Getting Life

by Michael Morton

  I had always been a fan of newscasts and following world events. Now I had nothing but time to indulge my interests—and my own TV! Kosovo, Columbine, the theater of presidential politics—every hiccup on the world stage became a kind of background music for my incarceration.

  I joined a Sunday morning talk group with a handful of other inmates, specifically to discuss world affairs. Our circle of penitentiary pundits was made up of bright men who had done dark things—­sexual indecency with a child, aggravated assault, break-ins, armed robbery, murder—you name it. I learned in prison that these charges and crimes represent only one aspect, one element of an inmate’s life. But sometimes, that criminality is a powerful urge they cannot overcome, that will be played out again the first moment they get a chance. Sometimes, though, a crime was simply a one-off, a lapse due to drugs or alcohol.

  Our prison Meet the Press was a welcome diversion, a chance to talk about something other than field work or horseflies, professional sports or who was going to “whack” whom.

  My graduate classes in literature got under way a few months after I arrived and I was happy as a clam. I had someone new to speak with about what I’d been reading, someone to help me with my writing, and a new distraction to take away my prison blues.

  One of my professors, Elizabeth Fields, insisted on a great deal of creative writing from her students. After only a few weeks, I could see a difference in my work. She taught me to add personal and telling details to my remembrances—the squeak of the boss’s saddle as he rode his horse closer to check on our work, the all but audible difference we felt when the shadow of a big cloud passed over the squad and the temperature seemed to drop ten or fifteen degrees. And of course, the Pavlovian response I experienced whenever I heard the tractor drawing close. I knew the tractor pulled the water wagon, and I knew I would get some, and I physically responded to it with each rev of the engine as it bumped its way across the uneven ground toward my squad of parched workers.

  Reading classic and contemporary literature and learning how to analyze it helped me “see” my own life—and my own limited world—differently.

  The inherent cruelty and occasional beauty of working in the prison’s fields was striking. One morning, as my squad sat on the wagons headed for a day of God-knew-what, one of the guys called out, “Damn! Am I having a flashback or what?” He pointed to the sky. Not fifty feet above us was a flock of perfectly neon-pink flamingos. We watched in silence, gape-mouthed at the tragic and ridiculous contrast in our lives.

  I remember returning to the fields once after a few days of rain, when the weather was not too hot and the work was not too hard. I knelt on the ground, moving along—weeding or something—and the smell of the earth was wonderfully overpowering. Compared to the ever-present bouquet of disinfectants, human waste, fear, and bad food that filled each prison building, the dirt seemed to be real and right and a place where people belonged.

  On that day, the near silence, the soft soil, and the breeze were a balm.

  Nature, of course, was not always so kind. A few days after our fabulous flamingo sighting, we suffered one of our worst critter attacks. While chopping weeds that were higher than the tallest man in my squad, someone disturbed a hive of ground-dwelling bumblebee-like creatures. The enraged hive roared up and out of the ground with such fury that they looked like a huge black snake shooting out of a hole and high into the air. I stayed low enough to the ground that I did not get attacked. Most of the others were not so lucky. The field was alive with yelps of pain, men leaping and running, swatting anything that moved. A friend of mine got stung six times on the side of the head and ended up in the infirmary.

  Our boss, who watched us every day from his lofty position on horseback, had seen this sort of thing before. He and his steed stood calmly off to the side, watching the shrieking, slapping, and running. He gave us time to calm down and share with each other our stories of trauma and injury. He made sure none of us went into allergic shock. Mostly, though, he and the guards who always sat on horseback ringing the perimeter made sure no inmate used the madness of the moment to slip out of sight.

  Their guns weren’t for show.

  I had also seen the guards behave less than kindly.

  Not long after I started in the fields, I saw a man collapse and appear to pass out from heat and exhaustion. I knew how he felt. Some of the men moved toward him, but one of the bosses waved them away. After handing his pistol to another guard also on horseback, he dismounted and walked over to the rag doll figure. He grabbed him up by the collar and dragged the inmate’s limp body to a nearby fire ant bed. He let go, watching as the man’s face hit the bed of vicious fire ants, which promptly started stinging him ferociously. Immediately, the inmate yelled with pain, leapt up, and began brushing off the stinging insects—a clear indication he had feigned the collapse.

  That was how the guards separated the fakers from the fainters. If the inmate woke up, he would be immediately put back to work. If he lay there, being bitten by hundreds of the world’s angriest ants, he would get to go to the prison infirmary—disfigured but forgiven.

  I wanted out of there. So I began shopping for new jobs everywhere inside the prison, going from job site to job site, trying to cajole, charm, check on openings, make myself seem like a good hire. It was like looking for work in the free world—only much more desperate. I wasn’t sure I could survive more field time. And I was so physically spent at the end of the day that I wasn’t at my best with my schoolwork or reading.

  Finally, I was told I would be going to the commissary to work “soon.” Some guys in my squad took to calling me Mr. Last Day because I believed every day was going to be my last on the job.

