A Savage Wisdom

by Norman German

  When I regained my composure, Sister Mary Catherine handed some books to Monsignor LeBlanc, who passed them to me. They were diaries, the last two years of Toni Jo Henry’s life, verification of what he had revealed to me.

  That night, I went straight to my room, telling Mother—my foster mother—that I was tired. She said I should eat something before retiring. I told her burgers had been ordered in at headquarters for the late workers.

  As I read the diaries, I wouldn’t let myself feel convinced that I was a part of all this, the daughter of a murderer, the only woman executed in Louisiana’s electric chair. It was preposterous. I kept reminding myself that I had always been suspicious of Monsignor LeBlanc. He might be lying to me for reasons of his own.

  I read about Toni Jo Henry’s surrender and confession, the trials, Arkie Burk’s hanging, Toni Jo’s strategies to get her execution changed to electrocution. Then luring the man she called Slim, their excursions outside the jail, their first kiss. The story seemed completely unbelievable, but no one could make up something like this. I got nauseous when she wrote about kissing Slim, the Mayor, Lamb Deer, my father. After five minutes of giving up nothing but viscous strands of saliva, I returned to the entries. Toni Jo’s anger at having her baby—me—stolen from her. Then, written after it had failed, a description of her escape plan.

  In the early morning hours, I reached the last week of my real mother’s life. Feeling light-headed, I went to the icebox and returned with a Coke. I looked at the next entry—November 21, 1942—then at my calendar. November 21, 1963. And I was 20. Chills broke out on my arms. No, I caught myself, I was 21. That would take some getting used to—one less year to live than I thought I had. I knew the execution date without looking: November 28. She would have had seven more days to live. I paused to wonder what I would feel if I had only one more week to spend in this world. I read the last pages of my mother’s life.

  “Deathwatch.” There was that word again. The last twenty-four hours. I wasn’t even in the middle of the diary. It didn’t seem right. There should have been more pages. Then I remembered that she was paying for a crime, giving her life for taking a life. I turned to a new page, the final entry:

  November 28, 1942.

  On the last day of my life,

  This entry, the diaries, and her life ended in mid-sentence.

  I wondered what she had been about to write.

  Then I was done, and I had to come back to my own life. The horrible, horrible reality came upon me again. The idea that I had kissed my father disgusted me. I stood up. I had been sitting cross-legged on the bed for so long that my legs wobbled with weakness. I felt light-headed. Little worms of light swam in my vision, and I was forced to sit down again.

  Even after all the terrible things I had read, a single event kept screaming for attention. I had kissed my father. I felt the gassy syrup of the Coke coming up and ran for the bathroom. The carbonated liquid burned my throat as it spilled into the bowl. The awful smell rose in my nostrils. I flushed the toilet and waited for the next wave of nausea. After the water settled, I looked at my tired face, transparent on the slightly disturbed surface. Then it hit me. I was sick because I was pregnant.

  Chapter 24

  November 22, 1963

  Yes. That, too. My own father. As horror was added onto horror, I had to know more. For the first time, I went to Monsignor LeBlanc and asked for any information he could give me that I didn’t already have. He said I knew everything of consequence, but if I wanted details Sister Mary Catherine could supply the remaining diaries. I was surprised by this, thinking Toni Jo Henry had kept them only while an inmate in Abraham Deer’s jail.

  I spent the rest of the day and the entire night reading the diaries, flipping back to reread passages that later entries shed new light on. Sunlight had been coming through my window for nearly an hour when Arkie Burk picked up a hitchhiker and Harold Nevers was finally dead. I felt a strange sense of satisfaction. I had been lost in thought for some time when Mother called me for breakfast. I told her I wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be going in to work.

  I fell asleep and awoke at eleven, famished. I washed my face and stepped outside, surprised at how clean I felt, despite the truth that was growing inside me. Even before walking to MaryAnn’s for a burger and Coke, I knew what I was going to do. I had no idea what I would do tomorrow, but I knew that today I had to find my mother’s grave.

  I took a bus to Highland Cemetery after calling the caretaker for information regarding the burial place. The voice on the line said that every year three or four curiosity-seekers called about the grave, which was unmarked, as all murderers’ resting places were, to prevent desecration of the headstones or vandalism by souvenir hunters. The best he could suggest was to look in the northwest corner, for maybe an empty plot between other tombstones.

  I wandered around the sector methodically, trying to avoid the ground I had already covered by weaving up and down the serpentine paths between the graves. After a futile search of an hour or so, I returned to town. When I stepped from the bus onto the curbside, I sensed a peculiar dread in the air. Down the block, people were huddled on streetcorners, looking up at radio speakers saying something that made their hands cover their mouths. It all sounded garbled to me, until I walked closer and heard the voice, crackling with static, break through:

  “The announcement is now official. At one p.m. Central Standard Time, President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital, after being struck on a Dallas street by an assassin’s bullet. A man calling himself Lee Harvey Oswald is currently in police custody. . . .”

