David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

I went out back and jumped in the pool. I blew out my breath and felt myself sink to the bottom. I rolled onto my back and looked up. The sun was low in the west, casting a dancing shadow from our curly willow over the water. The shimmering surface calmed me.

Earlier that summer, a girl who had been in Lincoln’s preschool class drowned at a classmate’s fifth birthday party at a neighborhood country club in full view of her supposed protectors. I have heard that drowning is not a painful death, but I don’t believe it. Twenty kids were swimming, and neither lifeguard saw her go under. Her hair got caught in the drain. They emptied the pool and sent the children inside and tried to revive her for half an hour before another parent who is a doctor mercifully declared her dead.

She had been an only child. I told Katya that if it had happened to Lincoln, I didn’t think I’d be able to go on. Her eyes filled and she said, I know, me neither.

Under the water, I tried to imagine what the girl’s parents felt, how they got out of bed in the morning. If you have other kids, you have to. If you don’t, you don’t. I was dizzy. I felt hollow, like the pressure had shrunk my organs and my body contained nothing but space. I sliced to the surface. When I came up, Lincoln and Winona were chasing each other around the yard. He was laughing. Her tongue was lolling to the side. She was running sawtooth slow, so he could catch her. I said, Hey Linco, you want me to go back to the field and buy you a snow cone?

He said, Nah, I think I’ll just have some ice cream instead. Two scoops, one coconut crunch and one of chocolate, and a cone on the side. He paused a beat, then added, Please.

I said, I love you, amigo.

He said, I know.

WHILE KATYA AND I were having dinner, Kassie called. Green had been friendly. He told her that he knew for a fact that Henry was innocent. He said he knew who the killer was, and that the killing had been drug related. The killer’s name was Ruben. Green told Kassie that he had been in the county jail with this Ruben during Quaker’s trial. Kassie asked why he had been in jail, and Green said he’d violated his parole. She asked why Ruben was there. Green said he didn’t know. She asked for Ruben’s last name. Green said he forgot. Kassie hadn’t pressed him for details, she just let him ramble. Kassie’s major strength as a lawyer is her instinct about people who are generally untrustworthy. She said, He might have been yanking my chain, or he might not have been. It’s hard to say. I’ll need some time to poke around. She told me she was going to investigate the drug angle, see whether Sandra Blue, the neighbor, could remember anything helpful. I told her that sounded fine, and that she should get Gary to help her. I asked her whether there was anything else. She said, Yeah. The guy asked me if I know any recipes for soul food that he can cook on his hot plate. And one other thing, too. He masturbated while he was talking to me. Didn’t try to hide it in the slightest. He’s a piece of work, Doc. I’d rather not have to go see him again.

I told Katya what Kassie had said. She said, See. You should listen to me more often. I said I’d reserve judgment on that until we could figure out whether anything Green said was true. I told her about the masturbation. She said, All I’m saying is that he’s actually trying to help you. Just because people are screwed up doesn’t mean that nothing they say is right.

Later that night we were sitting in the library reading. I started to think about Jeremy Winston’s children. I’d seen them at the prison the day I met Winston. I had given them my cell phone number, and they called me twenty times or more in less than a week. His sons were twelve and fifteen when he died. I wondered whether they went trick-or-treating on the anniversary of their dad’s execution. What happens to children whose father is a murderer? I should know the answer to this question, but I don’t. Nearly all my clients had terrible fathers, but only one, so far as I know, had a dad who killed someone. Isn’t that curious? Lincoln wants to be a wrestler because I was a wrestler, yet my clients come to murder on their own. But what about their children? What will they tell people about their dads? How do their teachers treat them? Are their classmates scared of them?

How far into a relationship do you have to be before you tell your girlfriend that the state executed your old man?

I meet many of the parents, though I can’t truly say that I know them. I wonder whether they blame themselves. I remember news footage of Timothy McVeigh’s dad, in his small yard, on a riding mower, refusing to hide from the cameras. I felt like he was trying to say, I didn’t kill anyone. Now let me mow my grass in peace. During a death-penalty trial, when a murderer’s mother gets on the witness stand to plead with jurors to spare her son’s life, the prosecutor tears into her as if she herself committed a crime, throwing in her face every bad thing her son has ever done, insinuating that she is somehow to blame. Does the prosecutor hate his own mother, or does he not see this other mother as like his own?

I’m pensive only when I have time on my hands. Socrates had it backward. He thought the unexamined life is not worth living. I think no one’s life holds up to examination. The more time you spend thinking, the more you notice that everyone else is doing something better, or more important, than you. Idleness and idolatry aren’t related, but they ought to be.

Winston’s father was a devout Jehovah’s Witness. He had forced Winston to knock on doors and invite himself in to people’s homes to discuss the Bible. When Winston misbehaved, his father beat him with a tree branch or an extension cord. He didn’t think he was being cruel. He thought he was being stern. He and Winston’s mother got divorced when Winston was fourteen. The father moved to Louisiana. He never talked to the son again. Days before the execution, he called me to say that he believed he had been too tough on his son and to ask if there was some way he could help. He asked whether he could see his son in prison. I told him no, he couldn’t. He said, I do understand. Thank you, sir. If you think it is appropriate, please tell Jeremy that I love him.

When I called Winston shortly before he died, I told him what his dad had said. If you can feel an emotion through the phone, I would swear I felt him smile, not a happy smile, more a smile of relief—no, of release, which is different, the smile of a weight being lifted.

Lincoln started to cry. I ran upstairs to his room. I tried to wake him but he was deep into a dream. He was saying, Stop, turn off, stop. I lifted him out of his bed and turned on the light. He kept screaming. I sat down at the electric keyboard in his room with him on my lap. I played two bars of Thelonious Monk’s Everything Happens to Me. At last Lincoln woke up. He told me his bad dream. He had been in our exercise room and the treadmill turned itself on. The belt was whirring and the platform raised itself to the steepest incline. Lincoln pulled the plug out of the wall, but it kept on running. He said, I tried to make it stop, Dada, but it wouldn’t. I told him it was okay, that it was over now. I put him back in his bed and stayed with him, stroking his damp hair, until he fell back asleep.

Katya had been standing in the hall outside his door, ready to come in and help if I needed her. When Lincoln was three and four, he had these nightmares once or twice a week. Katya used to be the only one of us who could calm him down. I would try and fail, and she would have to intervene. This night was the first time in several months that he’d had one, and I felt absurdly happy that Katya had let me handle it by myself. I made it through the day without being a total failure. I walked out of his room, feeling serene. Katya was waiting there, right outside the door. She kissed me softly and said, You’re a great dad.