Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (6 page)

During the summer you felt that you were being cooked in your skin. The sun beating down on that metal roof made the place so hot that you’d literally think you were going to lose your mind and go stark raving mad. At night I would lie in bed sweating and being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

The winter wasn’t much better, as the only source of heat was a small wood-burning stove, which filled the house with more smoke than heat. Our eyes always burned and our clothes always smelled of soot. My feet got so cold that I wanted to cry. No one could stay awake all night to constantly feed wood into the stove, so the fire was guaranteed to go out right when the temperature reached its coldest point. In the morning, the temperature in the house was only slightly higher than the freezing air outside. The house always gave me the creeps, and I despised it with a passion. When we decided (were forced) to move there, it was literally filled with knee-high garbage. Trash, sticks, broken tractor parts—it was all one big ocean of garbage, and the rats swam through it, delighted with their lot in life. There were no flushing toilets, and our drinking water came from a well that the crop dusters regularly sprayed with pesticide. It was fucking misery. I remember times when my entire family had to bathe in the same water. My stepfather would drag a big steel tub into the kitchen while my mother boiled pots of water to fill it up. There’s nothing like marinating in a lukewarm pool of other people’s filth to make you feel clean.

The shack was situated on top of a raised platform of earth in the middle of several miles of field that was used for farming. It was a stereotypical sharecropper’s shanty. Someone probably thought that putting it on the isolated lump of higher ground would keep the rains from washing it away during a flood. That seemed to work, but there were still times when we had to use a fishing boat to reach dry land (the highway, which ran alongside the property) if the nearby swamp overflowed. It turned the only road to town into a small lake so that cars couldn’t get in or out.

We had fourteen large dogs that lived underneath the house. We didn’t mean to have that many originally; they just kept breeding. People who have never known the hunger of being dirt poor always ask why we didn’t have the dogs spayed or neutered. As if the money to do that was just lying around, waiting on us to pick it up. We couldn’t afford a trip to the doctor ourselves, much less for the dogs. More often than not, we had trouble scraping the rent together. The farmer who owned the house didn’t mind if we were a little late with the payment, because he knew we’d eventually come up with it, even if we had to cash in aluminum cans to do so.

Strange things were always hovering at the periphery of my family life, but none so much as during our years in that house. There was just a bad feeling around the place. The house felt malevolent. I could never escape the feeling that the entire place wished me ill. It was the sort of place where, if you lived long enough, a doctor would eventually inform you that your insides were black with cancer and you had only days left to live. It was unpleasant in every regard, and the entire house had the aura of the inside of a body bag. It always felt dark, even on the sunniest summer days. There were odd drawings left on the walls by whoever had lived there before us—things like a grandfather clock with a single eye where the face should have been. They looked like the sorts of things an insane person with a great degree of artistic talent would have created. We painted over most of them, but ran out of paint before we got to the clock. It was worse at night, when you could feel it staring at the back of your head.

That place was never quiet at night. I would lie in bed listening as the dogs dragged strange things to and fro beneath the floor. Inside the house was as dark as an oil slick, so you couldn’t
see
anything moving in the room but you could
sense
it. It was the same sort of sensation you would experience if a closet door were to swing silently open behind your back. Later I learned a term to describe that sensation—air displacement. What I was sensing was air being displaced by something moving from one spot to another. Sometimes late at night I would be overwhelmed with the feeling that someone was standing by the bed, leaning over me, so close they could have brushed their lips across mine if they’d so desired. The breath would pass from its lips to my lips like the taste of something unmentionable. It wasn’t like a ghost or anything; it was just a feeling the house itself radiated, like an aura. My eyes would bulge and strain like an animal’s, fiercely trying to penetrate the darkness.

Eventually we were told to move, and the house was torn down. The suburbs around Marion were expanding, and people who lived in the houses that cost a quarter of a million dollars did not want a tin-roof shack standing on a bone hill in their line of sight. Something like that tends to lower the property values.

