Dead Man Walking (14 page)

Pat seems to be holding up well. He is getting letters from his young pen pals and he reads parts of the letters to me. “It’s a good thing we don’t have hanging as a method of execution here in Louisiana, or Mark would feel bad, because look what he says in
his letter: ‘hang in there’ ” and he laughs. It’s bravado, of course. “They’re not going to break me,” he says to me again and again. “I just pray God gives me strength to make that last walk.” He says he didn’t read the Bible last night. Instead, he says, he talked a long, long time with the guards on duty. Reading, he says, might make him sleepy and he’s not too keen on sleeping. He’s staying conscious and in control as much as he can.

I tell him that his letter to the governor has been delivered. I tell him that Bill Quigley is filing the petitions in the courts this morning, and that Millard is making his move to see the governor in private.

“Look,” he says, “I appreciate all the efforts to save me, but me and God have squared things away. I’m ready to go if it comes down.”

And I can see that he does have strength and resilience and this gives me courage too. I think of Kathleen lining up the burial plot, the coat from Goodwill. But with Pat I am in a circle of light and strength. I learn to stay in this space of the present moment and not to think to the future, not to think past today to Wednesday night at midnight. Today is Monday and Pat is alive and I am alive and we are here talking together.

Outside it is another rainy, gray day, the third in a row. Pat sees the stormy weather as a bad omen. And he adds another: “They’ve already executed two blacks — Williams and Taylor — it’s time for a white; the governor is under pressure to get a white.”

Captain John Rabelais comes to the door where Pat and I are visiting. He is captain of Camp F and the death house falls under his jurisdiction. He asks Pat if he wants a lunch tray. Pat shakes his head no. The rules prohibit him from offering me one. I am drinking coffee and canned drinks from the machine in the lobby. I look up at this man, Rabelais, with the long, lined, hangdog face. In his 60’s I’d guess, and a paunch hangs over his belt, but unmistakably the brown eyes are friendly. He offers to get me a cup of coffee and I accept.

Later in the day, when Pat is inside his cell to use the toilet, I get a chance to talk to Rabelais.

“What’s a nun doing in a place like this?” he asks. “Shouldn’t you be teaching children? Do you know what this man has done, the kids he killed?”

“What he did was evil. I don’t condone it,” I answer. “I just don’t see much sense in doing the same to him.”

He looks at me and I look at him, and I am thinking that if
circumstances were different, I could be sitting at this man’s kitchen table, eating jambalaya and swapping stories. I like the man.

“You know how the Bible says ‘an eye for an eye,’ ” he says to me, but it’s like a gentle pitch in softball, slow and big and easy.

“And you know,” I say back to him, “that Jesus called us to go beyond that kind of vengeance, not to pay back an ‘eye for an eye,’ not to return hate for hate.”

He smiles, puts up his hand. “I ain’t gonna get into all this Bible quotin’ with no nun, ‘cuz I’m gonna lose.”

Making my way back to Pat, I pause to talk awhile to the guard sitting inside the door. I comment on the rain and he looks outside and says, “Yup, just don’t seem to want to stop.” And I say something about how it must get pretty tiring just sitting here all day, and he couldn’t agree with that more. “Borrrrring,” he says, and he drops his voice and I bend down lower to him and he whispers, “I don’t particularly want to be here, you know what I mean, doing this, being part of this, but it’s part of the job. I got a wife and kids to support.”

Morning has turned into afternoon. I will be leaving soon to go back to New Orleans. I ask Pat if he is interested in a prayer service tomorrow. I know he is not keen on being in the company of the old priest. Some months ago he had told me how he had confessed to the priest “you know, the heavy-duty stuff,” and when he had finished the priest had asked, “Have any impure thoughts? Say any obscene words?” And it was all he could do, he says, not to hit the “old man.”

“If you’re there with me I’ll do the prayer service with him,” he says, “but not by myself.”

I tell him that I’ll plan it and I’ll talk to the priest. There’s a song I want him to hear, I tell him, called “Be Not Afraid,” based on Isaiah 43, and I have my Bible there and I read the words to him. I read the words slowly so that he can take them in.

