Authors: Helen Prejean
I give Pat some moments alone in his cell. I tell him I’m going to the rest room. The building is buzzing now. Guards are everywhere, and men in three-piece suits. A secretary has arrived and has begun typing. You can hear the
click, click, click
of the typewriter. It sounds like a business office.
“What’s she typing?” I whisper to Rabelais.
“Forms for the witnesses to sign,” he says.
The large aluminum coffee pot is percolating a fresh batch of coffee. I see that someone has put a white tablecloth on a table and has placed ballpoint pens in the center of the table.
I go into the rest room. A few precious moments of privacy. I look at the sparkling tiled walls, the clean white fixtures, ample soap, paper towels. Everything is so clean. I keep feeling as if I’m in a hospital, the cleanliness, attendants following a protocol …
Oh
,
Jesus God, help me, help me, please
, and I harness all my energies, I gather myself inside like someone who pulls her coat tight around her in a strong wind.
I leave the rest room and glance down at the path of tiles that leads to the white metal door at the end of the room. Rabelais comes through that door now with someone in jeans and a plaid shirt and jacket. Must be the electrician. Rabelais locks the door behind him.
I go back to the visitor door. Pat is still in his cell. The phone rings on the wall near the cell. The guard on the tier walks down and answers it and hands the phone to Pat. I can see the coiled wire of the phone along the wall until it disappears into the cell. I can hear Pat’s voice rising and falling. “Thank you, Mr. Millard, thank you for what you and all the others done for me. I got you too late. If I had had you sooner …” Silence. “No, Mr. Millard, no you didn’t fail, you didn’t fail, it’s the justice system in this country, it stinks. It stinks bad, Mr. Millard, no, no, no, Mr. Millard, you didn’t fail …”
And now for the first time I know surely that he’s going to die. I look at my watch. It is 8:40.
I go to Captain Rabelais and ask to make a couple of phone calls. I call the Sisters to ask them to pray, and I call my mother to let her know I am okay and to ask her to pray.
I go back to the visitor door, The guard inside is putting the shackles on Pat’s hands and feet inside the cell. He opens the cell door and Pat comes over to the metal folding chair by the door. As he approaches the chair his legs sag and he drops to one knee beside the chair. He looks up at me. “Sister Helen, I’m going to die.”
My soul rushes toward him. I am standing with my hands against the mesh screen, as close as I can get to him. I pray and ask God to comfort him, cushion him, wrap him round, give him courage to face death, to step across the river, to die with love. The words are pouring from me.
His moment of weakness has passed. He sits in the metal chair and calls to Rabelais for a cup of coffee. He notices as he pulls a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket that there are just a few left. “Ought to just about make it,” he says.
He makes out his will, one single line on a piece of yellow legal paper. “I give to Sister Helen Prejean all my possessions.” Rabelais has someone notarize the will.
That done, Pat composes a letter to Eddie.
“Dear Brother,” he says, “don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay. You keep your cool, it’s the only way you’ll make it in this place.
When you get out someday, take care of Mama. Remember the promise you made to me. I love you. Your big brother.”
The front door is opening regularly now. Pat looks up every time he hears someone coming in. He watches. He notices everything.
A guard called Slick comes through the front door. He is a big, burly man with a shiny bald head and he is carrying a small canvas bag. Rabelais comes and asks me to step out into the foyer. Slick, accompanied by two other guards, goes into the cell with Pat. I quietly walk up and down the foyer. I look down at my black leather pumps. I walk back and forth, back and forth. “Please, God, help him, please help him.”
A chaplain named Penton approaches me. He is dressed in a bright green suit. I have the feeling that he has worked here for a long time. He tells me that he is here “in case the inmate might need my services at this time.” Then he tells me to prepare myself for the “visual shock” of Pat’s shaved head. “They must remove the hair to reduce the possibility of its catching fire,” he says. I keep walking slowly up and down the foyer and he walks alongside me. I am thinking of Gandhi. I am thinking of Camus. “Resist, do not collaborate in any way with a deed which you believe is evil … resist …” In his
Reflections
Camus tells of a Russian man about to be hanged by the Tsar’s executioners who repulsed the priest who came forward to offer a blessing: “Go
away and commit no sacrilege”
(p. 224).
