I found my mother inside folding clothes. In a rush I spit out the entire sordid story, my bare foot stomping in fury. After hearing that my sister and grandfather had stood by laughing as I nearly drowned, she simply continued to fold clothes. Brow furrowed, she lit a cigarette and expelled a stream of noxious gray smoke into the air before suggesting, “Don’t put the flippers back on, then.” I was dumbfounded and my feelings were hurt. I had expected to be fussed over. Instead, no one took my trauma seriously.
Sometimes my grandfather would pass on bits of strange and highly suspect information to me, often involving the nature of feet. He had lots of time to think on these mysteries, as he spent most of his days sitting quietly in the flea market, waiting for someone to come and offer him a deal on some of his wares. He once obtained several large boxes of socks, which he proceeded to put on display. I hated those socks. There was nothing even remotely interesting about them. I strolled through the flea market inspecting all the other booths, which always held strange and fantastical devices. When you came to my grandfather’s booth there was nothing but a bunch of boring socks.
I was eating my usual summertime lunch of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and washing it down with a Scramble soda, when I started to suspect that all white people were as disdainful of those socks as I was. Every white person who approached the booth seemed to show no interest in the socks, and would almost turn their nose up if my grandfather attempted to draw their attention to his discount hosiery. I also noticed that almost every black person who happened past would buy at least one pair, sometimes several. This struck me as highly peculiar.
“How come only black people are buying the socks?” I asked Ivan in between bites of sandwich. He eyed me over the rim of his cup as he took a sip of coffee. “Because they don’t want their feet to get cold,” he answered eventually. There seemed to be some deep mystery to me here. Was there some special reason they were being protective of their feet? Did white people not care if their feet got cold? I know that I myself was opposed to cold feet, yet I had no desire to purchase flea market socks.
“Why?” I blurted in frustration. “Why don’t they want their feet to get cold?” He looked at me as if I had gone insane, frowned, and shook his head before answering with “Because if their feet get cold they die.” This was a stunning revelation. Now I was getting to the bottom of this thing. I was amazed, and wondered why no one had bothered to teach me this fact of life in school. I had one last question. “Will white people die if their feet get cold?” He chuckled, turned his back to me, and went about the business of trying to draw more customers. This conversation stuck with me for many years. I even told a guy on Death Row about it, and it became a running joke. When he was getting ready to go out into the yard on cold winter mornings, I’d yell over and remind him, “Make sure you’ve got your socks on. You know what happens when your feet get cold.” He’d laugh and say, “You and your old racist granddaddy ain’t going to trick me.”
There was one other incident in my youth that involved my grandfather and socks. For some reason I couldn’t sleep without socks on. It just didn’t feel right. I would put on my pajama bottoms and tuck them into my socks. The socks had to be pulled up almost to my knees so that it looked like a bizarre superhero’s costume. The problem was that I often didn’t change the socks for three or four days at a time. I would howl in outrage if anyone caught me and forcibly pulled them off.
This changed when my grandfather told me that sleeping with my socks on could cause my feet to burst open, because they weren’t getting any air. In my head I saw my toes exploding like kernels of popcorn. It actually caused me to have bad dreams, all of which contained bursting feet. He was always telling me something crazy, and seeming to believe it himself. I now tell my sister’s children bizarre tales, which they swear by. At least I can say I’m not sending them into a den of fire ants. Ivan was a nice man, in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. There’s not a hell of a lot more to say about him, other than that I grew to love him over time and cried like a baby when he died a few years later.
After the wedding Nanny moved from her apartment to Ivan’s house, which was in the nicer, middle-class section of West Memphis. They hadn’t been living together long when we moved in with them. By “we,” I mean me, my parents, and my sister. It was supposed to be a short-term arrangement while my father found us another place. We had hopped from place to place, and for roughly two years we lived in six states before finally crashing to a halt with my grandparents.
My mother and father slept on the bed in the guest room while my sister and I slept on the floor next to them. I remember my father’s strong arms picking me up off the floor on more than one occasion when he had been awakened by the sound of me gasping for breath, having an asthma attack. He’d carry me to the emergency room, which I despised because I knew many needles awaited my arrival. Now I actually look back on those days with a warm feeling in my heart, and I miss them. Times were simpler then.
I once asked my father how fish get into a previously empty pond, and he told me in all sincerity that they ride the rain. He believed that when water was evaporated from a lake, the fish were evaporated with it. Somehow the fish survived the process, and when it began to rain, the fish came back down with the water. There was no question in his mind about the truthfulness of the statement. Of course he also believed that you would die if you were to toss your hat onto a bed. When I asked him why fish didn’t rain down everywhere, he said they sometimes did. He told me that once when he was a kid he saw fish flapping on the highway after a rainstorm. He refused to eat them because it would bring bad luck. He was uneasy just talking about it.
After we had been there for a few months my mother and father began to fight, though I still to this day do not know what they fought about. Perhaps it was the usual strain of being broke and on hard times. Whatever the reason, my father moved out and into a motel.
