by Ninie Hammon
She paused, waited.
“When it commences to itchin’ don’t scratch it right away. You let it keep itching ’til you can’t wait nairy another second and then you can go at it. Just with the tips of your fingers, though; even if you just bit your nails you don’t want to scratch and draw blood. It’ll get ’fected quick if it ain’t clean. Go on, now. Try.”
Mac tried. Concentrated. Nothing. He thought about faking it, almost reached up to scratch his neck, to pretend.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t work for me.”
“I ain’t surprised. Shoot, your mind’s all full up. You’re a-thinking about puttin’ jam on your toast this morning, ridin’ out here in your car with the window down, the wind blowin’ in your face so it’s hard to breathe.”
Her smile grew wider.
“I rode in a car like that once! The windows down, ever’ last one of ’em, and the wind blowin’ through, hair in our faces, ticklin’ our noses, and we was laughin’…”
The smile drained slowly away.
She sat down, quiet again. “My mind ain’t all full up with things like yours. That’s why I can do it, make a itch. My mind’s so empty if I was to sneeze in there you could hear it echo.”
She stopped abruptly and looked down at her feet. They were bare. It was the first Mac had noticed she wasn’t wearing shoes.
“I done it again,” she said softly.
“What did you do?”
“Talked. Blabbered.”
“What’s wrong with talking?”
“See I ain’t had much practice with conversation. You talk, then I talk, then you talk. It’s kinda like playin’ catch, ain’t it?”
“Kind of.”
“ I musta stayed up most of last night thinkin’ I’d see you today and what I’d say, and I ain’t said none of that yet.”
Mac hadn’t said any of what he wanted to say yet, either.
“Okay, tell me what you wanted to say.”
“What I mostly wanted wasn’t to talk a’tall. I wanted to listen. I wanted you to talk, ’bout life. You know, out there.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“What I got to say you’d want to hear?”
“Where did you learn to sing like that?”
She looked surprised, embarrassed. “When’d you ever hear me sing?”
“Today. You were in the exercise yard, I guess. Where did that song come from?”
“Just made up. Outa my head.”
“But the words weren’t … English. Were they? What language is it?”
She was suddenly shy. Her face reddened and she ducked her chin.
“Them’s my words is all. Made-up words.”
“So they’re just sounds, not really words.”
“That ain’t what I said.” She cocked her head to the left, a pleat stapled between her eyebrows, her lips pressed together. “Are you listening to me? You know, conversation’s a whole lot harder’n I thought it’d be. I said what I sing’s words, they’re just my words.”
“For instance?”
“Well … bomba-layla. That means ‘little baby.’ And wee wurlin. That’s ‘wind blowing.’”
Lewis Carroll leapt out of Mrs. Branscom’s sophomore English class and landed feet-first in Mac’s mind: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” Carroll didn’t have anything on a death row inmate named Princess. Shoot, he didn’t even set his nonsense to music.
“You made up a whole language?”
“No, not ever’ word in it. Just the ones I used in songs.”
“Why?”
Princess gave him a brown-toothed smile.
“When Angel was little, I usta sing her to sleep of a night. She liked that, would lay there real still, like she was really listenin’. I didn’t know no proper songs to sing, so I just made some up. She was so little, she didn’t know the difference ’tween real words and made-up words.”
Mac had a sudden, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“Angel?”
“I mean Angela. I’s the only one called her Angel. My little sister.”
Mac grabbed words an instant before they leapt out his mouth. Instead of you mean the little girl you murdered? he managed to say, “Tell me about her.”
The stillness around Princess gathered, settled. The warm honey of her voice bubbled up out of its center.
“She was so beautiful she broke your heart.”
That was it. Silence. Princess was wrapped tight in it. Then her head came up and her face was animated again.
“You got your own little girl, doncha? She pretty?”
The silver ice pick slid back in under Mac’s ribcage.
“She’s gorgeous. Which brings up something I want to talk about. You knew about her, about me. And yesterday when I asked how you knew, you said a new guard told you. That wasn’t true, was it?”
“No.” She ducked her head again. “But I had to say somethin’, else you’d a got all skittish and maybe woulda left, and I didn’t want you—”
“What is the truth, Princess? How did you know about me? About my family?”
“Honest answer?”
He nodded.
“I don’t have no idea.”
“You don’t know how you know?”
“There’s lots of things I know that I don’t know how. It’s just there, in my head. I didn’t put it there. Been that way ever since I …” She paused. “…started having fits.”
She must have read the startled confusion on his face. Leaning toward him, she spoke in the same, measured tone he had used with her earlier.
“I don’t fret over not understandin’ the how and why of it. I figure ain’t no gutter in the world knows where the rainwater comes from. All of a sudden it’s just there, and it flows right through and out the other side. The knowin’, it’s like that.”
She looked deep into his eyes. “You forgive me? For lyin’ to you?”
“You won’t do it again?”
She dropped her eyes, studied the edge of the table.
“That’s hard. Truth is hard.”
“Yeah, truth is hard.” Hard and sharp. Give it enough time and its razor edge would eventually slice through whatever pretense you wrapped it in.
