Death Sentence (44 page)

“You probably brought it in here thinking you might need something to throw up in and don’t remember it. You don’t remember half of what you do when you’re drunk.”

“Son,” Thomas said, “your mother’s trying to kill me.”

“You’re the one who’s trying to kill yourself drinking,” Ronnie told him.

In the shock and sorrow, conflict and confusion that had come with his father’s death by fire only weeks afterward, Ronnie later said, no thought of what his father had shown him and told him came to his mind. He had suppressed it, he believed, perhaps because of the implications it had for his mother and his devotion to her, perhaps because it had seemed too incredible to be true. And it had remained suppressed until the dream had presented itself after her arrest.

His mother’s stunning revelations to the police made him realize that his father no doubt had been correct, just as he now was sure that the later fires at his house had been set by his mother, too, surely for the insurance money to buy more drugs to obliterate what she had done.

Yet he never had been able to bring himself to confront her about this, had kept to himself the secret knowledge his father had revealed to him. The dream, however, had been a sporadic but relentlessly recurrent reminder that there was unfinished business between him and his mother.

And he was determined to deal with it on his next visit. When he met Pam at the prison on the following Saturday, he told her that he planned to ask about their dad’s death.

“Are you sure you want to know?” he would recall her asking.

“I’m sure,” he said.

He knew no better way to deal with it than directly.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you about Daddy,” he told his mother. They were sitting in a classroom in the vocational building where they usually visited, side by side in cheap plastic chairs. Velma said nothing. Her hands were in her lap, and she stared at them. After long, silent moments, her eyes slowly rose to his.

“I’ve wondered if that was going to come up,” she said, and offered no more.

“Well?” Ronnie asked.

She seemed reluctant to go on.

“No matter what you tell me, it’s not going to affect how I feel about you,” Ronnie said. “You’re still my mother. I’ll still love you. I’ll still be here for you.”

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Did you kill him?”

“I’m sure I probably did,” she said.

Ronnie pressed for details.

“I can’t remember everything,” she said. She recalled that Thomas had come in drunk again that morning. They argued. He finished off a six-pack and passed out on the bed.

“I remember having something in my hand,” she said. “A cigarette or a match. I remember laying it on the foot of the bed.”

She closed the bedroom door, she said, left the house and went to the laundry.

That closed bedroom door had always haunted Ronnie. Ernest Hagins, the Parkton police officer, had told him that it had been closed when the firemen arrived. He knew that his father never closed the bedroom door. If the fire had been accidental, the door would have been open, and Sadie, the family’s Siamese cat, who was devoted to his father, might have sensed the danger and jumped onto the bed and awakened him before the fire had a chance to spread. But Ronnie had said nothing about that at the time.

“You know I wasn’t in my right mind,” his mother told him.

“I know,” Ronnie said.

“I guess I’d just had all I could take. I don’t want you to hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Ronnie said. “I just needed to know.”

23

Despite Velma’s avowal to accept her fate, Jimmie Little and Richard Burr had fought too hard for too long to give up now. They wanted to come up with new, solid issues and try again in court. Two weeks before Velma’s scheduled execution, Little went to talk with her about it.

He didn’t want to give false hope, he said, but he did want her to consider the possibility of continuing the fight. She seemed amenable, but her major concern was what Ronnie and Pam would think. Little knew that Pam had been pushed to the emotional brink, and while Ronnie appeared to be resolute—on every visit Velma pressed on him the need to be strong for Pam, Faye and others—he seemed resigned to his mother’s death on November 2.

Time was vital, and Little called Ronnie and Pam to tell them about the proposal. He wanted them to discuss it with him and their mother on their Saturday visit.

The call sent Ronnie into depression. He had been certain that no court was going to allow his mother to live. He had thought the ordeal soon would be over. He had been steeling himself for its inevitable end. Now the lawyers wanted to prolong it again.

On Saturday, Pam brought Beverly and Sarah to see their grandmother, and after the visit Little and Mary Ann Tally planned to take Ronnie, Pam and her girls to the state fair. Little bought a video camera so that he could tape the grandchildren at the fair to share with Velma.

Sister Teresa kept the children while Ronnie and Pam met with their mother and Little to discuss renewing the court fight. Not until Monday, when he got together with Burr and Tally, would they know if they had issues strong enough to plead, Little told them, but now he wanted Ronnie and Pam to tell their mother how they felt.

“The toughest thing about it from my perspective,” he said, turning to Velma, “is a fear that they will feel that what you’re basically asking us is to tell Mom whether we think she ought to die on November 2. I’ve told them that is not it. First of all, it is not going to be their decision. What I want them to do is just be honest with you.”

Velma sipped water from a foam cup, pushed her glasses up, folded her hands and looked expectantly at her children.

Ronnie broke the uneasy silence. “Knowing everything the way I do, I don’t want a stay,” he said.

He felt the fight was over. He and Pam had done all they could in the drive for clemency, and it hadn’t been enough.

“I just don’t know how much more of it I could go through. I think I’ll be okay. If you have to do something, you have to do it and you should do something the best you can. But unless it’s a real solid reason—I think it should be
real
good—and I don’t know that it’s there.”

He seemed to have run out of words.

“Like Ronnie said, it’s been very hard,” Pam said, picking up where he had stopped. “To be very honest, I don’t know if I can go back through sixty or ninety more days like I have been through these last few weeks. It would have to be something good. I don’t know. I don’t know if I could go through it.” Her voice was cracking. “God knows I want you to live…”

Velma looked surprised, even shocked, but tried not to show it. “Well, I feel that way too, you know. I think, like I told Wade and John last Saturday, I would be very inhuman if I said that I don’t want to live. I don’t want to rush my death. I’m prepared. If there was an issue that can not only help me, but would help somebody else on death row…”

She had been receiving letters from other death-row inmates across the country, and Little and Burr had reminded her how her case might affect others.

