That evening, Deer came by after his shift. Toni Jo asked about the ruckus. The deputies had been tuned in to the Yankees’ game, with the inmates straining to listen, when Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak came to an end. Some of the men sided with Joe D., while others hated the Yankees. An argument ensued. The convicts would go to bed supperless.
Toni Jo shook her head in disbelief. Death row had changed her perspective. Who would care how many times Joltin’ Joe or anyone else hit a baseball?
* * *
September, 1941.
The honeymoon, such as it was, was over.
The warden, perfunctorily, informed her of the date. October 13th, 11:01 P.M. A Monday. Less than a month away.
Deer made sure all reading material was screened before it went to Toni Jo’s cell. He did not want any news of the electric chair reaching her.
He had to follow other procedures, too. By the book.
Toni Jo’s new Life and Look and Saturday Evening Post magazines fell apart in her hands. She asked Deer about it.
“Just something we have to do.” Evasive. Toni Jo asked again. Deer tugged at his top lip. “We have to take the staples out. It’s required.”
Toni Jo didn’t understand and waited. She had to press for a reply.
“Why?”
“They’ve been known to be used—. Some men on death row have used the staples to commit suicide. Slit their wrists with them.”
“Good Lord,” Toni Jo said. It would never have occurred to her. “What would be the point? They’re going to die anyway.”
Deer thought for a moment
“Some of them just can’t stand the thought of hanging, or whatever. Some want to do it themselves. Like cheating the system. Who knows what they’re thinking?”
* * *
The earth turned and it was September 23rd, the autumnal equinox, when days and nights were of equal length no matter where in the world you were. Toni Jo’s life was in the balance.
The earth turned a few more times and it was October 1st. Deer was not taking it well. Once while visiting, he cried when the Ink Spots came through Toni Jo’s radio: “I don’t want to set the woooorld on fi-yer, I just want to start . . . a flame in your heart.” He had avoided the word as long as possible, but finally confessed that he loved her.
Saturday, the eleventh of October. Toni Jo’s deathwatch would start the next day, and then Deer would know her for only twenty-four hours more. He came by at noon on Saturday to ask what she wanted for her last meal.
Technically, the job was the warden’s, but he had asked permission to fulfill the duty.
Something was wrong. Toni Jo was cheerful. It broke his heart to see it. Deer had heard of such things. A kind of ecstatic surrender to fate. He hoped she wouldn’t fall over the edge into lunacy. He didn’t think he could bear watching her go to pieces.
“It’s okay,” Toni Jo said when he expressed concern. “Really.”
“It’s awful,” he said. “I hate. . . .” Deer thought about what he hated. “Everything.” He looked at Toni Jo through watery eyes. “What’s wrong with the world?” he demanded. “That man deserved to die. He was scum.”
Toni Jo touched his arm.
“I have a surprise for you.” She had a serene, a beatific smile on her face as she looked at him. “My luck is finally changing.”
Deer became afraid of her as she slipped into someone else. Insanity. It was worse than he imagined it might be because she was cheerful.
“I won’t be executed on October thirteenth.”
Deer held her like a child shielding an abused doll.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I won’t leave you. I’ll be right there with you.”
Toni Jo pushed him away. She was someone else. Her face wore a cruel smile. Something unthinkably mean possessed her.
“The state can’t kill an innocent unborn,” she said. “And I’m carrying one.”
It took Deer a few seconds to process what she had said. She came at him again.
“I figure I’m three months along. That gives me till next April or May. By then I’ll think of something else to delay the date again. I might not be able to keep it up forever, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna sit here and let them light me up without a fight.”
Deer couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had never heard her speak like this. It was like watching a beautiful bride turn into a demon. He stared at her with an expression of terror on his face, unable to speak, almost in a swoon.
Toni Jo looked at him with derision. Even now, she cared about him, but he looked pathetic and weak. Something deep inside her rose up and wanted to hurt him again.
