Dark and Bloody Ground (46 page)

Sherry, standing around outside with no one to talk to, then wandering back inside the courthouse, upstairs to the deserted courtroom, did not know what to do with herself. She approached the jailer, who told her that she could not see Benny now. Police were preparing to take the prisoners to the state penitentiary at Eddyville. They would be leaving in an hour or so, out the side exit. She might be able to see Benny then.

She wandered back toward the courtroom, past Judge Hogg’s chambers, and found herself outside the Commonwealth Attorney’s office. Through the glass in the door she could see a light. She stepped into the small, empty waiting room and sat down on a tattered couch. She began singing a song. It was Billy Joe Royal’s “I’ll Pin a Note on Your Pillow,” about how a lover will let it be known that he is gone. She sang the first few lines and kept on mumbling and humming the rest. The door to the inner office opened and James Wiley Craft came out. His shirtsleeves were rolled up; he was holding some papers.

“Hello, Sherry,” he said. “I know that song.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said.

“It’s about being lonely, isn’t it?”

“I reckon.”

He stood looking at her. He wondered if what he felt for her was wrong. He had seen her around the courthouse, always alone, so
devoted to this man. There was something about her. She was that song. It seemed a waste. She was still humming.

“Sherry,” Craft heard himself saying, “you ought to get on with your life.” He cleared his throat. She looked up at him through her glasses. He had the impulse to say more, but did not.

She got up and left.

Outside again, around to the side of the courthouse, she sat down on the curb and smoked cigarettes as the darkness became complete. It was after ten by the time a Department of Corrections van pulled up.

Soon there he was, her man, handcuffed and shackled to Roger, being led down the steps toward the van. No one tried to stop her as she rushed up to him and threw her arms around his neck and covered his face with kisses and tears.

“Benny, I love you. Benny.”

They loaded them into the van. It drove slowly off. Sherry balanced on the curb, waving.

Suddenly she remembered that her car was parked around the corner, and she ran. She jumped in, found her keys, and gunned it, tearing off in the direction she knew they were going. She caught up to the van at the intersection where Highway 15 goes toward Hazard.

They seemed to be the only ones on the road. Did they know she was following? She was crying so, the taillights ahead were a red blur. Benny was in that van. If this was the closest she could get to him, she would follow all the way. She would see him taken out and into the prison. It would make it better for him if she did that.

Half an hour passed on the good, two-lane road. Through part of Hazard, closed stores, a light or two in houses. She followed them down the on-ramp and onto the Daniel Boone Parkway heading west. It was so easy not to miss the turn when you were following someone. She checked her gas gauge: half-full. She would have to stop for gas somewhere, but so would they. Eddyville was way to the west, almost to Missouri. If she had to stop first, she could always catch up to them. Him. She kept on, beginning to sing, crying.

Somewhere before Manchester the van slowed and veered onto the shoulder and stopped. She pulled up twenty or thirty yards behind and switched off her lights. The driver stepped out. He flicked on a flashlight and shone it in her direction.

She remembered that she had left her clothes and her music tapes back at her motel. She gave up and turned around.

*    *    *

Back with her parents in Harriman, Sherry talked to Ben Gish over the telephone and told him that Benny and Roger had been “railroaded.”

“I don’t agree with anybody being killed, but at least let’s try to be fair about it,” Sherry said. “I hope that everybody that had a helping hand in taking these two men’s lives has nightmares every night.” She continued through tears: “Taking two more lives is not going to bring back the one that was took.”

She thought that the jury’s spending so little time deliberating meant that they had already made up their minds and had not listened to the evidence. The way things had turned out, she could only hope that Judge Hogg would sentence Donnie Bartley to die, too. “It would tickle me to death. If it’s good enough for two, it’s good enough for all three of them. Bartley put those two boys in the electric chair. He took Benny’s life and Roger’s. Every statement he made contradicted every other witness. If that ain’t railroading, I don’t know what is. He killed that girl and lied to save himself.”

There were rumors, Gish told her, that Bartley had linked all three of them to other robberies and murders.

