by Howard Fast
“What could they tell you?” the Priest asked desperately. “Can they give you God’s absolution?”
“They gave me man’s absolution,” Madeiros answered as simply as a child.
“Will you pray with me?” the Priest asked.
“I have nothing to pray for,” Madeiros answered. “I have found two friends, and they will be with me as long as I am here on this earth.”
And with that, he stretched out on his bed, his hands folded beneath his head and his eyes closed—nor did the Priest have the courage to speak to him again. As they had come, so did they go; but this time, as the Priest passed the cells of Sacco and Vanzetti, he looked into them, and he saw in them the men who had become a new legend of New England. And as he looked at them, each of these men looked up in turn, and met his glance with theirs.
Now the Priest walked more quickly through the tunnels and corridors of the State Prison—yet as quickly as he walked, he was able to control himself to a point where the Warden would not know that he was indeed in flight. Beyond him and behind him, in the death house, was a mystery which not only defied his understanding, but threatened his very existence, and now he fled from this mystery.
Chapter 17
THE WARDEN was pleased to be rid of the Priest finally, for so much remained to be done, and here it was already almost ten o’clock. People did not realize how much there was to an execution beyond its factual horror; and sometimes when he was in the mood to philosophize—as what prison warden isn’t?—this Warden would contemplate the similarities between his own functions and those of the director of a large and complex funeral establishment. Well, so it was, and it was not any of his doing, and if ending life was surrounded with more ritual than beginning the process, he was not the one who could change this or resist it.
First, the Warden went to the mess hall adjoining the death house, for he had allocated this dining room to the press. It was already filled with a full complement of those reporters who had received special invitations either to witness the execution directly, or to be close at hand if and when it took place. The Warden knew the value of proper press relations, and he had attempted to anticipate all the wants of the reporters and to provide for these wants. The smell of fresh coffee filled the air of the mess hall, and there were piles of appetizing sandwiches and good, fresh coffee cake. The Warden had made a special purchase of twenty-five pounds of delectable cold cuts; for he felt that while there was a need to impress upon anyone who broke bread within the prison that such bread was not worm-eaten, to satisfy so many of the press at one time was even more important.
The telephone company had been equally cooperative, and six branch lines had been installed here, that the news of the details of the execution might go out without impediment or delay to a waiting world. And the Warden had seen to it that there were sufficient yellow copy paper and pencils for any thoughts or fancies the newspaper men might wish to express. It was with some sense of irony that he reflected upon the circumstances which had brought him, his prison, and this particular spot of old Massachusetts, into the focus of all the world’s attention; but once again he accepted a situation that was not of his making, and decided that the best thing anyone could do under such circumstances, was to see that everything went smoothly and without untoward incident or complication.
When he appeared in the dining room, the reporters surrounded him and plied him with questions. They wanted all the details which he could provide—the names of the guards and attendants, the name of the prison doctor, the name of everyone else who would be associated with the execution. They also asked him whether he would be in touch with the Governor’s office during the last moments before the execution—to make absolutely certain that a postponement would not come a fraction of a minute too late to save the lives of the condemned men. They also wanted to know what the order of the executions would be.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” the Warden protested. “I would have to spend the whole night here with you to answer all these questions, and there’s still a great deal that has to be done. Now I have assigned one of my assistants here to be at your service and to give you all the information that I myself would be able to provide for you. You must understand that we are simply public servants who are given a very unpleasant duty to fulfill. I am not a judge or a policeman, but only the warden of this prison. Of course, I shall make every attempt to be in constant touch with the Governor. You must understand that I have come to know these men, and shall do all I can that might help them with just and legal aid. Now, as far as the order of execution is concerned, we have determined it in this way. The first to die will be Celestino Madeiros. After him, Nicola Sacco, and then finally, Bartolomeo Vanzetti. There you are, gentlemen, and that’s the best I can do for you.”