Before the shack was torn down, it drew someone else’s attention. All of us used to go to the bank with my stepfather on Friday afternoon to cash his paycheck, especially in the summer. It was the rare few minutes when we could sit inside an air-conditioned building. We probably didn’t smell very nice, because we were sweating twenty-four hours a day. We poured into the bank like a carload of Vikings and tried not to mess anything up.

Every week I would walk around the bank looking at things I’d examined a hundred times before. There wasn’t much else to do. I was taken aback when we walked in one week to see an art display in the lobby. It consisted of a folding wall, almost like a room divider, and it held about twenty paintings. A laminated sheet of paper attached to the display informed the reader that the paintings had been produced by the art class at the local high school. I moved down the line, examining each piece in turn. Most were nothing to write home about. A few were outright bizarre and even a little scary. When I reached the end of the line I stopped dead in my tracks and held my breath. I was witnessing something both miraculous and cruel. Someone, some high school kid, had painted our house. Here it was displayed to the world in all its squalor. It had been rendered in perfect detail. One side of the porch was dilapidated and had caved in on itself. There were wild roses growing over all the ruins. The flesh prickled along my spine and I looked around, as if perhaps the artist were standing nearby and watching to see my reaction. There were no customers in the bank except us. The teller didn’t even glance in my direction.

I stood in the bank staring at this painting of our house with its collapsing front porch, surrounded by cotton fields, when my mother walked up behind me and asked, “Is that our house?” Her brow furrowed in concentration before exclaiming to herself in a low voice, “Oh, wow.” When my stepfather came over to see what we were looking at, she said, “Look, it’s our house.” He put on his glasses and leaned forward to study it intently. Finally he said, “Maybe. It might be some other house, though.”

I knew my stepfather wasn’t the brightest guy in the world, but this was pushing it even for him. I pointed out the details, elaborating. “Look. Half the porch done fell in. It’s ours.” He dug his heels in, stubbornly. “That don’t mean nothin’. The porch fell in on other houses, too.” I knew better than to try to argue with him. When you proved he was wrong he’d just make your life miserable for the next week.

I wish I had that painting now. I’d keep it locked away somewhere, and take it out every year or so, just to remind myself where I came from. I’d show it to my wife and son, and try to tell them how hard life was out there, and the effect it had on me. That never works, though. I learned a long time ago that you have to experience something for yourself or you never really comprehend it.

Looking back, the worst part about the shack wasn’t the poverty, the heat, the cold, or even the humiliation of living in such circumstances; it was the absolute and utter loneliness. For many years in that old house, I didn’t have a friend in the world to keep me company. It was far out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but fields. No kids or neighbors to even speak to you. I was so lonely that I thought even death was preferable. If not for my small battery-powered radio, perhaps I would have died inside.

Years later, I read a book by Nick Cave called
And
the Ass Saw the Angel
. It struck me because of how close he comes to catching the feel of life in that lonely shack. None of the more well-known southern writers like Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor have done it for me. It’s like they may have witnessed life, but never lived it. Nick Cave comes damn close, though. More so than anyone else.

Books helped me to survive out there. The only places close enough to walk to were the courthouse and the library. I had no interest in reading anything but horror at this age, so I read the few tattered paperbacks housed there numerous times. I read Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels more times than Billy Graham read his Bible. They kept me company on many a long and maddening summer day.

Later I discovered the ultimate horror—the Inquisition. The first time I stumbled across this atrocity was in a book by some demented adult that was titled something like
The Children’s Book of Devils and Fiends
. It was filled with tales (and woodcuts) of witches having orgies, standing in line to kiss the devil’s arse, eating children, and cursing people so that they went into convulsions. The book didn’t explain that all these things were nothing more than the fevered dreams and insane concoctions of religious zealots that the educated world now knows them to be. It put them forth as being true, much as they were originally published during the Inquisition itself. Then there was the additional horror of people being tortured and burned at the stake simply because someone accused them of being witches. It explained how they were strangled, burned, cut, drowned, and dismembered in an effort to make them confess to flying on broomsticks to attend secret meetings.

