Cargo of Orchids (23 page)

The writer asked each of them if she felt capital punishment was a deterrent to crime, or just something to satisfy the public’s need for revenge.

“I think some people are over-sensitive,” Rejean said. “I’ve executed a lot of women. Do I look like I’ve been losing sleep?” Leetia said yes, in that a dead woman will never offend again. Valerie thought
deterrent
was a pretty big word, which probably meant she didn’t understand it; Wanda said yes and no to both questions; Cecile wished there were a better way sometimes, but mostly she had no complaints and would go on doing the job until she had enough experience to get a better-paying one that didn’t take up so much of her life.

Asked for survival tips, the women all said there was only one rule: Never establish eye contact with a person you were about to execute. Each one, except for Rejean, said she would sleep better if she hadn’t had to look into a walking-dead woman’s eyes before putting the trash out at night and turning off the lights.

Didn’t they ever feel tainted? When you dealt in death every day, didn’t you lose an important connection to life? the writer asked.

Valerie said no woman she’d ever executed was anything important. Cecile said if you’re going to have mental problems about it, get another job. Wanda said yes and no, but that killing people had to rub off. “You can’t shovel manure without getting shit on you.”

I read this and felt only sadness. How is blindness cured by plucking out the eyes of the sightless?

The one other woman on death row who had been granted clemency, even though she didn’t want it, was a serial killer whose cause had also been taken up by the Women’s Empowerment Coalition. Her
modus operandi
was to gouge out men’s eyes (“They could never see me, anyway, for who I was inside”). “Go ahead,” she’d say to them. “Now let’s see you fuck me blind.”

Shortly after she was granted clemency (she was found too insane to be executed), she hanged herself in her cell.

Hanging used to be more popular than it is now. In the bestselling
Do-It-Yourself: The Science of Neck-Breaking
(I’m kidding, of course, about the bestseller and do-it-yourself parts, but because Rainy can’t read, I make things up, just to see how much she’ll swallow), you’ll find one of the saddest stories you’ll ever read, about a girl hanged in England in the early nineteenth century. She had been sentenced to death for trying to take her own life, which was a capital offence in those days. She slit her throat, and would have succeeded in bleeding to death if her father hadn’t come home unexpectedly. He saved her life, a doctor stitched up her throat and then she was charged with trying to commit suicide. She pled guilty, got convicted. She was given the death penalty, and she chose hanging.

Her doctor pleaded for her life. He said that if they tried to hang his patient, her stitches would come undone and she would breathe through the aperture in her trachea,
suffering unimaginable tortures that surely even a judge would not wish to inflict upon any human being, regardless of her sex, no matter how heinous a crime she had committed.

This girl was like me—she insisted on her right to choice, and she was hanged. As her doctor had predicted, her stitches came undone, and the hangman granted that the woman’s suffering might be relieved, on humanitarian grounds, by the “medical person” in attendance at her execution. Permission was given to this medical person (the nineteenth-century equivalent of a corrections officer who has recently updated his CPR skills, no doubt) to clamp his hand over the aperture through which the woman breathed. But the fake croaker’s hand wasn’t big enough, and after the woman had danced, gasping and twisting, at the end of the rope for as long as anyone watching could bear, she was cut down and given clemency as a result of a “technicality.”

Rainy, who had been listening closely as I relayed these details to Frenchy, had only one question. “Why did her father come home unexpectedly?”

Here’s the thing: nothing is more predictable and more certain than death, yet nothing is less predictable and less certain.

“Whoopee fucking ding,” says Rainy, a sign that she thinks I am thinking too much. It drives me when Rainy says, “Whoopee fucking ding.”

Something I
have
always thought about: every year, from the day we’re born, we pass the day on which we are
going to die. We all know death is inevitable, but in most cases live in complete ignorance of its timing. Only two kinds of people are spared from continuing to live in this state of uncertainty: a) those who plan to take their own lives; and b) those who will be “put to death”—like Rainy and Frenchy and me.