They thanked him profusely, and he was not a little proud of the expert and unperturbed manner in which he had dealt with the situation, making neither too much nor too little of it. While the Warden was thus occupied with the press in the mess hall, the prison doctor, the electrician, two guards and the prison barber had come to the death house. Like the Warden, they were painfully aware of the significance of each move they made; but unlike the Warden, it was theirs to deal not with the press, but with the three doomed men in person—and thereby, it was only to be expected that they would shrink from the unpleasant tasks which had been set out for them. Along with this feeling of shame and unhappiness, perhaps to bolster themselves, they inflated their own importance in so enormous an event, and speculated on how they themselves would describe it the following day. Each of them, however, felt personally embarrassed, and personally felt the need to apologize to the three men, the two anarchists and the thief. The barber made his apologies as he shaved their heads.
“You know,” he said to Vanzetti, “it is my miserable misfortune to have this job in this place. What can I do about it?”
“There is nothing you can do,” Vanzetti answered him, a note of reassurance in his voice. “It’s your job and you do it. What else is there to say?”
“I wish I could say something that would help a little bit,” the barber insisted. And when he had finished with Vanzetti, he whispered to the electrician that the experience was not as bad as it might have been, and that the man Vanzetti was unquestionably a most unusual and discerning man.
But Sacco said nothing at all, not a word, and when the barber made a few attempts at conversation, Sacco looked up at him in a strange way, and then the barber’s words died still-born in his throat.
With Madeiros, the barber had another feeling entirely. Madeiros was like a small boy, and his tranquility became almost terrifying to the barber. Outside in the corridor, he whispered to the guards concerning his tranquility; but they shrugged and dismissed Madeiros as a “hophead,” nodding significantly at the door to the execution chamber.
The electrician watched the guards exchange the prisoners’ underwear for that special underwear which is made only for such occasions. And the condemned men put on, then, the black suits of death, garments which they would wear for that short distance between the three cells and the electric chair itself; and while he was drawing this horrible suit onto his body, Vanzetti said softly,
“So the bridegroom is dressed! A thoughtful State gives me warm clothes, and the deft hands of a barber to shave me. And strangely enough, fear has gone away. All I feel now is hatred.”
He spoke in Italian, and the guards did not know what he was saying; but the barber understood, and whispered a translation of his words to the prison doctor, who shrugged it off with the professional cynicism that such a man must needs arm himself with.
It was the task of the electrician to slit the trouser legs and the sleeves of the death costumes. He did this sullenly, cursing himself and the fate that had brought here to such work. And once, when he touched Vanzetti’s flesh, Vanzetti pulled away from him, looking at him with contempt, and then raising his eyes with the same contemptuous hatred to the guards who watched
the work of the electrician.
“And this is a service,” Vanzetti said, his voice hard and flat as a file. “You lend yourselves to this, and in every age there will be more like you. Even if there were a God, he would not have mercy on the eunuchs who become the handmaidens of death. The truth is that all I wanted was to finish fighting, and instead, the likes of you are reserved to me. But now keep your damned hands away from me! Your hands are dirty with the dirt of the master you serve!”
Again, the barber translated, but the prison doctor said,
“Well, what do you expect? You can’t do more to anyone than kill him. If he wants to talk, you can’t keep him from talking, can you? Don’t come to me with any more stories about what he says. He can say what he wants to say.”
The guards locked the cell doors once again, and in each cell there was a man clad in black. Not in any way had Madeiros changed. In his black clothes, he sat as calmly on his bed as he had sat before; but Nicola Sacco stood in his cell, plucking at the new garments he wore, and looking at them strangely. Vanzetti, however, remained close to the door, his face framed in the opening. There was anger on his face, and the blood pulsed in his veins with a hard, steady beat. Life coursed through him. He was full of life, vital with it, and the muscles of his arms tensed and hardened as he pulled at the door. He reclaimed the passages of his life without regret, without sorrow, but with a hardening and mounting anger. He saw himself living his free and happy childhood in an Italian village, a place bathed all over with the glow of sunshine. He greeted his mother again, and felt the warm, soft flesh of her face pressed against his own face as she embraced him. He saw her sick and fading while he crouched beside her, never leaving her bedside, trying to pour some of his own vast store of life current into her. Even then, so long ago, he was beginning to have an understanding of these great forces for life and struggle that were lodged within himself. He was like a well, out of which you could dip water endlessly and drink and drink until the thirst of all around was satisfied—yet his own thirst was never quenched.
