Through the Shadows with O'Henry

CHAPTER XXIV. Tainted meat; O. Henry's morbid curiosity; his interview with the Kid on the eve of execution; the Kid's story; the death scene; innocence of the Kid.

I had nothing to do with the letting of the contracts, but the acceptance of the supplies was within the province of the warden's office. I knew the horrible starvation forced on the men in the main diningroom. The memory of my first meal there with the maggots floating in the stew gravy and the flies drowned in the molasses filled me with nausea every time I passed the kitchen.

I made up my mind for one thing ... if towering prices were paid for meat, I would at least insist that the supply brought to the prison be wholesome.

"You can do that," Porter said. "The warden will bear you out on it. We can have that much satisfaction anyway."

When the first consignment came under the new contract, I went down to look at it. Prepared as I was for cheap substitutes, I was not ready for the shocking spectacle before me as the rotten stuff was shouldered out of the wagon.

"Put it back," I yelled. Breathless and fighting mad I reached the warden's office.

"They're unloading a lot of stinking, tainted meat down at the butcher shop. Flies wouldn't crawl in it, it's so rotten. It's an outrage. We've paid for prime roast beef. We've given the highest price ever quoted on the face of the earth for meat and they've brought us in a load of carrion. What shall I do about it?"

The warden turned a white, startled face toward me.

"What's this, what's this?" His voice sounded seared and faint to me. He started pacing the floor.

"It's a shame warden, the men are being starved. The beans are so old and withered and only famished men would besmirch themselves with that meat. We could at least require common wholesomeness."

"That's right, yes, that's right. You say the meat is absolutely tainted? Send it back. Write to them and tell them we demand good fare."

I made the letter strong enough to ring true. I informed the wholesalers that the Ohio penitentiary paid first-class prices. It demanded first-class produce. The meat we got after that was coarse, but it was fresh and clean.

I used this one authorization from the warden again and again to send back stuff. The contractors came to realize that the prison was no longer a garbage can for their spoiled supplies. They found it cheaper to send in a medium grade in the beginning.

"You've come to see there are worse things in the world, Bill, than an ex-convict," I suggested to Porter when I told him about the tainted meat. "When you get out will you brazen out their prejudice or will you keep to your old resolution?"

Porter had about four months more to serve. We kept a calendar and every night we would strike off another day. It is a melancholy thing to feel the separation coming daily nearer a separation that will be as final and uncompromising as death. We talked indifferently, almost flippantly at this time because we were so deeply touched.

"I have not changed. I will keep my word. What would you do, colonel, if you should get out?"

"I will walk up to the first man I see on the street and I will say to him. 'I'm an ex-con—just got out of the pen. If you don't like it, go to hell." (I did that very thing some years later.)

Porter burst out laughing. It was the first time I had ever heard him laugh outright. It seemed to come bubbling and singing up from his throat like a rich, sonorous tune.

"I would give a great deal for your arrogant independence. I wonder if I will regret my plan?"

I don't believe he ever did, even on the black day in New York when he all but admitted he could endure the suspense no longer.

"Is the fear of life greater than the fear of death, Al? Here I am ready to leave this pen and I am beset with anxieties lest the world may guess my past."

Porter didn't expect any answer to his question. He was in a sort of ruminating mood, liking to speak his thoughts aloud.

"How hard we work to make a mask to hide the real self from our fellows. You know I sometimes think the world would go forward at a lightning pace if men would meet each other as they are—if they could, even for a short time, put aside pose and hypocrisy.

"Colonel, the wiseacres pray to see themselves as others see them. I would pray rather that others might see us as we see ourselves. How much of hatred and contempt would melt in that clear stream of understanding. We could be equal to life if we tried hard enough. Do you think we could ever look into the face of death without a tremor?"

"I have seen men take a bullet and laugh with their last gasp. I have hidden out with the gang and every hide of us knew we were probably on our last stretch.

None of us were squeamish about it."

"But there was uncertainty to give you hope. I am thinking of death that is as certain, say, as my release. Take, for instance, a condemned man you know they are lashed with hideous nightmares. You have seen some of them die. Did any go fearlessly?"

