In the Deathwatch cell, Frank Beachum didn’t move. He sat as he had sat since I’d walked out, his hand lying slack on the table, his mouth turned down, his eyes cast down, his gaze fixed and empty.
Bonnie, standing by him, still clasped the bars of the cage. Then, slowly, she let her grip relax. A strange feeling had come over her. A strange calm, strangely electric. Everything in the room seemed very clear to her. Clear and bright. The clock, the guard, the chairs, the bars. Her husband at his table. The thoughts in her mind-they seemed clearer to her than they had in weeks.
Because suddenly she knew it was hopeless. Suddenly she understood, grasped in the visceral way, that there was no chance of pardon or reprieve. Somehow, the fact that I believed in Frank’s innocence had brought this home to her. No one had ever believed in his innocence before. Not the jury, not his own lawyers, not the press. Not even the Reverend Harlan Flowers, who simply refrained from judgment. And now I had come, and I had believed, and she had cried out to me: It’s too late! And in crying out, she had realized the truth of it. It was too late. No one could save her husband now. She was going to lose him. They were going to put poison in his arm and kill him. He was going to die.
Her tears stopped falling. Her hands lowered to her sides. With this new clarity, she looked around her, almost amazed. She saw the duty officer on the other side of the bars. Benson-he was watching her. Moving back to his desk, running his hand up through his shiny hair, he was giving her the side-eye as if he thought she might do something terrible. He sat down at his chair and picked up the telephone. He spoke into it in a low murmur. Frowning at her dangerously all the while, all the while watching her. In her strange envelope of queer, sizzling, hopeless calm, Bonnie nearly smiled at him. He’s frightened of me, she thought. That big strong man. He’s frightened of a hundred-and-ten-pound woman locked in a cage. She felt, in her clear thoughts, that she understood why this was so. She felt almost as if Benson’s mind had been revealed to her as she stood there. And he was afraid of her, she thought, because he was doing evil before her eyes. The killing of another person, a helpless person, was evil. No excuses; it was evil. In the heart of every human being, where the quiet mind could hear, there spoke a voice that said that it was evil, and the voice was never untrue. Bonnie knew this and she thought the guard knew it but did not want to know it and so he was afraid of her. Because the guard wanted to do his job without knowing. He wanted to collect his pay, and feed his family, and do his job. His boss, the warden, had told him to do this. The courts had told the warden. The lawmakers of the state of Missouri had told the courts. And most of the people of the United States of America agreed with the lawmakers and elected them to do what they had done. So the guard wanted to think: it must be right to do it. But he knew that was not the truth. Truth, Bonnie thought in her electric calm; Truth is not a democracy. All the people of the earth crying out for Evil with one voice could not drown out that other voice, that still, small voice that spoke within the quiet heart. And so the guard knew. They all knew. And they were afraid before her eyes.
Slowly, Bonnie turned her back on the guard and faced her husband.
He didn’t move, still he didn’t move. He went on gazing dreamily down at the table, at his hand lying on the table. And Bonnie thought she could see him now; she could see him more clearly than she had in a long, long time. So tired, she thought; he looks so terribly tired. My God, my God-what have they done to him? It was as if she hadn’t noticed it before. And when she thought of the way he used to be … in the old days. Lumbering home with the garage grease on his face, with his teeth white through the black smudges. Pulling his shirt off as he tromped upstairs, dropping the shirt thoughtlessly half the time so that she scolded him as she scooped it up and dumped it in the hamper. The way the floor used to shake when he walked upstairs like that. The way the trinkets used to tinkle on the mantelpiece. It had been like having some beast in the house, some great, growling bear, and it was the best thing that had ever happened in her life. Men like Frank had always frightened her before. They had even disgusted her a little, big and dirty and like beasts. But now, the beast was in the house with her, and it made her feel … alive-more intensely alive. She had always thought of herself as a quiet, even mousy person. She knew she didn’t have that intensity herself. Frank, being with Frank, drew it out of her, drew it up to the surface of her skin where it pricked and tingled. He was her life. He was the life of her life. And she needed him.
She closed her eyes a moment. She felt dizzy, weak. She needed him. That was why she hadn’t seen him clearly, she thought. Because she could not admit there was no hope. Year after year, she hadn’t seen what was happening to him. She had gone on, as she always had, drawing on his strength, drawing on his life, and she hadn’t seen. And now she knew there was no hope.
She opened her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
He glanced up quickly, as if she’d awakened him. “What? Oh-no, Bonnie. For what?”
“Making such a fuss …” She pressed her knuckles to one side of her nose, then the other. She wiped the tears off her cheeks with her palm. “I guess that’s not much help, is it.”
“No, no. I love you, Bonnie,” he said, a little absently. “It’s all right.”
She nodded and said nothing. Benson started pattering grimly at his typewriter. Frank glanced over at him, and then at the door.
“He was a strange guy,” he said after a moment.
She followed his gaze. “Who? Who, the reporter?”
Frank didn’t answer right away. He watched the door. “That stuff he was saying. About how he didn’t care about anything. About right and wrong or …” He looked up at her, gave a brief, nervous, uncomfortable smile. “Must be kind of an empty life, it seems like,” he said.
Bonnie studied her husband’s face. She felt she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. It was something. Not about the reporter. About something else. She could see it in his eyes, but she didn’t understand. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess he didn’t seem like a very nice person, now that you mention it.”
Her husband looked at the door again, looked at it in that same way. That frowning, dreamy stare.
“I almost think …” he said, after a long pause. “I almost think I’d rather be in here like I am than out there, living like that.”
Bonnie, in her strange state of mind, had the saddest sensation when he spoke these words. It was almost as if she heard him saying two different things at the same time. It was almost as if she heard him saying the thing that he had said-and the exact opposite thing as well.
A little cry of pity broke from her and she stepped to him quickly. She put her arms around him and pressed his head against her.
“I love you so much,” she said. “Don’t forget that. Think about that the whole time and it’ll be all right.”
Even as she held him, Frank kept looking past her, past her hands, looking at the door through which I’d left. Bonnie wished she had been struck dead before she ever let herself weaken in front of him.
The phone rang on Benson’s desk. She felt Frank tense in her arms, against her breast. She held on to him. The duty officer continued typing a moment.
“That’ll be Weiss,” Frank said quietly.
She pressed her cheek against his hair. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered. She shut her eyes tight as her tears started again.
The phone kept ringing. Benson stopped typing and grabbed it.
“It’ll be about the governor now,” Frank said dully. “It’ll be about the governor truning us down.”
“I love you, I love you,” said Bonnie, crying. “Just think about that, and it’ll be all right.”
Benson listened at the phone for a second. Then, with a sigh, he pushed to his feet.
“Frank,” he called out, as he came walking across the cell again. “It’s your attorney. Calling from Jeff City.”