On Tuesday, April 3, I leave New Orleans for Angola at 6:45
A.M
. after a sleepless night. I kept jerking awake, wondering what else might be done for Pat. Were we doing everything we could? By 3:00
A.M
. I couldn’t go back to sleep. Ann Barker, my close friend, a doctor, had started me on an antibiotic for a bronchial infection. I know I am running on adrenaline. I know my physical resources are running low.

I arrive at the prison at about nine o’clock and ask to see Warden Maggio. He comes immediately to the front gate. Briefly I tell him what I know about the two brothers, Pat and Eddie. I show him
Eddie’s letter to the governor. I make the request for Eddie that he not be put in lock-down if Pat is executed. The warden makes no promises. “I’ll see,” he says, and then, referring to Eddie’s letter to the governor, “I can’t get into who’s guilty or who’s innocent. I’m here to carry out my job as warden, but I can tell you this — nobody’s doing handsprings over this execution. It’s not easy on anybody.” Then he tells me that the head of the Department of Corrections, C. Paul Phelps, wishes to talk to me. I can come with him to his office for the call and then he’ll see that I get a ride back to Camp F.

I walk into the antechamber of Maggio’s office. Several armchairs line the wall and a secretary sits behind a desk. She looks very professional in her tailored suit and white blouse with the colorful bow at the neck. The office is quiet and well organized. There is the appointment calendar, the telephone, the computer. And there on the desk are a green potted plant and pictures of laughing children.

I realize that I am very, very tired. I did not eat breakfast before I left New Orleans this morning. Maybe that was a mistake. I won’t be able to eat again until I leave the death house.

I telephone Phelps in Baton Rouge at the Department of Corrections. A friendly, crisp voice on the other end of the phone asks me to wait “one moment please.” I shut my eyes and take a few deep breaths. A glimmer from a recent dream flashes: Pat Sonnier in a red-and-black plaid shirt, alive and smiling and sitting in my living room. I’ll have to tell Pat about the dream. Maybe he’ll see it as a good omen.

“Sister Prejean?” It is Phelps on the phone. As head of the Department of Corrections he is responsible, he tells me, for the “overall process,” which includes approving each of the witnesses. Do I wish to witness?

“Yes.”

“I would like to talk to you eyeball to eyeball,” he says. “I want to make sure that each witness understands that this event is to be carried out with as much dignity and respect as possible.”

I tell him that I will be in the death house all day with Pat, that I don’t see when I can come and see him at his office. My first obligation, I say, is to be with Pat every minute that I can.

A pause. Then he says that I will be given a paper to sign before the execution. It states the rules witnesses agree to follow. I am to read it very, very carefully.

I tell him that I will do that.

He is calm reasonable, organized, professional, and he’s planning to kill someone two days from now.

The warden’s secretary has a kind and pretty face. She asks me if I would like a cup of coffee while I am waiting for my ride to Camp F. She goes to the urn in the corner and pours coffee for me in a plastic cup. I am cold and shaky. I sip the coffee slowly. These people too, the warden, the pretty secretary, they’re also getting ready to kill someone.

Before leaving the prison yesterday I had made preliminary preparations for the prayer service with one of the associate wardens and requested the presence of the Catholic priest. I had been told that the music tape would have to be approved. Music of all kinds is frowned on at a “time like this,” the warden had said. “Stirs up too many emotions.”

At last the rain has stopped. The sky is wide and arching and blue. The sunlight is brilliant and white and falling lavishly on everything. I ride with a guard to the death house by a different route. We drive down “B” line, where houses of prison personnel are located. There’s a small store. There’s a tiny post office. There’s a cemetery on a hill.

As I walk into the foyer of the death house, Captain Rabelais awaits me. With him are the Catholic priest and the chief chaplain of the prison. They are assembled here to talk about the prayer service. One of the associate wardens asks for the music tape so that he can “preview” it. The priest and I are talking when everything begins to blur. I make an effort to keep speaking. I feel hands under my arms, supporting me. When I come to, I am lying on my back on the floor. Above me I see a ring of faces. I feel as if I have had a little nap. All I can think is how good it felt to sleep.

