All Their Yesterdays

by Ninie Hammon

  Mac groaned.

  “Yeah, its ugly. Only thing uglier is the protesters, who should start arriving sometime Thursday—the early birds’ll probably show up the day before. And this facility sits out here on the prairie like a bump on a pickle with absolutely no way to contain them.”

  “And that’s a problem because …?”

  “Because protesters are nuts! Did you see what that woman did at Joe Polechek’s execution in Alabama? Chained herself to the front gate. Handcuffed one arm to the gate, the other arm to the fence, then swallowed the handcuff key. Couldn’t open the gate without tearing her apart. Which, in my opinion, was the only reasonable thing to do under the circumstances.”

  Mac chuckled.

  “I fail to see the humor in that, Reverend McIntosh. Frankly, I’ve been thinking about saving up my own feces to throw at the protesters.”

  Mac let go then, a full belly laugh that finally ignited a smile on Blackburn’s face.

  The warden sat back in his chair with a sigh. “Hey, that’s what the great state of Oklahoma pays me the big bucks for, right.”

  He paused, looked hard at Mac, and shifted gears. “That’s my story, so … how are you?”

  Oh, we most certainly are not going to go there!

  “Gettin’ by,” Mac said.

  Blackburn surely recognized that for what it was—a crock of the warm, sticky substance on the south side of a horse going north. The man was in Mac’s congregation. He hadn’t missed the signs in the past six months of … of what? Mac had no idea what word to tack onto it, what label to give it. What toe-tag to attach to it—cause of death: “unknown.” No, probably a simple “natural causes.”

  Since Melanie died, Mac had not performed any of a long list of ministerial duties that ranged from hospital visitation to preparing the church’s annual budget. His sermons had gone from lackluster—and that was while he was still in shock or they wouldn’t have been that good—to stumbling, to monosyllabic to … non-existent. Got up three Sundays ago and couldn’t speak, couldn’t say a word. Just sat back down. After some very pregnant silence, the organist dutifully cranked out a few more songs, the song-leader led the congregation in a couple more hymns, they passed the offering plate, had a closing prayer, and everybody packed up and went home.

  Last two weeks, they’d had “guest speakers.”

  Oh, but Mac was going to preach this Sunday. Yes sirree, he was going to deliver the sermon he’d been writing in his head for years!

  “Listen, Mac, I, we, understand that—”

  “Thanks, Oran. Really, I mean it, thanks. But I’ve got a killer day today and I had to squeeze this ‘pastoral visit’ in between appointments. So if we could just … what am I doing here? I was a chaplain in the military but I’m not sure the same skills apply.”

  Oran gazed at him for a moment with the kind of sincere sympathy Mac had come to loathe in the past half year. Then he turned back to the business a hand.

  “You’re here because death row inmates are entitled to spiritual comfort in their final days. That’s what the chaplain—and in our case, that’s you—is here to provide to Emily Prentiss.”

  “So tell me about her. A Readers’ Digest Condensed version; it’s not like I’m getting into a long-term counseling relationship with the woman.”

  “She’s epileptic, pretty severe grand mal seizures, but she refuses medication.”

  “How come?”

  “Won’t say.”

  “Can’t you force—?”

  “Nope. If she doesn’t want to take medicine, the state can’t make her.”

  “But why—

  Blackburn held up his hand. “Mac, you need to deep-six all questions that begin with ‘why’ because the answer to the whole bunch of them is ‘I don’t know.’ Where Emily Prentiss is concerned, nobody knows much of anything.”

  Blackburn reached out, picked up the coffee pot, and looked a question at Mac. “You sure?”

  Mac nodded and Blackburn poured himself a cup.

  “Let me tell you what I do know,” he said. “She was on the Long Dark when I—”

  “The Long Dark?”

  The warden rolled his eyes. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t name it. Death row in this prison’s been called the Long Dark for as far back as anybody can remember.”

  “Spooky.”

