The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  The attorney, wanting to help out a deserving family in the holiday spirit, had called a woman who worked at a loan company to ask who needed help. The woman had suggested that, what with their raising foster kids and other good works, the Bud Wolf family was the most deserving in town.

  For the families of Denice Haraway—her own and her husband’s—Christmas was, of course, subdued. The year before, there had been rage: the terrible tale of the October confession tapes was still fresh; ahead lay the ordeal of the trial. Now there was continued mourning for Denice, and unavoidable recollections of happy Christmases past. But there was also, perhaps, a measure of grim satisfaction. The trial was done. The suspects had been convicted and sentenced to die. Denice could not be brought back to life, but if religion meant anything at all, then she was at peace, in the fields of the Lord. And here on Earth the gears of justice had meshed; justice was being done. And, one day, perhaps, retribution.

  In his cell at McAlester, Tommy Ward was shaking more than ever. His body had erupted in a nervous rash. They were going to kill him on January 21, unless a stay of execution came through. By Christmas Day it had not come through.

  His mother came to visit, bringing along Jimmy’s two boys, Jesse and Jack. As they talked, Jesse began to cry. Tommy began to joke around, to cheer him up, to get the boy laughing.

  Afterward, in his cell, Tommy cried, because he could not be with them.

  A few cells away, Karl Fontenot wrote a letter, on a yellow legal pad. He, too, had his family on his mind. “While I was in the city jail on Christmas of 1984,” he wrote, “my real family didn’t even come see me, write me or sent me no Christmas gifts. I wrote them continuously trying to get them to write me some letters but they never wrote me. I wrote them one letter which said if you love me at all family like I love you all you will write me or come visit me. That was like proof to me that they don’t love me.”

  In the afternoon, Tommy called Tricia and Bud, to say Merry Christmas; they’d all been over at C.L. and Maxine’s in the morning, exchanging gifts; now they were at home, serving a turkey dinner to Tricia’s side of the family.

  Tommy planned to spend Christmas night reading his Bible, and praying. But about eight o’clock, for unexplained reasons, the lights in the cell block went out. They stayed out till eleven the next morning. Reading was impossible. Tommy just prayed.

  When he fell asleep, he dreamed again of the Haraway case. He dreamed that Denice Haraway was alive, was being held prisoner by some guys; and that he, Tommy Ward, was the head of the investigating team trying to find her. He was in a truck with a bunch of men, who were armed with rifles and automatic weapons. They jumped out of the truck, surrounded a house in which Denice Haraway was being held against her will.

  He woke up before the rescue.

  The paperwork on Ward’s and Fontenot’s visitor lists was completed. On the last weekend of the year, Tricia and Bud were able to see Tommy for the first time at McAlester. They brought along Rhonda and Yuvonda; they held the infant up to the glass, for Tommy to get a good look. It was a cheerful visit.

  The sight of the baby summoned up yearnings in Tommy. He wrote them down that night: “Today was the first time I seen Yuvonda. She is a doll. I about started to cry when I saw her. I love baby’s. I always wanted one of my own. I always like looking at magazines with pictures of baby’s in them. And cry for hours wanting one of my own. I also think about this mess and how those people are trying not to let me have a chance of a famaly of my own.

  “I wish I could only had been able to take my heart out and show those people in Ada how it beets and let them hold it and they’d see that there is no way I did it.”

  New Year’s Eve came and went. And New Year’s Day.

  It was 1986.

  Tommy Ward still believed he was scheduled to die on January 21. No one had told him differently.

  And he was right.

  The judge, the lawyers, all thought the problem about the stay of execution had been taken care of. But in the bureaucratic labyrinth of the criminal justice system of the state of Oklahoma, there existed no stay of execution for him. Tommy Ward, though he had not been moved to the thirty-day holding area, was scheduled to be executed in twenty-one days.

  The week ended. Another weekend passed. On Monday, January 6, Miz Ward received a call from the warden’s office. They still had received no stay of execution, she was told. She’d better find out what was going on.

