by Ninie Hammon
“I wonder if it’ll hurt’s all. But they all tell me it don’t. That you don’t feel nothin’ a’tall.” She looked at Jonas. “Don’t seem much sense in askin’ questions today when they’ll all get answered tomorrow.”
“Are you afraid?” Mac asked softly.
She laughed at that, a big, full rumbling laugh.
“Wouldn’t you be? I ain’t had a solid bowel movement in more’n a week! They’re a-fixin’ to fry me tomorrow. ’Course I’m scared.”
Then she thought a moment. “Least I’m pretty sure now that’s what I’m feeling. That hole-in-the-my-side thing, I’m fairly sure now it’s scared. And if it is … shoot, I been feelin’ that for years.”
She crossed and sat back down.
“Thing is, what’s gonna happen tomorrow … it’s what’s s’posed to happen. Like I said, I done made my peace.”
Mac thought about Jackson Prentiss. He didn’t want Princess anywhere near that sanctimonious, graceless ogre. No telling what he might say to her. But there was nothing Mac could do to prevent the meeting.
He suddenly realized she was looking at him again with that quiet, penetrating look. The stillness had settled around her and it was like she could see into his soul.
“Don’t you trouble yourself ’bout me, Rev. I’m good. A body don’t get to pick what happens. All’s you gotta decide is what you do about it. I made my decisions that got me here a long time ago. It’s all led to this. And I’m ready.”
Chapter 18
Princess sat at the table in the room with a window that looked out on the Indian Bluffs. That looked out on a town the Rev said was a fake. Imagine that, a whole da-gone town wasn’t even real.
She rolled around in her mind the images of her visit with the Rev and his father-in-law, the way you’d wallow a lemon drop in your mouth, licking up every last little bit of the sweet. He was sure enough in pain, that old man was, hurtin’ somethin’ fierce. She surely would like to know what was sucking the life out of him. But that wasn’t to be. She was coming to the end of it now, the end of everything. It was all a-hurtlin’ at her, fast as a freight train. Every breath she took, it was one of the last ones. Had to treasure ’em. Had to treasure ever’ one.
She sat wrapped tight in stillness, snug in quiet. Waiting for Jackson to come.
But inside her chest, her heart was bangin’ away loud as a wood spoon in a metal pot. So loud he’d surely hear it. He’d come in that door and take one look at her, hear her heart thump-thump-thumping and he’d know he still had power over her. That all these years later, she was still scared to death of him.
Tomorrow she was going to die. And today would be the first time she’d been alone with Jackson since that last night, him sittin’ drunk in the chair with the broken springs in their little house high up in the hills of Arkansas. The night she left, took Angel and all the money in his wallet, flung her knapsack over her shoulder and disappeared into the darkness.
Ever’ time after that when she seen him, there was other people around. The police or her lawyers, the different ones of them. She seen him in court, of course, when he got up there on the stand and told all them lies. But he’d never come to visit her a single time in all the years she’d been in prison. They’d never been alone, just him and her.
Until today.
It suddenly hit her, come clunking down into her mind so powerful and heavy it was like somebody dropped a big rock right on top of her head.
What you got to be scared of, fool? Tomorrow, they’re gonna kill you? What can he do to you today’s worse’n that?
She burst into a rumbling roar of laughter. And that’s how he found her. When the guard opened the door and Jackson Prentiss come striding into the room, Princess was sittin’ at the table, laughing her head off.
He just stood there, looking at her, his lip curled up in a snarl like it always done when he was ’bout to get mean. Couldn’t get mean here, though! There was a guard right outside the door that’d come runnin’ in here and lock Jackson up somewhere his own self.
The thought made her laugh even harder.
“You’re crazier now than you ever were.” He spit the words out like they tasted bad in his mouth.
She was laughing so hard tears ran down her cheeks. She reached up and wiped them away and felt the laughter dribble down to a little giggle and silence.
