“Hey,” Toni Jo began teasingly.
“Ahn!” Deer said. “I deserve it.” He was a man of few words. And Toni Jo was beginning to like him—at the same time that Arkie Burk was starting to grate on her nerves. Since their verdicts in April, he had written her numerous letters apologizing for the mess he had made of her life. It gave Toni Jo the eerie feeling that her husband had not told her everything he knew about Nevers. And she didn’t want to know. She wanted to forget. What good would it do now to know anything else about Nevers? Or Burk. Toni Jo rarely responded to his letters. She was working on another plan.
The fan got her to the end of September, when her second trial began and the humid days were relieved by northern fronts that grew cooler and stayed longer as the trial progressed. Two days before Halloween, after a virtual rerun of her first trial, Toni Jo was convicted and sentenced to die the following October.
Finally, it hit her. By this time next year, there would be no Toni Jo Henry. She would be dead. A poem from high school came to her mind:
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
For a day and a night, Toni Jo despaired. There was no point in making new diary entries. The succession of days was like watching a Movietone reel of herself doing nothing—again and again and again. Toni Jo ate little and slept fifteen hours a day.
Near Thanksgiving, she was awakened by the merry sound of the trustee’s keys. A priest appeared at her cell door. The holy man had a small red nose pressed into a pleasant, doughy face. Santa Claus without a beard, Toni Jo thought cynically. Avoiding the topic of her death, Father Jacob talked about change. As if by magic, he said, one could turn the direction of one’s life around. Or, if not one’s life, then one’s thoughts, one’s disposition.
Toni Jo thought Father Jacob was a coward, not directly saying what he meant—that since she had no future life to turn around, she should adjust her attitude about her past life and prepare for the after-life.
The priest did most of the talking on their visits. Having no other appointments, Toni Jo decided she would while away her time by antagonizing the man. She contradicted whatever sugar-coated view of life he tried to make her swallow: through adversity, we build strength of character; no matter what we’ve done, God can forgive us—that sort of thing.
She didn’t need God’s forgiveness, she said, for evening an unsettled score with a man who had wrecked her life. Father Jacob said only God had the right to take a life, that vengeance was His and His alone, that no man was so bad he couldn’t be redeemed. Toni Jo reminded the priest that he didn’t know Harold Nevers.
At length, frustrated, the priest asked Toni Jo what she thought man’s job on this earth was. On that and related subjects, she had done some thinking in the past few months.
“Nothing,” she replied without hesitation.
“Then what do you believe in? You must believe in something.”
By example and anecdote, Nevers had taught her the answer to that one. She just hadn’t been listening.
“The evil core of the human heart.”
All cheer drained from the face of the good priest. He stared at her for a long while, like a check-mated opponent looking for an escape when the only way out is off the board.
On the verge of tears, he said, “I implore you in the name of Christ Our Lord to consider you might be wrong.”
Toni Jo stared at him without emotion. Father Jacob knew he was losing her. He had brought her a Bible on his last visit, but he could see the book had not moved.
“Please,” he said, “keep an open mind. Don’t despair. Read from God’s Word and search with an open heart for its messages.”
Toni Jo was growing weary of the priest’s company and hurried Father Jacob from her presence with the promise to do as he asked if he would not return for a month.
In the meantime, Deputy Sheriff Slim Deer surprised her with a Christmas present, a Philco 355T radio in a walnut cabinet. Toni Jo divided her time among the radio, the Bible, and magazines. She especially enjoyed the Photocrime section in Look: “How good a detective would you make? Try to solve this short mystery with the clue pictures on this page.”
Toni Jo dialed past news and farm quotes in favor of variety shows—featuring Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Glenn Miller, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and Bing Crosby,— or serial stories with Amos ‘n’ Andy or the Lone Ranger. Toni Jo recalled laughing at Charlie McCarthy on Sunday evenings with her mother. Now, she wondered why anyone older than six would be amused by a ventriloquist talking to a dummy on the radio.