"I don't mean gameness or bravado, but downright absence of alarm. Did any one of them seem to grin in the teeth of death as though they were about to enter upon a sort of adventure?"

"Bill, you speak now of the fellows who pay for the drinks at their own funeral. The jailbird ain't that kind of an animal."

"I would like to talk to a man who looked at death. I would like to know what his sensations might be."

"I wonder if that's the reason Christ called Lazarus back—sort of wanted to know what the big jump might be like?"

It occurred to me that Porter was writing a story and wanted to daub the color on true. He never stuck to facts, but he went to no end of pains to set up his scenery aright.

"I can't produce a Lazarus to gratify your curiosity, but there's a fellow due to be bumped off in a week or so. You come over tomorrow and I'll knock you down to the near stiff."

"What is he like?" Bill seemed all of a sudden to weaken and his fluent whispering became hesitant and uncertain.

"Don't know. But he'll sit in the chair in about ten days. He sent another fellow over the great divide some months ago. He says it's a lie and he's innocent just like a babe, you know."

There's nothing very esthetic in the prison soul. Men laugh and jest over death. For weeks we would know when the electric chair was due for a sitting. We would watch the condemned man walking in the yard with a special guard before he was finally locked up in the death cell and fattened for the slaughter.

"I'd change places, ---------them, I'd die for the pleasure of gorging myself with a week of square meals." Many a time I have heard raw-boned, hungry-eyed men in the ranges and shops fling out the challenge.

But as the day for the official murder draws near, the whole place seems overhung with mournful gray shadows. One can almost feel it in the corridors—the cold, clammy atmosphere of the death-day. It is as though drowned people with wet hair clinging about their dead faces went drooping up and down reaching out chilly fingers and putting their icy touch on each man's heart.

We never talked on those days but often in the night, screams, long, frightful and sobbing screams that trailed into broken agonized moans would split the air waking us with creeping foreboding. Some overwrought wretch whose dream tormented him had seen the death in his sleep.

There was that grewsome hubbub about the prison now for the Kid was going to be bumped off. They were extra busy in the electrical department—it takes plenty of juice to kill the condemned.

Porter came over to the campus to talk to the man who faced death. "There he is, the soft-looking fellow walking with the guard—he'll let you talk to him."

When a man has but seven or eight days of life they give him a few privileges even in a prison. They let him take a turn in the yard—they give him roast beef and chicken to eat. They let him read and write, and sometimes they let him keep his light all night. Darkness is such a dread magnifier of terrors.

Porter went over to talk to the Kid. The three men fell in together and walked up and down for about five or ten minutes. The condemned man put a hand on Bill's arm and seemed childishly pleased to have such company.

When Porter came back to me, his face was a sickish yellow and his short, plump hands were closed so tight the nails gored his flesh. He rushed into the post-office, sat down on a chair and wiped his face. The sweat stood out like heavy white pearls.

"Guess you got the scare, all right, Bill? Get a close enough squint at the old Scythe Dancer?" He looked as though he might have seen an unholy ghost.

"Al, go out and. talk to the boy. Be quick. This is too monstrous. I thought he was a man. He is but a child. He has no fear. He can't seem to realize that they mean to kill him. He hasn't looked at death. He's too young. Something should be done about it."

I had not talked to the fellow. I knew he was up for murder. I thought he was about 25.

"Colonel, did you see the way he put his hand on my arm? Why he's only a little, ignorant fellow—he's just 17. He says he didn't do it. He's sure something will happen to save him.

"Good God, colonel, can a man believe any good of the world when cold-blooded murders like this are deliberately perpetrated? The lad may be innocent. Al—he has gentle, blue eyes—I've seen eyes like them in a little friend of mine. It's a damn* shame to murder him."

As the warden's secretary I had to attend and make a record of the executions. A soft youngster of 17 would make an ugly job for me.

I knew the facts in this case. The evidence was strong against the Kid. He and a boy friend had gone down to the Scioto river one Sunday afternoon to take a swim.

The Kid came back alone—the other boy was missing. Three weeks later a body was found in the mud far down the river. It was decomposed beyond the possibility of recognition. The face had been eaten away.