Then she studied him, like examining some strange bug crawling on a leaf in the woods. In her mind, Jackson Prentiss was a giant, huge, menacing and terrifying. This man was old and used-up looking. Oh, his outsides was all shined up slick and glassy like, better’n she’d ever seen him. But his insides was a ruin of evil and meanness and alcohol.
Drink charged a price Jackson Prentiss had been paying every day since he was twelve years old. The man had reached out soon as he opened his eyes of a morning and there by golly better be a cold beer there to grab or he’d come up side Princess’s head with whatever he could lay his hands on—a piece of firewood, a hairbrush, an empty bottle. She learned quick to rise at dawn and fetch a cold brew out of the ice box to be waiting by his bedside.
There wasn’t usually much else in the ice box besides Jackson’s beer. Often, there was no food in the house a’tall, and Jackson’d just leave her there to figure out how she was going to feed herself and Angel. His pitiful little group of followers couldn’t afford to pay him diddly squat, so he’d got his self a part-time job at the sawmill, wouldn’t be home ’til he’d drunk up most of his pay at the tavern late that evening.
That’s when Princess took to walking down to the bottom of the hill where the colored people lived. Angel was just a baby. She didn’t understand there wasn’t no milk to drink. When those folks in their little shacks by the creek heard the baby crying, somebody’d find milk for her. And they didn’t have hardly enough food to feed their own young-uns. Princess never would take nothing to eat from ’em, said she wasn’t hungry, thank you kindly. Lots of days, she didn’t eat, even though the colored folks tried their dead level best to get her to.
They was good people. Like the Rev. Not like Jackson. And Jackson wasn’t a good man that drink made into a monster, neither. Jackson Prentiss was a caged monster that drink set free.
“You’re uglier than you ever were, too,” he said. He made a humph sound in his throat. “Though I suppose scars all over your face are better than those bumps, full of pus, oozing all the time.”
He talked smooth and proper-like now. Must have learnt that along the way as his preachin’ made him famous. Oh, the man could preach, she’d give him that. When he was in the pulpit, he’d get all wound up and it was like people’s eyes’d start to glaze over, and before long they’s ready to follow the man down the barrel of a cannon. That was how Mama got hooked up with him. Princess remembered the look on her mother’s face when they sat together on the hard bench in the little store-front church in Texas, ’fore Jackson moved the whole bunch of ’em to the hills of Arkansas. Mama’d looked … dazed. Shoot, they all had! Only one among ’em wasn’t slack-jawed and droolin’ was Princess, and she was just a little girl. Nothing Jackson Prentiss ever said moved her that way, had just the opposite effect, in fact. What she heard was nothing but meanness and spite and anger. Sometimes, it was like she could see it, his mouth was all full up with snakes and spiders, and she’d hide her head in her mother’s skirt, scared plum to death.
“It used to make me sick just to look at you,” he continued, his lip still curled in a snarl. “Turned my stomach so I felt like vomiting.”
Princess looked at him from her quiet place and realized with a sudden thrill of joy that his words no longer hurt her. She didn’t care anymore! He used to rail at her, call her all manner of hurtful things. And she hated that worse than the beatings. The things he said stabbed into her soul with a pain worse than his fist hittin’ her face, smashing her lip or him kickin’ her with his boot as she lay on the floor in front of him.
She didn’t care now, though. The joy that
filled her heart with that realization spilled out onto her face in a huge smile.
“What you grinning at? And what’s the matter with you? Did the imps of hell steal that ugly, gruff voice of yours so you can’t even cry out for mercy?”
“What are you doin’ here, Jackson?” She had known he would come, knew it the way she knew so many other things. She just didn’t know why. “What’d you come all this way for?”
“To watch you die!” He crossed the room in a rush then, as if he actually meant to attack her. But he stopped at the table, put his palms down on it and leaned toward her, his face twisted up in a mighty explosion of rage. “I came to watch them fry you, send you straight into the fires of hell on a bolt of lightning!”
But Jackson’s rage broke over Princess like a wave crashing on a rock. It barely even got her wet.
“You ain’t mad at me for killin’ Angel,” she said, her voice a velvet hammer. “You’re mad ’cause I ran off, ‘cause I won.”
