The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend (20 page)

With those words, Vanzetti stops speaking. The impact of his last sentence is like a hammer smashed into the center of the silent courtroom. Now Vanzetti looks directly at the Judge, and his eyes are a huge and frightening part of the Judge's present nightmare.

“I have finished,” Vanzetti says. “Thank you.”

The Judge raps suddenly with his gavel, but there is no disorder, no sound for him to still. He lets go of the gavel and sees that his hand is trembling. He pulls himself together and says with forced firmness.

“Under the law of Massachusetts the jury says whether a defendant is guilty or innocent. The Court has absolutely nothing to do with that question. The law of Massachusetts provides that a Judge cannot deal in any way with the facts. As far as he can go under our law is to state the evidence.”

“During the trial many exceptions were taken. These exceptions were taken to the Supreme Judicial Court. That Court, after examining all the exceptions—that Court in its final words said, ‘The verdicts of the jury should stand; exceptions overruled.' That being true, there is only one thing that this Court can do. It is not a matter of discretion. It is a matter of statutory requirement, and that being true, there is only one duty that now devolves upon this Court, and this is to pronounce the sentences.”

“First the Court pronounces sentence upon Nicola Sacco. It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Nicola Sacco, suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven. This is the sentence of the law.”

“It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Bartolomeo Vanzetti—”

Vanzetti now leaps to his feet and cries out, “Wait a minute, please, your Honor. May I speak for a minute with my lawyer?”

“I think I should pronounce the sentence,” the Judge continues. “Bartolomeo Vanzetti, suffer the punishment of death—”

Sacco interrupts him now with a sudden fierce cry, “You know I am innocent! That is the same words I pronounced seven years ago! You condemn two innocent men!”

But the Judge has gathered his nerve and his wits by now, and he goes on calmly,

“—by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven. This is the sentence of the law.”

And then the Judge adds, “We will now take a recess.”

And today, in the early evening of August 22nd, the day finally set for the execution after several delays, he woke up from his nap with those words of his echoing in his ears,
We will now take a recess
. He woke up and realized that someone was calling him for dinner. Actually, it was remarkable how little disturbed he was. He suddenly had an appetite for food, and he realized with pleasure and relief that the day was already drawing to an end. When once it ended, this whole matter would be settled forever and soon forgotten. At least he consoled himself with this thought.

Chapter 14

T
HE LONGEST
and most lonesome pilgrimages come to an end, and this day the Professor of Criminal Law had traveled across the universe and back. In the farthest reaches of space, he had gazed for brief moments at the deepest secrets of life, and what he found was bitter and unsettling. He had forgotten home and children, and when he ate, the food became coarse and tasteless in his mouth. He ate with the Attorney for the Defense, who had come into town for a last word or two with the men who were going to die. This attorney had stepped out of the case, in the hope that new legal aid might influence the Governor, but now he had come to Boston to speak once again with Bartolomeo Vanzetti. He had asked the Professor of Criminal Law to come with him to the death house in the State Prison.

“I am afraid,” said the Professor of Criminal Law, saluting the dark companion at last. It had pursued him the whole day, and now stalked by his side. “I could not face Vanzetti.”

“Why?” asked the Attorney. “It was not you who condemned him.”

“No? But I'm not so sure of that any more. Do you remember the statement that Vanzetti made on the ninth of April, after the Judge passed sentence?”

The Attorney nodded, and the Professor added, with some embarrassment, “I would like to quote it to you. I have committed it to memory and have been carrying it around inside of me like a stone tied to my heart. I don't want to seem over-melodramatic, but this morning I faced the President of a great university—you know who I mean—and later, I saw a colored working man, beaten terribly because he walked on the picket line in front of the State House, and this and other things have been most unsettling. I need to see this thing clearly. I ask myself what Vanzetti meant when he said, ‘If it had not been for these things, I might have live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—the lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.'

“What strange and brooding words those are, and how many times I have asked myself what they mean. I am not sure that I know. Two men are going to die, and from now until the end, I will not lift my hand to prevent it.”

“You cannot prevent it, my friend,” the Attorney said. “You must understand that you and I can do nothing anymore.”

“Is that the whole fruit that we suck on?” the Professor wondered. “The juice is sour, then. I am just a Jew and not even native to this land; but no one drags me into a police station and beats me until I am blind with blood. Yet all this black working man did was to walk on the picket line. I have done more. I bearded a great man of the old blood of this land, and practically called him a liar whose hands were dirty with blood—but no punishment came to me. Suddenly I see that the punishment is reserved for the oppressed, as Vanzetti calls them, and we smile about that, the quaintness of the term, but we are putting these two people to death because they are radicals, and not for any other reason. The mighty have been challenged, and for that challenge, a shoemaker and a fish peddler must pay with their lives. So why such a commotion, such a sound of voices? So many have died in silence, and you and I never raised a hand to do one damn thing about it. Now we try to heal our consciences, but a month from now we will live just as comfortably among the rich and the mighty. I will pay the small price of being fired out of the university, but in private practice I will make twice as much money—and my clients will be those who murdered Sacco and Vanzetti. Yet I try to' say that my own hands are clean—”

The Attorney listening to him was a middle-aged man, a Yankee of sober honesty and deep integrity, who had come into the case, not for money or fame, but because his irascible conscience led him into it; and now, for all that this kind of an outburst made him somewhat uneasy, he listened respectfully and thoughtfully. “I never accepted their views,” he said. “I am a conservative man, and I never made a secret of that. But I don't whet my appetite with the smell of blood. They are being murdered, and it only fills me with shame that this should take place. But maybe, somehow, there is still hope. Come with me to the jail—do come.”

With that and more argument, the Professor of Criminal Law finally agreed, and they walked in the summer evening past the State House, where the picket line still moved. As they came alongside of it, they were greeted by many of the people who marched, and the greeting was full of sadness. The tall young woman poet, whose name and verse were known all over the world, grasped the Defense Attorney's hand, begging him,

“You will do something? It's not too late, is it?”

“My dear, I will do what I can,” he said.

Six women, walking together two by two, and weeping, carried signs which said, “We are textile workers from Fall River, Massachusetts. God help the mighty in New England if Sacco and Vanzetti die.” On the sidewalk nearby, an old, gray-haired man held by hand a little boy, his grandchild, likely enough, and he whispered to the little boy, explaining and motioning; but when the child began to cry, the old man said worriedly, “No, no—it will not help for you to weep.”

“We must not linger,” the Attorney said, drawing the Professor along. “I have this appointment, and I must not be late.”

“No, tonight is not a night to be late. You know, there never was anything like this before. Why? Why? I don't think that even when Jesus Christ carried his heavy cross to its destination, there was such grief from mankind. What will perish in us when these two go?”

“I don't know,” said the Attorney somberly.

“Hope, perhaps?”

“I don't know. Shall I ask Vanzetti?”

“It would be too cruel.”

“No, I don't think it would be cruel at all.”

They took a cab to Charlestown. In a very plain tone of voice, the Attorney said to the Professor, “There, a block or two over on our right, is Winthrop Square—Austin Street, Lawrence Street, Rutherford Avenue, the persistence of names, so as to speak. Warren going into Henley—I've wondered if that is the same Warren, do you remember, ‘Fear ye foes who kill for hire? Will ye to your homes retire—look behind you, they're on fire!' Am I quoting correctly? It must be thirty or forty years since I've seen that. And over that way, the monument—”

Only part of the Professor's attention was held by the words of the other. Both his thoughts and his emotions had responded to the serene quality of the early evening, the pastel beauty of the clouds in the sky acting as prisms for the light of the descending sun, the boats on the water, and all the many sounds and smells, the smell of the clean summer evening air, tinted and textured with smoke from the puffing locomotives, the sounds of train and boat whistles and the mercilessly free passage of birds across the sky. All of it was so beautiful that it created a framework within which death was impossible and vile, and thus, for the moment, he lost all touch with the reality toward which they were moving. He was returned by the dry recollection of the Attorney, who spoke of monuments:

“You would have caught a glimpse of it a moment ago, but in the wrong place. Isn't that so? I've always been under the impression that the monument stands on Bunker Hill, but the battle was fought on Breed's Hill. That's where they dug their trenches and crawled into them, poor farmers and laborers facing the best regiments of Europe—”

“Men like Vanzetti?” the Professor asked.

“That doesn't disturb me, sir. No, really, no. The past is dead. I don't know what they were like—no one does now, I suppose. One thing I know, they were not people all alone like Sacco and Vanzetti—”

“Alone? Surely they are not alone—no.” The Professor smiled slightly for the first time in hours. “They aren't alone.”

“I know what you mean—I meant something else. You mean all the millions who weep for them. I've discovered that an ocean of tears will not move a small rock. A quarter of a million sign a petition, but what difference does it make?”

“I don't know,” answered the Professor.

“There you have it. Up there on Bunker Hill, they had their guns in their hands. They underwrote their statement, sir.”

“Don't you think they wept when Nathan Hale was hanged?”

“I feel like a schoolboy,” the Attorney said to himself. “What old bones we are trying to rattle! Here is this Jew—they seem to recognize suffering, or maybe there's a bitter smell it leaves in the air—trying to find consolation somewhere. But the past is dead. He put his finger on it, and Sacco and Vanzetti are dying in a world they never made. We come as observers, but what else can we do?”

“There's the prison,” the Professor said. The evening was golden, but he was filled with fears, and this portent of the beauty of the world, overlaid with a shimmering wash like a George Innes painting, only made the fears he carried with him sharper. There should have been thunder and lightning instead of this, but like a lady of infinite vanity, the world had arrayed herself in sheer perfection. They came up to the grim, octagonal walls of the prison, and for the first time, the Professor caught a glimpse of a further reality, and had insight into the profound meaning of John Donne's somber warning, “—never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” He was going to his own death, for he was connected with the doomed men, his soul tied to theirs, his memory collective with theirs, his needs as theirs; and though in the years to come, he would forget this night and how he had died, for time does strange things, he would always have a touch of remembrance when he saw golden sunlight or felt the cold shadow of the angel of death passing by.

The Warden greeted them now with the professionally long countenance of a funeral parlor director, and within the prison the good light of day ended. They marched through crypt and catacomb toward the death house.

“I guess you understand that we don't welcome these days,” the Warden said. “These are bad days for a prison. Let me say that the whole population dies a little with the condemned, and that's not as fanciful as it might sound. There are little threads tying people together when they live in a jail.”

“Howsoever you see the jail,” thought the Professor.

“And how—how have they been?”

“Good,” the Warden answered. “Within the situation, of course, but how good can anyone be at the end? They are two brave men, believe me, mister.”

The Professor thought this came strangely from a warden, and peered at him uncertainly. The other lawyer had wrapped himself in his own defenses, and his slow steps paced with his memories of this case, a game at first, the way any complex legal case is a game, a puzzle, a problem and a challenge—and then finally, the focus of his life. Well, he had shaken loose from that. When all was said and done, people like Sacco and Vanzetti had always perished under one violence or another. They defied the great shibboleth and rose up to smash images. All other crimes might be forgiven, but the lord and master could not forgive him who cast doubt on lordliness and mastery. That was inevitable; therefore, why did the world protest so?