“Well, what did you expect from someone who has nothing to lose?” Deer looked at her while pulling painfully at his top lip. “Mr. Deputy Sheriff,” she said. “Mr. Boy Scout’s honor.” Anything to hurt him.
And he took it. Blow after blow.
Chapter 19
October 1941–November 28, 1942
Chief Deputy Slim Deer was a Catholic, and thus wrenched in two directions by Toni Jo’s being with child. It was important that no one find out about the pregnancy. And later, about the baby. His career would be destroyed, the family name dragged through the mire. And yet, he knew he had an obligation to the mother. And the child. Although he had been tricked, he was responsible. He understood that.
* * *
The execution of Toni Jo Henry, set for October 13, 1941, had been delayed, then rescheduled for November of 1942. Inexplicably, everyone in Lake Charles now used Toni Jo’s maiden name.
Cal Sonnier reported the mysterious stay, about which he could gather not one shred of factual information. The citizens of Lake Charles went wild. The rumor mill had a bumper crop to grind, and it worked at full capacity night and day.
One rumor said the young woman cheated justice by a suicide attempt; another, that she had made a daring escape with outside help. Toni Jo and a tall stranger almost reached the Texas line before being stopped for speeding. One rumor that fell like a quail hit with a tight pattern of bird-shot was that Governor Sam Jones, formerly a Lake Charles attorney, had exercised his power of clemency at the last minute and Toni Jo was now on her way to the home of relatives in Tennessee.
What really happened was that Deputy Sheriff Slim Deer made a confession to Father Jacob, who, in sworn confidence not to reveal his source, expedited the information to Warden White, who called Angola to tell the warden there that he could postpone transportation of Little Sizzler, the portable electric chair, the following day. From Baton Rouge, Warden Donaldson said he would have to track down the chair on its current route around the state and let the driver know he could skip Lake Charles and go on to his next stop. New Iberia, he thought it was.
What also happened after Toni Jo cooled down, was that she and Lambert Deer were pronounced man and wife in a very private late-night ceremony in her cell a week after the stay of execution.
For several restless nights, Deer had agonized over how he could fulfill his duty to mother and child while keeping the potentially ruinous affair from the public. Then he hit upon a plan. He again talked with Father Jacob, who swore himself to secrecy. The only hitch then was a witness. Father Jacob solved the apparently insurmountable problem in a flash.
Sister Mary Catherine.
No one was more devoted to her order. At seventy, she had been a Sister of the Incarnate Word for over half a century, serving first as a nurse at St. Patrick’s Hospital, then as a teacher at the Convent of Hearts. She had been forced into retirement because of failing eyesight and made a vow of silence to last until her death. That was their witness: a purblind nun committed to a lifetime of silence.
* * *
Deer could hardly have been called a model husband. After the ceremony in late October, he ignored his bride for a week. Toni Jo had time to think about the events of the past month. In a few days, she had gone from deathrow convict to wife and mother-to-be. She reviewed her life. I
t was hard to believe that in three years a small-town waitress had become a restauranteur, demimondaine, wife, and murderess known nationwide—then wife again, after executing a plot she would never have thought herself capable of hatching a short year ago.
Nevers. He was growing in her mind again. In troubled sleep, she often dreamed of him falling in the headlight beam with a wet splat—the bullet wound now transferred by nightmarish necromancy to the head of the angel, now restored, on his chest. She turned to Arkie as he screamed, commanded him to drag the body to the rice canal. Then she heard Nevers laugh and saw his corpse rising in the vapor. She shot him five more times. He thrust his hand into her stomach. Delivered a bloody child and threw it on the ground.
Toni Jo would awaken here, panting, sweating, crying. Holding, guarding her womb.
It was then she knew that the child born of her own cunning would serve as atonement for the abortion performed against her will.
