Morning has turned into afternoon. I will be leaving soon to go back to New Orleans. I ask Pat if he is interested in a prayer service tomorrow. I know he is not keen on being in the company of the old priest. Some months ago he had told me how he had confessed to the priest “you know, the heavy-duty stuff,” and when he had finished the priest had asked, “Have any impure thoughts? Say any obscene words?” And it was all he could do, he says, not to hit the “old man.”
“If you’re there with me I’ll do the prayer service with him,” he says, “but not by myself.”
I tell him that I’ll plan it and I’ll talk to the priest. There’s a song I want him to hear, I tell him, called “Be Not Afraid,” based on Isaiah 43, and I have my Bible there and I read the words to him. I read the words slowly so that he can take them in.
On Tuesday, April 3, I leave New Orleans for Angola at 6:45 A.M. after a sleepless night. I kept jerking awake, wondering what else might be done for Pat. Were we doing everything we could? By 3:00 A.M. I couldn’t go back to sleep. Ann Barker, my close friend, a doctor, had started me on an antibiotic for a bronchial infection. I know I am running on adrenaline. I know my physical resources are running low.
I arrive at the prison at about nine o’clock and ask to see Warden Maggio. He comes immediately to the front gate. Briefly I tell him what I know about the two brothers, Pat and Eddie. I show him Eddie’s letter to the governor. I make the request for Eddie that he not be put in lock-down if Pat is executed. The warden makes no promises. “I’ll see,” he says, and then, referring to Eddie’s letter to the governor, “I can’t get into who’s guilty or who’s innocent. I’m here to carry out my job as warden, but I can tell you this — nobody’s doing handsprings over this execution. It’s not easy on anybody.” Then he tells me that the head of the Department of Corrections, C. Paul Phelps, wishes to talk to me. I can come with him to his office for the call and then he’ll see that I get a ride back to Camp F.
I walk into the antechamber of Maggio’s office. Several armchairs line the wall and a secretary sits behind a desk. She looks very professional in her tailored suit and white blouse with the colorful bow at the neck. The office is quiet and well organized. There is the appointment calendar, the telephone, the computer. And there on the desk are a green potted plant and pictures of laughing children.
I realize that I am very, very tired. I did not eat breakfast before I left New Orleans this morning. Maybe that was a mistake. I won’t be able to eat again until I leave the death house.
I telephone Phelps in Baton Rouge at the Department of Corrections. A friendly, crisp voice on the other end of the phone asks me to wait “one moment please.” I shut my eyes and take a few deep breaths. A glimmer from a recent dream flashes: Pat Sonnier in a red-and-black plaid shirt, alive and smiling and sitting in my living room. I’ll have to tell Pat about the dream. Maybe he’ll see it as a good omen.
“Sister Prejean?” It is Phelps on the phone. As head of the Department of Corrections he is responsible, he tells me, for the “overall process,” which includes approving each of the witnesses. Do I wish to witness?
“Yes.”
“I would like to talk to you eyeball to eyeball,” he says. “I want to make sure that each witness understands that this event is to be carried out with as much dignity and respect as possible.”
I tell him that I will be in the death house all day with Pat, that I don’t see when I can come and see him at his office. My first obligation, I say, is to be with Pat every minute that I can.
A pause. Then he says that I will be given a paper to sign before the execution. It states the rules witnesses agree to follow. I am to read it very, very carefully.
I tell him that I will do that.
He is calm reasonable, organized, professional, and he’s planning to kill someone two days from now.
The warden’s secretary has a kind and pretty face. She asks me if I would like a cup of coffee while I am waiting for my ride to Camp F. She goes to the urn in the corner and pours coffee for me in a plastic cup. I am cold and shaky. I sip the coffee slowly. These people too, the warden, the pretty secretary, they’re also getting ready to kill someone.
Before leaving the prison yesterday I had made preliminary preparations for the prayer service with one of the associate wardens and requested the presence of the Catholic priest. I had been told that the music tape would have to be approved. Music of all kinds is frowned on at a “time like this,” the warden had said. “Stirs up too many emotions.”
At last the rain has stopped. The sky is wide and arching and blue. The sunlight is brilliant and white and falling lavishly on everything. I ride with a guard to the death house by a different route. We drive down “B” line, where houses of prison personnel are located. There’s a small store. There’s a tiny post office. There’s a cemetery on a hill.
As I walk into the foyer of the death house, Captain Rabelais awaits me. With him are the Catholic priest and the chief chaplain of the prison. They are assembled here to talk about the prayer service. One of the associate wardens asks for the music tape so that he can “preview” it. The priest and I are talking when everything begins to blur. I make an effort to keep speaking. I feel hands under my arms, supporting me. When I come to, I am lying on my back on the floor. Above me I see a ring of faces. I feel as if I have had a little nap. All I can think is how good it felt to sleep.
They tell me to stay lying down. (Later, Captain Rabelais tells me that everybody thought I had had a heart attack.) They have called an ambulance. I tell them that I am really okay, it’s just that I haven’t had much sleep, that I am taking an antibiotic, that I can’t get anything to eat in the death house.
“You just stay right there, young lady,” Captain Rabelais says. I close my eyes. It feels delicious to rest.
“Please tell Pat what happened, he’ll be worried,” I say as the ambulance drives up (did they use the siren?) and they are lifting me onto the stretcher.
They bring me to the prison hospital, where attendants quickly run an EKG. I wonder how much the medical personnel here at the prison will be involved in Pat’s execution. I ask one of the nurses administering the test. “One of the doctors is a witness and declares the man dead afterwards, and then the ambulance brings the body here and we run an EKG — unfortunately,” she tells me, and I think that Pat may be the next one lying on this table.
Associate Warden Roger Thomas appears and announces he’s taking me to lunch. He drives me in his car to the personnel cafeteria. As we are standing in line with our trays, Thomas talks about the importance of carbohydrates. I tell Warden Thomas that it would help if they fed visitors in the death house. It’s the only rule at Angola I have ever helped change.
By the time all this hoopla is over and I am driven back to the death house, it is almost one o’clock in the afternoon. Pat looks at me anxiously and asks, “Are you all right?”
I tell him I’m fine and I explain about taking the antibiotics and feeling weak and the EKG and the importance of carbohydrates.
“I thought you had a heart attack. I thought I was going to have to go through this by myself. Please, please take care of yourself,” he says, and his voice is hoarse with feeling. In ordinary circumstances the whole incident would have been a great joke, but not now, not here.
“I kept asking them here what happened but they wouldn’t tell me nothin’,” he says, and the anger makes him punch the words. I thought surely someone would have had the sensitivity to inform him that I was okay and that I’d soon be coming back to him.
I turn all of my energies now to this man on the other side of this metal door. I give him an update on what Millard says and how he has an appointment to see the governor tomorrow at 3:00 in the afternoon (in case the courts don’t grant relief) and I tell him about my request to Warden Maggio that Eddie not be put in lock-down, but I do not tell him about my conversation with Phelps. I point to the brilliant day and how blue and bright the sky is.
The dark, stormy clouds are gone.
The old priest arrives around three o’clock for the prayer service. He carries a prayer book and a small round gold container with the communion wafers in it. He wears the stole around his neck, the symbol of priestly authority in the Catholic Church. I suggest a plan to him for the prayer service and he nods his head in agreement.
I turn on the audiotaped hymn:
If you cross the barren desert
you shall not die of thirst …
be not afraid, I go before you always …
if you stand before the fires of hell
and death is at your side …
be not afraid …
The harmony of the young Jesuits is sweet and close, a song that promises strength for difficult journeys. Pat’s head is lowered, his ear cocked close to the metal door, intent on every word.