  The current of fear and uncertainty on which Miz Susie Ward’s life had floated helplessly since her son was arrested seemed to have no end to its twists, its turns, its rocky shoals. She called Winifred Harrell at Don Wyatt’s office; Tommy had not yet been assigned another lawyer.

  Winifred, too, thought the matter had been taken care of. She telephoned Patti Palmer, the deputy appellate public defender, in Norman. Ms. Palmer told Winifred she had been at the Court of Criminal Appeals the previous Friday, January 3, that a stay had been granted, that the paperwork was on the way.

  Winifred reassured Miz Ward.

  No one reassured Tommy. He could make phone calls out, but no one could phone in.

  At his home in Chandler, Judge Powers was pondering the case. He needed to appoint a private attorney to represent Tommy Ward, because the public defender was representing Fontenot. But he knew how unpopular the case was among the attorneys of Ada.

  Finally he hit upon what seemed like the perfect solution. Who else could better represent Tommy Ward’s interests? Who understood the complex case better?

  He looked up the Ada number and dialed. Judy Wood answered. She buzzed her boss’s office. She told him Judge Powers was calling.

  At his large desk, beneath the shelf of Philip Roths and Stephen Kings, Don Wyatt picked up the phone.

  Judge Powers told him his decision. He, Don Wyatt, would be Tommy Ward’s court-appointed attorney for the appeals.

  Wyatt groaned. His chest sank. He did not want the assignment. He had had his fill of this case.

  The judge told him the assignment was his anyway. The official document appointing him was on the way.

  Wyatt hung up. He called in Winifred. As his legal assistant, much of the work load in handling the appeals would fall on her. He told her the news.

  Winifred’s mind flashed to the Ward file she had maintained from the day she joined the firm. It had been in perfect order, until the trial. But after the trial everything had been shoved in any which way; it would not be needed for a long time, if ever, she’d thought; the case would be someone else’s.

  “I quit,” she said. “I’d rather go on welfare.”

  Winifred knew she was joking, but barely.

  That same day was moving day at McAlester. The new Death Row had been completed, and fifty-six inmates, their cases in various states of appeal, would be relocated there. Because there were so many—the last execution in Oklahoma had been twenty years before—sixteen would have to double up, two to a cell; there were only forty-eight cells on Death Row.

  From the beginning, Ward and Fontenot had talked about rooming together. But in recent weeks, with Karl increasingly blaming Tommy for his predicament, they had hardly been talking, had just had some desultory conversations in the yard. Now Karl told Tommy he wouldn’t share a cell with him.

  Moved to Death Row, they were placed in cells across the corridor from one another. Karl was in a cell alone. Tommy’s cell had two bunks, and an inmate called Luke (name changed) was asked if he would share Tommy’s cell. Luke, who had murdered several people, said he would; he liked Tommy okay.

  The inmates settled in, those who had them plugging in television sets, radios, arranging their toilet articles, their writing pads, spare prison outfits of dark blue shirts, blue jeans, blue boxer shorts, T-shirts. After a few hours, Luke turned to Ward. “Come over here and I’ll masturbate you,” he said.

  Tommy was horrified.

  “The hell you will!” he said.

  “Look, I never done it before wi
th a guy either,” Luke said. “But I’m here for life. I’m not getting out of here except in a box. I might as well get used to it. You’ll do it, after a while.”

  Tommy knew that a lot of the men in the prison had turned gay. He made it clear to Luke that the idea revolted him.

  The men kept apart. Afternoon became evening. Evening became night. In their new cells, the inmates were keyed up, restless. Long into the night, TV sets remained on, and radios. The inmates stayed awake, talking, shouting conversations from cell to cell. That was easier here than where they’d been; the doors here were made of bars instead of solid metal.

  It was past 3 A.M. Most of the inmates were still awake. The sound of radios, TVs, tuned to different stations, cluttered the corridor. Karl Fontenot stood behind the barred door of his cell, looking out. An inmate in another cell started a conversation. They had to half-shout over the din.

  “How come you ain’t rooming with your fall partner?” the man asked.

  Karl replied, “Tommy? I don’t want to room with him. Tommy’s a snitch!”