But she loved Orson Welles as The Shadow, asking the imponderable question, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”
Each time, Toni Jo’s sarcastic response was, “I know.”
Her favorite songs were “Angel in Disguise,” “Fools Rush In,” and “Where Do I Go From You?” The routine lifted Toni Jo’s depression and dissipated her anger.
A week into the new year of 1941, Father Jacob reappeared. After the small courtesies of reacquaintance, he asked if Toni Jo had changed her mind about her place in God’s world.
“Somewhat,” she said. The priest lifted his eyebrows in hope. “I said the human heart was rotten at its core.” Toni Jo was almost ashamed at having baited the man who only meant her well. “I can’t say that I’ve read your Bible from cover to cover, but I have read around trying to cut to the good parts. I was raised Methodist, you know, so I read a good bit of this already. Anyway, after reading a lot of the stories, I’ve decided that life is a tug-of-war between good and evil. Take Job, for instance. Here he is, minding his own business, when one day God and the devil get into it and use him as taffy. Now, does that sound fair to you?”
Father Jacob stared at her blankly.
“Or take Jonah or Abraham or any number of those guys.”
The cleric tried to subdue his wince at the reference to the holy patriarchs as guys.
“What did they ever do to deserve what they got? I mean, God asks Abraham to kill his son? How cruel can you get? So I’ve decided that if there is a God, He treats us like wishbones. He and the devil take a pull and one or the other comes up with the big end, but we’re the losers every time. So this is what I’ve decided.” The priest looked at her expectantly. “No good, no evil,” she said. “The only way to win is to make life neutral.”
Father Jacob was both impressed and troubled by Toni Jo’s naive theology. It was so wrong-headed that he puzzled over where to begin untangling her misconceptions.
Toni Jo interrupted his thoughts. “One thing I did find interesting, though.”
“Yes?”
“If life is like a big riddle and you get to go to heaven if you solve it, then there’s a way out for everybody.”
The priest smiled at the familiar goodness of her logic.
“This guy Job had the right idea. If you’re a good person, you can only do what you think is right and hope for the best. I even marked it.” Toni Jo opened the Bible using the built-in scarlet ribbon. “Here it is. It’s in Job. ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him, but I will maintain my own ways before Him.’ You want me to have faith in God, Father Jacob? That’s faith, if you ask me.”
Toni Jo launched into an amateurish exegesis.
“You see, the idea is that Job’s a good man and here he is getting kicked around as if he’d done something wrong. So he decides that if God’s going to punish him for doing right, well then, to hell with Him—he’d just go on doing right.”
Father Jacob flinched at the curse, and Toni Jo smiled.
“I don’t mean to offend you, Father, but that’s the way I see it.”
Toni Jo was so unacquainted with the intolerance of orthodoxy that she assumed the priest would take her new philosophy with humor, even if he couldn’t subscribe to it himself. He remained, however, insulted.
He sp
oke of repentance and change, citing numerous instances in both Testaments: Adam and Eve, Moses, the Ethiopian eunuch, the Israelites, Saul becoming Paul. Through the forgiving power of Jesus, he said, her will could override any bad thing done to her or by her.
When his lecture was finished, Toni Jo knew she had been beaten with the heatless whip of doctrine—dogma the man had learned second hand in a stuffy classroom of a seminary far removed from what she had seen of the world. She mustered a polite but firm reply.
“I’m sorry, Father, but I just don’t see it that way. I can’t repent a sin I never committed. Job said”—Toni Jo flipped a few pages—“‘All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.’ That’s what I plan to do, Father: wait out my term until the time of my change from this world to the next. I’m not afraid. It’s just a change.”
For the first time, Father Jacob lost his patience and viewed Toni Jo as an obstinate child.
“You’re wrong. And I hope God will have mercy on you. As for me, I pity you.”
The priest’s condescension touched a sore spot in Toni Jo, who had been demeaned too many times by Nevers.
