A delicious thrill crawled through my body as I read the headline:
DEATH BY ELECTROCUTION
A History
For the next seven days, Calvin Sonnier (it felt strange knowing an older version of this same man) examined the execution from every angle: What Is It Like? Is It Right? Chance of Executing an Innocent Man? Why the Autopsy?
Sonnier presented conflicting “expert” opinion. He began the series with general information, then, as the death day approached, served up the more grisly details. After the switch is thrown, the current shoots into the head, travels through the brain, neck, and heart, then violates the other organs, “some of which explode,” the electricity coming to ground through the ankle. I had thought the killer was shot with high voltage for a few seconds and that was it. In fact, the deadly charge is delivered in two doses. It was like reading a prescription.
Shot one, administered for fifty-seven seconds, was comprised of a 60-cycle alternating current of 2,000 volts at 4 to 8 amperes. (I had no idea what all this meant, but the results were quite clear.) Attending physicians say the subject is immediately struck unconscious, justifying the process as humane. Instant death is achieved via destruction of the brain, which occurs with such speed that the nervous system can’t react quickly enough for the condemned to feel pain.
The visual report of an execution was more unsettling. After the first jolt, the body jerks, lunges against restraining straps, and stiffens. Deep, rapid breathing ensues. This fact made me suspicious about “instant death.” A spiral of smoke rises from the head, then a crackling noise is heard, followed by the odor of burning flesh. The hands turn red, then white, and the neck cords stand out.
After dose one, the current is cut off for three seconds. The body slowly relaxes. Just when it looks rested from a mighty labor, the second shot, also fifty-seven seconds, brings the corpse to life again in a series of twitches. After the second dose, the skin looks sunburned because it has reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The body is left alone for three minutes to cool off so the coroner can handle it. The autopsy reveals second degree burns at the electrode on the right leg and a pinkish froth similar to beach foam coming from the mouth. If the current was miscalculated, the brain is baked hard. During their investigation, coroners calloused by years of gruesome deaths joke that it’s not the volts that get you, it’s the amps.
What I read next would already have occurred if I had been there in 1942. I turned to the evening edition of November 28. At the top of the page were three photographs:
Toni Jo Henry smoking in her cell, a dozen witnesses standing around the empty electric chair, and a sheet-covered corpse being lifted into the ambulance on a gurney.
The headline screamed, TONI JO PAYS SUPREME PENALTY. The article itself was surprisingly sketchy. Pushed to the far right-hand side of the page, it was headed “Henry is Silent, Calm to the End,” and subheaded, “State Exacts Life for St. Valentine’s Slaying of Lover.”
The narrative described Toni Jo’s bride-like walk to the chair. She was strapped in. The generator whined until it sounded like an angry wildcat and someone unseen pulled a switch. Two minutes later, a physician checked Toni Jo’s heartbeat and said to the Warden, “Toni Jo Henry has expired.” Then the Warden said to the Judge, as if he hadn’t heard, “Your Honor, the Court’s order has been fulfilled.” Sonnier then backtracked and related other oddments of the scene: Toni Jo’s last meal, a Coke; the execution was delayed because the generator wires were too short to reach her cell; one of the eyewitnesses was a nearly blind nun; and the final statement of the condemned—”Give my baby a good home,” a comment Sonnier interpreted as the distracted ramblings of a brain under extreme duress.
That was it.
I felt a lump in my throat, then realized my face was moist with tears. As I reached into my purse for a Kleenex, my eyes fell on the three photos capping the page. Toni Jo looked so peaceful in her cell, gazing out at the camera with the eyes of a deer about to be slain.
Deer. The word reminded me of the Mayor. I looked at the other photo. There he was, barely recognizable. Much thinner. With an exhausted, worried look on his face. I jumped from person to person to see if I knew any of the others. Another deputy, two doctors, Sonnier with hair, the nun, a priest, and assorted other people. The priest. He looked familiar. The caption said Father Jacob. Yes, his face suddenly came true. Add a little putty, a few cracks, some gray hair—and there he was. Monsignor LeBlanc.
