Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

"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."