The parents of the missing boy had been haunting the morgue. They looked at the remains, found a birthmark on the decomposed body and established the identity of their son. The Kid was arrested. Witnesses clamored into the courtroom. They had seen two boys on the Scioto and the Kid was pointed out as one of them.

The boys had been quarreling. Suddenly the Kid had grabbed his companion by the arm, dragged him down to the river, shouting: "I'll drown you for this!" Two men and a woman had heard the threat. The Kid was condemned on their circumstantial evidence.

"Yes, sir, that's true." The youngster looked at me with his gentle eyes and put his hand on my arm as he had on Porter's.

"Thet's true, all right—but thet ain't all."

The Kid kept his hold on me as though he feared I might leave before he had a chance to speak. It was pathetic his eagerness for company. We walked up and down in the sun and he looked at the sky and at the top of a tree whose branches reached over the wall. He said he wasn't afraid and there was no resentment in his expression—just gratitude for the pleasure of talking, it seemed.

"Yer see, Mr. Al, me and Bob Whitney went down to the river thet Sunday and we got to foolin' and wrestlin' 'round there and we wasn't mad et all, but maybe we looked like we was. He throwed me down and landed on top er me and I jumped up and yells that to him.

"I sed, '111 drown yer for this,' and I pulled him up and we bumped each other down to the water.

They was people there and they heard it, but we was only foolin'.

"I had to git back to work and I left Bob there and I never seed him again. And after a while thet body was washed up and they sed it was Bob and thet I drowned him and they tuk me into court and I got all twisted up.

"I told them it was all jest funnin' and I sed Bob was swimmin' 'round when I left, but they looked at me like I was lyin' and the judge sed, 'I sentence yer to die or somethin' like thet— "

"But death don't skeer me---"

All the time he talked the Kid kept his rough, freckled hand on my arm. It sent a chill, creepy sensa- tion up to my shoulder and across my neck. I never saw softer, kinder eyes than those that ignorant, undeveloped boy of 17 turned so persistently at me. The more he talked the harder it became to picture him walking to the electric chair.

I felt weak and sick at the thought of taking notes on this Kid's death agony. The sun was warm and gentle that day, and the Kid stood there as if he liked it and he kept looking up at the tree and then at me. He had such a boyish jaw and chin and a kind of likable pug nose that had nothing malicious about it—he didn't look like a murderer.

I could hardly imagine him capa'ble even of anger. He seemed to grow younger with almost every sentence he uttered.

"Jest look et thet tree—ain't it a shinnin', though? We had a tree like thet in our back yard once when I was a kid. I ain't gonna show no yeller streak.

I ain't skeered to die. When I was a kid I had a li'l sister. I sold newspapers and uster come in late. We was all alone 'ceptin' for a old stepmother.

"Li'l Emmy uster creep up ter me and say, 'Aintcha skeered, Jim, to be out so late? Didjer bring me a cookie?' We uster have fine times eaten' the cakes.

"Then li'l Emmy got sick and the old hag—that's all we ever called her—beat her, and I got mad and we sneaked away and lived in a basement, and we was awful happy, 'cept thet li'l Emmy was skeered of everything.

"She was a-skeered to go out, a-skeered to stay home and she uster foller me 'round while I sold the papers. 'Bout 10 o'clock we'd go home. She'd hug on to my arm and whisper. 'You ain't skeered o' nuthin, are yer, Jim ?' We treated ourselves to cookies and Emmy made coffee and we did jest whatever we wanted to.

"Then Emmy got sick agin and she died. She had li'l white hands, and one finger got chopped off' n her right hand when she was a baby. And the last thing she did 'fore she died—she put out her hands to me and she sed:

' 'Jim, you ain't skeered o' nuthin', are you? You ain't skeered to die?'

"And I ain't. I'm gonna walk right up ter thet chair same's it was a plush sofa 'fore a big fire."

It was an obsession with him.

"I've got a pass for you to see the Kid die," I said to Porter the night before the execution.

He looked at me as though I were a cannibal inviting him to partake of the flesh of some human baby. He started up as though jerked by an electric shock.

"Is that going through? My God, what a den of depraved fiends this prison is ! I'd rather see the only thing I have on this earth dead at my feet than watch

the deliberate killing of the poor 'softy.' Excuse me, colonel." Porter took up his hat and walked out of the post-office. "I want to live a few weeks after I get out of here."

