God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  Wary and yet still optimistic, I reached Amherst. Even if the warden had taken kickbacks for inmate labor (and there was no proof), would that make meaningless his message about the convicts or his goals for the penitentiary? Weren’t all men corrupt in one way or another? Didn’t we inhabit a fallen world? Couldn’t he remain a kind of hero?

  And in any case, as long as I kept my access, my privacy with the inmates, and kept free of editorial intrusion, I could go on learning and writing about the lives of Terry Hawkins, Danny Fabre, Donald Cook, Buckkey Lasseigne, Johnny Brooks….

  At a bed-and-breakfast, I took a room across the hall from Cain’s.

  The quaint wing chair he sat in, I noted with sympathy, was too small for him. His belly was squeezed, forced outward, looked like a package on his lap. Such were the cruelties of bed-and-breakfast furniture.

  The short speech he entered into—never mentioning editing or overseeing my work—was also sympathetic. His parents, he said almost introspectively, had been small-town people. They had been simple people, not poor but definitely not well-off. They hadn’t retired with much. He hoped he could retire more comfortably than they had. “And I have to think about that. ’Cause I’m in my fifties. I’m not such a young guy anymore like you.”

  He wanted, he explained, to build his wife a barn for her dressage horses. It would cost about fifty thousand dollars. Could I see my way clear to contributing?

  Faintly, as he’d come to his wife’s desire for a new barn, I’d sensed the request in the air. When he asked for money, I wasn’t shocked. I only stared, thinking, So it’s true, and listened in a fleeting calm, adrenaline in momentary remission, as he made it plain that my continued presence at Angola depended on my paying him. If I couldn’t come through, he would give himself and his prison to another writer.

  “And I’ve got a good thing there,” he reminded me, for I must have been a second delayed in my response. “I’ve got another rodeo coming up next year. And I’ve got those inmate clubs, the Toastmasters and the CPR, and that’s good, that’s good. And I’ve got Angola’s history, all that drama and all that blood, and that change.

  “And I’ve got another execution coming up in April, and that’s good, too.”

  Adrenaline surged. I thought fast. But this time the room didn’t feel cold, this time I wasn’t freezing, only scrambling in my mind for some way to navigate. If I gave him money, I would break a journalistic taboo against paying for stories. If I didn’t, my year was finished. What if I paid and then wrote about it openly, as part of the story? Maybe, maybe if it came down to that. But in the meantime, my words and voice somehow effortlessly composed now that we were dealing on the most basic level, far, far from any talk of redemption, I deflected his demand. First I suggested gingerly that there might be “ethical concerns” raised by any arrangement between us.

  He said he wasn’t worried.

  I didn’t want to press, didn’t want to change my phrasing from “ethical” to “legal,” didn’t want him to realize what he’d just become in my mind: a brazen extortionist. We’d gotten along so well at the beginning of the year because I’d seen him the way he’d wished to be seen. My implying that he was a criminal wasn’t going to keep me inside his kingdom. I said that I couldn’t possibly pay him up front, but that we might work something out in terms of future royalties. “So you’ll want to get a lawyer—”

  “I don’t want any lawyers.”

  “Well, in fairness to you—”

  “I don’t like lawyers.” He spoke as though attorneys were an affront to Southern honor.

  “No one does,” I said. “But to protect your own interests you’re going to need one, to make sure whatever we might sign is valid and to review the sales figures, to make sure you’re getting your fair share.”

  He thought this over. The fear of losing out on proceeds seemed to overwhelm his desire for secrecy. “Well, that’s true. I really will need one. Now, what we’ll do, we’ll just call our deal a consultancy, and that way it won’t be any problem. I can get it past the state ethics board.”

  “All right.” I tried to invest my voice with a slight hint of warning, just enough that he might reconsider, but not enough that he might think I harbored any ill-feelings.

  “I sure hope we can make some money off this thing,” he said, as though we were now, fully, joined.

  In a lecture hall at the University of Massachusetts that evening, he spoke with gravity, even agony, about the executions his job forced him to carry out. He told his audience of students and professors about the second of the two men he’d put to death: how that convict had changed, was no longer the person he’d been seventeen years earlier, when he was convicted and sentenced for murdering two men in robberies that netted seventy-seven dollars.

  “And when the time finally came, and it looked like there wasn’t going to be any more appeals, Antonio was scared,” Cain remembered, in a tone that seemed private and confidential to everyone in the hall, to the girls with their neo-’60s hair parted down the middle and to the professors standing with their table of leaflets calling for an end to capital punishment and the beginning of prison reform. He even seemed to confide in the empty chairs, vacant because the night was frigid and full of snow, and because even here at a liberal college, in a liberal college town, no one cared all that much anymore.

  “He was scared because he didn’t know if when he died Jesus would be there right away, and he asked me would he have to wait. And I told him, I said, ‘I’ve read in a book where a band of angels will take you right away.’ So we made a deal: that when the IV was ready and the lethal injection was about to go in, I would tell him, ‘The Lord is waiting for you,’ and that way Antonio would know Jesus was there.

  “And that’s exactly what I did. I can’t tell you anything else for sure. I can’t tell you what I do, when I carry out the law, is right. And I can’t tell you it’s wrong. I just held Antonio’s hand. Now some people say to me, What about the victims? How could I hold this man’s hand when that same hand took two lives? Where was I for them? Well, I wish I’d been there when they were dying. I would have got down on my knees on the pavement and held their hands, too. But I only had Antonio. He was the one. He was the one who needed someone to hold him.”

  “But what if Jesus was sitting next to you right here?” a girl asked from the audience. “What would Jesus say about your killing?”

  There was a pause. Cain was unruffled, but when he answered he sounded yet more pained. “That’s just it,” he said. “I don’t know. We make earthly laws. They’re not God’s laws. We are imperfect. Our society is imperfect. Our knowledge is limited. But we do as best we can, and I am a public servant. I have to serve both God and man, that’s the problem with being a warden. But when it comes to executions, if someone has to do it, I’m glad it’s me in a way, because at least I do it with compassion. That might sound horrible to you all, but that’s how I think.”

  As the program ended, the audience wouldn’t let him leave. He stood near the doors, carrying no overcoat, wearing just a tweed sport jacket, the warmest winter clothing he had for this trip to the North, and he was surrounded. They wanted to know everything he knew, wanted his wisdom, not only on capital punishment but on all his prisoners. He told them how the inmates had grown up without fathers, without anyone positive paying attention to them, rewarding them for the good things instead of the bad, and how he paid attention, walked the penitentiary, listened to the men. “It’s just common sense,” he said. One of the professors, handing out his newsletter condemning the Massachusetts state prisons, whispered to me, “We could use a few people like him.” And finally Cain invited two of the students back to the bed-and-breakfast so he could give them Angola gate keys. An ACLU lawyer who’d spoken as part of the symposium, and who was taken like everyone else by Cain’s open heart, came along with us.

  “Come down and visit,” the warden urged the students, presenting each with a heavy five-inch-long brass key. �
��It’s a real interesting place. We’ll show you around. We’ll treat you right.” He turned to me. “Won’t we?”

  “He will,” I confirmed, smiling.

  It was almost eleven by the time the kids left. The ACLU lawyer wanted to take Cain out for coffee. I made a move to return to my own room.

  “We’re going to try to work all this stuff out,” I promised Cain as the lawyer started down the stairs ahead of him. I waited until the man was almost to the vestibule. I wanted the warden aware of his presence. “But can I schedule my trip for Easter in the meantime? I’d really like to be at Angola for that week.”

  “Let’s get this deal worked out first,” he said.

  I had nowhere to maneuver. I all but begged, saying that airline tickets would be too expensive if I had to put off reserving till the last minute. And that my story of regeneration at Angola would be left with a terrible gap if I couldn’t include Easter at the prison.

  I kept at it.

  Cain relented.