It slowly dawned on me that every important man in the city was connected to every other. But I needed a guide to show me the intersections related to the case at hand. In the City Room, Sonnier sat working deliberately, immune to the haste swirling around him, his desk as orderly as a tea set. I rapped gently on the metal frame of his partition.
“Excuse me, Mr. Sonnier, but I was wondering if you would answer a few questions. I’ll only take a minute of your time.” Barely moving his head, Sonnier peered at me over his reading glasses and returned his eyes to the pad before him. After a minute, he put his pencil down and swiveled toward me. He looked at me with eyes, sleepy and glazed, that years ago had seen their last surprise.
“Now what’s this matter of urgency?” His eyes locked on me calmly, like a lion looking disdainfully on prey too small or stupid to be worth pursuing. Nervous, reluctant to infringe on his time, I threw my question at him as if he knew what I had been reading for the last hour.
“What’s this about taking care of my baby?” Another man would have looked at me with utter bewilderment. Sonnier merely tilted his head an imperceptible distance backward, a gesture that said, “What kind of fool am I dealing with now who thinks I want to take care of her baby?” He waited for the next development. “Toni Jo Henry, I mean. I’ve been reading about her execution.”
Sonnier’s head moved forward a bit. “Well, why didn’t you say so? That’s something I know a thing or two about.” With his hand, he made a subtle gesture. “Have a seat.” I sat in the chair and placed my purse on the floor. “Someone’s always trying to dig that poor woman up. They ought to let her rest in peace.” He looked at me indifferently. “What’s your angle?”
“I work for Mayor Deer. There’ve been some rumors floating around that his father and Toni Jo Henry. . . .” I returned his stare. I was telling more than I needed to. “I wasn’t around then. I just wanted to see what I could see.” Sonnier wasn’t going to help me out. “For myself, you know. I was just curious.” His smug demeanor was starting to irritate me. Deciding to play his game, I stared at him and waited for a reply. After an uncomfortably long while, he spoke.
“Curiosity. That’s what killed the cat, you know.”
I held my tongue, pretending to deliberate, then gave what appeared to be a measured response.
“So I’m told.” The part of Sonnier’s mouth visible through his mustache grew the smallest of grins.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Now what’s this about me taking care of your baby?”
“Not mine,” I said. “Toni Jo Henry’s. At her execution, you wrote that she said, ‘Take care of my baby. Give him a good home.’ Something like that.”
Sonnier put a hand on his chin. “Sounds vaguely familiar. Yes, seems like—. You have to understand, Miss. . . .”
“Bienvenu.”
“Bienvenu. That was twenty years ago and I’m not in the habit of rereading my own material. I’m not that vain.”
“At the execution it came time for last words, and Miss Henry said she wanted her baby taken care of. I’d be grateful for anything you can remember about that. In the article, you seemed to think Miss Henry was talking out of her head. Because of the stress and all.” Sonnier’s eyes looked past me, about twenty years past me. After an extended pause, he broke out of his trance and spoke.
“Nineteen forty-two, right?” I nodded. “I came onto the newspaper in ‘41 as a comma chaser, a copy editor. I had just moved up to reporter and needed a scoop. Jim Mead—he’s the editor now, you kn
ow. Back then, he occupied the chair I sit in now.” Sonnier slapped the armrests. “Well, not the same chair, but you get the idea. City Editor. He was a gatekeeper. He could let a story through or quash it without explanation. A week after the execution, I wrote a piece suggesting the original execution date was postponed because of some illicit carrying-on between the Sheriff and Toni Jo. Possibly even a baby. Ah, there’s your baby,” Sonnier said with mild surprise. “Funny, I had almost forgotten about that.” Sonnier was lost in thought for a bit. “The article never saw light. Mead spiked it. He was right to can it, but I didn’t think so then. Journalism is about facts, not speculation. What do you think? It doesn’t seem likely that the baby could have been snuck out without somebody seeing him, or hearing him. Babies do cry, don’t they?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “He?”
