by Ninie Hammon
There was also a boring network of cracked sidewalks. The cracks no longer seemed comforting to Mac, just annoying; had to watch your step where tree roots had bowed up the concrete or you’d trip and go sprawling.
“’Lo, Preach! Howya doin’?”
The carpenter who’d built the addition on the church tipped his John Deere cap as he got into his pickup truck across the street. Hats and footwear were the Southwest version of clan tartans. Ranchers and cowboys wore Stetson hats and Tony Lama boots; farmers and everybody else wore square-toed, leather work boots and broad-billed caps advertising the tractor they drove or the ball team they cheered for.
“Fine. You?” Mac called back breathlessly and kept running. Over the years, the folks in town had gotten used to the preacher’s odd hobby, what Jonas called “running when wasn’t even nothin’ chasin’ you.”
He crossed the street in front of the library, dodged around the Book Mobile bound for an isolated crossroads somewhere in Durango County, and headed toward the town square.
In the center of the square sat the courthouse, an imposing, three-story, granite structure with four white columns on a wide porch, a domed roof, and an ornate belfry—sans bells. Loud speakers there blasted non-stop Christmas carols as soon as the live nativity scene was erected out front the first week of December every year. They also shrieked an occasional tornado or air raid warning siren—just as a test, of course. Graham had never actually been in the path of a twister or a nuclear warhead, at least as far as anybody knew. On the expansive courthouse lawn, massive cottonwood trees drizzled sticky white fluff on benches where old timers whiled away their days chewing tobacco, spitting, whittling, and telling lies.
Mac had gotten a late start this morning, which was good because it was going on nine o’clock now, so he’d miss all the school bus traffic and the parade of moms dropping their kids off. But he’d also missed Joy. Up half the night doing the two-step with chronic insomnia, he’d finally dozed off and then overslept. By the time he made it out of bed, she’d already left for school. He couldn’t keep doing that, couldn’t keep missing connections with her. She needed him. He had to get some routine back into their lives. She was just a kid and she needed that, too. So did he. Oh, how he longed for the return of the ordinary: days melting into nights and blooming into days again, over and over until he felt snug and safe in their endlessness.
He hit Main Street and turned down it toward the square, past the Trim Your Rim Barber Shop, smelled the aroma of lilac vegetal in old men’s hair and talcum powder on their shaved necks. He swerved around one of the church deacons as he crossed in front of Simpson’s Grocery.
“Hey, Mac. I need to talk to you ’bout—” the deacon began.
“The office. Later,” Mac panted over his shoulder. “Try me. After ten.”
“But I need—”
Mac kept running.
Yeah, the deacon needed him. They all did.
He picked up his pace. With no hills to train on—the state road department had graciously bulldozed a big mound of dirt so Graham could hold a soapbox derby—he varied his speed to change the rhythm of his workout. Around the square. Past the police station and the fire station and the newspaper office. A couple of cops waved and Mac waved back. The newspaper editor was getting out of his car as Mac ran by and he stood with his arm resting on the top of the car door, nodded his head but didn’t speak.
Mac nodded back and kept running.
He turned it up another notch, determined not to slow his pace until he made it to the post office at the end of the block.
How many miles, altogether?
Melanie had tried to calculate it once.
Her face burst so perfectly into his consciousness it was like taking a fist in the belly. The blow staggered him, knocked him off his stride, and he gave in—not to the stitch in his side, but to the pain in his heart— stumbled to a stop, put his hands on his knees, and gasped.
Then, with a little inward groan that was probably audible, he let go, allowed himself to topple over the precipice into memory. He’d tried hard not to live in the past, to stay in the day, focus on reality, but as he walked slowly to the stop sign in front of the post office, he let himself wallow in the beauty of her face and the sound of her voice and the smell of her hair—like strawberries. Melanie’s hair had always smelled like strawberries.
“I figured it all out, if you want to know.”
Melanie is sitting in the swing on the porch of that little house behind the church in Arkansas, rocking slowly back and forth, a pad and pencil on her lap. “Calculated how many miles you’ve run altogether.”
Mac is sprawled on the porch steps, catching his breath after a six-miler, listening to the eech-eech, eech-eech of the swing and watching the fireflies flicker under the willow tree in the front yard. He is wiping his face with a dish towel.
“How far?”
“Almost 10,000 miles.”
He turns to look at her.
“How do you figure that?”
“I took an average of three miles a day and multiplied it—”
“But I ran more than that in high school, and I didn’t run at all when—”
“I know that, let me finish. I added the miles from—”
“And what about the summer before seminary?”
“I counted that.”
“’Cause I ran a lot—”
“I started today.”
“What?”
“Started my period. I’m not pregnant.”
Melanie is like that. She’ll be talking about one thing and right in the middle she’ll switch subjects to something else entirely.
Her lower lip starts to tremble.
“Oh, Mel, I’m sorry.” He gets up and goes to her, sits down on the porch swing beside her. He wants to put his arm around her, draw her close, but he’s sweaty from the run so he just takes her hand. “Maybe next month. We’ll try again.” He tries to lighten it up, leans close and whispers in her ear. “You know how much I like to try! In fact, my favorite thing in the whole wo—”
“Why won’t God give us a baby, David?”