  Home, I pursued the background research I should have done months before. While in charge of D.C.I., Cain had become involved with a recycling company just as local parish officials were facing new state recycling requirements. Lobbying the parish to hire the company, he argued publicly for its plan to use convict labor. He meanwhile signed a contract with the company, guaranteeing him a commission on its business. And soon he had invested his own money in the enterprise. Later, the recycling prospects having fallen through, Cain was questioned by the Advocate about his ties to the operation. “My relationship had nothing to do with my state employment,” he replied. “I avoid any conflict of interest at all costs. I know better.”

  His moments under judicial, legislative, or local journalistic scrutiny never seemed to deter him. He had no reason to be deterred. The problems came to nothing; the bad publicity just melted away. Though the governor who succeeded Edwards had few ties to his predecessor and was a conservative Republican while Edwards was a populist Democrat, he kept Cain on at Angola. It seemed that as long as there was no rash of escapes, and no return to the embarrassing violence of the early ’70s, the new governor felt it best to leave things alone. The public wasn’t clamoring for a change. Men who committed crimes were sent away; it was easiest not to think, in any way, about where they went or who was in charge. They went to another world. The god there was largely on his own.

  After the relabeling plant closed, Warden Cain had encouraged the use of a soy-based meat substitute to be served at Angola and throughout Louisiana prisons. The Department of Corrections, effectively under his authority, bought 20 tons of the mix and planned to buy 480 more—close to $4 million worth—all from a company called VitaPro. Then the deal hit two snags.

  Another company bid to supply the same product at a much lower price. And a scandal broke in neighboring Texas: The head of its prison system had, over the past five years, purchased $33 million of VitaPro’s soy without taking bids, then had retired and accepted a job with the company paying $1,000 a day. Suddenly, unable to buy from VitaPro, Louisiana’s Department of Corrections lost interest in any meat substitute at all. “VitaPro wasn’t my deal,” Warden Cain told the Advocate—exactly what he had told me about the relabeling. As I read the stories, it was hard for me not to wonder what kind of sinecure he had worked out with VitaPro for his retirement.

  How could I have deceived myself for so long, diminished so thoroughly what now seemed Cain’s primary interest in running prisons? My only, marginal comfort was that other journalists, too, were eager for delusion. One local reporter I spoke with assured me that Cain’s brief scandals had arisen from naivete rather than greed. He endorsed Cain’s explanation that the need for inmate jobs had led to the relabeling and deboning. Cain just hadn’t foreseen how the arrangements would appear. There had been nothing sinister behind the contracts. “If that’s not true,” the reporter kept telling me, “then I don’t know Burl Cain.”

  And the producers of those glowing Warden Cain portraits shown on ABC, PBS, and the Discovery Channel (with a new one in the works for A&E), whose underlings must have run press searches before film crews were sent down, seemed to have made hopeful calculations, like my own, that the warden’s ideas on punishment and rehabilitation were far more important than any small transgressions. It was easy to think that they were, especially when you might want to film another program requiring access to a maximum-security prison, and when you knew that so few welcomed journalists past their gates, and when you knew that you had no legal right to be inside, no First Amendment standing at all, and when you knew that a flattered Warden Cain would allow you to return.

  But perhaps there was still another reason. The journalist himself, at least in my case, felt flattered by the warden. It felt good to be trusted—and liked—by a person in such absolute control of his world.

  SEVEN

  THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI HAD BEEN SURGING. WITH Easter six days away, the river at Angola’s bend climbed past record height and was starting to flood the prison. I traveled again into the warden’s domain.

  I carried the notion that one of the inmates I knew might, on Holy Thursday, kneel down in church to wash another convict’s feet. The rite of forgiveness was limitless in need. It was an effort to love perfectly, if only for a minute, as the self dissolved in servitude. It was an obliteration of the origin of all sin and wrongdoing. And for the one whose feet were being washed, it was a touch of this unmitigated love which, for the vast majority of humanity that feels undeserving, was hard to welcome, even painful to absorb. I went down that week to see men healed, for an instant. I found the penitentiary about to be washed away.

