Carnival of Shadows (41 page)

He remembered the last time he’d seen her, the visit they’d made together to see his mother, the trial, her sentencing, the day he’d sat with her and understood that she didn’t even remember who he was.

That was the memory that came, and try as he might, he could not stop it.

37

The events that transpired in the late fall and early winter of 1943 were significant for many reasons. The trial of Janette Travis began on Monday, October twenty-fifth, and concluded on Wednesday, November seventeenth. During those eighteen days, a series of testimonials were presented by both the state prosecutor and the assigned public defender. The public defender, a diligent and spirited man by the name of Nathan Harper, went head-to-head with the much-respected and experienced state prosecutor, Jim Greaves. Whereas Harper possessed a studious bearing and deportment, always on time, always precise in his diction and manner, Greaves possessed a more relaxed and folksy kind of style. He made the jurors smile; he engaged them; he brought himself down to their level and connected with them. Greaves was an academic, possessing more letters after his name than he did within it, but he understood people. He knew something of the life of a Midwest small-town farmer, for such a life was his grandfather’s and his grandfather’s before that. Greaves was an anomaly in his ancestral line, a man who had struck out of that mold and walked an untrod path to somewhere different. Not necessarily better, but different.

So, in this way, Harper was disadvantaged, not only due to the fact that his client was a self-confessed premeditated murderess, but he was also pitted against someone who had him on the back foot from the get-go.

It was a slow slide into a certain conviction, and those who were present understood that there was no other possible outcome.

Michael Travis did not attend the trial. He knew it was happening, but he did not believe he could face seeing his mother in the witness stand or on the prisoner’s bench.

“I can take you,” Esther told him. “I’ll be there with you.”

Michael declined her offer. He felt certain of how it would end, so certain that he did not need to see it played out in painful reality.

Esther, in communication with Howard Redding from State Welfare, learned of the end of the trial and the knowledge that her cousin Janette had been found unanimously guilty, that sentencing would take place at two p.m. on the afternoon of Tuesday, November twenty-third. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that the sentence could or would be anything but death.

Until sentencing, Janette would be held in the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln. Now the better part of seventy-five years old, NSP had been the only such facility in Nebraska right through to the end of the First World War. Prior to 1903, convict executions had always taken place in the county where the offense had occurred. Subsequently, those executions took place at State, and from 1913, the means of execution was by electric chair instead of hanging. Between 1903 and 1929, there had been seventeen executions, seven of them under the respective jurisdictions of Governors Samuel McKelvie and Adam McMullen. The last execution had been that of one Henry Sherman—a twenty-year-old white farm laborer found guilty of rape and murder—on May 31, 1929, under Governor Arthur J. Weaver. Weaver’s term had ended in January of 1931, and during the following decade—the first four years under Charles Bryan, the next six under Robert Leroy Cochran—Old Sparky had not been fired up even once. Cochran’s governorship had ended in January of 1941, and though there had yet to be an execution under the new governor, Dwight Griswold, that did not mean that Janette could not be the first. Rumor had it that Griswold was a lenient man, perhaps less the “hanging judge” and more the “strict but compassionate overseer,” but—regardless of whatever sense of moral or ethical reservation he might possess about the death penalty—a governor did not possess the power of absolution. A governor governed by the will of the people, and if the people bayed for blood, then blood they would get. Additionally, due to the protracted period of time during which Janette Travis would reside on death row, there was no guarantee that Griswold would even be the governor when her execution date finally arrived.

Esther took it upon herself to convince Michael that he should attend the sentencing hearing.

“I feel it’s necessary,” she told him. “I know you don’t want to go, and believe me, I would not want to go if it were my mother, but I think in years to come, you will regret that you weren’t there when your mother needed you most.”

“I can go,” Michael said, “but what good will it serve?”

Esther took his hand. They were seated across from each other at the kitchen table. It was the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-first.