“Save it for somebody else,” Toni Jo said, rising. “A pity saved is a pity earned. Spend it on someone who needs it. I don’t.”
Chapter 18
February–October 1941
Arkie Burk was scheduled to hang on February 13, 1941. Toni Jo was twenty-three years old. Even though it was her husband she had been reading about in the newspaper, she couldn’t force herself to have any wifely feelings for him. She felt detached. The accounts, written by Cal Sonnier, seemed unreal.
During Toni Jo’s trials, she had seen the reporter scampering up and down the marble steps of the courthouse trying to get a word with Toni Jo or her lawyers. The short Cajun had an eager expression enhanced by receding hairlines that gave him the look of someone running into a strong headwind.
Cal Sonnier knew his trade. In a series of dramatic articles leading daily up to Arkie Burk’s deathwatch, he presented his researched facts on hanging. Sonnier’s editor topped the articles with stark headlines: The Rope, The Ritual, The Condemned, The Death Debate. From the pieces, Toni Jo learned several things she wished she hadn’t.
———
Twenty-four hours before a hanging, a new rope is stretched by suspending from it a heavy bag of sand. To prevent the rope from being sold by the inch as souvenirs, it is destroyed immediately after the execution.
Eight in the morning is universal hanging time. The prisoner gets a final meal of his choice and a last wish, within reason. The night before his final day on earth, the man is transferred to a holding cell near the gallows. There, during equipment tests, he may hear the double-flap trapdoor being sprung, followed by the foreboding thud of a sandbag reaching the end of its drop.
Minutes before his time has run out, the condemned is led to the execution room, where a white hood is placed over his head. Some say this keeps him from being alarmed by the forbidding scaffold. Others claim it prevents witnesses from having nightmares of the man’s face before, during, or after the drop. The intense strain on the hanging man’s face caused by the tightening noose was in ancient times termed risus sardonicus, a sardonic or mocking grin.
After the convict is helped up the steps, his ankles are bound together and his wrists tied behind his back to keep him from grasping the platform as he falls. Two assistants then pick up their charge and place him on the trapdoor. Some faint and must be revived before being killed, for the State requires the convicted to be conscious of the retributive act.
Depending on the inmate’s weight and the strength of his neck, determined by muscle tone and girth, the drop necessary to separate the man from his life usually measures between eight and seventeen feet. An experienced hangman, educated by trial-and-error, does the estimate by dead reckoning. Slow strangulation occurs if the drop is too short. Too long, and the result is decapitation.
The time and cause of death have been hotly debated for centuries.
Experts in one camp aver that although breathing stops in seconds, death does not claim its prize until the heart stops beating, sometimes for fifteen minutes or more. Those who say hanging is cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore unconstitutional, explain that the victim does not die immediately. Instead, after the tearing of muscles and skin, the veins near the neck’s surface are blocked by the tightening noose, while the deeper arteries continue pumping blood to the brain, inducing a severe headache. Heart and respiratory rates slow until stoppage, at which time death occurs. Some doctors avow that a good knock in the head would be more humane than this medieval garotting.
Another camp argues instantaneous death based on the fact that the second cervical vertebra fractures at the end of the drop. A small battalion within this camp believes it’s the knot of the rope that injures the medulla oblongata, thus terminating life and all sensation immediately after the spinal cord is separated from the brain.
———
Warden J. Michael White set Arkie Burk’s execution for February thirteenth. He wasn’t up to reading his name in cockamamie headlines designed to sell papers: ST. VALENTINE’S DAY EXECUTION: Man Loses Head Over Wife’s Ex-lover, that sort of thing. No-siree, he would have no part of it.
Arkie’s last request was for a conjugal visit with his wife. After some exchanges between the warden and the lawyers of the two inmates, the visit was granted based on precedent. Toni Jo was informed of the matter only after the legal rigmarole.
She said no. Emphatically.