“… I’ll be willing to even wait on that, but—”

Ronnie interrupted. “Let me ask you a tough question. If you knew that you could get a stay and that it may not help you but may help somebody on death row but you also knew that it may put Pam or myself through something really bad, would you—”

“No, I wouldn’t want that,” Velma quickly responded.

He was most worried about Pam and her family, Ronnie said. Because of his own failures, he envied her marriage, her family situation, and he didn’t want anything to happen that might put that at risk.

“Well, I feel like she’s gone through the heavier load than anybody,” Velma acknowledged. “Where she lives. Can’t even go to work in peace. I know that.”

“I don’t want you to make a decision based on how tough a time I’m having,” Pam put in.

“This is what concerns me,” said Ronnie. “If Pam does suffer a nervous breakdown, that’s not going to affect just Pam. It’s going to affect Kirby and those babies for the rest of their lives. I don’t want that to happen.”

As for himself, if a stay was granted and the battle continued, Ronnie said, he didn’t think he could go on fighting.

“I am prepared so much for this day that if it is stayed, some people, I’m sure, would call me and say, ‘I’m so glad, I heard you got a stay,’ and I may just say, ‘That’s not what I want. You don’t know what I want.’”

He had told Little that he didn’t think any issue would stop the execution. Good issues had been raised but the courts had ignored them.

“You should know if you’re going to die on November 2 without any thought of a stay,” Ronnie told his mother. “It shouldn’t even cross your mind, to me. I can’t say that it doesn’t disturb me sitting here today that it is crossing your mind,” Ronnie went on, “and we’re less than two weeks away. It scares the living hell out of me.”

“Well, I have felt that November 2 would be the day.”

“Will you think that when I walk out of here? Do you still feel like that right now?”

“I can’t think of any issues. I really can’t. Now I’m not saying that Dick and Mary Ann can’t find—”

Pam spoke up. “Do you feel like, ‘Well, I’ll be out of the way, and people can go on with their lives.’ Do you feel that way?”

“I feel like that would be a big burden gone, sure.”

Still, Velma seemed to be searching for reasons to overcome her children’s doubts. “I feel like everybody’s more prepared for whatever happens,” she said. “I know I am, if we went into another stay. I’m just as prepared for a flat no. … I think there’s always a chance, that there’s always some hope when you’re in there digging for something, that we all never should lose hope, whatever our circumstances. But it’s a slim, slim chance.” She shook her head.

“This is the best I’m going to be prepared,” Ronnie said. “And I don’t know how I will react afterward. But you don’t play with somebody’s life like it’s a game, and it’s getting close to that. Not just yours, but Pam’s and mine and the grandchildren.”

Ronnie paused, the strain evident. His mother sat silently, looking at her hands. After several silent moments, he went on.

“And that’s crazy because I wouldn’t want you to walk into the room if our positions were switched and say that to me.”

“Why?” Velma said, turning to Little with a smile, as if she were about to make a joke. “Wonder why he wouldn’t want me to walk in and—” But then she seemed to realize that what she was saying was inappropriate and became suddenly somber. “I think we should say what we’re thinking.”

“It’s just from being beat around for so long,” Ronnie said, despair heavy in his voice. “I’m not too tired to go on, but I just know that I can’t give any better effort than I’ve already given. I’m still trying to pull my own damn life back together, and it’s been a struggle. It really has. Just to try to keep my sanity. And that’s what I want to concentrate on doing—”

“And I want you to,” Velma said. “No matter what happens.”

“—in the way you told me to do it.”

“I don’t want nothing except that.”

Little jumped in with questions about logistics. When did Ronnie and Pam want to know about the decision, and how?

“I don’t want to hear anything that’s still up in the air,” Ronnie said. “I can’t stand it.”

Little asked Velma if she thought she had a good enough understanding of how Ronnie and Pam felt, and she said that she did. Did she want him to leave so they could talk privately?

“I think we’ve said everything,” Velma said.

But Ronnie hadn’t. He needed to clarify what he had said.

“I do want you to know this. I have tried to say what I said without emotion. But no man loves his mother any more than I do, and I know that. I also know what you taught me. And I know what you’re concerned about. I know you want nothing to happen to this girl and your grandchildren, and I’m scared that it’s getting close to that. If something happens to Pam, she may never be the same, and I’m worried about that. And I think that’s the way you would want me to be. That’s what you told me anyway. That’s what I’m trying to do, what you want me to do.”

“I know she would be less than human if it hadn’t taken its toll on her,” Velma said.

“It’s taken its toll on me…” Ronnie said.

Little jumped in again, joking, trying to lighten the mood.

But Ronnie’s mood was too dark to overcome. He stood.

“She probably hates my guts for saying what I said,” he said to nobody in particular, “but I feel like I had to say it.”

“Ronnie, there’s no part of me that has any hate for either one of you,” his mother told him. “I would hope that I never have hate for anybody else.”

“This time I think I’m right,” Ronnie said. “I know what I’m saying, I believe in.”

Ronnie was so despondent after the meeting that Sister Teresa sensed what he was thinking and took him aside for a talk.

“Ronnie,” she told him, “it may never get any better for you, but don’t give up on God.”

As he drove back to South Carolina, he could not get her words out of his mind.