“Your mother loves you more than life itself,” Esther said. “There is no way to avoid that reality. She did what she did to protect herself, of course, but she also did it to protect you.” She smiled and shook her head. “I cannot tell you what to think and feel, Michael, and I know it is really difficult for you to speak about these things, but there’s no escaping the fact that at some point you’re going to have to come out of your shell and face the world.”

“Come out of my shell? What do you mean?”

Esther looked at him then, and there was something almost maternal in her expression. It was not something he had seen before, and it unsettled him. She looked at him as an adult to a child, and in that moment—merely a handful of weeks since they had first become intimate—he felt patronized, almost looked down upon.

“Do you not think I know what’s going on?” she said. Her voice was calm and measured, strangely sympathetic. “I see you, Michael… I see you every day, and every day my heart breaks for you. You have cried about what happened just once and once only. You never talk about it. Your mother killed your father. She murdered him. He is dead, and she is in prison, and her trial has just ended and they found her guilty—”

“I know—”

“You know in your mind, perhaps,” Esther interjected, “but you don’t seem to know in your heart.”

Michael withdrew his hand from hers.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t withdraw even further, sweetheart. You have to have someone love you. Everyone needs someone to love them, and they need to love someone back. That’s what makes life worth living. I know you love your mother, and I can’t bear to see you hide from what’s happening to her.”

“I know what’s happening, and I am not hiding,” Michael said, his tone defensive.

“Michael,” she said, and then she smiled in that same manner, and once again she was the adult and he was the child.

“Don’t speak to me like that,” he said.

Her eyes flashed with hurt. “Like what? What do you mean?” She reached out to take his hand again, but he withdrew it further.

“Like I am a child.”

“I am not speaking to you like a child,” she said. “I can’t believe you think that. I love you, Michael. I really do.”

“Then understand that maybe I am different from you, different from anyone else. I don’t need to cry and weep and get angry and frightened because of what’s happening. I know she’s been found guilty, and I know she’ll be sentenced to death, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“So, what you’re saying is that it will serve no good for you to go and see her?”

“Right.”

“And what about her?”

“What
about
her?”

“Well, don’t you think she might want to see you? Don’t you think it might help her to know that you are there, that you still love her, that she means everything to you?”

“I can’t give her something that she didn’t give me,” Michael said.

“How can you say that? How can you even think that way? She loves you more than you will ever know—”

“Loves me so much she deserted me? Loves me so much that she has taken herself out of my life completely? Loves me so much she is going to die and leave me alone for the rest of my life? Is that how much she loves me?”

Esther looked frightened then, her eyes wide with alarm. “Oh, Michael, I can’t believe you think that—”

“Then tell me what I am supposed to think, Esther. Tell me that. Tell me how I am supposed to feel about what is happening. What will happen to me when she is dead? Where will I go? What will I do? If either of them had loved me at all, then maybe he wouldn’t have been so bad, so crazy, so violent to her, and she would not have had to kill him. He never laid a hand on me. He never even raised a finger against me. She did not kill him to protect me… She killed him to protect herself.”

Esther closed her eyes. She seemed to be gathering herself together at the seams. When she opened her eyes, they were brimming with tears. She finger tipped them away, but they did not stop, and for a moment she sat there and cried in silence.

Eventually, Michael reached out his hand and took hers.

“These past weeks,” he said, “I have found out what it means to love someone. I am sixteen years old. I don’t know anything about life. I don’t understand why this has happened. I don’t understand what will happen to me, to us… because I know this will end, Esther. I see that already. Even if we wanted to go on being together, the world wouldn’t let us. My mother’s gone. That’s the truth. If you want to go to this hearing… if you want to go and see her when they tell her that she’s going to die, then I’ll go with you. I will not be going for myself, but for you. You understand?”

Esther nodded. Her throat was too tight for words.

“Do you want to go?” Michael asked her.

She nodded again. “Ye-es,” she stammered. “F-for her, Michael… for he-her sake…”

Michael smiled, but there was little humor or warmth in that smile. “Then we’ll go. I’ll go with you. We’ll tell her that we love her and that we will be thinking of her, and then we’ll leave and never see her again.”