She looked up. “Okay, I won’t never lie to you ever again. But you got to make me the same promise.”
“Deal.” The word popped out before he could grab it.
“Now I ain’t sayin’ I’m gonna tell you ever’thing there is to tell.” Her brown teeth peeked out of a small smile. “You know it ain’t lyin’ if you just won’t say.”
He threw his head back and laughed out loud, a full, belly laugh.
“Princess, you would have made a good lawyer.”
“Lawyer? Why most of what comes out of their mouths don’t make no sense a’tall.”
“You got that right,” he said, still chuckling.
“You talk to that little girl of yours last night, find out what’s wrong?”
Mac’s laughter froze in his throat.
“I talked to her, yes.”
“And?”
“And what’s wrong with her is she just lost her mother!” He didn’t intend to raise his voice, but Princess jumped. “I’m sorry. Look, I don’t know how you see things or know things, but it doesn’t take some psychic power to figure out that my daughter’s in pain. So am I. She’s hurt and bewildered and—”
“It’s somethin’ else. It ain’t a simple pain, it ain’t mourning. It’s all tangled up and there’s a whole lot of scared in it.”
“How do you—?”
“I don’t know!”
Now, it was Princess whose voice was raised, not in volume but intensity. She stopped, steadied herself.
“I don’t know how I know,” she said, quietly this time. “I always been … different. Please, Rev, it don’t matter if you think I’m battier ’n a bedbug. Just sit that little girl of yours down and look her in the eye and ask her w
hat’s a’eatin’ at her.”
Mac sighed.
“Nothing wrong with having a heart-to-heart talk with my daughter, I guess. Truth is, we’ve been needing to have one for a long time. You happy now?”
“As a pig in a mud waller.” She smiled. “She’s a pretty little thing, your girl—that right? You said she was gorgeous.”
“Absolutely! Of course, I’m her father, so I might just be a teeny bit biased.”
“You got a picture?” Again the stillness, intensity and focus.
“Well yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Her school picture.”
Mac reached into his pocket for his wallet. Princess’s eyes followed his every movement, she sat tense, breathlessly expectant. Then Mac remembered. The guard who’d frisked him had kept it in the basket by the door.
“Oops, I’m sorry. I left my wallet with my car keys downstairs.”
All the air whooshed out of her. She squeaked out a little “Oh!”—the iceberg tip of a wail.
“If you’d really like to see a picture, I’ll bring it tomorrow when I come.”
She looked up and smiled and he could see the shadow of tears in her eyes. “Wouldja?”
“Sure, no problem.”
“I ain’t got no pictures to show you. Just the one, well four of ’em, that we made in that machine at the circus that day.”
The circus—maybe the one where she had a seizure and was arrested. No, she said “we,” and she’d already killed Angel when she showed up at the circus covered in blood.
“Who’s in the pictures?”
“Me ’n Angel.”
“I’d love to see them.”
“Can’t.” She pronounced the word so it rhymed with paint. “There ain’t no faces to see no more. I musta rubbed all the paper off ’em a-pettin’ ’em all the time.”
She brightened. “But you’re gonna bring me a picture of your little girl anyway, right? I would powerfully like to see your child.”
“I’ll bring it.”
She nodded. That settled, she switched gears.
“I said I’s up the night, thinkin’ of things I needed to talk to you about, remember?
Mac nodded, steeled himself. He’d just promised this woman he wouldn’t lie to her. So what did he say when she asked about life, death and eternity? Well—it ain’t lyin’ if you just don’t say.
She suddenly hopped out of her chair and hurried to the window.
“That there!” She pointed to a collection of structures on the Indian Bluffs to the north. From here, it looked like a small village with some stores, a church with a steeple, maybe some houses—hard to make out specifics at this distance.
“Years ago, when that lawyer’d come and talk about things I didn’t understand, I usta sit here a’starin’ at that pretty little town.” She turned from the window and smiled at him. “I usta make up play-stories in my head ’bout it at night, you know, pretending I lived there an’ all. What’s its name? You ever been there?”
Mac relaxed and shook his head. “Sorry to disappoint you, Princess, but that town’s not real.”
“How can a town not be real?”
“It’s a movie set.”
“Oh, go on! Really?”
“Back in the ’40s, MGM made a low-budget Western here—think it might have starred Audie Murphy but I’m not sure—and they built a set up there in the hills. All that you can see, it’s just false fronts. There are walls on the end buildings to hold the whole thing up and enough internal walls to keep it stable, but when you open one of those doors, you step all the way through and out the back side. The Durango County Historical Society took it on as a project years ago and restored it, painted it and fixed it up. Gave it the name of the town in the movie—Laramie Junction. Little old ladies spend hours up there every week, planting flowers and keeping the grass neat.”
“Well I never,” she said in awe, staring out the window. “I usta pretend—now don’t you laugh at me—that I got married in that little church up there.”
She turned back from the window and looked at him.