I would like to have changed places with Bill. Death hadn't any terrors for me—the elaborate ceremony they made of their murders. But I had to be in the death cell when the kid was bumped off. He came in between two guards. The chaplain walked behind him, reading in a chanting rumble from an open Bible. The Kid lopped in as though he had lost control of his muscles; he appeared so loose limbed and soft, and his pug nose stuck up, it seemed, more than ever.

His gentle eyes were wide-open, glazed and terrorstricken. His boyish face was ashen and his chin shook so, I could hear his teeth knocking together. The guard poured out a big glass of whiskey and handed it to him.

It was a little custom they had to brace a man for the last jolt.

The Kid pushed the glass from him, spilling the liquor on the floor. He shook his head, his chin sagging down and quivering.

"I don't need nutin', thanks." His face was bloodless as flour, and the frightened eyes darted from the chair to the warden. He caught sight of me. I never felt so like a beast so like an actor at a foul orgy in all my life.

"Oh, Mr. Al—good mornin', mornin'." His head kept bobbing at me, so that I could see the big round spot on the crown where they had shaved the hair clean. One of the electrodes would be fastened on that shiny patch.

"Mornin', Mr. Al, I ain't skeered—what'd I tell you? I ain't skeered o' nuthin'."

The Kid's suit had been slit up the back seam so that the voltage could be shot through his body. He was led up to the chair, his shoulders and his elbows tied to its arms and the straps adjusted. The electrodes were placed against the bare calves of his legs and at the base of his brain.

It didn't take very long to make the complete adjustment, but to me it seemed that the ignoble affair would never be done with. When he was finally strapped down, the boy seemed about to collapse as though his bones had suddenly become jelly, but he was compelled to sit upright.

Warden Darby stepped up to the boy and called him by name.

"Confess, Kid," the warden's breath chugged out like a laboring engine's. "Just admit what you did and I'll save you. I'll get you a pardon."

The Kid sat staring at him and muttering to himself, "I ain't skeered, I tell yer."

"Confess, Kid," Darby yelled at him, "and I'll let you out."

The Kid heard at last. He tried to answer. His lips moved, but none of us could hear his words. At last the sound came:

"I ain't guilty. I never killed him."

The warden threw on the lever. A blue flame darted about the Kid's face, singeing his hair and making the features stand out as though framed in lightning. The tremendous voltage threw the body into contortions, just as a piece of barbed wire vibrates out when it is suddenly cut from a fence. As the current went through him there came a little squeak from his lips. The lever was thrown off. The Kid was dead.

For a long time that night neither Porter nor I said a word. The whole prison seemed to be pressed down with an abject and sodden misery. The cons missed the Kid from the patch of sunlight in the yard. They knew he had been bumped off.

"Colonel, have you any special hope as regards heaven?" Porter had a glass of Tipo half raised to his lips. The grafters had sent us a new case of costly wines.

"Give me a swallow of that, Bill! it must have a wonderful kick in it—up to heaven in two gulps!" Porter ignored me. It was not a night for jest.

"I am not speaking of a churchly paradise, but what, Al, is your idea of a state of perfect bliss?"

"At present, Bill, a dugout way off in the wilderness, where I would never again see the faces of men. I would want plenty of cattle and horses, but no trace of the human kind except perhaps a few of their books."

"No, the books would spoil it. Don't you realize, colonel, that the serpent who wrecked the first paradisc was Thought? Adam and Eve and all their unfortunate descendants might still be lolling in joyous ignorance on the banks of the Euphrates if Eve hadn't been stung with the desire to know. It's quite a feather in a woman's cap. Mother Eve was the first rebel—the first thinker."

Porter seemed impressed with his own brilliance. He nodded his head to emphasize his conviction. "Yes, colonel," he continued, "thought is the great curse. Often when I was out on the Texas ranges I envied the sheep grazing on the mesa. They are superior to men. They have no meditations, no regrets, no memories."

"You're wrong, Bill, the sheep are more intelligent than men. They mind their own business. They do not take upon themselves the powers which belong to Nature, or Providence, or whatever you wish to call it."