Camus says about Christians:
The unbeliever cannot keep from thinking that men who have set at the center of their faith the staggering victim of a judicial error ought at least to hesitate before committing legal murder. Believers might also be reminded that Emperor Julian, before his conversion, did not want to give official offices to Christians because they systematically refused to pronounce death sentences or to have anything to do with them. For five centuries Christians therefore believed that the strict moral teaching of their master forbade killing. (p. 224)
I talk to Penton about a phone call I received from one of the Catholic prison chaplains several weeks ago. The priest had asked me which funeral home would pick up Pat’s body if the execution were to take place. Before I got this call, Pat had told me that the old priest had approached him in his cell and said brightly, attempting
humor, “Well, Sonnier, what are we gonna do with the body?” Pat had said angrily, “Don’t you call my mama and ask her that. Don’t you dare upset her. Call Sister Helen.” And so the phone call had come to me, and I had said I had no idea who would pick up the body.
I see how easy it is for chaplains, on the payroll, to play their part in this “uncomfortable but necessary business,” and I ask whether it should be the role of the chaplain to collaborate with the prison in planning the “disposal of the remains” of the person the state has killed. Penton tells me he will think about that. (He does. Later he sees to it that chaplains no longer make burial arrangements for executed prisoners.)
Rabelais comes to tell me that I can go back now to Pat.
I move to my side of the visitor door and wait for Pat to come from the cell.
Slick and crew are just coming through the door from the tier. One of the guards is carrying a towel and small broom, another a brown paper bag with Pat’s curly black hair in it. Slick is zipping up his canvas shaving kit. He moves quickly. I look at Pat as he comes back to the metal chair. His head looks whitish gray and shiny. His hair is gone now, eyebrows too. He looks like a bird without feathers. I see that they have also cut his left pants leg off at the knee. “They shaved the calf of my leg,” he says, and he holds out his leg for me to see. I see a tattooed number.
“What’s that number?” I ask.
“That’s from when I was at Angola before,” he tells me. “In case anybody killed me, I wanted them to be able to identify my body.”
I notice that he is wearing a clean white T-shirt.
I look at my watch and Pat looks at his. It is 10:30. Everything is ready now. All Pat needs to do now is die. He asks the guard for a pen and writes in his Bible, up in the front, where there is a special place for family history — births, marriages, deaths.
“There,” he says, “I wrote it in my own hand.”
The guard unlocks the door and hands me the Bible. I look at the front page. He has written loving words to me, words of thanks. Then I see under “Deaths” his name and the date, April 4, 1984.
I remember Jesus’ words that we do not know the day nor the hour. But Pat knows. And in knowing he dies and then dies again.
Two guards inside the tier stand on stepladders and hang black curtains over the windows along the top.
“They don’t want other inmates to see the lights dim when the
switch is pulled,” Pat tells me. He is smoking and talking now, his talk a torrent, a flood, all coming together now, snatches from childhood and teasing Eddie and school and the sugar-cane fields gleaming in the sun and Star, what will happen to her, and his Mama, to please see about his Mama, and Eddie, will he be able to keep his cool in this place, and if only he knew when the current first hit that he would die right away …
He begins to shiver. “It’s cold in here,” he says, and the guard gets a blue denim shirt from the cell and puts it around his shoulders, then goes back to his position at the end of the tier.
People are chatting nervously in the foyer and lobby now. The witnesses must all be inside by now, the press, all the prison officials. You can hear the hum of talk and some snatches of conversation. You can hear when someone inserts coins into one of the drink machines and the clunk of the can when it comes out.
I look around. There, standing behind me, are Bill Quigley and Millard Farmer. I rise and move toward them and have to hold myself in close check. Their presence, their love, knowing they have tried so hard to save Pat’s life, makes me want to weep. But no tears now. Bill gives my hand a tight squeeze. Millard does not look into my eyes. We move to the visitor door. Guards bring two chairs for Millard and Bill. What words to say during these (I look at my watch) last fifty minutes? Pat says, “Look at the time, it’s flying.”