“I’s all the time in church when I’s a kid. The building was right down the bottom of the hill from our house, on the far side of the creek, away from where the colored folk lived, and I used to sneak off and go there when Jackson wasn’t home. Just sit where it was quiet.”
The growl was in the word again—Jackson.
“There was a piano in the church. You ever look in the back of a piano, seen what’s in there? What makes the noise is strings. You hit one of them keys and this hammer-lookin’ doo-dad hits one of them strings. Did you know that all the high notes, they got these little bitty strings, pulled reeeal tight.”
She turned back, rested her forehead on the bars in front of the glass, tracing the outline of them with her finger.
“All my life, my insides was piano keys that didn’t play nothing but high notes.”
“You want to tell me about it, Princess?”
“Maybe someday.”
“You’re running out of somedays.”
“Sayin’ things don’t make ’em not so.”
“No, but sometimes it helps to talk. Get things out in the open.”
“What does it help? I ain’t gonna live to see thirty. Rake up a bunch o’ awful stuff and talk about it now—shoot, that’d just ruin the time I got left.”
She pointed out the window to a sight inside the walls of the Iron House. A small cemetery lay in the corner of the fenced-in area, on the northeast side so it wasn’t visible from the Quonset hut that housed Sizzlin’ Suzie.
“That there’s real, ain’t no movie set. They’re gonna plant me there on Friday, a hole in the ground inside a cage.” She paused, then added wistfully, “Ain’t even gonna be free when I’m dead.”
Then she turned with a resolute smile. “Now’s my turn and I want to know ’bout you. Was you in the army? Did you fight in the war? Mama told me all about how my daddy fought in the Philippines, dodged bullets for three years, then come home and got kilt in a car wreck. Was you in the Philippines?”
Her mother said her father’d been killed in a car accident? Guess that was easier than explaining he’d run off with another woman. But wouldn’t Princess have been old enough to know? Before he had time to consider the mystery, Princess’s litany of questions drowned out his curiosity.
“Have you seen a ocean? I only ever been in Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. You been overseas? Did you—?”
“Whoa, that’s enough. Let’s start with ‘was I in the army?’”
And so they talked. Princess peppered him with questions. He told her about everything from JFK, and John Glenn orbiting the earth in Friendship 7, to skateboards, Barbie dolls, American Bandstand, and the twist. He didn’t trouble her with Korea, the Cold War, or civil rights, but did take a stab at explaining the phenomenon that was Elvis Presley. He struggled to condense, to fill in the gaps the best he could for fourteen years of silence.
The door opened as he was singing “… you ain’t nothing but a hound dog …” in an off-key baritone. The guard with the eight-by-ten-glossy-suitable-for-framing face stepped inside.
“It’s five o’clock, time’s up now,” he said to Mac. Then he asked, “You coming back tomorrow?”
Mac saw Princess tense, and then relax when he said, “I’ll be here every day this week.”
“If you want to wait, I’ll take her back to her cell first, and then show you the way out through the administration building,” the guard said. “That way I won’t have to escort you back to check-in every day.”
Mac suddenly remembered the newspaper reporter and blurted out, “Princess, I forgot. There’s a newspaper reporter who wants to talk to you. He asked me to ask if you’d see him.”
“He the same one’s been a’pesterin’ me for a interview?”
Mac nodded.
“I don’t never talk to them people ’cause all’s they ever want to talk about is bad stuff.” She gave Mac an innocent look. �
�But if you think I ought to, I will. Do you?”
He didn’t even have to consider the question. “No.”
“No it is, then.”
The guard gestured for Princess to step over to him. The man reached behind him and unhooked the shackles and leg irons fastened to his belt. Princess docilely held out both arms.
Mac’s stomach rolled. He turned for the door.
“Don’t forget them pictures!” Princess cried.
“I won’t,” he said over his shoulder. He stepped outside into the hallway and pretended to be examining his fingernails when he heard her shuffle out the door and down the hall behind him.
He was driving home before it hit him.
Princess said she wouldn’t live to see thirty.
That didn’t add up. If she was sentenced at seventeen and had been in prison for fourteen years, she’d be thirty-one.
He drove straight to his office, found the business card Sam Bartlett had left with him, and called the motel room number that he’d scribbled on the back.
“Tell me something.” Mac said without any preamble. “How old was Emily Prentiss when she was arrested?”
“Seventeen. Why?”
“How did they know that, how old she was?”
“The prosecutor wanted a birth certificate but Jackson Prentiss said he didn’t have it. Said her mama was dirt poor, she and her husband had been sharecroppers in Texas and Emily was born at home.”
“So how did they know her age?”
“Prentiss told them. Swore an oath. Said she was seventeen.”
“And the part about her father running off with another woman, who said—?”
“Emily wouldn’t answer any questions about anything. All the information they got about her came from Prentiss. Of course, the members of his congregation backed him up, said the same thing he did.”
Mac gave Bartlett the bad news that Princess had again refused to talk to him, then sat for a long time with his hand on the receiver after he hung up the phone.
Jackson had said she was seventeen.
Maybe Princess had “lost” two years…
Or maybe she was only fifteen years old when a court sentenced her to die.