Getting Life

by Michael Morton

  The doctor made arrangements to have our baby “delivered” the following Monday—leaving us with a lost weekend that seemed to stretch on forever.

  Chris did not want to be around family or friends. She felt too fragile to handle breaking the news or answering endless questions. She told me she just wanted to go away. We decided we would drive down to San Antonio and just be alone—together. We wanted to absorb the loss privately. So in one of the sunniest, happiest cities we knew, we spent the weekend in darkness. It was as if there had been an eclipse in our lives. We roamed through stores and never bought anything, went out to dinner and didn’t eat, stopped for a drink and stared in silence at the table.

  Each of us braced in our own way for Monday. I knew it was going to be terribly hard on Chris and there was really very little I could do for her. It was difficult to know what to say—or what not to say. I just stayed close and prepared for the worst day we’d ever had together.

  Monday morning at the hospital, we were assigned a room in the obstetrics wing, a brightly decorated area that seemed filled with flowers and balloons. There were doting grandparents around every corner, dads handing out pink- or blue-banded cigars, and proud, tired mothers being wheeled out carrying carefully wrapped infants—­everything we had hoped would happen for us.

  I was with Chris as she was given sedatives and labor was induced. In the quiet room and the low light, amid a sea of tears, our beautiful, lost little girl emerged. She was weeks too early, but far too late to be saved.

  The doctor let me see and touch her tiny, still body. In another room, I stood beside her for a long while, taking in her almost eerie perfection. She had Chris’s thick dark hair and beautiful skin. Her petite hands were flawless and graceful. Her little feet fit into my palm. In that moment, she became real to me—in the way she had been for a long time to Chris. A father never has the instant intimacy of pregnancy that a mother does. I hadn’t felt our little girl kick or sensed her growing, talked to her at night or embraced her with my entire body, the way Chris had. But now I felt as if I knew our little girl—I knew who we had lost.

  The doctor pointed out a place near her tiny abdomen where the umbilical cord had twisted into a tight little knot. Her lifeline—her connection to Chris—had been choked off.

  Chris mourned Nicole profoundly. She quit her job and began working in a small office where she didn’t know anyone. She didn’t want to be around people for what felt like a long time, a real change for someone as outgoing and exuberant as Chris. She blamed herself. She blamed her body. Chris simply could not accept that as her little girl was dying inside of her, she had felt nothing, had suspected nothing, and had done nothing.

  Chris didn’t know she was losing Nicole until she was gone. Now that had happened to me with our other child—Eric was gone, too.

  For once, prison routine gave me comfort. Nothing had changed in my life on a daily basis—and work, college classes, and the brutish, tragicomic carnival always under way around me gave me a place to hide the emotional turmoil I felt.

  There were moments inside when I flashed back on everything I had lost—moments when a sound or a scent or a muscle memory would remind me of the life I used to have. The smallest things could take me back.

  Once, lying on my bunk listening to the hissing tsssts-tsssts-tsssts of the prison sprinkler system spitting water on the newly cut grass, I closed my eyes and was transported to my old backyard. I could feel the familiar lawn chair I used to sit in on our deck and smell the neighbors’ grill heating up next door. If I reached down, I felt certain there would be a cold bottle of beer waiting there, sweating in the heat the way I was. To my right, I saw a flash of movement from inside the house—Chris was walking past the glass doors of our bedroom. She had gone in to change. I watched as she removed her blouse and let it fall to the floor. She looked up, saw me, and gave me a delightfully wicked smile—then faded away.

  I missed her. I missed the man I used to be. I missed our son.

  I missed my life.

  The courts were certainly giving me no relief. My petitions to the federal courts went nowhere. I felt like a drowning man who finally caught the eye of the lifeguard—and he looked straight at me and then turned away.

  Every time I lost a round, I had to go through the ritual of breaking it to my parents. I had to watch them gulp and grow quiet and absorb the latest bad news. I knew how much it hurt them, how high their hopes would be with every court argument—only to have me, once again, throw a big bucket of ice-cold legal reality on them.

  My appeals journey taught me that it is perfectly legal to imprison a man for a crime he didn’t commit. As long as every i was dotted and t crossed, no higher court could—or would—intervene, particularly in Texas. I had to find another way out. I believed new technology was my best hope.

  There had to be some evidence somewhere that would help me.

  During the 1994 O. J. Simpson trial—“must-see TV” in the prison community—I watched as a young defense lawyer named Barry Scheck explained DNA, and how it could affect investigations, with more clarity than anyone I’d ever heard. I knew that Scheck had started a group called the Innocence Project to work on cases of people in prison who were actually innocent. Unbeknownst to me, one of my attorneys at trial, Bill Allison, was a friend of Barry Scheck. Bill told me he had contacted Barry on my behalf. I was elated. But I had no illusions about anything happening quickly. For me, getting help from the Innocence Project became my birthday wish, my Christmas hope, my bedtime prayer—the Holy Grail of good luck.

  It was part of how I survived. Getting through the day is easier if you believe help is on the way. I chose to believe. That belief that someday, everything would be okay again kept me going when inmates on my unit killed themselves because they couldn’t take life inside anymore. Or when a guard committed suicide in the tower where he stood watch over us. Or when another inmate cleanly sliced off his penis while he was alone in his cell—suffering from untreated mental illness, untrained observation, and uncaring staff.