When you live on the Row, you don’t have a lot of opportunities to take your own life, even if you plan it that way. Our health and well-being are priorities here. If you catch lung cancer or wake up with a cold on the day of your execution, you’ll get a rain check. They’ll wait until you stop blowing your nose or coughing up blood before sending you on a trip to the stars.

Frenchy’s a slasher; instead of getting jailhouse tattoos she mutilates herself, tattooing her rage on her skin. When she cuts deep enough it brings blood to the surface, so everybody can
see
her wounds.

But Frenchy’s best-laid plans fail, over and over. She’s made nine attempts at suicide since the first time she was given the death penalty. “Of course, I have to fail,” she said. “I never, ever succeeded at anything I tried to do.”

Rainy won’t speak to Frenchy after she cuts herself. Stitches are one of her “issues”: when she was eight years old, her father punished her for wetting the bed. “He thought if he sewed up my
chocha
, it’d teach me a lesson,” she says.

Rainy went to school every day stinking and wet until a teacher reported her to the health nurse and they found out what her father had done. “He went to jail for it, but he never said he was sorry, and he never was. Sorry. He told
the parole board he’d do the same thing again, if I didn’t grow up.”

Rainy says she’s grown up a lot since then. “But I still pee the bed. Every night.”

If the state decides to end your life for you, you don’t, at first, get an
exact
DOD (date of departure); it could be any time within the next twenty years, depending on your trials (your guilt trials and your penalty trials), your appeals, public opinion, and the electoral and political processes. In states that employ the death penalty, judges are subject to re-election. We always know when there’s an election coming up because the Row starts getting crowded, and then, one by one, the women are shifted to “death watch,” a holding cell in the Health Alteration Unit (or the dancehall, as we all call it), a few feet away from the execution chambers. This means their execution is less than thirty days away.

When you get your “date certain,” you know the date you’re going out on, providing you don’t get lucky and get cancer first. Some people argue that it’s a cruel punishment, to be told you’re going to get gassed on such-and-such a day. What murderer has ever told her victim, “I’m going to kill you. It may be a year, three years or even fifteen years from now, but I am going to kill you. Meanwhile, I am going to lock you up in a cage and torture you in small ways until I am ready to kill you.”

In China, they spring it on you. Some say this is a more humane system, that in keeping a person uncertain of the date and time of her death, the state is preserving her status as a human being. You’re in your cell, reflecting on the harm
you have done to society and the terrible amount of money it costs taxpayers every year to keep you locked up, and suddenly there they are, at your door, calculating how much money they’re going to make when they’ve got your vital organs in their hot little hands. You eat the remains of your breakfast, because failure to clean your plate is considered an infraction of prison conduct, subject to disciplinary action, then they take you outside and shoot you in the head.

Neither you nor any family member is notified beforehand, so there are no long goodbyes, no tearful partings. Just you, your bodyguards, a man with a gun and the croaker (who’s supposed to make sure you are dead enough for him to start operating on). As a courtesy, to let them know you have finally paid your debt to society, your family will be sent the spent bullet casing afterwards.
And
they’re required to pay for it.

There’s one other way a woman can postpone her date certain (besides catching a terminal illness)—and that is by getting pregnant. Condemned women can “plead the belly” and get a stay, though a friend of Rainy’s pled and nobody believed her. Even after two male orderlies and a male midwife examined her, they sent her to the Chair. Flames shot out of her head when they pulled the switch, and milk spouted from her breasts into the flames. At the autopsy, they found an eight-month-old “healthy” baby boy dead inside her.

Now when a woman pleads the belly, she’s allowed to have an examination by a panel of
women
gynaecologists. We’ve come a long way, baby.

——

We
are
the prisoners of infinite choice. If you choose to be hanged, you next have to decide whether you wish to die from strangulation or from a broken neck. No drop at all, or a short one, usually results in strangulation—death from asphyxia, caused by stoppage of the windpipe, which causes convulsions (somewhere between the time it takes to drink a Starbuck’s and the time it takes to finish an anniversary dinner with your ex), or from apoplexy, by pressure on the jugular vein. The long drop ends in a broken neck. Death is supposed to be instantaneous and painless, though as one woman said to the executioner before she fell, “How the fuck would you know?”