* * *
Desirous and shy, autumn descended like a tentative lover trying to make a confident move. Returning upriver from the Gulf, redfish and speckled trout swam into the lake, tracking hordes of white shrimp migrating into the marshes and bays to spawn. The fishermen with their rods, the shrimpers with trawls, spread out over the waters to worship and prey.
Toni Jo slept and awoke, felt her baby growing inside her. Ate every meal and thereby fed the unborn child and came to feel blessed with new life.
November, the early days of December. The sky cool and grey as a wet newspaper.
December 7, 1941.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Deer rushed down the cell block to tell Toni Jo. Two minutes later, he returned. It was a radio hoax, like The War of the Worlds.
Five minutes later, confirmation. It was true. There had been an invasion, but not from outer space. The world had gone crazy.
The world was at war with itself.
* * *
Winter camped on the city for two weeks in January, then wrestled with spring through February and March. Deer visited his wife regularly, but was distracted by war news. And his father had been hospitalized. Diabetes. Doctors fought for and finally gained control over the disease while Slim Deer waited and worried and watched for the next bit of life-changing news.
Amidst all the commotion, in the tranquility of her cell, Toni Jo had formulated a plan. She would have to be taken to St. Patrick’s Hospital for the delivery. There, after her child was born, she would pretend weakness, anemia, something—and while no one was looking, escape in the middle of the night.
But before the offspring of her now-devious mind could reach full term, it died in utero.
* * *
On the twenty-fifth of April, 1942, a nameless baby was born in the deathrow cell of the Calcasieu Parish Jail. Dr. Silvers, a retired obstetrician, attended with an old nun from the Convent of Hearts, once a midwife at St. Patrick’s. Silvers had only a remote curiosity about how the female inmate came to be in a family way. He was old. He had seen it all. When his old friend Abe Deer had asked him to lend his services in a peculiar case, Ben Silvers didn’t even ask for explanations.
The nun had worked with Dr. Silvers before, but Sheriff Abraham Deer explained to him before she arrived that her failing sight and recent vow of silence might cause complications. Silvers told Deer not to worry. Even in the early days, Sister Mary Catherine had worked quietly and, since he did most of the work himself, he doubted even a difficult labor would require assistance.
The patient was sedated, the delivery accomplished, and Toni Jo awoke from the gelatinous haze of twilight sleep.
Slim Deer and Silvers stood as she came around. When she asked for her baby, Dr. Silvers gave her a sedative from a prepared hypodermic and informed her it had been taken to a foster home. Toni Jo lifted herself on one elbow. In a rage, she shrieked at Deer, accusing him of betrayal. A pain flared up from her insides, stopping the words. She glared at her husband.
Deer composed himself. Looking at her calmly, he said, “What did you expect from someone who had everything to lose?” They were the cruelest words he would ever speak.
Toni Jo tried to stay focused on him, wanted to burn holes in him with her eyes. Finally, exhausted, she slumped to the mattress in a feverish swoon.
* * *
A week after Toni Jo had been relieved of her child, she fell into a profound depression, grieving at the absence, the overwhelming emptiness. She had wanted to take care of the infant. She needed to know something about her baby. Anything. Her present state of mind was unbearable.
Deer still cared for his wife, probably even loved her, but he could not allow his indiscretion to be broadcast to his future constituency.
He explained to Toni Jo that the child was now a charge of the orphanage on the grounds of the Convent of Hearts. Neither it nor its eventual foster parents were ever to know its true parentage. This concealment was necessary, Deer said, because the stigma attached to being a murderer’s child could lead to its abuse by the heartless. Sister Mary Catherine would effect the transaction.
Toni Jo listened intently, anger, grief, and understanding mixing in her chest like a bad drink.
“Why couldn’t I keep my baby until . . .”
“It wouldn’t work,” Deer said. “There was no sense in y’all becoming attached.” He looked at her with compassion. “I hope you understand.”
She knew he was right. Her emotions subsided into a mellow sadness. She glanced up at Deer, who had chosen to remain standing in her cell.