  “In case it escaped your notice, this place’s old, Mac. Outdated. And just last fall our esteemed representatives in the Oklahoma legislature voted down, yet again, a tax bill that would have provided the funds either to renovate it or, as I have recommended repeatedly and obnoxiously over the years, bulldoze the whole place off into a gully somewhere and start over. The Long Dark’s in a wing on the west side, in the oldest building here. There’s a covered walkway from the door on the end of it to the building where … well, come here, I’ll show you.”

  Blackburn got up and crossed to the window behind his desk. It looked out into the quad, an area enclosed by the administration building on the east side and three other gray-stone buildings. The admin building was four stories tall, the other buildings three each, with no windows facing the quadrangle on any of the ground floors, bars on the two-by-three foot windows in the cell blocks and piles of razor wire on the rooftops. Guard towers stood sentinel at the four corners of the enclosed square, tall enough that in addition to the area encircled by the four buildings, the guards could see the open area between the buildings and the inner fence and the no-man’s land between it and the fence that formed the outside perimeter of the prison. Though the quad’s space was sectioned off into separated areas that contained space for volleyball and basketball courts, none of the inmates was playing a sport. The areas were mostly bare cages where human zoo animals stood grazing on the concrete, alone or in small herds.

  Blackburn pointed to a one-story appendage that jutted out from the side of the building that formed the western wall of the quadrangle.

  “That’s the Long Dark, on the side of building two, which was the whole prison for the first fifteen years it operated. The other three buildings went up courtesy of FDR and the WPA. They built the Iron House for maximum security prisoners and then added on a death row as a separate cell block later on.”

  Blackburn sighed. “Don’t know exactly when that was, but judging from the condition of the place, I’d say it was constructed shortly after the Ark went aground.”

  He leaned over and gestured toward the end of the Long Dark.

  “See that building just beyond it, the one that looks like a Quonset hut?”

  Mac nodded.

  “That’s where the chair’s located.” Blackburn looked pained. “It’s got a name, too. They all do; every prison’s electric chair is called something. Here it’s Sizzlin’ Suzie. Back when this was a men’s prison, the guards would say a death row inmate, ‘had a date with Suzie.’ And when he was executed, they’d say he—” The warden caught himself. “‘—made it with ole Suz.’”

  Mac lifted an eyebrow to indicate he knew that probably wasn’t the phrase they’d used.

  “As you can see, there are gates in the fence in front of the Long Dark and a parking lot beside it, so folks who show up just for an execution have easy access.” He gestured toward the open plains beyond the prison. “And if it weren’t so barren out here—”

  “You’re not from Oklahoma, are you?” Mac interrupted.

  “What was your first clue?” Blackburn pointed toward the gates. “If the topography were a little more cooperative, I wouldn’t have so much trouble keeping the protesters at the front gate on the eastern side of the building and away from that entrance point. But I’m not holding out much hope for that, unless the highway patrol post in Durant sends more troopers. And they won’t.”

  He turned and headed back to his chair. Mac sat back down and Blackburn picked up his coffee cup, took a sip, and made a face. “Cold.” He replaced the cup and looked at Mac. “Emily Prentiss had already been here for six years when I became the wa
rden here in 1955. Emily was seventeen, tried as an adult when she was convicted, and she’s been in solitary confinement in the Long Dark for going on fourteen years now.”

  “Solitary! For fourteen years?”

  “Death row inmates are segregated from the general population. That’s why there’s a separate cell block. But she’d have been in solitary or something like it for a couple of reasons even if she hadn’t gotten the death penalty. You kill a kid and you don’t last long in gen pop. Too many mothers in here. They won’t tolerate a baby killer.”

  “I don’t imagine the colored inmates have much use for Jackson Prentiss’s daughter, either.”

  Blackburn nodded. “That’s the second reason.”

