insects, and in the distance I could hear a great horned owl and a whippoorwill, and the bark of a lonely dog—the sounds I’d heard many nights on that porch as a child.
“Ott Bowles can speak for himself in the Chamber,” I said. “He made his choices. He doesn’t need a lawyer.”
Luas tapped his pipe against the banister to empty it of ash. “Perhaps so,” he said, “but it is justice that needs our help in the Chamber, Brek, not Ott Bowles. Presenters supply the distance that makes justice possible for the accused and the Accuser, the created and the Creator. We are the many colors in the promise of the rainbow as it fades into the horizon of eternity.”
“I am the Accuser, Luas,” I said. “There’s no need for a trial because I’ve already found him guilty. It’s time for justice to be served.”
35
* * *
I’m waiting for a clerk to come to the counter of the convenience store and holding Sarah in my arm. She’s getting fussy an
d heavy, and I’m getting impatient.
“Hello? Hello...?”
“Just a minute...,” a female voice calls from the stockroom.
The clerk finally pushes through the double-hinged doors, a young woman in her early twenties, overweight, with too much makeup and a too tight shirt. Flicking back her hair, she apologizes for the delay. She smiles at Sarah, extending two thick fingers and tugging at her tiny hand.
“How old are you?” she asks.
I lean in close to Sarah like a ventriloquist. “Say, I’m ten months.”
“What a big girl,” the clerk says. “I’ve got two little boys, one and three; they’d sure love to meet a little girl as pretty as you. What’s your name, honey?”
“Sarah,” I answer for her again.
“Hey there, Sarah. Sara Smile. That’s one of my favorite songs. You’re a cutie.”
The clerk releases Sarah’s hand and touches her nose; Sarah responds by reaching out and touching the clerk’s nose, making us all laugh. I give Sarah a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek. The clerk pulls the milk toward the register.
“Will that be all today?”
“That’s it.”
“Bag?”
“No, thanks.”
I pay and we walk back out to the car, picking up where we left off with the song that’s been playing on the cassette: “It’s almost six-twenty, says Teddy Bear, mama’s coming home now, she’s almost right there. Hot tea and bees honey, for mama and her baby....” Sarah allows me to buckle her into her car seat without fussing.
It’s a cool autumn night, already dark at 6:30. We pass a couple of other cars heading in the opposite direction on the way home, but otherwise the road is empty until a single car appears in my rearview mirror and begins following us. Coming around a bend and picking up speed on a slight downgrade, we reach a long, deserted stretch of road with corn and hay fields on both sides; the high-beam headlights of the car behind us start flashing and bursts from a red strobe light fill my rearview mirror, hurting my eyes. The red light comes from low on the windshield; I can tell it’s an unmarked patrol car. Bo had warned me he’d seen a speed trap on this stretch of road, and I was being careful to stay below the posted speed limit. Bringing to bear my expensive legal training, I’m already planning my defense as I pull off onto the berm. The officer couldn’t have clocked me with radar while following me from behind, so he must be relying on his speedometer. I decide to request a copy of the speedometer certification from the police officer at the trial—if they have them, they’re usually expired, and it’s an easy way to get out of a ticket if you know to ask. Even if I did go over the speed limit, it couldn’t have been for long; they have to record it for at least a full one-tenth of a mile; I’ll come back tomorrow and measure the distance from the bend in the road to the point where he started flashing to pull me over, which looks like less than a tenth of a mile to me.
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