I picture the words of the song echoing from room to room within the death house, the words filling the place where the witnesses will sit, where the executioner will stand, the tender, merciful God-words, traveling across the hundred feet of tiled floor that must be walked to where the electric chair waits. I picture the words bouncing off the oak wood of the chair and wrapping themselves round it: be not afraid. I know the words may not stop the death that is about to take place, but the words can breathe courage and dignity into the one who must walk to this oak chair and sit in it.
The old priest says prayers in Latin and takes the communion wafer from the container and places it on Pat’s tongue, then into my outstretched hand.
“The Body of Christ,” he says.
“Amen.”
Yes, in this place I believe that you are here, oh Christ, you, who sweat blood and who prayed “aloud and in silent tears” for your Father to remove your own “cup” of suffering.1 This man about to die is not innocent, but he is human, and that is enough to draw you here.
The priest leaves. I feel sorry for the old man. He is performing his priestly office as he has performed it for fifty years or more. The Latin prayers said, the communion wafer given, he has nothing else to say to this man about to die. His trust is in the ritual, that it will do its work, even in a foreign language. For him, the human, personal interaction of trust and love is not part of the sacrament.
After the prayer, Pat’s mood is lighter. The sunlight is flooding in everywhere — through the glass door, through the row of windows at the top of the tier. The little sparrows are loud and busy and flitting in and out of the eaves. Seeing the birds, I share something I remember from a college course about how the brains of certain animals compare with the human brain, how a bird can be flying at a fast clip, then suddenly light on a small wire or branch perfectly poised because so much of its brain is devoted to seeing. And bloodhounds can smell much better than human beings because much of a dog’s head cavity contains large sinuses and corresponding brain matter for smelling. But even though we can’t smell as well as a bloodhound or see as well as a bird, we can think. And Pat laughs and says, “Some of us.” And then he tells me some of his animal stories, about deer and rabbit and coon and how you track them and how it is when it’s cold out in the woods and it’s just you there listening, watching, waiting, and how when he and Eddie would come back with a deer, his Mama would always cook up a pot of white beans and rice to go with it and how even the little dog, Beauty, would “lick her chops” waiting for her share.
If he were dying of cancer, it would be easier to comprehend his death. But here he is, fully alive, and it is hard to picture him fully dead. Death is thirty-three hours away and here we are talking about the brain size of birds and bloodhounds and hunting in the woods. You can only attend to death for so long before the life force sucks you right in again.
I encourage him to share his feelings and not feel he has to put up a front with me. I tell him I won’t think less of him as a man if he admits he’s afraid. “I’m afraid,” I tell him. “Everybody’s scared of dying.” But he is holding down his emotions. “I can’t let myself go,” he says, “I’d lose control,” and so he holds tight except to express love and gratitude to me. “I have never known real love,” he says, “never loved women or anybody all that well myself. I gave Mama a lot of trouble and Eddie was always her ‘baby.’ She always loved her ‘baby’ and it’s not that I blame her. It’s a shame a man has to come to prison to find love.” He looks up at me and says, “Thanks for loving me,” but I feel guilty that so much love has been lavished on me. In the face of this man’s utter poverty, I feel humbled.
I am getting ready to leave for the day.
He makes me promise to get to sleep early. “Take care of yourself,” he says as I leave.
I promise him I will, that I won’t be driving all the way back to New Orleans tonight but staying at Mama’s. I tell him I’ll see him tomorrow after I visit with Eddie.
As I leave the prison I see a familiar car in the parking lot. My brother and sister, Louie and Mary Ann, have come to drive me home. They have heard that I fainted. Millard had called to tell them about it after I had checked in with him earlier in the day. Ann, Louie tells me, is also coming to Mama’s for the night, and plans to stay for the “duration.” That’s just like her to do that, good friend that she is, to drop everything to come and be near me when I need her. She’s a doctor in an inner-city clinic in New Orleans and it must not have been easy to rearrange schedules.
At Mama’s I telephone Millard in New Orleans.
“Any word from the courts?” I ask.
“It’s in the Fifth Circuit,” he says. “They haven’t rejected it out of hand, they’re studying it, that’s a good sign.”