Italy died with his mother. He saw himself in flight from the old, bucolic life that he had built around her presence. Toil and struggle—work for the dry bread of life, and a savage hunger within him to consume it; that became Bartolomeo Vanzetti, his life, his existence, and the deep meaning of his existence. He was not like Sacco. He was a man born for the troubles and stormy waters of existence—but he was also born to survive them. Now he could not surrender. His whole body screamed to him that surrender was impossible, just as death was impossible and unacceptable—that there had to be a way out, another step forward, another word spoken, another challenge flung! Life was the answer to life; death was not the answer to life. Death was a monster, the dirty, dark and frightful god that his enemies worshipped. He defied death with hatred, with anger, with rage. Life was joined to him—and by the same token, he was joined to life. And now his words and his thoughts were identical.
“I must live—do you understand? I must live! My work has only begun. The fight goes on. I must live and be a part of it. I will not die! I cannot die.…”
The prison doctor reported to the Warden in the press room, and the Warden stood up on one of the dining room tables and called for attention and silence from the vast throng of special reporters, newspaper men and columnists who had gathered there.
“As the matter now stands, gentlemen,” the Warden said, “we have prepared the prisoners for the execution. That is, the customary procedure of changing their clothes and preparing their tonsures has been followed. Only a few minutes more than an hour remains before the time which the Governor of this State set for their death, a time beginning at midnight. In the hour between eleven o’clock and midnight, we shall have to test the wiring which will bear the load of electricity. If in that time you see the lights of the prison dim suddenly, you will know that this test is being made. I shall now go to my office and call the Governor, and also arrange for any messages from the Governor to be delivered to me immediately.”
Chapter 18
IT CAME to the last hour, the hour between eleven and twelve o’clock, the hour before the day ended, and along with the day, many other things, hopes and dreams and a faith in the will of people for righteousness to achieve justice. In that last hour there were millions of human beings who, in their tired silence, came to realize that because one wants, prays, wills, or believes, it does not necessarily mean that such a thing will transpire.
During that last hour, the picket line around the State House grew even larger, and there was some talk of a march upon the prison. But to the people who walked in that procession, it had become plain and most evident that no such adventure could change things now, or alter the inevitability of what was going to happen. Now and then the Governor drew aside the curtains of his office windows and looked down at the picket line; but by this late hour, he was used to the sight of massed men and women marching below, and he was not moved by what he saw.
In London, it was not yet five o’clock in the morning, and there the death watch had plodded in its closed circle all night long. Now the faces of the British coal miners and textile workers and longshoremen were gray and drawn with their long vigil. And as word was passed from man to man that this was the last hour before the end, a sigh seemed to escape from their tired bodies, and their bent shoulders bent a little more in unwilling resignation and acknowledgment of the barrier which time and distance had imposed upon them.
In Rio de Janeiro, it was between one and two o’clock in the morning, and there a growing crowd pressed into the space before the United States embassy, roaring out a challenge of defiance and a plea—shouting with such a voice that it seemed certain that the heavens must reflect the echo into distance, even such distance as to the city of Boston in Massachusetts.
In Moscow, the workers were leaving their houses to go to the plants. Here and there they formed in great clusters around the wall newspapers, and the whispered question was passed from person to person,
“What time is it now in Boston?”
Many a workman dried his eyes and cleared his throat; but others wept openly and unashamed—even as the French working people wept as they stood at the end of a lonely, night-long watch in front of the American embassy.
In Warsaw, the first glimmers of daylight were breaking, and there, demonstrations had been forbidden and broken up. There in Warsaw, workers moving silently and ghostlike through the night, finished pasting up the last of their illegal posters—calling upon the people of Warsaw to make one final effort that Sacco and Vanzetti might live.
In far off Sydney, Australia, it was the middle of the afternoon. And here the longshoremen had laid down their hooks and their ropes and now, eight abreast, were marching through the city toward the American embassy, chanting their fierce demand that part of their own lives should not be taken from them with the lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler.
In Bombay, the coolies had hardly settled down to the beginning of their shift in a great cotton mill, when one of them leaped up on top of a machine, agile as an acrobat, and cried out to the others,
“Now we lay down our tools for this one hour, one last hour, to honor two comrades who are going to die!”