  Chapter 25

  December 1963

  The world is very different now.

  When I heard the news of the assassination, I dropped to my knees. For almost an hour, I was so stunned I forgot about my own problems. Here was a man who symbolized hope and charity for a whole generation, a whole country—a Catholic who opened doors for fellow Catholics, for Lamb Deer and others like him. And his life was snuffed out in a few seconds. The tragedy reminded me of how little my life was, and how utterly valuable.

  As usual, we had our first freeze just after Thanksgiving. The leaves were dying, and yet there was something eerily beautiful about it all. Birth, death, and renewal. I had a lot of thinking to do. The first gubernatorial primary was over and Mayor Deer was still in the race. I looked at my parents—I mean Mr. and Mrs. William Bienvenu—as if they were strangers. They were good people ignorant of the pain they caused by their pure innocence—my grief or tragedy or whatever I’m caught up in, caused by deception on the part of . . . how many? A half dozen people? More?

  My parents obviously didn’t know where their second daughter had come from. Or was I adopted before Maureen? I guess it’s all futile speculation at this point. Still, it would be nice to walk up to someone and, with a mouthful of blame, let them have it.

  I thought of killing myself. That would be the easiest way out. Or I could go somewhere and have the child, then give it up for adoption. I could try to have the baby removed. I had heard of it. I just never imagined I would be on the deciding end of something like that.

  Should I let Lamb know?

  Know what?

  That I am pregnant?

  That he is my father?

  Let him know one, but not the other? Know that I have decided to have the child, hide the child, lose the child?

  What would he do? Kill himself? Reject me?

  Send me away so he can play governor?

  Into the midst of my doubts and worries and wrestlings with my conscience floated another matter: Should I tell Mo she’s adopted? Was Mo, in fact, adopted? Or was that a ruse by Monsignor LeBlanc? I forgot to ask. Mo—my big sister who is younger than I am. My world could go in any of a hundred directions based on any of these decisions.

  I know only that I will not choose to destroy the baby. I have an older, unborn half-sister that my real mother was forced to expel by a man
she trusted and ended up dying for.

  Then I was brought into the world as part of a plot so she could escape from a hospital with her life. Although I had no choice in it, everything surrounding my life has been wrong.

  Up to this point. But I can clean the slate and start anew.

  The worst part is that I still love him, Lamb Deer. And I have to see him one more time. I’ve been imagining the scene. I will reveal nothing to him. Not who I am, or who I know him to be, or what my condition is. I will surprise him by kissing him full on the mouth. I can see his face. His eyes will twinkle and he will say, “Well, Little Bit. What’s that for?”

  “That’s because I love you,” I will say. Then I will slap him on the face, hard. “And that’s because I hate you.” And then I will walk away and never see him again.

  At least, that’s the way I imagine it will be, if I have the guts to do it.

  * * *

  It is the first day of December, 1963, the day I start my life. From what I have been able to learn about Toni Jo Henry—when I call her that, I have to remind myself she’s my mother—I must believe that she was a good woman. If anything, she was too good. One of the lessons she taught me is this: there’s danger in trusting everyone. If you do, you’re gullible and probably deserve what you get. So I don’t want to trust everybody, but neither do I want to assume the worst of every person I meet. Somewhere between relentless suspicion and blind trust, then—that’s the right place to live. Sincerity can always be subjected to proof.

  While packing, I reviewed the case many times. Toni Jo Henry met someone who took advantage of her, and her system couldn’t stand the shock of discovering the true nature of this man she loved. So my mother learned, and then practiced, a savage wisdom. But I will avoid that.

  Well. There. Now I must do something, something that signals an end as well as a beginning. I look around my room one last time. I feel for the ticket in my coat pocket.

  Now, carrying you—my daughter and half-sister, your father’s daughter and grandchild—I, Leigh Ann Bienvenu, will go forth into the world and practice a wary goodness until I get it right, until it becomes a habit and I earn my only sure reward. Then I will write this all down and pass on to you, when you are nearly grown and need the lesson, as much of it as I think you can bear.

  The Beginning

  Norman German is a professor of English and fiction editor of Louisiana Literature at Southeastern Louisiana University. His award-winning short stories appear in literary and commercial magazines, including Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Salt Water Sportsman, and Sport Fishing.

  His novel No Other World fictionalizes the life of Marie Thérèze, the ex-slave slaveholder who founded Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana.