The Dreams of Ada (54 page)

Frustrated, Winifred called Judge Powers at his home in Chandler, and explained the situation. The judge chose not to assess blame. He took the blame upon himself; he should have noticed the Ward paper was missing from those he signed.

The judge would try to work it out on the phone, he said. If he could not, then he and Winifred would meet somewhere on Monday, and he would sign the necessary forms.

To keep the record in order, the judge said, he would have to formally assign the case to the public defender’s office. They would have to formally decline it. Then he would appoint a private attorney to handle Ward’s appeals.

Winifred thanked the judge. She called the warden at McAlester, and told him what was being done, that the paperwork would be forthcoming, that a stay of execution was in the works.

The next night, Saturday, the first day of winter, Tommy had a dream. He dreamed he was in the death chamber: not strapped in a chair, but lying down. He was allowed two witnesses in the chamber with him. They were his mother and his brother Joel. Two clergymen were also present. As a tube was hooked up to his arm, and a doctor was about to administer the fatal injection, Tommy said, “Stop!” The others paused. Then, in his dream, Tommy said, “My momma brought me into this world. I want her to take me out of it.”

He woke up before she did.

An unexpected delivery was made two days before Christmas to Bud and Tricia’s house. It was a gift of enormous cans of baked beans, pork and beans, pie fillings, and other basic foods. It had been sent by the Ada Kiwanis Club.

Money was tight, and the gifts were gratefully accepted. Bud and Tricia did not know why they’d been sent. They felt that perhaps, at some deep but informal level, the town was beginning to have a guilty conscience.

Late the next afternoon, Christmas Eve, Barney Ward came to their house. He, too, brought with him gifts of food: a hundred-pound sack of potatoes, a fifty-pound sack of yellow onions, a turkey, and other foodstuffs. The blind attorney shook Bud’s hand and wished him a Merry Christmas.

The attorney, wanting to help out a deserving family in the holiday spirit, had called a woman who worked at a loan company to ask who needed help. The woman had suggested that, what with their raising foster kids and other good works, the Bud Wolf family was the most deserving in town.

For the families of Denice Haraway—her own and her husband’s—Christmas was, of course, subdued. The year before, there had been rage: the terrible tale of the October confession tapes was still fresh; ahead lay the ordeal of the trial. Now there was continued mourning for Denice, and unavoidable recollections of happy Christmases past. But there was also, perhaps, a measure of grim satisfaction. The trial was done. The suspects had been convicted and sentenced to die. Denice could not be brought back to life, but if religion meant anything at all, then she was at peace, in the fields of the Lord. And here on Earth the gears of justice had meshed; justice was being done. And, one day, perhaps, retribution.

In his cell at McAlester, Tommy Ward was shaking more than ever. His body had erupted in a nervous rash. They were going to kill him on January 21, unless a stay of execution came through. By Christmas Day it had not come through.

His mother came to visit, bringing along Jimmy’s two boys, Jesse and Jack. As they talked, Jesse began to cry. Tommy began to joke around, to cheer him up, to get the boy laughing.

Afterward, in his cell, Tommy cried, because he could not be with them.

A few cells away, Karl Fontenot wrote a letter, on a yellow legal pad. He, too, had his family on his mind. “While I was in the city jail on Christmas of 1984,” he wrote, “my real family didn’t even come see me, write me or sent me no Christmas gifts. I wrote them continuously trying to get them to write me some letters but they never wrote me. I wrote them one letter which said if you love me at all family like I love you all you will write me or come visit me. That was like proof to me that they don’t love me.”

In the afternoon, Tommy called Tricia and Bud, to say Merry Christmas; they’d all been over at C.L. and Maxine’s in the morning, exchanging gifts; now they were at home, serving a turkey dinner to Tricia’s side of the family.

Tommy planned to spend Christmas night reading his Bible, and praying. But about eight o’clock, for unexplained reasons, the lights in the cell block went out. They stayed out till eleven the next morning. Reading was impossible. Tommy just prayed.

When he fell asleep, he dreamed again of the Haraway case. He dreamed that Denice Haraway was alive, was being held prisoner by some guys; and that he, Tommy Ward, was the head of the investigating team trying to find her. He was in a truck with a bunch of men, who were armed with rifles and automatic weapons. They jumped out of the truck, surrounded a house in which Denice Haraway was being held against her will.

He woke up before the rescue.

The paperwork on Ward’s and Fontenot’s visitor lists was completed. On the last weekend of the year, Tricia and Bud were able to see Tommy for the first time at McAlester. They brought along Rhonda and Yuvonda; they held the infant up to the glass, for Tommy to get a good look. It was a cheerful visit.

The sight of the baby summoned up yearnings in Tommy. He wrote them down that night: “Today was the first time I seen Yuvonda. She is a doll. I about started to cry when I saw her. I love baby’s. I always wanted one of my own. I always like looking at magazines with pictures of baby’s in them. And cry for hours wanting one of my own. I also think about this mess and how those people are trying not to let me have a chance of a famaly of my own.

“I wish I could only had been able to take my heart out and show those people in Ada how it beets and let them hold it and they’d see that there is no way I did it.”

New Year’s Eve came and went. And New Year’s Day.

It was 1986.

Tommy Ward still believed he was scheduled to die on January 21. No one had told him differently.

And he was right.

The judge, the lawyers, all thought the problem about the stay of execution had been taken care of. But in the bureaucratic labyrinth of the criminal justice system of the state of Oklahoma, there existed no stay of execution for him. Tommy Ward, though he had not been moved to the thirty-day holding area, was scheduled to be executed in twenty-one days.

The week ended. Another weekend passed. On Monday, January 6, Miz Ward received a call from the warden’s office. They still had received no stay of execution, she was told. She’d better find out what was going on.

The current of fear and uncertainty on which Miz Susie Ward’s life had floated helplessly since her son was arrested seemed to have no end to its twists, its turns, its rocky shoals. She called Winifred Harrell at Don Wyatt’s office; Tommy had not yet been assigned another lawyer.

Winifred, too, thought the matter had been taken care of. She telephoned Patti Palmer, the deputy appellate public defender, in Norman. Ms. Palmer told Winifred she had been at the Court of Criminal Appeals the previous Friday, January 3, that a stay had been granted, that the paperwork was on the way.

Winifred reassured Miz Ward.

No one reassured Tommy. He could make phone calls out, but no one could phone in.

At his home in Chandler, Judge Powers was pondering the case. He needed to appoint a private attorney to represent Tommy Ward, because the public defender was representing Fontenot. But he knew how unpopular the case was among the attorneys of Ada.

Finally he hit upon what seemed like the perfect solution. Who else could better represent Tommy Ward’s interests? Who understood the complex case better?

He looked up the Ada number and dialed. Judy Wood answered. She buzzed her boss’s office. She told him Judge Powers was calling.

At his large desk, beneath the shelf of Philip Roths and Stephen Kings, Don Wyatt picked up the phone.

Judge Powers told him his decision. He, Don Wyatt, would be Tommy Ward’s court-appointed attorney for the appeals.

Wyatt groaned. His chest sank. He did not want the assignment. He had had his fill of this case.

The judge told him the assignment was his anyway. The official document appointing him was on the way.

Wyatt hung up. He called in Winifred. As his legal assistant, much of the work load in handling the appeals would fall on her. He told her the news.

Winifred’s mind flashed to the Ward file she had maintained from the day she joined the firm. It had been in perfect order, until the trial. But after the trial everything had been shoved in any which way; it would not be needed for a long time, if ever, she’d thought; the case would be someone else’s.

“I quit,” she said. “I’d rather go on welfare.”

Winifred knew she was joking, but barely.

That same day was moving day at McAlester. The new Death Row had been completed, and fifty-six inmates, their cases in various states of appeal, would be relocated there. Because there were so many—the last execution in Oklahoma had been twenty years before—sixteen would have to double up, two to a cell; there were only forty-eight cells on Death Row.

From the beginning, Ward and Fontenot had talked about rooming together. But in recent weeks, with Karl increasingly blaming Tommy for his predicament, they had hardly been talking, had just had some desultory conversations in the yard. Now Karl told Tommy he wouldn’t share a cell with him.

Moved to Death Row, they were placed in cells across the corridor from one another. Karl was in a cell alone. Tommy’s cell had two bunks, and an inmate called Luke (name changed) was asked if he would share Tommy’s cell. Luke, who had murdered several people, said he would; he liked Tommy okay.

The inmates settled in, those who had them plugging in television sets, radios, arranging their toilet articles, their writing pads, spare prison outfits of dark blue shirts, blue jeans, blue boxer shorts, T-shirts. After a few hours, Luke turned to Ward. “Come over here and I’ll masturbate you,” he said.

Tommy was horrified.

“The hell you will!” he said.

“Look, I never done it before with a guy either,” Luke said. “But I’m here for life. I’m not getting out of here except in a box. I might as well get used to it. You’ll do it, after a while.”

Tommy knew that a lot of the men in the prison had turned gay. He made it clear to Luke that the idea revolted him.

The men kept apart. Afternoon became evening. Evening became night. In their new cells, the inmates were keyed up, restless. Long into the night, TV sets remained on, and radios. The inmates stayed awake, talking, shouting conversations from cell to cell. That was easier here than where they’d been; the doors here were made of bars instead of solid metal.

It was past 3
A.M
. Most of the inmates were still awake. The sound of radios, TVs, tuned to different stations, cluttered the corridor. Karl Fontenot stood behind the barred door of his cell, looking out. An inmate in another cell started a conversation. They had to half-shout over the din.

“How come you ain’t rooming with your fall partner?” the man asked.

Karl replied, “Tommy? I don’t want to room with him. Tommy’s a snitch!”

Suddenly it was as if some implosion of sound had occurred on Death Row. The word “snitch” was the catalyst. As soon as it was spoken, loudly over the noise, conversation stopped. In the sudden, comparative quiet, radios were turned off, and TV sets. Quiet moved down the corridor like a snake, until there was total silence.

Fontenot had never spent a minute in jail, anywhere, until his arrest in the Haraway case. He was, perhaps, unaware that the deadliest word in any prison in America is the word “snitch.”

“Say that again?” the inmate said.

“Tommy’s a snitch,” Karl said. “If it wasn’t for Tommy, I wouldn’t be in here. If Tommy hadn’t given the cops my name, they never would of come to question me, for me to make that tape.”

There was silence again on Death Row. Then the other inmates started talking. They didn’t want snitches around. They started talking about killing Tommy.

They started planning aloud how to do it.

Tommy, listening, began to shake.

We could do it, one of them said, when they open the cell door to let Luke out for exercise. We could rush in and beat Tommy to death.

But then the guards would know who done it, another said. We should kill Tommy when no one is around.

Tommy became afraid, terrified. He began to shout for a guard.

A guard came down the corridor. He asked what was wrong. Tommy said, “You just get me out of here!”

The guard asked why.

“I’ll tell you after you get me out of here!”

“I have to get a sergeant for that,” the guard said.

The guard walked away. Minute after minute passed. The other inmates continued to talk about killing Tommy. The sergeant did not appear.

Luke looked at Tommy slyly. “I guess they’re waiting to see if I’m the one who’s going to get you,” he said.

Tommy was petrified. He knew Luke had killed before.

The guard returned. A few minutes later a sergeant arrived. They took Tommy out of the cell, led him down the corridor, to another section of Death Row. They put him in a cell, alone; it was larger than the other one.

“Now, tell me what’s wrong,” the guard said.

“They were threatening to kill me,” Tommy said.

He did not give details about who, or why. He did not want to get a reputation as a snitch.

He could tell the word had beat him to this unofficial protective custody area: word that “a snitch was coming down.” He told an inmate in a nearby cell that it wasn’t true; that Karl was telling lies.

“Your fall partner?” the inmate said. “That don’t make you a snitch. It happens all the time. Fall partners turnin’ on each other.”

In the morning, the news was brought to Tommy in his new cell in protective isolation: his stay of execution by the courts had been received. The stay would be in effect pending the outcome of his appeals. The state of Oklahoma no longer was planning to kill him on January 21.