She calls him David. Every other human being in the world, including his own parents, calls him Mac, but Melanie calls him David.
“Is that what you think, that God’s punishing us?”
“Well … is he?” She drops her chin to her chest and the tears that have been sliding down her cheeks begin to fall into her lap.
Mac reaches over, lifts her chin, and turns her face toward him.
“God is not denying us a baby because we ticked him off about something. That’s not how he operates.”
“Then why?”
“I don’t know why. But I do know—”
“Oh, I do, too! I just …”
She bursts out sobbing then. That’s another thing about Melanie. She doesn’t ratchet up from sniffling to crying to sobbing. It’s usually all or nothing.
He wraps his arms around her, sweaty or not, and pulls her to him, patting her on the back, his face buried in her hair—curls the color of honey with the sweet scent of strawberries.
“Hey now, it’s okay. I love you. Shhhh.”
He holds her, crooning her name, pushing the swing gently back and forth until she’s cried herself out. It doesn’t take long. Melanie’s emotions are like spring storms—sudden, sometimes violent, and over quickly.
And like the sky after a storm, the sun is soon shining again.
“That’s how I got to calculating how far you’d run,” she says into his shoulder when the sobbing subsides.
“What’s how?”
“I was adding it up, you know, calculating when I was supposed to start and I … oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter because I’m not late.” She heaves a sigh, takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “And my math was all wrong about your running, too. You want spaghetti for supper or tacos?”
Spaghetti or tacos. That’s Melanie.
“How about a gr
illed-cheese sandwich?”
She takes the dish towel out of his hand and starts to wipe away her tears. “You serious? Do you really—ugh!” She chucks the towel back into his lap. “Phew, that stinks!” She sits up. “And so do you!” She playfully shoves at him. “Get away from me.”
“That’s not what you say when you’re trying to have a baby!”
He is instantly sorry. Mr. Sensitivity!
“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
“You think maybe I should go to another doctor?”
He’s lost count of how many they’ve been to already. They’d stopped “using protection” on their second anniversary—five years ago.
“If it’ll make you feel better, sure, go ahead.”
“I’m glad you feel that way because I already called a specialist in Little Rock and made an appointment for Friday.”
She hops down out of the swing and starts for the door. “A grilled-cheese taco with spaghetti sauce—right? Or I could grill the spaghetti…” And she is gone.
He bows his head and prays, as he’d done hundreds of times before, “Lord, please, give us a child.”
And just a few weeks later, he’s out telling anybody who’ll listen how God answered that prayer, not when they wanted or how they expected, but he had given them joy. Joy!
Honk! Honk!
Mac jumped back on the curb as a pickup truck sped by and the farmer behind the wheel gave him a dirty look and flipped him the bird. Couldn’t blame the man, Mac had stepped right out in front of him. Wasn’t looking where he was going.
He took a deep breath, shook himself like a dog climbing out of a creek, and tried to rid himself of the gloom that clung to him like a swarm of gnats all the time.
No way to live, all hunkered down, just toughing it out.
He started running again and the five miles seemed to last forever. Was he that seriously out of shape? No, it was carrying the dead weight of grief and despair around with him that slowed him down, that made every effort at anything in life twice as difficult.
Home, quick shower, and into his office behind the sanctuary of New Hope Community Church by 10 o’clock. He was grateful Lillian wasn’t in yet; she’d said on Friday she had a doctor’s appointment this morning. No matter what time he got in, if she’d been sitting at her desk a minute longer, she gave him the scolding, third-grade teacher look that pronounced him guilty on the spot—no judge or jury needed, thank you very much—of the sins of slovenliness and laziness.
Oh, how he longed for the day he wouldn’t have to greet that look every morning.
And what would he greet? What would his mornings look like after Sunday?
Don’t know, don’t care. Just know they’ll be different. And right now, different is good enough.
The phone rang before he got settled behind his desk. The voice sounded familiar, but it was a moment before Mac could place it. The caller was Oran Blackburn, the warden of the Oklahoma State Women’s Penitentiary, the ugly stone structure that sat isolated out on the prairie northeast of town.
“I need your help, Mac,” Blackburn said.
“What can I do for you?”
“You can take Ralph Beecher’s place this afternoon at 2:30.”
Beecher was the pastor of the Assembly of God Church and the chaplain at the prison. He was a weird little man who’d come to Oklahoma from eastern Kentucky two years before with what the old-timers called “the smell of hot sulfur on his coat tails.” His sermons were tirades against the evils of drink; he saw a demon behind every bush. He’d even hinted at a history of snake handling during his ministry in the mountains, and that was way too weird for the good citizens of Graham, Oklahoma, in the spring of 1963.
“What was Ralph supposed to do this afternoon that you’re trying to sucker me into doing for him?”
“He was scheduled to see Emily Prentiss, the woman we’re executing Friday. The law says we have to provide her a minister in her last days. She’s never asked for one before but she’s asking now, and Ralph’s out of commission, got the gout, can’t get out of bed. Can you cover it, Mac?”
