waiting to be handled by the executioners … This explains the odd submissiveness that is customary in the condemned at the moment of their execution. (pp. 201-202)
Pat is scheduled for execution on Friday, August 19. That really means the evening of Thursday the eighteenth, because the execution is scheduled for just after midnight. I go to visit him on Wednesday the seventeenth. Warden Ross Maggio has granted me a special four-hour visit. Just before entering the prison I use the public telephone outside the gates to call the Coalition office to see if perhaps the courts have issued a stay of execution. Execution is about forty hours away. They have not yet moved him to the death house, where the electric chair is located about five miles deep inside the prison.
Pat looks thin, sallow. He has dark circles under his eyes. He has not been able to keep his food down and has lost thirty pounds in two weeks. He keeps going on coffee and cigarettes.
“My stuff is packed, ready to go,” he tells me when I walk in.Any minute the prison authorities might summon him to move to the death house. He has packed what they allow him to bring: a toothbrush and toothpaste, a change of underwear, cigarettes, his Bible, his address book, some stationery and a ballpoint pen. No radio. Music stirs emotions, and prison authorities want as little emotion as possible in this process. There will be a television for him to watch. There will be a telephone on the wall near his cell from which he can make collect calls. Some men on the Row have recently made this move to the death house, but they have all come back alive, receiving stays of execution from the courts. There hasn’t been an execution in Louisiana since June 1961.
I tell him that I have just spoken with the Prison Coalition by phone and Tom Dybdahl, who has replaced Chava, has told me to assure him that his attorney has filed his petition and he will surely get a stay from the courts any minute now. I tell him I will visit with him for a couple of hours, and if by then word of a stay has not come, I will ask the major to let me use the phone in his office to call the Coalition office again.
I hope Tom knows what he is talking about. I know nothing of legal issues. I’m practicing blind faith that the attorney knows what he’s doing.
“How sure are you about the stay?” I had asked Tom. “Ninety-five percent sure,” he had said. That reassures me. But he had also said, “You’re never absolutely sure about what the courts will do.” How does one deal with this kind of waiting? How keep one’s poise, one’s sanity? Even if he had said 99.9 percent sure, there’s that one tenth of 1 percent.
The simplest surgery can go wrong. Delivery of babies can go wrong. Anything that human beings do can go wrong.
To pass the time I do what I do best. I talk to him. I ask him questions, tell him stories. He talks about hunting in the woods, driving the big trucks, working on a hog farm in Texas, how his mama cooks venison and rabbit stew with a lot of onions and thick gravy, what it is like to work on oil rigs and what makes it dangerous work, some close calls he’s had, some bad accidents he’s seen.
We talk for two hours. We do not talk about death and dying. We will if the time comes, but for now the talking helps pass the time and maintain sanity until the time when the phone will ring and the guard will come in and say, “Sonnier, you got a stay.”
Pat is hyped, at times full of bravado. “They want to see me break. Well, they’ll never break me.” He had talked to one of the guards about getting some barbecue corn chips and a Dr Pepperfrom a snack machine for me. “We’ll celebrate when we get news of the stay,” he told me. “Ole Maggio [the warden] thinks he’s got me this time, but I’ll show him. My attorney will pull off the stay at the last minute. Maybe I’ll even get a good ‘last’ meal off of him,” and he laughs. But the laugh is forced. It
Pat is scheduled for execution on Friday, August 19. That really means the evening of Thursday the eighteenth, because the execution is scheduled for just after midnight. I go to visit him on Wednesday the seventeenth. Warden Ross Maggio has granted me a special four-hour visit. Just before entering the prison I use the public telephone outside the gates to call the Coalition office to see if perhaps the courts have issued a stay of execution. Execution is about forty hours away. They have not yet moved him to the death house, where the electric chair is located about five miles deep inside the prison.
Pat looks thin, sallow. He has dark circles under his eyes. He has not been able to keep his food down and has lost thirty pounds in two weeks. He keeps going on coffee and cigarettes.
“My stuff is packed, ready to go,” he tells me when I walk in.Any minute the prison authorities might summon him to move to the death house. He has packed what they allow him to bring: a toothbrush and toothpaste, a change of underwear, cigarettes, his Bible, his address book, some stationery and a ballpoint pen. No radio. Music stirs emotions, and prison authorities want as little emotion as possible in this process. There will be a television for him to watch. There will be a telephone on the wall near his cell from which he can make collect calls. Some men on the Row have recently made this move to the death house, but they have all come back alive, receiving stays of execution from the courts. There hasn’t been an execution in Louisiana since June 1961.
I tell him that I have just spoken with the Prison Coalition by phone and Tom Dybdahl, who has replaced Chava, has told me to assure him that his attorney has filed his petition and he will surely get a stay from the courts any minute now. I tell him I will visit with him for a couple of hours, and if by then word of a stay has not come, I will ask the major to let me use the phone in his office to call the Coalition office again.
I hope Tom knows what he is talking about. I know nothing of legal issues. I’m practicing blind faith that the attorney knows what he’s doing.
“How sure are you about the stay?” I had asked Tom. “Ninety-five percent sure,” he had said. That reassures me. But he had also said, “You’re never absolutely sure about what the courts will do.” How does one deal with this kind of waiting? How keep one’s poise, one’s sanity? Even if he had said 99.9 percent sure, there’s that one tenth of 1 percent.
The simplest surgery can go wrong. Delivery of babies can go wrong. Anything that human beings do can go wrong.
To pass the time I do what I do best. I talk to him. I ask him questions, tell him stories. He talks about hunting in the woods, driving the big trucks, working on a hog farm in Texas, how his mama cooks venison and rabbit stew with a lot of onions and thick gravy, what it is like to work on oil rigs and what makes it dangerous work, some close calls he’s had, some bad accidents he’s seen.
We talk for two hours. We do not talk about death and dying. We will if the time comes, but for now the talking helps pass the time and maintain sanity until the time when the phone will ring and the guard will come in and say, “Sonnier, you got a stay.”
Pat is hyped, at times full of bravado. “They want to see me break. Well, they’ll never break me.” He had talked to one of the guards about getting some barbecue corn chips and a Dr Pepperfrom a snack machine for me. “We’ll celebrate when we get news of the stay,” he told me. “Ole Maggio [the warden] thinks he’s got me this time, but I’ll show him. My attorney will pull off the stay at the last minute. Maybe I’ll even get a good ‘last’ meal off of him,” and he laughs. But the laugh is forced. It
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