Sonnier looked at me. “He, she. Whatever. Those kinds of secrets have a tendency to rear up sooner or later and bite you on the ass.” Sonnier again lost himself in thought. Then, out of nowhere, he said, “Sorry. No offense.”
“You knew her?” I said.
“Toni Jo? Some. Interviewed her two or three times.”
“What was she like?”
Sonnier looked at me.
“Now that’s a different matter,” he said, as if I had broken the rules. “That’s not facts.”
I held my ground by saying nothing. Sonnier rested his head on his thumb and gazed at the floor. A couple of minutes passed. He looked up at me, a red circle in the middle of his forehead.
“There was charity in her voice,” he said, “like every word was a gift you’d never expected.” He shook his head. His level, emotionless eyes filled with water that never spilled.
Chapter 22
December 1962–June 1963
A week trickled by before I saw the Mayor again. He was cheerful, walking confidently, looking taller than six feet two. Everybody loved him and he knew it. He passed me twice before I got his attention.
“Mayor Deer?” He pivoted towards me on his boot heel.
“Lamb,” he said. “Lamb, Little Bit. Call me Lamb.”
I wondered at his innocence and hated to speak, knowing my words would spoil his party.
“Under one condition,” I finally said.
“What’s that?”
“Call me Leigh, not Little Bit.” A startled look appeared on his face. He laughed.
“Anything you say.” He looked at me as if truly seeing me for the first time. “Now what was it you wanted?”
“I need to talk with you in private.” The other workers had been eddying around us, the men slapping him on the back as they steered by. He put his hand on my shoulder and, after ushering me to a corner of the room, leaned over.
“Now, what’s so important it calls for a confidential congress?” I tried to look into his eyes, but couldn’t hold mine still. After several false starts, I looked squarely at him and just came out with it.
“The scandal about the baby. There’s something to it, isn’t there?” Deer’s face lost all expression. He held me with his eyes for a few seconds, then checked his watch.
In a calm voice, he said, “How would you like to have lunch with the next governor?”
* * *
It was a late lunch and MaryAnn’s was sparsely populated. The Mayor called to Bert Bataglia, the owner-chef, for two burgers and two Cokes. We took seats at a corner booth to wait for the order. Lamb spoke as if he were talking to an invalid.
“How did you find this thing out?” Only then did I wonder if I was doing the right thing. I hung my head, feeling personally responsible for the baby.
“The newspapers. I went to the Courier and looked up the articles on Toni Jo Henry’s execution.”
“The newpapers couldn’t have told you anything.”
“Intuition, then,” I said. “In the article, Toni Jo said something about making sure her baby had a good home. Sonnier explained the comment as the ramblings of a woman under extreme duress.”
“And?”
“And I don’t believe that. It just didn’t ring true, given everything else I read about her.” Deer looked at me for a while, inspected me. He nodded his head slowly. “All right,” he said. “There was a baby. But I don’t know whose it was. That’s the honest to God truth.”
“I was just worried,” I told him. “It seemed so obvious to me, others are bound to know it, too. I was worried about what would happen if someone. . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to finish.
In a kind voice, not at all upset or nervous, he said, “It’s important that you keep this to yourself.”
“I will,” I said.
* * *
As the gubernatorial race heated up, it looked like a free-for-all. The major contenders early on were ex-House member John J. McKeithen, former Governor Robert F. Kennon, and New Orleans mayor deLesseps Morrison.
