Authors: Helen Prejean
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 death 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.
Then Nancy Goodwin comes into the death house. She had been with the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons in the mid-seventies, and had befriended Pat and Eddie after Eddie had written asking for help. The relief I feel in seeing her makes me realize how close the terror is. Now here’s someone else to shoulder the afternoon and the waiting. It is just about 3:00. While Nancy visits with Pat, I go to Captain Rabelais’s office and telephone Joe Nursey at Sam Dalton’s office in New Orleans.
“Any word from the Fifth Circuit?” I ask.
“None yet,” he says. “A good sign. They’ve had it a good while now and maybe that means they see something substantive in the petition.”
“And Millard?” I ask.
“He just called from the mansion. He was about to go in to see the governor. He must be with him now.”
I count the hours on my fingers: nine hours before midnight. Time rushes by and yet time is frozen. Funny how we get so exact about time at the end of life and at its beginning. She died at 6:08 or 3:46, we say, or the baby was born at 4:02. But in between we slosh through huge swatches of time — weeks, months, years, decades even.
I look at my watch. It is 3:15
P.M
. I go to the visiting door where Nancy now sits talking to Pat.
At 5:00 she says she must leave, and my heart gives a turn. I steel myself. Before she goes, we huddle close to the door — she, Pat, and I — and pray. There is strength and comfort in her presence and she is about to leave. Just as she is walking to the front door the telephone rings. My heart stops. Is it the Fifth Circuit? Is it Millard? But we can hear the major or somebody on the phone, and the conversation drones on.
Nancy walks out of the foyer, and Pat watches until he can see her no more. When he stands up and gets close to the mesh screen he can see into the foyer just inside the front door. Just after Nancy leaves, a man walks in. “That’s the electrician. Come to check out the chair,” he tells me.
The front door is opening and closing often now.
A guard I haven’t seen yet comes to the door. “How you doing, Sonnier?”
“That’s the head of the goon squad [“Strap-down Team”],” Pat tells me.
A little later, a man in civilian clothes approaches the door. “Need anything, Sonnier?”
“Just a little more coffee,” Pat says.
“That’s the shrink,” he whispers.
The telephone rings again. Heart-stop. Wait. See if Rabelais comes with news. I imagine the words that will make all the difference: “Sonnier, you got a stay.”
I look at my watch: 5:15. I call Joe Nursey again.
“Any word from Millard?”
“He’s still at the mansion,” Joe says. “All he said was that he was going to stay there until everything is all right.”
What can that mean, I wonder. Why is he there so long? It must not have gone well. If it had, Millard would be calling us.
There is a gush of air as the front door opens. Pat looks. “It’s Wardens Maggio and Thomas,” he says. I turn to look at them. They are wearing three-piece suits. Each has a shortwave radio at his side.
It is 6:00. The sun has set behind the trees. Afternoon has now turned to evening. The sparrows are silent, nested up under the eaves for the night. It is time for Pat’s final meal.
Pat tells me what he has ordered: a steak, medium-well-done, potato salad, green beans, hot rolls with butter, a green salad, a Coke, and apple pie for dessert.
Warden Maggio comes to the door to tell Pat that the chef has been giving “real special attention” to his meal and will be bringing it in shortly. He is to eat it inside his cell so that his hands can be freed of the handcuffs and Maggio is granting special permission for me to join Pat inside the tier just outside his cell, where I will be served my tray.
The fluorescent lights are on now in the building. You can see the light shining on the polished tiles. I think of how comforting the orange glow of a lamp is in a window, when you come home in the evening and the darkness is closing in. But these lights are cold and greenish white. I am waiting for the telephone to ring.
It does. Just as the chef brings Pat his meal and I am served mine. I look up through the metal door and see Captain Rabelais’s face. He is looking at me and shaking his head no. Warden Maggio tells Pat in a matter-of-fact voice: “Sonnier, the Fifth Circuit turned you down.”
I do not give any outward sign, but inside I fall headlong down a chasm.
The Fifth Circuit turned him down
. Only Millard left now, with the governor.
Pat teases the warden. “Well, Warden, I won the last round” — in August — “and it looks like you’re winning this one.” He waves
his spoon in the air and then points it toward his heaping plate and laughs. “At least I got me this good meal off you, and I’m sure going to enjoy every bit of it.”
And I am remembering his words: “They are not going to break me.” I look down at my own tray of food and know that I will not be eating one bite. There is a glass of iced tea and I sip that. I feel unreal.
Pat talks and eats and talks. He is like a man in a bar who tells stories too loudly. The telephone rings again. It’s Rabelais at the door. “Sonnier, the U.S. Supreme Court turned you down.”
Millard. Still no word from him.
It is dark outside.
Pat has eaten everything on his plate except some of the green salad. He eats the apple pie, then lays the spoon on the tray and says, “There, finished, and I wasn’t even hungry.”
Warden Maggio comes to the tier just outside Pat’s cell. Pat says to him, “Warden, tell that chef, tell him for me that he did a really great job. The steak was perfect,” — he makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger — “and the potato salad, and really great apple pie.”
The warden assures him he will pass on his compliments to the chef. “He put himself out for you, Sonnier, he really did.”
“And you tell him, Warden,” Pat says again, “that I am truly, truly appreciative.”
I rise from my chair and hand my tray of untouched food to Rabelais. The guards are changing shifts. I look at the face of the guard leaving the tier. Is he finished for the night? Will he be going home to his family now? Will his children ask him questions? His face is tight. I cannot tell what he is thinking.