  That hope that I would someday be free kept me standing tall when a tour group came through and I locked eyes with a visitor, hoping to communicate to her that not all the men in here were awful—that we were human beings. She visibly recoiled at the dirty intrusion of my gaze.

  That hope kept me going when I saw one of the inmates who lived close to my “house” get set free because he was innocent. He had been railroaded when the police hid vital evidence in his case. When his attorneys gathered documented evidence, he was handed the proverbial Get Out of Jail Free card. What I hated was how I felt about his release—jealous, resentful, and angry. I had been inside longer than he had. I deserved to leave, too.

  At the Wynne Unit, I saw elderly prisoners brutalized by guards and, sometimes, by other inmates. I saw men die of easily treatable illnesses. I saw them treat themselves because they were afraid—or too stubborn—to go to the infirmary. One man I knew used fingernail clippers to remove the wounded tip of his tongue. Another finally had to be dragged to the doctor for a toe amputation—he had waited too long and gangrene was beginning to spread up his leg.

  I prayed for my continued health.

  And I took advantage of anything good the prison system had to offer. Beginning with my education.

  I finally got my degree in psychology—a mere twenty-three years after leaving high school. Chris would have been proud of me. We had both gone through a couple of years of college and taken jobs when we learned we couldn’t transfer our credit hours to the University of Texas. We were already living in Austin and figured we could work for a short while, then take turns going to school. We both had hoped to graduate. I would never have dreamed of the circumstances under which I would get my degree.

  Of course, my actual college graduation ceremony was a typically troubled Texas prison system production. Everyone graduating from anything was brought
together in our non-air-conditioned chow hall, where we could sip punch, eat cookies, and sweat with our lucky invited guests.

  The state hired a motivational speaker to stroke grads’ egos, telling some of the least disciplined people in the world that “if you would only put your minds to it, you can be anything you want to be.”

  Of course, many of them had already achieved that goal. They had wanted to grow up to be tough guys—and here they were. Some inmates simply didn’t have a chance. Some took every opportunity to make the wrong decision. Some couldn’t help themselves. Some didn’t know any other kind of life was even an option.

  Guys who had struggled to get GEDs made up the largest group of graduates. Some of them had gone through the program two or three times. And these men typically weren’t getting a high school diploma as part of a newfound ache for education. The TDC mandated a GED as a condition for parole. Everyone wanted parole—even if it meant they would be forced to learn to read and do basic math. “Class time” also kept the “students” from having to go to work at a prison job.

  The GED students and their guests were the rowdiest part of the graduation group—and the reason we had extra guards on hand. There were also students getting degrees from junior colleges; often they were the cream of the GED crop. Most of them, having already performed at peak educational capacity in their extended families, would now retire from scholastic competition.

  Those of us getting bachelor’s degrees felt a little like an afterthought. But I had loved the classes, the instructors, and the atmosphere. School was a haven of sanity and reason in the heart of a madhouse. It had helped me survive psychologically. And I wanted more.

  Now I had my eye on graduate school—something that would require more of me than all my previous classwork put together. I knew I could handle the academic work. The problem was that, as always in the Texas prison system, everything good came with a heaping helping of bad. Going to the University of Houston graduate school required moving off the Wynne Unit and onto Ramsey I, a facility about a hundred miles away. The unit was built in 1908 on land that had once made up five old plantations. The state had taken over the farming, with inmates doing the field work.

  I would have to do hard labor in high heat and humidity, under an unforgiving sun.

  With inmates half my age.

  Every day.

  I began training hard to make sure I was up to the task. Lifting weights, jogging, even spending increasing time in the sun so I wouldn’t get dangerously burned when I hit the fields. It was the only way for me to get a master’s in literature—and I wanted it badly. I knew it would help me when I finally walked out of this nightmare.

  I had been behind bars for more than eleven years. I had lost everything. Even my son had told me he never wanted to see me again.

  It was time for a change.

  I met with Eric one more time before I left the Wynne Unit. I had written him, asking for one more visit. I told him he didn’t have to come to see me if he didn’t want to. But that if he wanted to cut off contact with me, he had to tell me to my face.

  And that’s what he did—sort of.

  Eric and Mary Lee came for their next scheduled visit. I walked into the visiting room not knowing what to expect. I sat down and looked at Eric, sitting there next to Chris’s sister with his head down, a nervous fifteen-year-old boy. He was withdrawn and unhappy and uncomfortable.

  Join the club.

  We exchanged greetings. Looking right at Eric, I asked him if this would be our last visit. “Yes,” he whispered, still not looking at me. I told him if he ever changed his mind, I wasn’t hard to find.

  At that moment, I was profoundly hurt—deeply, deeply wounded—and I reacted the way men sometimes do when their emotions are overwhelming.

  I got mad. In prison, it was safer to be angry.

  I stood up and told Mary Lee to take care of my son—and I walked out. The visit had lasted only a few minutes. My hot anger didn’t last long either.