  Jackson Prentiss. The Reverend Amos Jackson Prentiss, rumored to be the national Grand Poobah, or whatever they called it, of the Ku Klux Klan, he currently served as the chaplain of the Alabama State Legislature. Chummy with Gov. George Wallace, his “prayer” to open the legislature’s spring session had been a vitriolic tirade against the “nigra communists” in the NAACP, and a plea that God would pour out righteous vengeance on the “growing black menace” plotting to mongrelize the races. Mac had seen an excerpt from the prayer on the Huntley-Brinkley Report.

  In the past five or six years, Prentiss had emerged as the spokesman for religious bigots across the South who trolled the scriptures until they hooked some obscure verse they could pluck the scales off and fry up to justify their hatred of colored people. The man was slick, photographed well, and had a smooth, fatherly delivery. Almost understated.

  It hadn’t always been that way, though. Mac had been in Little Rock on the Fourth of July, 1954, and happened to catch one of Prentiss’s campaign speeches at a rally in the park. A candidate for the local school board, Prentiss had outlined a one-plank platform: rabid opposition to the recent decision by the Supreme Court in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the ruling that declared school segregation unconstitutional. The man had looked like a snake charmer, weaving back and forth, his voice a singsong rant, his eyes open too wide and little specks of white spittle in the corners of his mouth. Even then, before Prentiss had become the national mouthpiece for white segregationists, Mac had seen it. Jackson Prentiss was either crazy or evil. He now believed the man was both.

  “Are there other inmates besides her on death row?” he asked. “She hasn’t been in that whole wing by herself all this time, has she?”

  “There have been times over the years she was the only one, I think. But even now she might as well be. Death row inmates don’t share cells. There are ten cells in the Long Dark and right now five of them are occupied. Prentiss has been there the longest. The cells are arranged so there’s no direct sightline into another cell, even through the slit in the door, and the prisoners are scattered—”

  “Slit in the door? There aren’t bars?”

  “There are bars on the cells in the rest of the prison. Long Dark’s got solid doors with a slit for food trays. Beginning to figure out why they call it the Long Dark?”

  “Sheesh!”

  “Death row inmates take a bath or shower in the bathroom at the end of the hall once a week and get an hour a day in the exercise yard—by themselves. That’s it.”

  “Can you say ‘cruel and unusual punishment’?”

  “I don’t make the rules, I just—”

  “That was a cheap shot. Sorry.”

  “And you need to keep in mind how she landed in the Long Dark. Emily Prentiss confessed to decapitating her two-year-old sister. Described in graphic detail how she chopped the body into little pieces and threw the pieces in the river. The only remains they ever found of that child, if I recall, was her hair on the ax Prentiss used to—”

  “Okay,” Mac interrupted, “you made your point.” He started to rise. “I think I know everything I need to know.”

  “Sit down, Mac. I haven’t gotten to the good part yet.”

  Mac sat back down.

  Blackburn looked uncomfortable. “Emily Prentiss is … well, she’s … different.” He ran his hand over his bald head, an unconscious gesture to smooth down hair that hadn’t been there in twenty years. “She’s …”

  “Come on, Oran, spit it out. She’s what?”

  “She knows things. Things she couldn’t possibly know.”

  “Like?”

  “Like a guard on the Long Dark was getting beat up by her boyfriend and Prentiss knew it.”

  “So she saw some bruises and a black eye.”

  “She never saw the guard’s face. Couldn’t. Slit in the door, remember?”

  “Okay, she heard something and figured it out.”

  “She knew that another inmate, a woman in gen pop she’d never met, was dead in her cell. Brain hemorrhage. But Prentiss knew, talked a guard into going to check on her.”

  Mac said nothing, just listened.

  “She knew that the guard, the one who was getting beat up, was in danger. Another guard overheard her begging the woman not to go home.”

  “And?”

  “And she went home. Soon as she got there, her boyfriend beat her to death with a claw hammer.”

  Mac was beginning to feel very uncomfortable. “What’s your point, Oran?”

  “I’m just telling you what I know. A prison is the quintessential small town. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. There are no secrets here. And among the residents of this small town, Emily Prentiss is known as a mystic, a psychic, a witch, Joan of Arc … Something.”