“You call dying in the electric chair winning?”
A sudden fury filled Princess with a power so intense it might have hurled her right through the bars on the window and out into the world a free woman. Words spilled out her mouth in the overflow of it.
“Nobody ever told you no and got away with it, did they, Jackson? But I did. Nobody ever left you, did they? Nobody but me! Nobody ever took what was yours and never give it back. I took Angel from you. I beat you.”
Jackson’s face was a boiling black hailstorm. Temper stole his polish and left him sputtering the words of his raising.
“How you figure that, you dumb whore? You’re the one loved that little’un. Snot-nosed brat didn’t mean nothing to me but she did to you. You run off with her, then had one of your idiot fits, went nuts, and killed her. You’re the one lost it all!”
“That what you think, it was a accident?”
“Even that Jew lawyer of yours knew you couldn’t a’murdered that child. She might have figured out a way to prove it, too ...” He paused, then added softly, “ … but I fixed her.”
Gretchen Solomon had been tall and willowy, with coal black hair she kept in a tight bun low on the back of her head. She wore round, rimless glasses and had skin pale as death. She’d grabbed hold of Princess’s case years ago and held on like a dog a’worryin’ a chew rag—just would not let it be. Princess went along with whatever Miss Solomon wanted. If it made the woman feel good to fight so hard for her life, well, what was the harm in that? Princess had cried for days when she died.
“What do you mean you fixed her?” The dread swelled up in Princess’s belly so quick she couldn’t breathe. “She was kilt accidental, fell in front of—”
“A bus! In Boston. Long drive from Alabama to Boston. Danged hard to find where somebody’s at in a big old city like that, too—least that’s what I hear. ’Course, I never been there myself.”
His voice got quiet, but so full of meanness and spite you could have used it as rat poison. “I also hear them sidewalks there get real slick when it rains. Not hard a’tall to fall right out into the street if you slip …”
He whispered the final three words: “ … or get pushed!”
Princess squeaked out a little scream. “She never hurt you! Why would you do such a awful thing?”
“The way this country’s goin’, that kike coulda fooled around ’til she finally got you off,” he hissed. “And I am done watching the perverted ways of man fly in the face of the righteous will of Almighty God!”
Princess stared up at him, moon-eyed. That’s what he’d wanted, that look on her face. He settled then, calmed, crawled back into the imposter he’d dressed in that fancy suit this morning.
“You didn’t beat me,” he purred, “any more than those nigger savages’ll beat me.” He leaned toward her again. “You’re going to die for trying and so are they!”
A darkness gathered around Jackson as he spoke. Princess could see it and feel the chill from it and she shrank back in revulsion. Jackson fed on the look in her eyes the way a vulture feeds on rotting flesh. He smiled, a great gash that showed teeth he’d had fixed all shiny and white, and spoke with quiet intensity.
“That black monkey who put his hands on me today, he’ll be sorry. I’ll get to him. One day soon. I get to all the black monkeys that cross me.” He put on a look of fake distress. “Being on death row and all, you probably don’t watch a lot of television, do you? Pity. A couple of months ago it was all over the news. This nigger farmer outside Birmingham was trying to get all his neighbors to register to vote, and he up and got himself hung. I hear his two little girls watched him get strung up, cried and begged those white men to let him live.”
He leaned closer and said softly. “Their daddy thought he beat me, too. Shame you’re not going to live long enough to hear about all the others, the ones to come. We will stop them, you know. Those nigger savages are just looking to rape white women and they are sorely mistaken if they think white men are going to stand idle and let it happen. They will not take over this country. But before the stupid monkeys figure out we’re smarter than they are, a whole bunch of them are going to die trying. And that’s just fine with me.”
Princess had no air to speak. She turned away from him and stared out the window at the town on the hillside. But it no longer looked charming and inviting. Just empty, like Jackson. All false front and phony. Open a door and step right through. Maybe the fake town wasn’t empty at all, she thought, but full of false-front people just like Jackson.