They tell me to stay lying down. (Later, Captain Rabelais tells me that everybody thought I had had a heart attack.) They have called an ambulance. I tell them that I am really okay, it’s just that I haven’t had much sleep, that I am taking an antibiotic, that I can’t get anything to eat in the death house.

“You just stay right there, young lady,” Captain Rabelais says. I close my eyes. It feels delicious to rest.

“Please tell Pat what happened, he’ll be worried,” I say as the ambulance drives up (did they use the siren?) and they are lifting me onto the stretcher.

They bring me to the prison hospital, where attendants quickly run an EKG. I wonder how much the medical personnel here at
the prison will be involved in Pat’s execution. I ask one of the nurses administering the test. “One of the doctors is a witness and declares the man dead afterwards, and then the ambulance brings the body here and we run an EKG — unfortunately,” she tells me, and I think that Pat may be the next one lying on this table.

Associate Warden Roger Thomas appears and announces he’s taking me to lunch. He drives me in his car to the personnel cafeteria. As we are standing in line with our trays, Thomas talks about the importance of carbohydrates. I tell Warden Thomas that it would help if they fed visitors in the death house. It’s the only rule at Angola I have ever helped change.

By the time all this hoopla is over and I am driven back to the death house, it is almost one o’clock in the afternoon. Pat looks at me anxiously and asks, “Are you all right?”

I tell him I’m fine and I explain about taking the antibiotics and feeling weak and the EKG and the importance of carbohydrates.

“I thought you had a heart attack. I thought I was going to have to go through this by myself. Please, please take care of yourself,” he says, and his voice is hoarse with feeling. In ordinary circumstances the whole incident would have been a great joke, but not now, not here.

“I kept asking them here what happened but they wouldn’t tell me nothin’,” he says, and the anger makes him punch the words. I thought surely someone would have had the sensitivity to inform him that I was okay and that I’d soon be coming back to him.

I turn all of my energies now to this man on the other side of this metal door. I give him an update on what Millard says and how he has an appointment to see the governor tomorrow at 3:00 in the afternoon (in case the courts don’t grant relief) and I tell him about my request to Warden Maggio that Eddie not be put in lock-down, but I do not tell him about my conversation with Phelps. I point to the brilliant day and how blue and bright the sky is. The dark, stormy clouds are gone.

The old priest arrives around three o’clock for the prayer service. He carries a prayer book and a small round gold container with the communion wafers in it. He wears the stole around his neck, the symbol of priestly authority in the Catholic Church. I suggest a plan to him for the prayer service and he nods his head in agreement.

I turn on the audiotaped hymn:

If you cross the barren desert
you shall not die of thirst …
be not afraid, I go before you always …
if you stand before the fires of hell
and death is at your side …
be not afraid …

The harmony of the young Jesuits is sweet and close, a song that promises strength for difficult journeys. Pat’s head is lowered, his ear cocked close to the metal door, intent on every word.

I picture the words of the song echoing from room to room within the death house, the words filling the place where the witnesses will sit, where the executioner will stand, the tender, merciful God-words, traveling across the hundred feet of tiled floor that must be walked to where the electric chair waits. I picture the words bouncing off the oak wood of the chair and wrapping themselves round it:
be not afraid
. I know the words may not stop the death that is about to take place, but the words can breathe courage and dignity into the one who must walk to this oak chair and sit in it.

The old priest says prayers in Latin and takes the communion wafer from the container and places it on Pat’s tongue, then into my outstretched hand.

“The Body of Christ,” he says.

“Amen.”

Yes, in this place I believe that you are here, oh Christ, you, who sweat blood and who prayed “aloud and in silent tears” for your Father to remove your own “cup” of suffering.
¹
This man about to die is not innocent, but he is human, and that is enough to draw you here
.

The priest leaves. I feel sorry for the old man. He is performing his priestly office as he has performed it for fifty years or more. The Latin prayers said, the communion wafer given, he has nothing else to say to this man about to die. His trust is in the ritual, that it will do its work, even in a foreign language. For him, the human, personal interaction of trust and love is not part of the sacrament.