And she had many reasons, one of which was that she was repulsed by the idea that someone she had made love to one day, would be a corpse the next.
What Burk got instead of his final wish was a ten-minute phone conversation with his wife.
They talked eight minutes. Burk said he tried to save Toni Jo’s life and couldn’t understand why she threw it away. In the end, he cried while she maintained a stoical silence. Toni Jo could not, for the life of her, figure out what to say or how to feel.
* * *
The entire cell block was dead quiet on the day of her husband’s execution. She tried to imagine the procedure. Arkie was led from his cell. The noose was slipped over his head. He dropped. Quickly or not, he died. They took him away. Someone buried him. He was now in an oblong box underground. Cool and dark.
None of it had a reality she could grasp.
By the end of the week, the letters began coming in. Men from all parts of the country professed love for her. Some of the letter-writers tried to convert her. Many claimed to be relatives. Almost all of the men mentioned her beauty. Was the death of a beautiful woman so disturbing? What if she had been ugly?
After a few days, she read only the addresses. Occasionally, a friend from DeRidder would write. Those letters were simple and direct. No twists of the heart or mind to wrestle with.
She propped an unopened letter from Mrs. Henry on top of the radio. Toni Jo wasn’t sure she could stand reading about the anguish she had caused her mother.
It took Slim Deer two weeks to muster the courage to face Toni Jo and offer his condolences. He might not have seen her even then if he hadn’t heard the reports—awful screams in the night reverberating down the corridor, ringing the metal bars. In recurring nightmares, the hangman’s rope was dragging Toni Jo forward like a calf to the slaughter.
She had never heard Deer raise his voice. Sometimes he spoke so quietly, she had to lean forward to hear him. Near the end of February, she was awakened at noon from one of her coma-like sleeps by his angry words.
“Don’t you have any sense of common decency! Don’t you have any sense, period!”
These were not questions. He was dressing someone down for an error in judgment. It took Toni Jo a few moments to figure out that he was mad at a subordinate for letting Sonnier’s articles on hanging reach her cell.
After Deer composed himself, he appeared around the corner of the cell block. He looked g
lum, like he was the one who would never see another New Year. Or Christmas. Or Thanksgiving. Toni Jo had to speak first. Otherwise, he might have stood till sundown watching his hands twirl the sweat-stained hat.
“I’d like to say I’m okay,” she began. “But it’s different when you’re looking down the calendar. It’s like a slide you can’t stop yourself from slipping down.”
“It’s my fault,” Deer said. “I should have been more careful about watching what came into your cell.”
“No, it’s all right.” She tried to help him. “I’m fine. It’s just that . . .” Deer looked at her for the first time. Anxiety had drawn her face. “I’m afraid, Mr. Deer.” She paused to fight back the tears. “Somehow I never thought Arkie would die. Now he’s dead and my turn’s next. It feels very strange to look at the squares of October and know that one of those will be blank, and then the next one, and the next one. Like that, forever.”
Deer turned his gaze from her. It hurt him to see her like an animal about to be slaughtered. Unlike animals, she could see it coming.
“You have to help me, Mr. Deer.” It was not a plea. It sounded like a statement of fact, like “The earth is round.” Everybody knows that. He had to help her. Fact. Deer’s head jerked to the left in half of a No.
“There’s nothing I can do.”
“You can,” Toni Jo said. She spoke frantically. “Make me comfortable. This cell is getting to me. I dream they’re putting the noose around my neck and then I’m falling and just before I hit I know I’m falling too fast and too far. I’m afraid my neck won’t be strong enough. I have no one. My mother’s no help. She’s worse than I am about this.”
“I don’t know. I’ll see what I can do.”
Toni Jo reached through the bars and held his arm. It was thinner than she thought it would be, but wiry with strength.
“Come back at supper,” she said. She opened her mouth to speak again, as if she had a plan, then realized she had nothing else to say. Only a feeling of urgency. “Please.”
A Savage Wisdom Page 23