David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

Jerome is the office conscience. He asked what we were going to do for O’Neill. He was holding half a fresh baguette, the only food he would eat all day. I noticed how thin his arms are.

So that I wouldn’t have to look him in the eye, I looked at the wall chart that shows the workloads of the lawyers in my office. No one has time to try to save O’Neill’s life. I said, Nothing. We’re not going to do anything. We don’t have any more capacity, and besides, O’Neill doesn’t want our help.

He opened his eyes wide and stared at me for a moment. He looked like he was rehearsing what to say. Then he turned and walked out without saying a word.

LINCOLN WAS WAITING in the driveway for me as I pulled up to the house. I changed clothes and we got on the tandem bike and rode to practice. The professional coaches were trying to teach the kids to field grounders. Lincoln was playing second base. The coach hit him a soft ground ball, and it rolled between his legs into right field. The shortstop, Alexander, came over to Lincoln and pushed him in his chest. Lincoln said, Hey, why’d you do that? On the way home, after practice, Lincoln said, Alexander is mean. He pushed me for no reason. I told Lincoln that some kids are like that. He asked me why. I said I wasn’t sure.

Here’s a bet I’d be willing to wager: Alexander is going to be a bully. He’s going to spend time in detention. He’ll get in some fights. But he’s a middle-class kid with middle-class parents living in a brick house in a nice neighborhood where people walk their dogs and kids ride their bikes in the middle of the street. He’ll never murder anyone. I’d bet my life.

We stopped at the grocery store on the way home. Lincoln wanted a slice of pizza. I asked the butcher for an organic chicken, which I planned to roast with olive oil, lemon, and lots of garlic. Lincoln said, Please don’t buy a chicken, Dada. When he was four, Lincoln loved chicken nuggets. One day he asked where they came from. I told him. He asked, Do they have to kill the chicken? When I told him that they did, he said, Then I’m not going to eat them anymore. It’s not nice to kill little chickens. He hadn’t eaten meat or fowl since. He has a Hindu friend at school. At a restaurant last week, when the waitress asked him whether he wanted a grilled cheese or a cheeseburger, he said, I have to have a grill cheese. Vijay and I are vegetarians. And I would also like some lemonade, please. And carrot cake for dessert.

When Katya was pregnant and the obstetrician told us we were going to have a boy, I knew I would love my son. Parenthood is just one cliché after another. What I didn’t know was that I would admire him.

I said, Amigo, I sure do admire you. But I like meat.

He said, Well, you shouldn’t. The animals didn’t do anything mean to you, did they?

That night, after Lincoln went to sleep, I told Katya about my conversation with Evelina. She drank some wine and said, You can’t save everyone, you know. She peeled the wishbone out from the piece of chicken she was eating. Here, she said, break this with Lincoln in the morning.

The next day, before he went to school, Lincoln and I broke the wishbone. Again he got the bigger piece. He said, Do you want to know what I wished?

I said, Sure, amigo, but you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.

He said, I know. But I don’t mind. I wished that I die at the same time as you and Mama, so that way, none of us ever has to be alone.

I’m sure there’s a good way to answer that, but I don’t know precisely what it is.

OUR PARALEGAL BUZZED ME the next morning and told me Ezekiel Green was on the line. Death-row inmates cannot make phone calls. They can talk with their lawyers, but only by prearrangement. I asked her whether she was sure. She said, That’s what he said.

Green said, I can’t talk long, but I heard about your hearing. You need to bench-warrant me up there so I can help.

A bench warrant is an order a judge signs to have an inmate transported to the courthouse. I said, How are you calling me?

He said, Cell phone, man. Don’t worry, it’s all cool.

I didn’t want to know what kind of favors Green was trading with a guard to be able to call me on a cell phone. I said, I don’t think the judge is going to hear from any witnesses. But I’ll let you know. And if you call me again, I’ll tell the warden.

Green said, Merry Christmas, counselor, and he broke the connection.

WINTER IS MY FAVORITE time at the beach. Every year, Katya and I drive down to Galveston a day or two before Christmas and stay until after the first of the year. We have the beach to ourselves. We go on long walks, read, watch the waves, and drink margaritas on the deck. I was going to cancel this year, but Quaker was going to get executed anyway, so why bother?

The day before Christmas Lincoln wanted to practice riding his bike on the beach. When he hit the soft sand, his front tire started to wobble. He squeezed the front brake and went flying over the handlebars. His face hit the sand. He cut his cheek, right below his left eye, and his forehead. He bit through his lip. Blood was streaming down his face and he was crying. I told him falling is normal and he should get back on the bike. He was crying harder. When he gets older, he is going to encounter bad people. He needs to be able to defeat them, or at least avoid being hurt by them. I said, Get back on the bike, amigo, or we are going to take it back to the store. A woman walking down the beach looked at me oddly, but I was not screaming. I wasn’t. Lincoln was sobbing so hard he was shaking.

Just then, Katya came running up to us, and Lincoln wrapped his arms around her. While she stroked his hair, I told her what happened. She said to me in a stage whisper, Can I walk home with him?

I said, Fine. It might have been closer to a hiss.

When O’Neill was twenty-one years old, he rode a kid’s tricycle through his neighborhood. I’ve seen photographs. He looked like a circus clown. He wasn’t doing it to be funny. He played with kids who were six years old. The neighbors thought he was simpleminded but harmless. They were half right.

I pushed Lincoln’s bike for a while, then picked it up and carried it the rest of the way home. The dog usually ran ahead of me, attacked some waves, chased some gulls, and waited for me to catch up. This day she was walking ten yards behind me, like she was embarrassed. Another hall-of-fame parenting day.

Lincoln ate some soup and went to sleep. Katya said, Do you want to go back to Houston? I told her no. She said, Okay. But Lincoln and I will understand if you change your mind. She read until she fell asleep on the couch. I carried her to bed and put Lincoln in bed next to her. I carried a bottle of bourbon out onto the deck and listened to the ocean that was too dark to see. At three I crawled into bed. At five I got up and started to work on my outline for the Quaker hearing. My phone buzzed. I had gotten a text message. It said, Quaker needs to see you. It was signed EG.

At eight I called Jerome, who is also the office ethicist, and asked him whether I needed to report Green to the warden. I was pretty sure it was illegal for death-row inmates to have access to cell phones, meaning I knew a crime was being committed. Green was not my client, so I did not have any duty of loyalty toward him. Jerome said, Don’t you think we need to keep Green warm in case he really knows something about Quaker? I asked Jerome to set up a meeting for me to see Quaker on December 30. He said, One other thing. I went ahead and wrote up something for O’Neill. I’m going to e-mail it to you. I’d like to get it filed the day after Christmas, so can you look at it today?