“Well, if that’s true,” Sherry said, “then why did this one bother him so bad if he wasn’t the one who did it? I wonder if he can sleep good now, knowing he’s killed two more people. If the other one bothered him so bad, then why in the hell didn’t he give the doctor back his money? I’m dying, too. When you take someone away from the person they love, that is death. If I could take Benny’s place in the chair, I’d do it. I love the man that much, and he loves me the same way. I won’t quit fighting till I got no fight left.”

She had no idea what had happened to all the missing money: “All I know is, I don’t have it. And unlike Bartley, I don’t lie. Even if I had it, that money’s nothing compared to Benny’s life. I’d give it to them in a New York minute. I don’t have nothing against the doctor and that other daughter of his. If I was them, I’d probably have feelings, too.”

Grateful for her candor—neither she nor Benny had spoken to any other reporter—Gish sent her a year’s subscription to the
Mountain Eagle.
He wasn’t sure quite why, maybe it was her steadfast devotion to Benny, maybe it was the way she stood alone, but he believed her. He hadn’t found anyone else who did. Aside from the
defense attorneys, everyone else who had been at the trial seemed certain that Benny Hodge was the killer.

Sherry began a weekly commute to Eddyville, a distance of nearly eight hundred miles round-trip. Saturday was visiting day; the Eddyville regulations for death row inmates were more lenient than most. As did Roger and Carol, Sherry and Benny met in a picnic area, closely watched, allowed one kiss. At the end of July, the wives rented apartments in the same building in Eddyville, figuring they would save motel money by doing so; Sherry paid her advance rent with four one-hundred-dollar bills. Carol, who wrecked two cars in two weeks, spent more time up there than Sherry did.

In Harriman, Sherry had to fend off questions from her parents.

“When are you going to give up on Benny?” E. L. asked her over dinner one night. “You’re wasting your life. He’ll never get out.”

“I know he won’t,” Sherry said. “I love him. Do you dump someone you love just because he’s in jail and is going to die? Would you run off from someone who’s sick? What kind of a woman does that? Benny made some mistakes. I have, too.”

“What if he got out? What if Benny escaped? Would you go with that Biggin?”

“Of course I would,” Sherry said, knowing how much this pained E. L. “I’d follow Benny to the ends of the earth.”

“Then you haven’t learned nothing,” E. L. sighed.

Sherry was sure that her days of being able to visit Benny every week were numbered. That was the reason, apart from devotion, that she went to see him as often as she could; and that was why she was spending more time with Renee than she had in more than a year. Unless Benny could escape and they could disappear together—it seemed impossible—she knew that it was only a matter of time before she was arrested.

She tried to prepare E. L. and Louise for this event; she could not bring herself to tell Renee. The day would come, she told her parents, when the Feds would take her away, she did not know for how long. “I’ve done some things,” she said, “don’t ask me no questions, and I’ll have to pay for them.” She wanted her parents to know that she did still understand the difference between right and wrong and that she was prepared to take responsibility for her actions. She hoped her parents could still love her. She was grateful that they had let her move back in with them. She was abiding by
their condition, that she not bring any of her trashy friends around.

Meanwhile, waiting for the inevitable, she piled up the miles between Harriman and Eddyville, rushing back after seeing Benny to receive the collect call he always made to her on Sundays. He also managed to call during the week—Sherry’s portion of the family phone bill for July was nearly five hundred dollars—but Sundays were special. She went to church with her mom and dad and, after the big Sunday dinner, waited for the phone to ring.

The phone calls and the visits—and the faint hope that Benny might escape—were all she felt she had to live for. Now that the reality of his sentence had sunk in, she could think of nothing else, and it seemed about to overwhelm her. She had no appetite. Every song, every place she drove around Harriman reminded her of him. She developed a monstrous headache that never seemed to go away; she went to bed with it and woke up in the middle of the night with her head pounding. It was then that the remorse got to her.

Everyone said that the cruelest thing you could do to your child was to kill yourself. She wondered. What kind of a mother was she? What chance did she have to redeem herself? Her going to prison would only make things worse for Renee, the biggest disgrace of all. Often Sherry got up in the silence of the early hours and stared at herself in the bathroom mirror and hated what she saw. She held a razor blade to her wrist on the scar Benny had made. Maybe Renee would be better off without her, but not Benny. Her love was all he had left. Better to wait until he was dead, then do it.