Then it seemed as though every brother and cousin Huey Long ever had decided to run. You’d think the Long dynasty would unite and crush everybody, but that’s not what happened. Huey’s widow and his son Russell sided with Gillis Long, but McKeithen won the endorsements of Earl Long’s widow Blanche, as well as Mrs. Jewell Long, widow of Congressman George Long, Earl and Huey’s brother. Throw in Huey’s sister Lucille Hunt and distant relative Speedy Long for good measure, plus eight others scrambling for their allegiance, and what you had was a problem in Long division.
Everybody’s platform was built of identical planks: taxes, teachers’ salaries, education, and racial segregation in public schools, which was supported by all the candidates but one. Lambert Deer. In a public forum, President Kennedy’s Civil Rights program was chewed up and spat out repeatedly, causing Baton Rouge newswoman Margaret Dixon to write, “the main issue seemed to be who could hate Mr. Kennedy the most.” Mayor Deer should have been slaughtered in the melee, but he wasn’t. While the wolves fought each other, he looked like he could very well make off with the carcass. It was only December, and the primaries were ten months away. Anything could happen.
Mayor Deer had a campaign manager and four campaign secretaries, one for each corner of the state. Reuben McInnis headed up southwest Louisiana. Aggressive and brash, he was just right for the job, but one day Mayor Deer appeared when Reuben was calling Kennedy a nigger lover. Deer fired him on the spot. The next day, to my utter astonishment, he asked me to replace McInnis as campaign secretary for southwest Louisiana. I told him I couldn’t do it. He assured me I could. It was like painting by numbers, he said.
Two days before Christmas, the Mayor called me to his office by phone. An hour later, as soon as I could break away, he handed me an elongated box wrapped in red with a green and gold bow. It was a watch. I inspected the watch, trying to figure out what it meant. I didn’t want to look at the Mayor. When I did, I saw someone I had never seen before: a handsome, middle-aged man with cool, powder-blue eyes and thin brown hair graying at the temples. The day after Christmas, I was at his house. On New Year’s Eve, he kissed me for the first time. Throughout January and February, we met clandestinely, though not frequently. Often, Lamb was very tired. Lamb. It’s funny how easily he became Lamb to me. Now, it was “the Mayor” or “Mayor Deer” that sounded alien. We saw each other ten and fifteen minutes at a time, whatever he could manage.
Between the publication of the newspaper article in November of 1962 and April of 1963, the “baby rumor” fluttered in and out of headquarters like a sick, confused bat that finally flopped to the floor, a harmless mouse with wings, panting weakly. Left unsubstantiated, the rumor had run its course and worn itself out. No one seemed to care one way or the other about the Mayor’s father’s one-time connection with a murderer’s imaginary baby. Quite naturally, since I felt closer to Lamb every day, the death of the rumor served only to pique my interest in it. In May, I called Sonnier, asking him to dredge up anything he could find from his personal files on Toni Jo’s tenure at the parish jail. He said that might take a few days. The Courier had kept no such
records that far back, and whatever had survived from his early days would be boxed in his attic. The next day, I spent my lunch hour in Sonnier’s cubicle.
“I thought it would take a few days to locate.”
“I’m as interested in this as you are. I just don’t have time to look through the stuff. Let me know what you find.” I dug gingerly through the box of yellowed pages, brushing off roach droppings with a Kleenex. I immediately recognized some of the articles in draft form.
“What does HFR mean?” Sonnier looked up from his work. He never seemed in a hurry, but he was always busy.
“Hold For Release.” He payed out only the information I asked for, rarely anything extra. The articles contained blue-penciled line-outs here and there, but nothing substantial was deleted. At the end of the hour, I had come across no startling discoveries.
“Would you mind terribly if I took these with me?”
“Terribly.”
“I’ll return them in two days, at the most,” I pleaded.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t take them. I said I’d mind it terribly when you did.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then that means I can have them?”
“Not ‘have,’” he said. “‘Take.’ Take and return. In two days,” he said as I lifted the dusty box and prepared a hasty retreat before he changed his mind. As I was leaving his door, he stopped me.
A Savage Wisdom Page 28