  Suddenly it was as if some implosion of sound had occurred on Death Row. The word “snitch” was the catalyst. As soon as it was spoken, loudly over the noise, conversation stopped. In the sudden, comparative quiet, radios were turned off, and TV sets. Quiet moved down the corridor like a snake, until there was total silence.

  Fontenot had never spent a minute in jail, anywhere, until his arrest in the Haraway case. He was, perhaps, unaware that the deadliest word in any prison in America is the word “snitch.”

  “Say that again?” the inmate said.

  “Tommy’s a snitch,” Karl said. “If it wasn’t for Tommy, I wouldn’t be in here. If Tommy hadn’t given the cops my name, they never would of come to question me, for me to make that tape.”

  There was silence again on Death Row. Then the other inmates started talking. They didn’t want snitches around. They started talking about killing Tommy.

  They started planning aloud how to do it.

  Tommy, listening, began to shake.

  We could do it, one of them said, when they open the cell door to let Luke out for exercise. We could rush in and beat Tommy to death.

  But then the guards would know who done it, another said. We should kill Tommy when no one is around.

  Tommy became afraid, terrified. He began to shout for a guard.

  A guard came down the corridor. He asked what was wrong. Tommy said, “You just get me out of here!”

  The guard asked why.

  “I’ll tell you after you get me out of here!”

  “I have to get a sergeant for that,” the guard said.

  The guard walked away. Minute after minute passed. The other inmates continued to talk about killing Tommy. The sergeant did not appear.

  Luke looked at Tommy slyly. “I guess they’re waiting to see if I’m the one who’s going to get you,” he said.

  Tommy was petrified. He knew Luke had killed before.

  The guard returned. A few minutes later a sergeant arrived. They took Tommy out of the cell, led him down the corridor, to another section of Death Row. They put him in a cell, alone; it was larger than the other one.

  “Now, tell me what’s wrong,” the guard said.

  “They were threatening to kill me,” Tommy said.

  He did not give details about who, or why. He did not want to get a reputation as a snitch.

  He could tell the word had beat him to this unofficial protective custody area: word that “a snitch was coming down.” He told an inmate in a nearby cell that it wasn’t true; that Karl was telling lies.

  “Your fall partner?” the inmate said. “That don’t make you a snitch. It happens all the time. Fall partners turnin’ on each other.”

  In the morning, the news was brought to Tommy in his new cell in protective isolation: his stay of execution by the courts had been received. The stay would be in effect pending the outcome of his appeals. The state of Oklahoma no longer was planning to kill him on January 21.

  In the afternoon, a guard told Ward he could go out and exercise if he wanted—not with the Death Row inmates who had threatened him, but with the Christians with whom he went to church. Tommy said he would wait a while. He wanted to make sure they were really Christians.

  19

  GERTY

  Allan Tatum had lived in Gerty, Oklahoma, for twenty-seven years.

  When asked the population of the small community, he liked to reply, “About thirty-seven.” A more accurate count would be 125 to 150, depending on how many of the children scampering through the countryside stood still long enough to be counted.

  Gerty is in Hughes County, about twenty-seven miles east, and slightly north, of Ada; about eight miles east of the Pontotoc County line. It consists of a single grocery store and a scattering of houses. There is no post office, no school. State maps of Oklahoma show no roads leading to Gerty; in fact, there are two or three, all of them dirt. One leads down from Allen, just inside Pontotoc about nine miles to the northwest; another leads down from Atwood, farther to the north. It is an area of rugged hillsides choked with thick underbrush. The coons and the possums far outnumber the people.

  Tatum, sixty-one, and his wife, Linda, lived in a house a quarter mile south of the Gerty store. He was a carpenter by trade. Linda worked at Toot’s Barbecue, out on Highway 75 to the east. Most winters, when the weather turned cold and snow covered the countryside, carpentry work was slow; Tatum would spend his time hunting and trapping in the woods. It was mostly for sport; depending on what he caught, he might barbecue the meat and sell the pelts.