They tried to work through it at first, seeing each other a couple of times a week and maintaining a relationship, sort of like dating. My father would come pick us all up on weekends and take us out to eat, or to a drive-in movie to watch the latest horror release and fill up on hot dogs and popcorn. We always watched horror movies. As a child I remember sitting up into the early hours of the morning watching horror movies with my father. I still watch horror movies and read horror novels because they remind me of “home.” Nostalgia, you could say.
At any rate, it didn’t work. I knew things between my parents were finished when I was walking home from a friend’s house one day and saw my father’s car in the driveway. As I approached I saw that the driver’s-side door was open and my father was sitting on the seat. One leg was on the ground, the other was in the car, and his face was hidden behind his hands as he cried so hard that his entire body was shaking. At first I thought he may have been laughing, until I looked up at my mother. She was standing outside the car next to him, with bloodshot eyes. When I got within arm’s length, my father grabbed me and held me while he continued to cry. It scared the hell out of me, and I had no idea what to do.
My mother gave me a saccharine-sweet explanation of how my father wasn’t going to be living with us anymore, but that he’d still come by to see my sister and me on weekends. And he did for a while. He’d come get us and take us to visit my aunt or grandparents on his side of the family. It all came to an end soon enough, though.
Four
It wasn’t long before my mother met someone else. I would have been in third grade at the time. His name was Jack Echols and he was twenty years older than my mother, though you wouldn’t guess it by looking at her. A steady diet of greasy fried food, cigarettes, no exercise, and a dead-end life had all come together to give my mother the look of years she didn’t yet own by the age of twenty-five or so when they were married. I’ve never encountered a single person in my life who had anything good to say about Jack. He was a hateful bastard who only grew worse with age.
A
fter breaking up with my father, my mother started going to a Protestant church not far from our house. This is where she met Jack, who had been attending services there for an eternity, or at least since Jesus, the carpenter, built the place with his very own hands.
I can still close my eyes and see the first time I noticed him. Church had just come to an end, and I rushed out into the parking lot to play a quick game of tag with all the other little heathens when I looked up to see Jack walking out the front door with his arm around my mom. My mind snapped to attention like a dog’s ears standing up at a strange sound. It interested me only for a moment; then I went back to what I was doing. I felt a great deal of resentment toward her, and I clearly recall one day when she found me crying and asked me what was wrong.
I told her that I wanted to live with my father, to which she responded, “Well, he doesn’t want you to.” I knew he had never said any such thing, but it still hurt to hear it. She couldn’t imagine the depth to which such a remark wounded me; she informed me that she had already told my father that she would soon be getting remarried, and I had better start getting used to the idea. At any rate, the moment she said that, I felt as if there were no comfort to be found anywhere in the world. I felt so cold inside, and there was nowhere to turn. By the look on her face I could tell she took pleasure in informing me of this. It wasn’t a happy or gleeful expression—it seemed more defiant than anything. I felt like Jekyll and Hyde—part of me still wanted to seek some sort of comfort from her, for her to tell me that everything was going to be okay. The other part wanted to say things that would go straight to her heart and hurt her the way I was hurting.
* * *
At home I used to walk through emotional wastelands where the lines on craggy faces were so deep that the wind whistled through them. People fell in and out of my life, but it was the places that really mattered. Even now I can feel them tugging at my sleeve and spinning around in my head. All the old stories have it wrong, because it’s not the ghost that haunts the house; it’s the house that haunts the ghost. I feel lost out here, and everything reminds me that I’m not quite real. In the end it’s always home that damns us.
My days have somehow become as rich and twisted as the kudzu vines that grew around my grandmother’s house back home. It’s almost too much to take, and my heart is on the verge of breaking. I’m overwhelmed with things I can’t even articulate. I’m haunted by the way overhanging leaves used to cast reflections on asphalt puddles. I want to go home. Never have I wanted anything so badly. Ghosts are using my head for a neon disco, and I want to go home. My heart is a haunted house that I cannot leave behind. Everything here vibrates slower than mud, and no one has a soul.
Time spoils quickly in here, and it smells like rotten meat. Every day adds a little more weight, barely noticeable at first, but eventually it will crush you to death. In this place your life can be measured by how long you can keep fighting. The ghouls can sense it if you have any life behind your eyes, and they move in to extinguish it. The guards, the prisoners, the administration—the energy spirals downward forever, creating a hellish staircase that leads nowhere. The most frightening part is how they’re all too thick to realize what they’re doing. They seem to believe that if they keep digging in the same hole, they’ll eventually reach heaven.
My exhaustion is beyond bone-deep. It has seeped into my soul, and every day it robs me of a little more of what I once was. Of what I was meant to be. There is no rest here, and there is no life. When I try to look ahead the light seems a little farther away each day. There is despair on my breath and no savior in sight. They say it’s death only if you accept it, but more and more these days I’m feeling like I don’t have a choice. I keep saying to myself, “I will not stop. I will not stop.” If for no other reason than that I will it to be so. If everything else fails, I will keep moving ahead on willpower alone. There has to be some magick in something, somewhere.
I caught a glimpse of my shadow today. It’s usually so hard to see because it always hides behind me. It’s so much easier to see everyone else’s.