  But the hurt went on.

  In the years ahead, I would send Eric cards on holidays and birthdays or special occasions in his life. He never wrote back, nor did I expect him to. It was like writing to Santa Claus—he was almost an imaginary figure. He was someone my family saw, someone I knew was out there somewhere—growing up, growing older, and growing further and further out of my reach.

  I told myself things would change when I got out, when I was proved innocent, when everyone knew this was nothing more than a terrible, terrible mistake. What I wouldn’t admit to myself was that some of what had happened to my relationship with Eric was irreparable. The tear had been too traumatic, the years of bad information and bad advice and bad feelings had left ugly wounds and deep bruises—on both of us.

  All I knew was that I would always love him—that he would always be the living embodiment of a marriage that ended too soon and a mother who should still be here. Eric would always be part of a small, shattered family that didn’t deserve any of what fate had handed out. And he would always be my son.

  I hoped that, someday, I would get the chance to be his father.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I embarked on my new life before the sun was up.

  The guard had come to my cell without warning, as is typical with inmate moves. TDC didn’t want anyone to be able to plan any kind of shenanigans. It was pitch-black when I walked out of the Wynne Unit for the last time in the early morning hours of Halloween Day 1999. I left as I had arrived, in the dark.

  The guards began handcuffing prisoners together in pairs, but when they got to me, there was no one left to handcuff me to. I was handcuffed, but I felt a weird sort of freedom not being shackled onto someone else. In the world of a prisoner, incremental, relative freedom is often all there is.

  We got on a bus loaded with other men cuffed or chained together—­some from other units, some going to other destinations—and off we went to the Ramsey I Unit, a hulking old monstrosity south of Houston.

  It was my first look at the free world in years, since I had tasted those chicken tacos on the way back to Williamson County to begin my fight for DNA testing. I felt like a blind man who suddenly had his sight restored. As we sped along the freeway deep into the city’s massive sprawl, I stayed glued to the bus window. The color and novelty of the shopping centers, car lots, fast-food chains, and gas stations mesmerized me. It was so early in the morning that there were very few people up and about, but the sides of the interstate were packed with a riot of new development.

  As we drove through the endless stretch of what passed for progress, I was surprised at how quickly the color and flash, the big and the brand-new grew old. Strip malls were thrown together with no forethought, fast-food joints had all the beauty and textured history of plastic silverware, and the many lots selling house trailers and used cars ultimately made me sad.

  The gaudiness and never-ending concrete had me longing for the rural greenery I had been looking out at for so long. Luckily for my scenery sensibilities, it turned out I was headed right back into the middle of nowhere—only this time it was muggier, buggier, and in many ways, a step back in time.

  Ramsey I sits in the heart of miles of farmland, some of it cultivated, some of it given over to the various creatures of the South Texas ecosystem—a humid, almost tropical place filled with head-high grass, angry fire ants, giant mosquitoes, and snakes of all descriptions, plus the occasional alligator. These critters became as much a part of my life as the inmates I would be living with. That’s because all of us—men and beasts, bugs and swampy bush—were going to spend a lot of time together.

  My first day in the fields was instructive. We were up at the crack of dawn, piled onto wagons, and driven to what felt like the edge of the world, finally stopping at a series of very long, very deep drainage ditches. The banks were steep, muddy, and slippery—and home to the tallest weeds I’d
ever seen, a small forest of greenery, taller than the men in my squad. Just maintaining a footing was tough. Our job was to scrape off the thicket of tangled, tall grass and brambles, leaving behind only bare earth.

  It seemed almost doable, if not necessarily survivable. Every single creature we encountered bit or stung or was eager to fill a person with poison. Sometimes, they could do all three.

  I made a good impression with my squad when I killed the first snake after lunch—a writhing water moccasin four feet long. I cut its head off with my “aggie,” a medieval-looking hand tool used to cultivate the land when it wasn’t serving as a way to kill the field vermin we confronted every day.

  The work was harder than I had dreamed possible. At the end of the day, I felt as though I’d just done ten hours of aerobics while carrying weights. I’d never known such exhaustion. At times, I thought I wouldn’t make it. I sweat so much that my clothing couldn’t have been more soaked if I’d jumped in a swimming pool.

  The heat, the humidity, and the crushingly hard physical work were the price I was paying to get a graduate degree. I just had to survive in the fields long enough to be selected for another job—preferably something inside and air-conditioned. I was trying my best.

  There were some elements to life on Ramsey I that I liked. The food was better—then again, maybe I was just so spent by the time we ate that it simply seemed better. Because the building was so old, it could not be retrofitted with the new, legally required dayroom where inmates could gather to watch TV. So each cell had its own little black-and-white TV—a flickering, fuzzy link to freedom. Finally, I could watch all the PBS and National Geographic I wanted, without having to fight the mob that insisted on tuning in to reruns of shows that were awful the first time they aired.

  I entertained myself by watching as much of the Clinton impeachment proceedings as possible—a story with more twists than any soap opera would dare attempt. When Robert Livingston, the blink-and-you’d-miss-him Speaker of the House, resigned his position after his own dalliances became public, I was left roaring with disbelief on my bunk.