You’d think it would be straightforward after that—you choose the short drop or the long one, depending on how much suffering you feel you deserve—but it’s not. After you make up your mind
how
you want to be hanged, you then have to choose the kind of rope you wish to be hanged with.

There are many different options—“No noose is good noose,” as Officer Freedman says—and some of the descriptions make it sound like
haute couture.
The
Vogue
model turned chainsaw killer, for example, might opt for the soft, pliable, five-ply Italian silk hemp rope with a three-quarter-inch diameter.

Choices, says Rainy. Dead if you do, dead if you whoopee fucking don’t. It’s like being in a restaurant and finally making up your mind that you’ll have the cheeseburger platter and the waitperson says, “Would you like Cheddar cheese or mozzarella on your cheeseburger?” and you go for the orange Cheddar. Then she says, “That comes
with french fries, baked potato, or garden salad.” You hum and haw, and then make a healthy choice, and say, “I’ll take the garden salad.” The waitperson says, “Will that be house dressing, oil and vinegar, french, thousand island or ranch?” You choose oil and vinegar, and then she says, “Will that be regular or lite?” It’s a form of harassment, like Frenchy’s train or guard humour. Why can’t they just
bring you the fucken cheeseburger platter
without taking away your appetite? Why can’t they just kill you without giving you so much choice?

It’s because for years women didn’t have options, my counsellor says. I don’t bother pointing out to her that my question was hypothetical. A pro-choice state means taking responsibility for your life—and your death, she adds. As if.

The Science of Neck-Breaking
uses mathematics to calculate the scientifically perfect drop for each person who might require one. There’s an art to hanging, the author wrote, as well. What works for one woman doesn’t necessarily work for the next. Her height and weight, age, whether she is physically fit or has spent a life horizontal on the couch eating Hostess Ding Dongs, and the length of the drop (controlled by the length of the rope)—these are the variables. The
Vogue
model will need less rope than a dwarf like Rainy to drop the same distance. Each person has a correct drop, and our drop is unique to each of us—like our DNA or our fingerprints. We can’t pass it off as someone else’s, or pretend it is not our own.

My mother says that before I got myself into this “bucket of hot water,” she had been all in favour of a death penalty. “I
think there would be a lot more people alive today if we had the death penalty in this country,” she writes. But now she sees it would be a mistake to apply it in all cases. “What’s sauce for the goose isn’t necessarily sauce for the gander.”

Frenchy is surprised by how many letters I write, and how many I receive. Prison for her, she says, is a place where you can’t think of anything to say.

“What do you have to write about,” she says, “when you’re in a place where nothing happens to write about?”

I tell her I write about getting through another day.

The day before they hang you, you get weighed and sized. More technicalities. What is life but technicalities, details? “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” Frenchy says. But she’s wrong. The small stuff is important, because a lot of small stuff can add up to something big. Two plus two is the beginning of death, and so on. I’m starting to catch on to what Dostoevsky meant.

The morning of your date, you put on your clean clothes, and you’re taken out to the gallows, smelling like Bounce, Frenchy says. To the right of the gallows platform, in a room with walls seven feet high, three guards are seated on stools. In front of the guards is a shelf, across which there are three taut strings. Only one of these springs the trap that causes the execution. The other two are connected to buckets of sawdust—the equivalent of blanks in a gun—which fall through the floor along with the hanging body.

Each woman is armed with a sharp knife. She waits for the hangwoman’s signal before cutting the string. It takes
between eight and fifteen minutes before the heart stops beating, the legal time of death.

This time when Frenchy’s last meal was brought to her, she kicked the tray high into the air, the undressed garden salad and the Diet Coke Rainy had ordered for her. “At least no one else will enjoy my leftovers when I’m gone,” she said.