* * *
My mother and Jack never did go out on dates more than a handful of times, and it seemed that most of their conversations took place in that cursed parking lot. After church my grandmother would arrive to pick us up, being smart enough to avoid the place herself. My mother, sister, and I would all get in the car, then Jack would come dragging out at the end of the herd and cut a path straight to us. My mother would roll down her window and he would stand there talking to her until every other car had left the lot and our brains were cooking in our heads from the heat of the brutal summer sun. Years later when I heard the teachings on purgatory, that’s what I imagined it to be like—not quite hell, but bad enough to make you curse the bastard hanging on to the window and forcing you to grow old in this desolate place.
Jack was bald on top, but he practiced the art of the comb-over. He had a ring of hair that grew around his ears, and he would comb it over the top of his head, which was as bald as an egg. Most of his teeth were missing, and the few he had left were yellow and crooked like old tombstones. His skin had been cooked to the texture of leather by the sun, and his stomach was bloated with ulcers. I wondered what appealed to my mother about such a creature, but the answer is quite simple. Jack Echols was the very first man to pay attention to my mother after my father left, and that’s all it took. She was striving for attention, and he gave it to her.
Jack had forced us to start attending services at a place called The Church of God. It was a real freak show where people spoke in tongues and rolled around on the floor screaming when they “had the spirit.” The minister was a morbidly obese man whom you could hear breathing from across the room.
Twice every Sunday, once in the morning and once at night, he would preach about how the end of the world was at hand. Before leaving he always got out a bottle of olive oil and asked if anyone had any infirmities that needed to be healed. Anyone who stepped forward would have olive oil smeared on their face before being shoved to the ground amid a flurry of shouting while a horde of rabid believers waved their hands in the air and howled at the ceiling.
This made quite an impression on my young, fourth-grade mind, and I gave quite a bit of thought to all the miracles I could perform if only I had that bottle of magick oil. My sister went up to be “healed” many times, because she had been very hard of hearing since she was a baby and always had to have some sort of tubes inserted into her ears. She never fell on the floor quivering, and never could hear any better.
My mother’s wedding to Jack was nice enough as far as white-trash shindigs go. The wedding ceremony was in an old church that stood next to the highway. Our family came, Jack’s family came, and any observer could point out who belonged on each side. Jack had six kids, the oldest of whom was only a year or two younger than my mother. He had four sons and two daughters, all older than me, ages seventeen to about twenty-four. His daughter Sharon and son Barney lived with us at this time. There was no music, no flowers, and not much of a reception afterward. My mother wore a blue gauzy dress and Jack was in his shirtsleeves. He didn’t even put on a tie. The ceremony was incredibly short, and after Jack slipped the minister ten dollars for his trouble, everyone climbed back into their cars.
Jack was pretty bad at this point, but not nearly as bad as he would later become. He forced us to go to this church three times a week, giving us no choice in the matter. He was one of the most hateful people I’ve ever encountered, yet he was always in church. Now I know this is nothing unusual, that it’s more the rule than the exception, but back then I couldn’t comprehend it. He stood guard every night as he made my sister and me kneel down next to the bed and pray. We had a small dog, a Chihuahua named Pepper, and I once saw him punch the dog with a closed fist because she dared to hop up on the bed while he was praying.
After making us go to this ghoul’s wasteland of a church for several months, he announced that we would be moving i
nto the church itself. The place we moved to almost defies description, because it was neither house nor apartment. The back rooms of the church had been converted into a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room, so that it could be rented out to bring in more money for the church. It wasn’t bad, really. Only the kitchen and bathroom had windows, so the rest of the place was dark and cool like a cave. At least we had more room than in the apartment, and I was in a new school closer to where I considered home to be.
Jack only ever committed two acts of undisguised violence against me, and both were around this point in time. The first happened in the kitchen one Saturday morning. I was sitting at the table looking over my sticker collection, which I had recently become a fanatic about. I coveted stickers more than anything else on earth and had quite the little album of them. My mother was cooking, and Jack stood blocking the doorway. I got up and tried to squeeze past him, with the intention of going to watch cartoons. I could feel the rage in him as he shoved me across the kitchen and into the refrigerator door, where the handle gouged my back. I lost my balance and fell to the floor.
When I started to cry, my mother looked up with no real sense of urgency and asked, “Why did you do that?”
He bellowed, “He has to learn he can’t bully his way around here!”
I had no idea what he was talking about, which only served to scare me. It’s frightening to be punished when you have no idea what you’ve done wrong.
The second act of violence was a “spanking.” I can’t remember what it concerned, but I had been arguing and pleading with my mother, attempting to get her to change her mind about something she had forbidden me to do or have. I can no longer remember what the argument was about, but I remember Jack’s reaction as though it were yesterday. He grabbed me and slammed me down on the bed with such force that I bounced off and landed on the floor. He slung me back onto the bed and began hitting me with rage. The most frightening part was the way he went into a frenzy, cursing (this is the only time I ever heard him curse) and turning blood-red.
Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Page 4