  Finally, mercifully, I was called inside one day at noon and told to report to the commissary. This was it.

  That morning, we’d been on hands and knees, gathering potatoes from the freshly plowed ground. I stood there sweaty and filthy when they opened the commissary door after I knocked. The instant I stepped inside, everyone took an involuntary step backward. I was dirty, and I reeked of hard labor. The commissary supervisor winced and ordered me to the showers.

  From now on, I was going to be able to stay clean. I was going to be working in a more civilized, clean, and air-conditioned section of the prison. I had made it. Once again, I’d survived.

  That night, I celebrated alone in my cell with two pints of Blue Bell ice cream and the growing sense that I might make it out of this hellhole intact after all.

  Just as my life inside began to make sense, the free world seemed to jump the tracks. I had been in prison more than fourteen years and would spend more than another decade inside. It was a typical day on the job at the commissary the morning of September 11, 2001, and I had stepped outside with another man to unload an eighteen-wheeler full of products for prisoners. As we were heaving boxes back and forth, somebody walked by and asked us if we had heard about the Twin Towers. He flatly stated, “They’ve fallen over.” Both of us brushed off his comment, considering it implausible. But even in our locked-down world, news began to bleed through about what had happened. Most of it came by word of mouth. We didn’t have a TV or a radio in the commissary.

  It happened on one of my short workdays and I was back in my cell by afternoon, to watch TV and try to figure out what was going on. Like the rest of the country, I was transfixed. It felt—as it did for so many in my generation—like the day Kennedy was shot. There was a forbidding sense that anything could happen now.

  Of course, this being prison, there was always some twist that made everything worse. On this day, of all days, the running water on the cellblock was suddenly gone. Stuck in my cell with a tiny TV as my only window on the world—surrounded by the mounting smell of human waste—I heard the growing drumbeats of war, I saw the fear and confusion among Americans, and for the first time in my adult life, I felt part of a vulnerable nation.

 
; For once, I actually felt physically safer inside.

  The world had gone crazy outside the walls. But everyone I loved was out there. I worried about eighteen-year-old Eric and the possibility that this attack would lead to a draft and he would be sent off to fight in some unfamiliar corner of the world. I worried about my parents and my inability to help them. I worried about my siblings and their families.

  I worried about my country—the country that had locked me away despite my innocence was still the country I loved.

  Inside, everything got back to normal—or what passed for normal.

  Every now and then, a mentally ill inmate would blow up or break down. In the chow hall one day, a man already known as “mental” (he had been caught drinking out of the toilet in the education building) had a full-blown “freak-out.” He stood up from his table, poured a pitcher of punch all over himself, stormed outside, stripped naked, climbed the fence, and threw himself into the razor wire at the top.

  The entire episode was witnessed by one of the inspector-­enforcer types sent from Huntsville to make sure our unit was up to snuff. The sad part was that even though he’d seen how bad it was here, nothing would be done to provide decent mental health care to prisoners. Instead, the imperative became to keep the inspectors from ever seeing that kind of thing.

  The beat went on.

  I got results from some of my DNA testing—not bad, but not what I had hoped for. The testing of the semen stain on the bed showed what could be found in a lot of married couples’ beds—­evidence that the man and woman who slept there had had sex. It wasn’t enough to spring me, but it did destroy the baseless and perverted theory prosecutor Ken Anderson had described in filthy detail to the jury—that I had masturbated over Chris’s dead body, using her dead hand. What kind of person could even think up something like that?

  I was deep into my graduate work, studying the literature of early Western civilization—an era and a sensibility that couldn’t have been further removed from the setting I lived in. But studying another place, another time, another world gave me a sense of freedom I found nowhere else in prison.

  For me, the last measure of freedom was found inside my head. It was my last hiding place, my last means of escape.

  I would need it. My life was about to change more dramatically than it ever had—in a number of ways.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  For the first time since my conviction, I finally had evidence the cavalry was riding to my rescue.

  One morning in July 2002, I was summoned to the captain’s office to take a phone call. When an inmate gets a call—which is rare—the guards never give a heads-up about the topic or who’s on the line. So the long walk to the office can be an exercise in terror—a panicked listing in one’s head of who might be sick or dead or what might have gone wrong.

  Once there, I found out I actually had good news—there were three women from the Innocence Project on the line. They told me they were going to be filing an all-inclusive writ in my case sometime in the next few weeks.

  I felt like I was high on some kind of new happy drug. Maybe I was just drunk on the only good news I’d had in years. But there was something else about the call that made me giddy, which had nothing to do with my legal case and everything to do with my long isolation. I had actually had the chance to speak with three intelligent, educated, polite, compassionate women. They chatted and laughed and were friendly and asked questions. They did not yell at me or issue orders or speak coarsely. It was embarrassing for me to realize, in that moment, how deprived of normal conversation—normal human contact—I had been.

  I floated back to my cell—high on life—for the first time in fifteen years.

  It wouldn’t be long before I hit bottom.