  “We need to talk tonight,” Cain said quietly in passing, on Monday, before he went off to battle the river. It was above the level of 1922, when it had swept over the levee in a bank of white water that looked, in pictures, like a mini-Niagara. Back then, the inmates had been packed on barges while their camps were submerged. By the time the river crested, parts of Angola were under sixteen feet of water, and all you could see of the buildings were the peaks of their roofs. The main levee was four feet higher now, built up over the years by inmates and the Corps of Engineers. But by Monday a secondary, peripheral levee had already been flooded; the Mississippi had claimed something closer to its natural shape; and a paddle boat full of roulette-playing tourists had lost its way amid the wider channel and cruised onto prison grounds, gamblers waving at the guard towers. One fifth of Angola was already underwater. The river wouldn’t crest until Friday.

  But the big problem wasn’t height, it was pressure. While the Mississippi sat just a foot or two below the main levee at Camp C, while alligators lolled near Camp F and hundreds of white pelicans converged on the fish that had been sucked over when the outer levee became a waterfall, it seemed that an unusual northern snowmelt had added as much to the river as it could, and that the local rains had stopped, that the Mississippi couldn’t rise much more. So it tried to break through. The main levee couldn’t hold the force of all the extra water. The banks were saturated and starting to let the river tunnel in. Brown water boiled up from the ground on the prison side. Tiny lakes formed around the percolations. There were fifty, sixty, seventy of them, the count growing every hour. Teams of inmates stacked sandbags around the pools, trying to create enough counter-pressure to stop the inflow. Then the river drove at another spot. If the levee caved, the prison would be under twelve to twenty feet within twelve hours.

  If there was time, the convicts would be trucked to tent cities, one on Angola’s only high ground, beside the administration building, the other in the forest six miles outside the gates. The inmates were almost finished building them. Vets Incarcerated, one of the convict clubs, directed the staking of tents, while hundreds of prisoners raised new cyclone fences around themselves and then, with long poles, hoisted coils of barbed wire to the fence tops. It was a delicate business, the placing of that barbed wire. If one man wavered with his pole, the length of coil would
come down like a net of razors. But the inmates were careful. And they built the makeshift prisons to specifications. Above them, guards poked their rifles from temporary towers made neatly with planks and two-by-fours, all cut and nailed together by the lifers.

  No one tried to escape. Convicts were driving tractors and trucks out the gates of Angola, down the state highway and onto the dirt road that led to the forest site, and they were driving them back out of the woods, but no one turned left at the highway instead of right, no one tried to make it to some bus depot or to a house where he could steal a car; they went to pick up their next load of lumber or barbed wire. Nor did anyone bolt past the sleep-deprived guards into the trees. When I asked if he ever thought about fleeing, one man laughed hysterically, rolling backward on the plywood floor he was building under a tent. He had to catch his breath before he could answer. He had to wipe away the raucous tears. “Man, I thought about running every day I been incarcerated. And when we out here, and that fence ain’t finished… But where am I gonna get to? Just ’cause we outside the gates don’t mean we outside Angola.” He elaborated the theory, so often mentioned, that the prison property extended far beyond its supposed lines, in this case all the way to the nearest town, St. Francisville.

  Most of the inmates hoped only that they wouldn’t have to move from their dorms to these tents, that they wouldn’t be forced to live for months here, that they wouldn’t lose the photo albums in their locker boxes, and, if the levee did give way, that they would be let out of their dorms before they drowned. Every morning, when they were taken to their work sites, they saw the exodus from the guards’ village, the two-hour traffic jam at the front gate. The guards with mobile homes were driving them out. The rest had their TVs and kitchen tables and box springs stacked in their pickups.

  On Monday evening Cain called a meeting of convict leaders—the club presidents and inmate counselors and editors of the Angolite. Angola’s wardens had always sent word outward through this group, and Cain loved the tradition. “I want the inmate leaders in A Building,” he said into his prison radio, and all over Angola assistant wardens passed this down to captains and lieutenants and finally to the low-level guards who barked into meeting rooms and kicked at bedposts and told the men Warden Cain wanted to see them right away. Once the inmates had funneled into the Main Prison visiting shed, once they’d settled themselves in the plastic chairs and waited a while, slouched indifferently but dutifully silent, Cain walked in, with his assistant wardens trailing behind him.