"That's exactly what I finished saying. They do not think; therefore they are happy."

"How stupid you are tonight, Bill. You might just as well go into ecstasy over the joys of non-existence. If thought makes us wretched, it is also thought that gives us our highest delight."

"Certainly, if I did not think, I would be serenely contented tonight. I should not be dragged down with a ton weight of futile anger."

"And if you did not think, you would likewise be incapable of intense pleasures."

"I have yet to find in thought, Al, this beneficent aspect. I persist—Thought is a curse. It is responsible for all the viciousness found in the human family; for depravities that are the monopoly of the lofty human species.

"Colonel—the Kid's execution is but one example of the viciousness of Thought. Men think a thing is and they conclude that it must be so. It is a sort of hypnotism."

Porter was never yet coherent in his philosophical pickings. He would begin with a whimsical absurdity and he would use this as a kind of string for his fancies.

He would pick up a thought here, an oddity there and run them all together. The finished necklace was like those chains of queerly sorted charms made by squaw women.

"Al," he turned to me with indolent deliberation, attempting to conceal the anxiety in his mind, "was he guilty?"

It was the thought tormenting me at that very moment. Neither of us had been thinking of another thing all evening.

"Colonel, the horror of this day has made an old man of me. Every hour I could feel that softy's freckled hand on my arm. I could see his gentle eyes smiling into mine. I believe him. I think he was innocent. Do you?

"You have seen many face death. A man might persist in a lie. But would a boy like that a child keep at it so?"

"Nearly every man who has not pleaded guilty insists on his innocence to his last breath. I don't know about the Kid. He may have been speaking the truth. I felt that he was innocent."

"Good God, Al—What a frightful thing if they have murdered a boy and he was not guilty! The terrible insolence of men to convict on circumstantial evidence! Does it not prove the conceit of Thought?

"There can be no certainty to second-hand evidence—what right have we then to inflict an irrevocable penalty ? The evidence may be disproved ; the charges may be withdrawn, but the condemned may not be summoned back from the grave. It is monstrous. The arrogance of human beings must tempt the patience of God.

"I am right, colonel, for all your opposition, thought not poised with humility, is but a goad lashing man's conceit to madness or at the other extreme we have thought unblended with faith then it is but a bludgeon striking man's yearnings down to despondency."

Abruptly he came over to me. He had picked up another bead for his fantastic chain.

"Was there ever a case in this pen when a man was electrocuted and it was afterward found that he was innocent?"

"Not in my time, Bill. But they tell of several. The old stir bugs could freeze the marrow in your bones with their tales."

"Some of them must be true. It is inconceivable that man's judgment should always be correct. The fact that one man has been cut off from life on evil evidence is sufficient indictment against the whole system of murder on circumstantial proof. How can men sit on a jury and take into their hands such wicked power?"

Several hours before the 9 o'clock gong had sounded there was a thick hush over the sleeping institution. Porter's whispering eloquence had lulled into quiet.

Our uneasy pangs were well diluted inTipo and into our harried minds there had drifted a half -dozing contentment. Suddenly a hoarse, rumbling growl that lifted into a piercing shriek came rasping out from the cell block.

Porter leaped to his feet.

"What was that? I was dreaming. It sounded like the crack of doom to me. This infernal place is haunted. I wonder if the Kid's spirit rests easily tonight ? Colonel, do you believe in spirits, in an after life, in a God?"

"No, I don't—leastwise, I don't think I do."

"Well, I do in a way. I think there is some kind of an all-powerful spirit, but the God of humanity doesn't loiter in this pen. He doesn't seem to be a student of criminology.

"If I thought much about this affair of today I would lose all faith, all happiness. I would never be able to write a hopeful line."

It was well for Porter that his release was due in a short time. The world could not afford to miss the buoyancy of his faith.

He was not in the prison when the shocking truth came out. The Press Post carried the story, bringing out again all the facts in the case. Bob Whitney, the boy whose body was supposed to have been washed up from the Scioto, turned up in Portsmouth. He wrote to his parents. He knew nothing about the Kid's execution.

The State had made a little mistake. It had bumped off a boy of 17 for a murder that was never committed. It had thought the Kid was guilty.