The old priest approaches us. I rise and go over to him, “Let Elmo know” — Pat hates being called Elmo — “I’m available for the last sacraments,” he tells me.
I give his message to Pat.
Pat shakes his head. “No, I don’t like that man. All of you, my friends who love me, you make me feel close to God. Sister Helen, when it is all over, you receive communion for both of us.”
I promise that I will.
The warden approaches Millard and asks him to step into the foyer. In a few moments Millard comes back. “Pat, the governor has given permission for me to be a witness.”
Thank God. It strengthens me to know that Millard will be there too.
Captain Rabelais asks the three of us to step into the foyer for a moment. Three guards go into the cell with Pat. It is 11:30. No one can say much, but Bill whispers to me that Ann, Lory, and Kathleen and some other Sisters are at the front gate.
People are all still milling around in the large room. The witnesses
have not been seated yet. Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Bourque must be here. What are they going through? Will this help heal their loss? I wonder. I hear the toilet flush in Pat’s cell.
Rabelais summons us back to the door. Pat comes from his cell, his legs and hands cuffed. Anger flickers in his eyes. “A grown man, and I have to leave this world with a diaper on,” he says.
“I’ll be free of all this,” he says, shaking his handcuffs. “No more cells, no more bars, no more life in a cage,” he says.
He reaches in his pocket for a cigarette. He turns and shows the guard, “Look, the last one. It’ll see me out.”
Warden Maggio approaches us. He is flanked by six or seven very large guards. It must be midnight. “Time to go, Sonnier,” Maggio says. One of the guards takes Bill out to the foyer, another tells Millard to follow him. I stand to the side of the door. I will walk with Pat. I am holding his Bible. I have selected the Isaiah passage to read as we walk, the words that were in the song, words that Pat has heard and the words will be there for him to hear again, if he can hear words at all, when he will be trying to put one foot in front of another, walking from here to there across these polished tiles.
“Warden,” he asks, “can I ask one favor? Can Sister Helen touch my arm?”
The Warden nods his head.
I am standing behind him. Guards, a mountain of blue, surround us. I put my hand on his shoulder. He is tall. I can barely reach. It is the first time I have ever touched him.
We walk. Pat walks and the chains scrape across the floor. God has heard his prayer. His legs are holding up, he is walking.
I read Isaiah’s words:
Do not be afraid … I have called
you by your name, you are mine.
Should you pass through the sea,
I will be with you …
Should you walk through the fire,
you will not be scorched,
and the flames will not burn you.
(43:2)
As we pass through the lobby the old priest raises his hand in blessing.
We stop. There is the oak chair, dark and gleaming in the bright fluorescent lights. There are the witnesses all seated behind a Plexiglas
window. There is a big clock on the wall behind the chair. There is an exhaust fan, already turned on to get rid of the smell of burning flesh. Two guards have firmly taken hold of my arms and are moving me toward the witness room. I lean toward Pat and kiss him on the back.
“Pat, pray for me.”
He turns around toward me and says, his voice husky and eager like a young boy’s, “I will, Sister Helen, I will.”
I see Millard then and I sit on the chair beside him. He reaches over and takes my hand. Mr. Bourque and Mr. LeBlanc are seated in the first row over to the right of us. Their faces are expressionless.
There is a small podium with a microphone on it and Pat is standing behind it. I can see past him to a wall of green painted plywood with a slit of a window behind which the executioner waits.
The warden is standing over in the right-hand corner next to a red telephone.
“Have any last words, Sonnier?” he asks.
“Yes, sir, I do,” Pat says, and he looks at the two fathers, but addresses his words to only one of them. “Mr. LeBlanc, I don’t want to leave this world with any hatred in my heart. I want to ask your forgiveness for what me and Eddie done, but Eddie done it.” Mr. LeBlanc nods his head. Mr. Bourque turns to Mr. LeBlanc and asks, “What about me?”
Pat is in the chair now and guards are moving quickly, removing the leg irons and handcuffs and replacing them with the leather straps. One guard has removed his left shoe. They are strapping his trunk, his legs, his arms. He finds my face. He says, “I love you.” I stretch my hand toward him. “I love you, too.”