He followed her gaze. “Wish you’s free to walk down the street of that town instead of getting ready to die?”
“No, I don’t wanna be there no more,” she said in a hollow voice. “But you should go sometime. You probably got family up there.”
“Oh, I got a family all right.” He fairly leapt on the remark. “I have a wife and two children.”
He’d aimed to surprise her and preened rooster-like when he did. “A boy and a girl, nine and seven.” His speech lapsed into his sing-song preaching rhythm. “And I am raising them right. I am raising my children in the fear and admonition of Almighty God. I am preparing by son and daughter to be mighty warriors in the celestial war between good and evil, in the Armageddon that’s coming, the final battle against the powers of darkness in America.”
He seemed to tire of the game once he’d put her in her place and she was proper cowed. He straightened up and strode to the door, then turned and faced her before he walked out.
“I’m staying the night in a hotel and I’ll be here tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be sitting in the front row of the gallery so I can watch up close when they flip that switch and fry you!” He hurled the final words at her, a rock aimed at her head. “And the last thing you’ll hear before you’re damned forever, before your flesh is consumed in the sulfur flames of an eternal hell, will be my voice—laughing!”
The guard came into the room after Jackson left and put the manacles and leg irons on Princess. He led her down the hallway in the opposite direction, toward the Long Dark.
She wasn’t aware of her surroundings, though, took no notice of the looks she got from the other prisoners as she passed their cells. Her mind was full of the images of two little girls begging for their daddy’s life.
And of two other children, Jackson’s private victims. A little boy and a little girl Princess couldn’t rescue.
* * * * *
Jonas was unusually quiet as they left the Iron House. He didn’t comment at all on the even larger crowd of protesters that formed a gauntlet they had to drive through, waving their signs and shouting their slogans.
He finally spoke as they were nearing the highway back to town.
“Pull over,” he said, pointing to the wide, sandy roadside. “Right here. Just pull off on the shoulder.”
Mac did as Jonas directed.
“What’s wrong? You sick?”
Jonas turned in the seat to face him. “Kill the engine. I want to talk.”
>
“Can’t we talk on the way into town? It’s getting late and I’ve got a date for dinner tonight with Joy.”
“You don’t need to be driving when you hear what I’ve got to say.”
Mac reached up and switched off the ignition. In the sudden silence that followed, they could hear the distant chanting of the protesters at the prison gate, though they couldn’t make out the words. There was a rumble of thunder, too. Mac glanced past Jonas at the southwestern horizon. A storm front was moving in.
“Okay, I stopped. Now, what is it?”
“I got a confession to make,” Jonas said. He must have seen the shocked look on Mac’s face because he rushed ahead. “Oh, it’s nothing like that, nothing bad. It’s about Maggie and me—and Joy, when she was little.”
Jonas settled back in the seat and looked sightlessly out the windshield.
“You was gone—almost right from the beginning—in Korea and it was just Melanie and Joy. You don’t have no idea how she doted on that child!” He turned to look at Mac. “Dressed her up in lacy dresses every day like she was a doll. Now, it might have been ’cause Joy’s hair was so short—remember? She looked like a little pixie.”
Mac nodded.
“And maybe that was it, that Melanie didn’t want folks to think Joy was a boy.”
Mac smiled, thinking of Melanie, carefully dressing the little girl who had been a gift from God.
“But the trouble was …” Jonas paused. “And mind, I’m not criticizin’. It’s just—she wouldn’t never let that little girl get dirty! I’m serious. Joy dripped the littlest spot of catsup on her dress, or scuffed her shoes, and Melanie was a’cleanin’ her up so fast it’d make your head swim.”
Jonas turned and looked at Mac.
“You knew she left Joy with Maggie and me the two days a week she worked at the hospital. She’d a’stayed home and never left that child’s side if it’d been up to her. But it was something about certification, keeping her skills up. And of course, the extra money helped.”
“It was good of you and Maggie to keep her,” Mac said, totally bewildered by where Jonas could possibly be going with all this.