It’s not possible to overstate the impact all this had on my young mind. I would lie in bed at night scared to move, while my imagination conjured up horrific images. I had already had scenes of hell and damnation drilled into my head by Jack and his wonderful church-folk friends, and these new discoveries did nothing to ease my terror. If I would have known then that in just a few short years I would be subjected to the same kind of witch hunt, that I would have some of the same accusations made against me, and that the same merciless zealots would imprison me and sentence me to death, then my heart probably would have burst of fright right on the spot. Who would have thought you could see the future by reading a book about the past?

I was miserable and under tremendous pressure, believing I would burn in hell for all eternity because I couldn’t stop myself from thinking bad things about people—not to mention the fact that I was entering puberty and knew with absolute certainty that my uncontrollable lust was earning me a one-way trip to the Lake of Fire. I had recently discovered masturbation and applied myself to the act with the utmost diligence. I couldn’t seem to stop myself, and afterward would pray to God, begging his forgiveness. I had no idea that it was normal to have such urges, for no one ever explained such things to me.

There was a nonstop war going on inside me—I wanted to be “good,” but couldn’t quite seem to manage it. My sexual appetite was insatiable, and as a typical adolescent, I thought most people were morons. I was on my way to the devil’s playground, all right. It all seems so ridiculous now, but back then it was the most deadly serious thing in the world.

Oddly enough, that same children’s book was where I first encountered Aleister Crowley. Now I know it was all propaganda, but at that young age I was amazed that someone could be so brazenly hedonistic and “sinful.” I’ve read much about this man and his life’s work over the years, and it’s incredible how people have misunderstood him. One of my favorite examples is his “How to Succeed / How to Suck Eggs” wordplay. It comes from chapter sixty-nine (wordplay: get it?), in which he talks about sexual practices; anyone not reading closely won’t pick up on the “suck seed” reference. His words have been misconstrued, twisted, taken out of context, and misunderstood continuously. If you don’t know the key with which to decipher him, then you’ll never understand what you’re reading. Others don’t even want to understand, and would rather use his name or image to sway and scare the ignorant, just as the prosecutor did during my trial.

Our financial situation continued its steadily downward spiral, and the tension continued to build. We started trying to grow our own food, and it was hot, backbreaking labor. We had no irrigation system, not even a hose and running water, so we had to haul water by the bucketful to our “garden.” Everything was done manually. Some days you’d go up one row of cucumbers or potatoes and down another with hoe in hand, busting up the dry, cracked ground. Other days you’d spend hours hunched over, pulling weeds from between plants with bare hands. That task was especially hazardous, as you had to constantly be on the lookout for poisonous snakes, bumblebees, and wasps. If you let the monotony of the task lull your mind into a stupor you’d often receive a nasty surprise. After all the hard work, only about half the food would be edible. The bugs and animals would have gotten some of it, while other areas couldn’t be saved from rot.

The only thing we didn’t have to do ourselves was crop-dusting. Our house was in the middle of the field the plane flew back and forth over, and it gave us a healthy dose of poison every time it passed overhead. If you didn’t run for cover when you heard him coming, you’d get dusted, too. During that time, I inhaled enough pesticides to put a small country out of action. My mom’s and Jack’s advice? “Don’t look up at the plane, and try not to breathe deeply until he gets a little ways past.” I developed allergies so bad that my mother had to start giving me injections at home. She had no bedside manner and wielded that syringe in an entirely unpleasant way.

You had to be certain you had all the food out of the garden by the end of summer or there was a chance the fire would destroy it. Every year after the final harvest, farmers would ride through the fields surrounding our house and set them ablaze with instruments that looked like flamethrowers. This was so all the burned and leftover vegetation would fertilize the ground for the next year’s crop. I don’t know what prevented the house from burning, because the flames would come to a halt only a few feet away. If the wind changed direction you would nearly suffocate on thick, black smoke.