Esther looked up suddenly, and once again there seemed to be something almost fearful in her expression, as if a facet of Michael’s personality had suddenly been revealed to her, a facet that she did not like or understand.

“Is that what you wish?” she asked.

“I have to end it sometime,” he said. “What do you want me to do? Go out there every week? Go and see her in prison and remind her of everything she is missing, remind myself of the fact that I have neither a mother nor a father anymore? Is that what you want?”

“I want you to be happy,” Esther said.

“I don’t think such a thing is possible, is it?”

“Oh, Michael… sweet Michael,” she said softly, and couldn’t say any more.

And so they went. On a cold Tuesday afternoon in November of 1943, they waited patiently to be admitted to the courtroom.

When at last they took their assigned seats and saw Janette Travis brought up from the cells below, Michael barely recognized his mother. Her expression was so very distant, and she sat gazing into some vague middle ground, perhaps with the vain belief that things were better there.

This was not the mother that Michael remembered, neither in looks nor manner. She had lost an inordinate amount of weight, and her hair—once full and long—was now thin and cut short.

She sat silently at the desk, beside her the public defender, Nathan Harper, and across the small courtroom sat her prosecutor, Jim Greaves.

Janette Travis was greeted by a silence that was more sensed than heard. The room was airless, replete with tension, and that tension was felt in every breath.

Janette looked in Michael’s direction, and yet she seemed to be looking right through them. A faint smile crossed her lips, as if noting a pretty child, a cute dog in the street, but nothing more. It really was as if she were elsewhere, her mind still inside a jail cell, endlessly pacing back and forth as if in constant determination of the amount of sadness trapped within the walls.

Michael raised his hand, but Janette’s focus had already drifted. He was aware of Esther holding on to the sleeve of his jacket. His chest was like a balloon—as light as air and empty.

Formalities ensued, people entered, a bailiff appeared and shuffled papers ceremoniously.

And then came the judge, and his expression was austere and hard; the shadows cast from the single window to his right made his features as angular and severe as if cut from stone.

Words were spoken—people rose and then were again seated, and finally Janette Travis was asked to stand, and she did so, and her defense attorney stood with her, and she looked at the judge as if she were waiting for him to offer her a cup of coffee, a cigarette perhaps. Nothing more significant than that.

“Janette Alice Travis, having been charged and tried and found guilty of murder in the first degree of James Franklin Travis on May 10, 1927, in the town of Flatwater, against the peace and dignity of the state of Nebraska, it is the judgment of this court that sentence is now heard. It is with a heavy heart that I am obliged to pass down the most severe sentence afforded this crime by the state of Nebraska, that you shall be remanded into the legal custody of the Nebraska State Penitentiary Department at a facility deemed fit for such detention, and there you shall reside until such time as provision can be made for your execution. That is the determination of this court in this case, and I am required by law to inform you of your right to appeal, said appeal to be filed within the due time allocated, the details of which will be afforded to you by your legal counsel.”

The judge paused.

Esther’s body trembled as she withheld the flood of grief that assaulted her every sense.

Michael sat silent and stoic, his eyes like glass, his heart measuring nothing but the passing of time.

Janette seemed insensate, as if this were nothing of any significance, as if this were no more important than a postponed train or an overdue library book.

“Does the defendant wish to make any further statement at this time?” the judge asked.

Nathan Harper looked at his client. Janette continued staring emotionlessly at the judge. Harper leaned close to her, said something that only she could hear, and then said it again as there seemed to be no recognition of what he was telling her.

And then she smiled. She turned and looked at Michael, at Esther, at the small gathering of onlookers and officials in the courtroom, and said, “Most of the time I had no idea why he was so very angry… but then other times I did know why.” She shook her head, and for a moment she seemed again elsewhere, a smile playing across her lips as if recalling some past moment of happiness. Then she turned to the judge and said, “Sometimes I wonder if my punishment for killing him was actually served before he died…”