  It was spring, a time for new beginnings, new growth, and high school graduation. This year Eric was getting his diploma from the private Jesuit prep school he attended. I had been looking for the announcement for some time. Finally, on one day’s mail call, I got the fancy envelope. I carefully opened it, determined to preserve it in all its pristine beauty.

  I read through it.

  Something was terribly wrong.

  Eric’s name had been changed. He was listed as Eric John Olson, not Eric Morton. I knew what had happened. Chris’s sister Mary Lee and her husband had legally adopted him and he had taken their name. Since Eric was over eighteen years old and had obviously gone along with this, there was nothing I could do. There was no requirement that I even be notified.

  It was done.

  I thought back to the beginning of Eric’s life, when Chris had wanted to name him Michael Wayne Morton, Jr., and I had argued against it. I’d known enough “Juniors” who hadn’t been thrilled with their monikers. I didn’t want my son ever to resent being burdened with his father’s name. We compromised by naming him Eric Michael Morton.

  After my conviction, the court had decided to give our little boy to Chris’s sister, even though my sister and her family had desperately wanted to take him, even though my mother and father had hoped against hope he could live with them.

  And nature took its course. He grew up hearing the worst about me.

  As time went on, the get-togethers between Eric and my family grew fewer and farther between. Then whenever a visit was finally coming up, it seemed that there would be some last-minute demand on Eric’s time—Mary Lee had “forgotten” about a long-planned trip to the West Coast—or Eric’s summer camp “unfortunately” co­incided with the promised trek to see my family. There were apologies and promises to try again, but in the end, it all worked out the way I feared most.

  Eric’s aunt was now his mother. His uncle was his father. His cousin was his brother. I was nothing more than a bad memory—a dangerous, misguided man who lived far away, locked up and locked out. I was unaware of Eric’s life, out of every loop, deemed undeserving of the most basic inclusion.

  This news left me absolutely broken. My long-hoped-for life after vindication and release was gone—irretrievably gone.

  I hit rock bottom.

  And I went down angrily blaming everyone and everything: fate, my sister-in-law, Chris’s entire family, my family, myself, the legal system, the universe—you name it.

  When Father’s Day followed a week or so after I learned of the adoption, it ripped me open again. It felt as if my guts had been yanked out and all I could do was stare at them on the ground before me—a helpless, mortally wounded fool.

  I woke up early every Sunday morning when I was a youngster, because I had someplace I needed to be.

  Carefully, I would put on my dressiest clothes—a gleaming white short-sleeved shirt, my good pants, and my best shoes. I’d brush my teeth, slick my hair down with water, look in the mirror, and add that last sartorial touch every twelve-year-old boy in the 1960s needed—a clip-on tie.

  We went to church almost every week, and I enjoyed the ritual and semiformality of it. My mom would put on her Sunday best—hose and heels, maybe a string of pearls, always a pretty dress. My younger sister would get all gussied up, too, and we’d all step out of our home, shiny and polished, and head for the First Baptist Church of Bakersfield, California.

  We weren’t living in Texas at the time, but the state and its Baptist traditions were still very much part of our lives.

  In Sunday School, the children learned Bible stories, and in the church service, we all learned how to apply those traditional lessons to our lives. There were no deep theological discussions, no complex academic searches for underlying messages or comparative religious theory. There was only right and wrong, heaven and hell, walking with God or walking off a cliff.

  The choice was easy. I knew which path I wanted to follow.

  One of those Sunday mornings, amid the music and the prayer, I felt the unique longing to make my allegiance to Christ public. I couldn’t explain why, but I felt it. The min
ister had called for those who were ready to accept Jesus to come to the altar.

  I had sat there uninspired through these kinds of outreaches many times before, but on this day I felt different. I felt called—driven—determined in some way to go up front. I felt profoundly pulled to accept the prayers of the adults and the promise of eternal life.

  There were tears.

  My mother was proud.

  I felt cleansed and whole and included.

  It all felt so right.

  But years later, about the time I turned seventeen, like many young men, I rebelled against religion, against conformity, against the comforts faith had once given me.

  A teenage friend had teased me when we were talking about something naughty—probably sex or beer, the two main temptations faced by teenage boys back in the day. He told me I couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about since I was a good churchgoing type.

  At that moment, in the stranglehold of peer pressure and with all the “wisdom” acquired in my short life, I decided that I would spend the coming summer “off the leash.” I would walk on over to the wild side and dabble in the things mothers dreaded—the acts my church warned against and the practices my faith frowned upon. I reasoned that I’d come back and pick up where I left off—wiser, more experienced, a “man of the world.”

  Thirty years later, I had not yet come back. And now, I was sitting in prison. Finally, for the first time in decades, I began to think about the role of God in my life.

  When Chris was killed, people told me they were praying for me. I took no comfort in that. I didn’t even know what it meant—and I was in no place to try to figure it out.

  I was too stunned, too rocked back on my heels at the low blow life had dealt Eric and me. I was simply trying to process losing Chris, trying to participate in the investigation, trying to keep my head above the dark, swirling water that was washing me away.