The headaches became unbearable; she went to the family doctor about them. When he asked her what she thought might be causing them, she told him about Benny and admitted that she was so depressed that she was thinking of killing herself. His response was swift. He told her that she had two choices: either to get psychiatric help immediately, or expect to deal with the police. It was his professional responsibility, the doctor said, to insist that any patient who was seriously considering suicide get help at once. He would give her twenty-four hours to seek counseling, or he would inform the police.

You bastard, Sherry thought. Now I can’t even go to the doctor without having the cops on my ass. She considered the doctor a blackmailer. Reluctantly she made an appointment at the Ridgeview clinic once again.

She was more open in talking about Benny this time, but she said
nothing about the stolen money or about facing prison herself. Follow-up sessions were advised, transactional analysis recommended, an emergency number provided, and she was given a prescription to relieve headache and muscle tension.

“35 year-old white female,” the diagnostician, a woman in this instance, wrote on the profile sheet, “average intelligence—pleasant presentation—depressed, tearful over an identifiable stressor. Dealing with issues of loss of husband who is in prison and may be electrocuted—underlying anger at him. Some suicidal ideation but ‘won’t do it because of daughter & her sister.’ Pessimistic outlook but beginning to make plans for the future—job hunting etc. Some guilt whenever she is enjoying herself and thinks of him in prison.” The category on this visit was “Adjustment Reaction & depressed (
DSM
309.00).”

When Sherry found out that the pills she had been prescribed were heavily laced with codeine, she threw them away. That is really sick, she thought, trying to turn me into an addict. I’ve come this far on my own; I better rely on myself. She did not return for further therapy.

For a year now, ever since Benny’s Florida arrest, Sherry had been taping his calls. She kept the microcassettes in a box on a shelf with her dolls; each night she tried to coax herself into sleepiness by listening to one or another of their conversations. Assuming that the FBI had her line tapped wherever she was, she devised a code so that she could refer to certain matters without being detected. The code for money was anything to do with Renee’s toys or clothes. When she saw Benny in person and they could speak without being overheard, she referred to “our” money. As if ownership had been transferred, the spoils were never the Acker money. They had earned it, hadn’t they, at an expensive price?

She taped his calls so that she could hear his voice at any time she chose and feel closer to him and remember what it was like to make love with him. Whenever she managed to be alone talking to him on the phone, she said things to excite him, sometimes using words she avoided in regular conversation; he would talk about the things they had done together and wanted to do; she told him what she craved and how excited she was becoming hearing him, touching herself with only him on her mind.

Sherry believed that no two people in the world had ever been more open with one another about sex or had ever talked about it in
such an uninhibited way. She knew from her first marriage and from girlfriends how different she and Benny were from other couples; she knew it from her days of cutting hair, when the women bitched constantly about their slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am husbands and boyfriends. She wished she and Benny could tell the world a thing or two; they might loosen folks up and bring happiness. Some might call it dirty; some might say some of the things they talked about were strange or weird or even perverse. They were puritans and hypocrites. You did what you had to do. Maybe the FBI were getting their rocks off listening. So what? Nobody understood.

How many people had done what she and Benny had together, tearing down a road after an armed robbery and making love in a jailhouse and being on the run and loving each other more the deeper in they got? She loved him now so completely, she wished she could chain herself to him with unbreakable chains so they would have to strap them into the chair together with her legs around him and the two of them screaming as some fool pulled the switch.

All she had to do was hear Benny’s voice to get so worked up that she couldn’t breathe. In her room, her parents asleep, she saw his face, his perfect body. She would reach over in the dark and pick out a tape at random and put on her earphones and start. It brought him to life. She’d have to force herself not to do anything but listen for a few tantalizing minutes, hearing his voice and her own teasing him, taunting him, with Benny becoming wilder and angrier, neither one of them holding back at all, until she couldn’t take it any more, sweating in her bed full of him or almost. Exhausted at last, she’d cry herself to sleep with her face buried in Big Ben the pink buffalo.