“Sir? Are you there?”
“I’m thinking.” Late twenties, LeDonne thought, analyzing the voice. Educated. White-collar worker. Maybe a lawyer. Not rattled by the idea of talking to a law officer. He waited.
“I’m trying to sort out the different days of the trip.”
“We’re right on the North Carolina line,” LeDonne told him. “Near Erwin. Unicoi. Do you remember anybody who looked-well, out of place-on the trail?”
“Oh, right. Let me see… There was a guy with hunting dogs. I didn’t think he ought to be in a national park.”
One of the Jessups,thought LeDonne. “They do that around here sometimes,” he said aloud, making a note to find out who had been out with the dogs, and to question them also.
“Other than that, there were just the usual folks doing the trail. It’s pretty crowded this time of year, you know. Lot of old dudes-the Woodstock leftovers, you know-out communing with nature, and some really buff women doing the Xena thing. All kinds, really. And guys that were obviously locals. Rednecks.”
LeDonne resisted the urge to tell Mr. Garrison how much he disliked talking to bigots. He had to be polite to potential witnesses, and besides, the exercise would be pointless. He was sure that the smug young man would be bewildered to be accused of prejudice. Political correctness did not require tolerance or courtesy toward white Southerners.
“Oh, wait. Speaking of locals. There was one guy out there who looked pretty odd.”
“How so?”
“He looked like he ought to be going to computer class instead of out backpacking. Skinny little guy with pens in the pocket, and dress shoes. And a necktie. In the woods.”
“Did he have a backpack?”
“Yeah. I think so. A bookbag, really. Not serious camping gear.”
“How old would you say this individual was?”
“Late teens. Early twenties. Hard to say.”
“Can you give me a description of him? Height? Hair color?”
“Not really. I just looked at him and thought:Nerd, and I kept walking.”
“Nerd, huh?”
“Yeah. Oh, wait there is one other thing I remember. The guy had an earring. You know that science fiction TV show about the space station?”
“No.”
“Well, the people from this one planet always wear this odd kind of double earring. And he had one of those. So I knew he was a space cadet. I wondered what he was doing out hiking, instead of shooting down aliens in the video arcade.”
“If I find him, I’ll ask him,” said LeDonne.
Fate Harkryder was having the dream again. It was dark, and he could not see where he was, but he knew, the way one does in dreams, that he was dead. He could not remember how he came to die, or whether there was any pain involved in the leaving of his life: all he knew was that he was dead and it was very dark. He kept still for a moment, listening for his own heartbeat or the sound of his lungs drawing breath, but there was only stillness and silence. He felt the oppression of a confined space, and he knew that he was in a box deep in the ground, but he was somehow conscious. Perhaps there had been a mistake and he was not dead after all. He had heard tales of men on the gallows who were revived after being cut down from the hanging rope, and of an electrocuted prisoner needing two or three jolts of current to finally stop the heart. Ethel Rosenberg-the convicted spy in that fifties atomic-secrets case-went to the electric chair at Sing Sing. Her husband had died on the first round, but they’d had to electrocute her a second time to make her die. Maybe his execution was over and he had been rendered unconscious, but not killed. He would shout for someone to let him out, but when he tried to open his mouth, he found that it had been sewn shut, and he could not open his eyes, because they, too, were sealed with nylon thread. He tried to lift his arms to pound on the lid of the coffin, but he could make no movement with his dead arms. The screams stayed inside his mind, caught behind sewn-shut lips, echoing in the dark.
He woke up then. The same place in the dream that he always awakened, to the same six-paces-by-nine-paces cell, filled with his books and his calendar pictures of mountains.
“Hey, Milton, you out there?” It was two o’clock in the morning, but nobody sleeps soundly on death row. Fate was shivering, even in the breathless heat of a Nashville summer night. It was not completely dark. It is never completely dark here. He listened for a sound from beyond the wall. “Milton?”
Milton, his neighbor, a skinny young junkie from Memphis, who copped the death sentence in a drug hit, didn’t answer. Fate didn’t like Milton much-but maybe, he reasoned, that was the point. Nobody that you could like very much ever made it to death row these days, because a jury wouldn’t ask for the death penalty if they could find any redeeming qualities in the accused. In the old days, maybe, but not now. Public opinion and liberal lawyers were making it harder and harder to execute prisoners, so it was mainly career criminals and second-time killers who made it into Pod Five now. Fate wondered if a new trial would get him taken off the list, but that didn’t seem likely now, as the dream reminded him.
“Milton? You up?”
Milton would stab his grandmother in the back and take bets on which way she’d fall, but at least he was there, and awake, and alive, and if anybody could understand what it feels like to dream you’re dead and know that the dream is going to come true real soon, it would be another condemned man on the row. He was better than nothing.
“What’s eating you, La-fay-ette?” The singsong drawl flowed out of the shadows; made him wonder if Milton could sing.
“Just wanted some company. Bad dream is all.”
Silence, and then a rumbling laugh. “Time is getting short, ain’t it? You dream you were in Virginia, La-fay-ette?”
“Dreamed I was dead. Buried alive. Couldn’t get out. Couldn’t scream for help.”
“Yeah, you musta been in Virginia all right, then,” said Milton. “They been killing prisoners right and left over there. You dead, you must be in Virginia, ’cause they damned sure ain’t killed nobody in Tennessee in thirty-some years. I don’t reckon they’ll start now with your sorry ass.”
“The appeals have all been denied.”
“I got money riding on your continued existence, homeboy. Well, cigarettes, anyhow. Two packs of Marlboros says you’ll be alive and kicking come New Year’s Eve.”
Fate took a long breath and waited to see if he felt any better. He didn’t. “Milton? I want to be cremated.”
“After you gone to the electric chair?”
“It’s the dream. I’m in a box and I’m dead but I’m still conscious, and it’s dark and I can’t get out. My mouth is sewn shut.”
Milton was silent for some minutes, and Fate had begun to think that he had drifted off to sleep, but then he laughed and said: “Cremated. Don’t you beat all?” He laughed again. “Cremate your ass.Man, you know what I heard about Old Sparky? They say that the death squad has to wait half an hour before they even touch the body, it gets so hot. It’s cooked from all that juice they run through you. Sometimes the skin catches fire, they say, and the eyeballs fry right on your face. And you think you’re gonna stay conscious through that, homeboy? You won’t have nothing left to think with by the time they put you in the ground to cool off.”
“I want to be cremated. If they’re going to burn me, they might as well finish the job.”
Burgess Gaither APPEAL
My carefully written appeal went off to Raleigh on Newland’s stagecoach, as did Judge Donnell himself. Both would reach the state capital in three days’ time, but I knew that many weeks would pass before I received a reply from the North Carolina Supreme Court regarding the fate of Frankie Silver.