And in Tokyo, the police, wielding their long sticks savagely, drove back the workers from their packed position in front of the American embassy. In Tokyo, it was midday, and everywhere through the miserable quarters of the working people, the question was passed from person to person—and many there were who wept unashamedly. If the sound of weeping had been caught and recorded, then it could have been traced out like a faint fabric of noise which enclosed the whole world; and the hard truth of it was that never before in all the time of man’s presence on the earth, was there a thing like this—so widespread, so common, and so consistent in its inclusion of the human race.
In New York City, Union Square was filled with silent people who now joined their weeping with the weeping of milli
ons more. Minute by minute, the bulletins were circulated among them, and the men and the women who stood in Union Square pressed closer to one another, touched shoulder and hand so that they might be better armed and prepared for the invasion of this gaunt and terrible stranger, this lord of death, who was taking a precious part of their own lives along with the lives of two working men and a thief.
In Denver, Colorado, it was two hours earlier—and perhaps that gave people a sense of the continuing possibility for a change, for in Denver there was still a gathering of names upon petitions, a dispatching of telegrams, and many people pleading with the long-distance operators to try once more for a connection with the State House in Boston. So it was also in San Francisco, where it was now between eight and nine o’clock in the evening. The San Francisco working men and women marched in their own angry death watch, but in the local office of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, there was the same kind of eager and desperate activity that was taking place in Denver. All through the United States of America, in more than a dozen cities, there were these defense offices for the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti—sometimes a rented office, sometimes only a desk, sometimes a corner of the living-room of a family which had been given over to this purpose; but wherever these defense offices were, people gathered together with the feeling and hope that by making a small, tight group of humanity, they might thereby increase and strengthen themselves, and effect some little advantage in the cause of these men who were like brothers to them.
A great, somber pall had been drawn over the city of Boston, and there was hardly a man or a woman or a child in the city who was not acutely, and very often agonizingly aware of what was going to take place in the State Prison. On the little peninsula of Charlestown, the prison blazed with light, the prison guards crouched apprehensively and worriedly behind their machine guns. State troopers and police patrolled every inch of the prison walls, and plain clothes men drifted through the streets near the prison. To these people, whose way of life and purpose of life was the herding of men like beasts, what was happening all over the world and in Boston too, remained an enormous mystery—and not even a clue could they find to explain why the agony of these two hated radicals was being shared by such a great part of the whole of mankind. The official explanation was to the effect of these men being used by the communists for the ends of the communists; but so far-reaching was the reaction already, that this official explanation held no water whatsoever, but had broken down wholly, leaving in its place only the wordless question—asked but unanswered—on the lips of those whose necessity was to hate two doomed Italians and to desire their finish so ardently. However, for those people who were intimately connected with the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, the last hour became a certain sort of hell. How many had pledged their lives to justice for Sacco and Vanzetti, it is not possible to say, but surely across the many continents of the earth, they numbered hundreds of thousands, and each one of these carried his own particular cross during that last hour. One of these people was the Professor of Criminal Law. Out of a necessity for comradeship, for action, for the proximity of his own kind, he had once again joined the picket line. Now he marched through the minutes that still separated him from the death of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; and as those minutes were spent, he attempted to comprehend the full nature of the drama in which he had been placed. He could not, like the working people here in Boston and throughout the whole world, answer all questions in a simple and true identity between himself and Sacco and Vanzetti. His own process of mind and conscience must of necessity have been more complicated, more tortuous, and less easily satisfied. As with all men, a picture of the years ahead was denied to him, and he could not see what events would happen, or what his own role in those events would be. But he had come to understand the ordinary proposition, that those who sit in the high seats of the mighty are different from the plain people and the oppressed people. He had also come to understand that questions of power are not decided by prayer—yet he shrank from the inevitable conclusions that such thoughts led him to. He knew that if the millions who desired the freedom of Sacco and Vanzetti, even here in the United States, were to come into a single, cohesive motion, then no force on earth could deny them; but he also knew that his vision of such motion was not entirely undisturbed, or marked entirely with approval, but was rather mixed with deep fears and confused apprehensions.