Then he tells me that he has an appointment to see Governor Edwards tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock. “The governor specified that I am to come alone.”
I say that sounds good — the governor alone with Farmer — that might help.
“No,” he says, “it means that he doesn’t want you there. He doesn’t want to face you again.”
This surprises me.
Ann gives me a sleeping pill and I climb into bed thinking of the man in the death house crawling into his bunk for the last full night of his life, and I think of the Bourques and the LeBlancs and their murdered children and of Mrs. Sonnier, and how she will make it through this long night and perhaps she is being hard on herself for paying too much attention to Eddie, her “baby,” perhaps she is berating herself for not loving her eldest son enough … and I say a prayer for all the mothers — Mrs. Sonnier and Mrs. Bourque and Mrs. LeBlanc. Then I am opening my eyes and the light is already in the windows and I know what day it is.
Ann drives me to Angola. The April day could not be more sparkling. All along the winding road the azaleas and dogwoods bloom, and the oaks and maples and cedars have new-green, sticky leaves and surely, I think, surely this is too beautiful a day for anyone to be killed, and I am filled with the hope that any moment now the courts will grant a stay of execution and this will all be remembered as a bad dream.
Ann, always organized, has worked it out that she will drive me to the prison this morning, then come back in the afternoon and wait for me in the parking lot from three-thirty on. That way, if Pat gets a stay of execution, I’ll have a ride home. And if not, she’ll be there when I come out, and she tells me that some of the Sisters plan to come to the front gate of the prison to protest Pat’s execution.
I visit Eddie first and he seems in remarkably good shape and my own hope buoys him up. His letter to the governor has appeared on the front page of the Times-Picayune this morning with the headline: “Brother to Governor: you’re killing the wrong man.” Perhaps this kind of public knowledge will create doubt by which the governor can justify a reprieve should the courts not grant relief.
At noon I leave Eddie to go to the death house. I am holding my thoughts on a tight rein and refusing to allow myself to think ahead. It is noon on this bright April day and Pat and I are going to have a long visit. But I tense up as soon as the deat
h building comes into sight.
Almost as soon as I’m inside, Captain Rabelais appears with a tray of food. “Eat, young lady,” he says, and they serve Pat a tray of food, too — gargantuan amounts of meat loaf, corn bread, mustard greens, and cake. “Our cook here at Camp F is one of the best at Angola,” Rabelais brags, and Pat says, “Sure beats what we get on the Row.” I’m glad to see that Pat is eating something. I go for the carbohydrates.
Pat says he did not sleep much last night. I tell him I did, and that Ann gave me a sleeping pill. He refuses the “nerve” medicine they offer him. He wants to be fully awake, he tells me, and he doesn’t trust what they might give him.
I tell Pat about my visit with Eddie. “I’m angry at him,” he tells me. “I’m angry at him for shooting the kids. I’m angry at the kids for being parked out in the woods in the first place. I’m angry that Mr. Bourque and Mr. LeBlanc are coming to watch me die. I’m angry at myself for letting me and Eddie mess over those kids and for me letting Eddie blow like that.
“I’ll have a chance to say my last words,” he says, “and I’m going to tell Bourque and LeBlanc a thing or two, coming to watch me die. Especially Bourque. I’ve heard he’s been telling people that he wishes he could pull the switch himself.”
“Your choice,” I tell him, “if you want your last words to be words of hate.” And then I talk to him about how his anger at a time like this is understandable and how it would be understandable too if he chose to make his last words a curse, a hateful attack on people who have come to watch him suffer and die, and maybe if I were in his place I would want to do the same thing — at least a part of me would. “But there’s another side to you too,” I say, “a part of you that wants not to be shriveled up by hate, a part of you that wants to die a free and loving man. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s possible and it’s up to you.” And then I ask him to think about the parents of David and Loretta and how they have already suffered torments and whether he wants to add to their grief. He’s hunched over in the chair, his elbows on his knees, smoking and thinking.
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