  “Just because—”

  “She sings songs in an incredible voice in the exercise yard and you can hear her all over the … I’m telling you, Mac, you need to be prepared for her voice. It’s deep, almost like a man’s, and odd-sounding.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “The songs aren’t … songs. No melody you can recognize and in a language nobody can identify. And, of course, she has fits and a lot of inmates don’t understand what that is.”

  “I don’t care what the inmates and guards understand. What do you have to say about her, Oran?”

  The warden let out a long sigh, started to reach for the coffee cup, and remembered that it was cold. Then he reached for it anyway, turned it up, and took a couple of long gulps.

  “I’m just going to tell you this, straight out. No commentary. You figure out for yourself what it means, if it means anything at all.”

  Blackburn described a day several years before when he was still new on the job. He’d been called to the Long Dark by a guard with an idea to convert a couple of unused cells there into badly needed storage space.

  “When Prentiss heard my voice, she called out to me through the slot in her door.”

  Blackburn got up abruptly, walked over to the window, and looked out. Then he turned back to Mac.

  “She kept hollering until I finally got a guard to unlock her cell and I went in to talk to her. She told me I needed to go home. Right then. That my wife needed me.”

  He turned back and faced the window.

  “Did you go home, Oran?”

  “Of course not; I blew her off,” he said without turning around. “What was I going to do, dash out to my car and go barreling home because some crazy woman on death row said I should?”

  Mac’s voice was quiet. “What happened, Oran?”

  Blackburn sighed, shoved his hands into his pockets and turned to face Mac. “When I got home that night I found out Joanie’d had a miscarriage that afternoon. She wasn’t that far along—hadn’t even told me she was pregnant because she wanted to surprise me. So she was there, all by herself, when it happened.”

  “And you think you should have … what? Could you have done anything if you’d been there?”

  “No.” He forced a smile. “And since then, we’ve had Jacob and Joanie’s pregnant again.” He crossed back and sat down again with Mac. “I don’t want you to go in there blind. You need to know what you’re facing.”

&nb
sp; “Sounds like you’d be better off with some gypsy palm reader instead of me”.

  “She specifically asked for a minister, and you’re the right man for the job, Mac.”

  “I wouldn’t bet the rent money if I were you.”

  Chapter 7

  She saw it when she opened the kitchen cabinet to get out a can of tomato soup for lunch. A tiny baby boy lay on his side just inside the cabinet. Very small, maybe six or seven inches long, but absolutely perfect. Had fingers and toes—long and skinny, like some tropical tree frog. There was a light fuzz of dark hair on his head, and a dusting of lanugo—the fine hair on premature babies—on his back and arms. He was breathing; you could just make out the tiny movement of his chest up and down.

  Then he opened his eyes and looked at her.

  Wanda Ingram stepped back with a strangled gasp and slammed the cabinet door shut.

  Her breath hitched in and out of her throat; her heart beat a staccato rattle in her chest. Balling her hands into fists at her sides, she spoke aloud through gritted teeth.

  “Not real! It’s. Not. Real!”

  It took every speck of strength she possessed, but Wanda forced her shaking hand to reach up and grab the handle on the cabinet door again. She squeezed her eyes shut as she slowly pulled it open. Then she peeked out one eye, through a slit and a forest of eyelashes.

  Inside the cabinet was a collection of canned goods. Two cans of creamed corn, some green beans, a can of hominy, and three cans of soup. With a hand trembling so badly she could barely grasp with it, she selected the lone can of tomato soup, set it on the countertop and turned to the silverware drawer to get the can opener.

  On the countertop above the silverware drawer was a puddle of bloody tissue.

  “No!” she pleaded, shaking her head back and forth, her voice a pitiful whine. “Pleeease, no!” She rubbed her eyes, dug at them with her fists like a sleepy child. When she opened them, the countertop was vacant and clean. But she wasn’t hungry anymore, didn’t want any soup. Her appetite was gone.