“Was it a boy or a girl?”
Deer gazed at her vacantly and shook his head.
“It—. I don’t know. I never looked,” he said, his eyes filling with water. He swallowed hard before resuming. “Either way, I wasn’t sure I could bear the knowing.”
* * *
The cool walls of her dark corner cell kept Toni Jo comfortable through June. Once, after pulling the fan from under her bed and then plugging it in, she received a shock that left her arm with a deep, dull ache. She inspected the wire exposed through the frayed cord. For the first time, her execution by electricity became an immediate reality, and she was afraid. Deer had told her the procedure would be completely painless. It was the latest and most humane method of executing justice. She hoped he was right.
But in case he wasn’t, she saw no harm in trying again to break her engagement with Death. After working through her initial anger at Deer and the postpartum depression caused by the rift from her baby, Toni Jo had come to see that in the long run Deer was probably right in doing what he had done. Always civil, sometimes openly friendly towards him, Toni Jo attempted a reconciliation with her husband.
Deer saw through the ruse. He would not fall into that trap again, he said.
The summer had given Toni Jo little to record in her diaries. She would have been writing the same entry, day after day. She began mailing some of her things home, but decided to keep the diaries from her mother, whom she hadn’t allowed to visit for almost half a year, telling her it would only make it harder on her after she was gone.
In September and October, Toni Jo “Annie Beatrice” Henry Burk Deer reread her life. She had written only on the front of the pages and began on the backs to flesh out the gaps with details, writing a retrospective commentary on her stupidity and the cruelty or kindness of others: What she could have done if she had only known. Who she didn’t like. Who and what she would miss. A Gulf breeze rushing into her face on Grand Isle. It hadn’t been all bad.
Looking back on it, her life read like a mystery she now had the key to. She could fan through the next pages, a hundred or so days, and see the conclusion. There was something comforting about it all, knowing your life like a movie unreeled on the projection-room floor. There. You could point to it. The last frame. THE END. November 28, 1942. Toni Jo would have a chance to prepare herself, to prearrange—arrange and rearrange—her thoughts like headstones in a well-planned cemetery.
The electric chair began p
ulling her towards it like a magnetic lover.
* * *
November 1, 1942.
The last month of her life. As Toni Jo’s deadline approached, the daily paper, delivered with her noon meal, reached her with short columns excised, then longer, then whole sections cut out. Those would be Cal Sonnier’s articles. Deer, she knew, was having someone screen the material before it reached her. Occasionally, she ran across the last few paragraphs of a jump story on a later page that a careless censor had missed.
During the last week of her life, most of the front pages were missing. The rest was war news. The major advertising tactic was patriotic appeal: Simoniz Wax—“Needed for the Defense of Every Car’s Beauty.” Pall Mall—“In cigarettes, as in naval patrol planes, it’s modern design that makes the big difference.” Harvey’s Barber Stropper—“Makes any blade a WHISKER BLITZER.”
Meanwhile, on her radio, Bing Crosby was dreaming of a white Christmas.
On November 23rd, the Monday before her execution the coming Saturday, Toni Jo found an intact article buried on a back page. It told of Cal Sonnier’s attempt, through legal channels, to secure a female witness for the execution: “If Louisiana is going to consign a female convict to the electric chair for the first time, it should also have its first female witness. It’s only fair.”
It was the first time Toni Jo Henry knew she was about to make history.
The Wednesday edition of the American Courier lay on her tray, heavy and sad. The paper would not run the next day, Thanksgiving, so this was a gala issue.
Toni Jo scanned the movies newly arrived for the weekend. Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth in You Were Never Lovelier. The ad looked romantic, but there was something about a man dancing that she never liked. Too prissy.
Road To Morocco, with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour. A smiling camel peeked over the shoulders of the male stars. Toni Jo smiled, too.
A Savage Wisdom Page 25