  The winter of 1985–86 was unusually warm in Oklahoma, as it was in most of the Southwest. Afternoon temperatures were often in the sixties. The weather stayed so good that Tatum was kept busy with his carpentry, repairing fences, building barns or cabins. By the middle of January he had not gone hunting once.

  Then a project on which he was working was delayed; some hardware was late in arriving. Tatum woke up on the morning of Monday, January 20, with no work to do. He decided to go out and lay some traps. He was hoping he would get a bobcat.

  His wife fixed him lunch before she went off to her job at Toot’s. Tatum ate, loaded his pickup with his traps and bait. He tossed his .22-caliber single-shot rifle into the truck and climbed in. For January, the seat of the pickup parked in the sun felt extra warm against his Levis.

  He drove west three miles over rutted dirt roads to open land that abutted his property. He parked the truck and carried the traps and the liquid bait into the underbrush, away from the road, where hunting would be best, making mental note of the locations; he’d be required by law to run the traps every day, to see if any animals had gotten caught, were injured but alive.

  The carpenter spent the whole long afternoon out in the brush. Then, with the winter sun dying early, he headed slowly back toward the pickup. He was pushing his way through the leafless brambles of huckleberry bushes, on a sloping hillside, when a rounded white object caught his notice, lying under a bush. In the fading light he thought it was a Styrofoam head, the kind sold in five-and-dime stores, for women to keep their hats on, or their wigs.

  Tatum reached down and rolled the object over with his finger. A skull was staring up at him.

  He did not touch it again.

  He noted the location, and continued on to his truck.

  As he drove home, his thought was to keep his mouth shut about what he had found. He had no idea who it might be, how long it had been there, where things might lead if he mentioned it to anyone. He parked the pickup, went into the house, sat. Linda was still at work, would be gone till after the supper hour. He looked at the telephone, silent. Tatum had a hard time with telephones. He was hard of hearing, could not understand what people were saying on a phone.

  He waited. On toward seven o’clock, his brother-in-law, Leonard Muck, came over. Leonard lived just down the road, and came by most every night to pass the time. They often hunted toget
her.

  Tatum told Leonard, and asked him to telephone Orville Rose. They both knew Orville Rose. He was the sheriff of Hughes County, had been the sheriff for eleven years.

  Leonard Muck told the sheriff what Allan Tatum had found. It was already dark outside. The sheriff asked questions, and Muck repeated them loudly to Tatum. The carpenter told his brother-in-law the answers, and Muck spoke them into the phone. It was agreed that the sheriff would come out to Tatum’s place at eleven o’clock the next morning, and Tatum would take him to the place where the skull was.

  None of them speculated on what the skull was doing there, or on who it might be. The sheriff especially didn’t speculate. In his eleven years he’d gotten many calls like this. Most of the time it turned out to be a dog.

  Orville Rose’s office was in Holdenville, the Hughes County seat; the birthplace, twenty-five years earlier, of Donna Denice Haraway. He left there Tuesday morning with his undersheriff, Floyd Trivitt, in Trivitt’s squad car. With Floyd behind the wheel, they drove in the morning sun down Highway 48, across the South Canadian River, past Atwood, down the unnumbered dirt road into Gerty. The sheriff had considered calling the OSBI, but first he wanted to make sure the skull was human. They picked up Allan Tatum at his house. Tatum directed them the three and a half miles to where he had seen the skull.

  It was still there, on the ground under leafless brush, on a bed of autumn-colored leaves, about 200 yards up a slope from the dirt road. The sheriff knelt beside it. The lower jaw was missing. In the teeth of the human upper jaw he could see a lot of silver fillings.

  He could not tell if it was male or female.

  They looked about in the immediate area. They saw bits of fabric on the ground, and snagged in the bushes: little more than frayed remnants; they appeared to be from blue jeans. They came upon other bones, scattered. There was no hint of flesh; that would have been devoured by dogs or buzzards, the sheriff figured, in no time. They came upon the soles of a pair of tennis shoes; the upper, cloth part was gone. Tatum saw what he thought was bits of some kind of blouse or top. It was a “streakedy, stripedy blue.” Sheriff Rose would not recall seeing any part of a blouse or top.