Mac groaned and then caught himself, hoped Blackburn didn’t hear him.
“Listen, Oran, I’m swamped. Can’t you get—
“Hey, I’ve tried, looked into everybody I could think of, ‘cause I know you’re … ” embarrassingly pregnant pause “… that you haven’t gotten all the way back up to speed yet.”
Blackburn was a member of Mac’s congregation and there couldn’t have been a man, woman, child, or pet gerbil among his 250-member flock who wasn’t aware that their pastor was not doing well. No, sirree, not doing well at all.
“Says she’s protestant, so that leaves out Father Liam and that new guy—what’s his name?—the Eastern Orthodox minister. And I called …”
Mac tuned out as Blackburn rattled off the member list of the Durango County Ministerial Association. Each, for one good reason or another, was unavailable to offer spiritual comfort to a dying woman this afternoon at 2:30.
Of course, not a one of them was any more unavailable than the Reverend David McIntosh. Couldn’t get more unavailable than Mac, but it appeared he was stuck with the job.
He could go on autopilot. It wasn’t like it was the first time he’d faked it.
“Okay, okay, Oran,” Mac interrupted. “Point made. Looks like I’m your man. How about I meet you in your office at a quarter after two. That suit?”
“Make it 1:30.” Mac caught an odd undercurrent in his voice. “It’ll take awhile to brief you about the inmate and the protocol.”
“What’s to brief? You think I don’t know who Emily Prentiss is and what she did?”
Emily Prentiss’s crime was the kind of gruesome horror folks would have remembered even if she wasn’t about to become the first woman executed in Oklahoma in more than half a century. And even if she hadn’t been related to the controversial Amos Jackson Prentiss, a foaming-at-the-mouth opponent of the growing movement to desegregate schools and businesses in the South. The local newspaper had carried stories over the years about the various appeals in Prentiss’s case, and the state press would be on this story like sour on pickles, sending in the big guns. The protesters would likely be out in force, too. If the execution of Elizabeth Duncan last August in California was any indication, Graham was in store for quite a circus by Friday.
“Not briefed about her story, just warned about her … peculiarities. She’s real different, Mac. You need to know that going in.”
“Fine, Oran. See you at half past one.”
Mac replaced the receiver, leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. What could he possibly find to say to a woman who was about to die?
Chapter 5
Joy had art class right before study hall/activity period, the forty-five-minute time slot before lunch when students could remain in their classrooms and study or attend one of the various clubs that met in different locations all over the school.
All the “futures” met in designated areas in the cafeteria. FFA, Future Farmers of America; FTA, Future Teachers of America; FHA, Future Homemakers of America. The Rodeo Club met in the animal show barn by the bus shed. The Thespians Club met on the stage in the auditorium. The Beta Club met in the library.
Most of the 500 or so students of Durango County High School went to some club meeting rather than twiddle their thumbs for forty-five minutes waiting to be dismissed for lunch. Joy was a member of several different organizations, was the fourth vice president of FHA, though she wouldn’t be for long unless she memorized the purpose statement she was supposed to recite from memory in two weeks at the end-of-school banquet.
When the bell rang, the other students started gathering up their things, but she continued to paint. She’d worked all period on a new watercolor. It was an expressionistic piece. Or impressionistic. One or the other. At the top of the page she’d painted a big colorful circle with a little tail, like a tadpole, and fitting spoon f
ashion beneath it, she’d painted a smaller one. She’d named the painting “Momma Comma.”
She’d been so intent on the piece that Mrs. Stevenson, the sweet, dithered art teacher, had noticed her interest and commented on it. She hadn’t even stopped long enough to cut up with the other girls at her table, Sherry and Rhonda Jo, who’d only taken art as an elective and couldn’t have drawn a stick figure without tracing it from a coloring book.
“Aren’t you coming?” Sherry asked when she noticed Joy was still working. Sherry was wearing her new Ben Casey blouse. Joy had been dying to have one, back when she had a life and cared about such things.
“Can’t,” Joy said, stepped back and looked at her work. “I’m right in the middle now and I can’t just leave it.” Even Sherry knew you had to keep working in watercolors or they’d dry.
“What’ll we tell Mr. Moore?” Rhonda Jo adjusted the pink bow in her ratted hair above her bangs and then gathered up her books. “He said he’d have some scripts for us to look at.” She popped her gum as she spoke. “You know he’ll want to know what you think.”
Mr. Moore was the speech and drama teacher and the sponsor of the Thespians Club. Joy loved to act and had been in every play he’d directed since her freshman year, when she’d landed the lead in Annie Get Your Gun. She was one of his favorites. Everyone knew it. She had played Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn, the mayor’s wife, in The Music Man, the junior class play last fall, even though she was only a sophomore. At the cast party, she’d pleaded with Mr. Moore to do The Wizard of Oz as the Thespian Club’s summer production this year, had started practicing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” with her mom, before …
“Just tell him the truth, that I had an art project to finish.” She hadn’t meant to sound snappish, but that’s how it came out.