Riven (49 page)

She read. She sewed. She watched TV and DVDs. While they agreed she should not undertake baking or big meal-preparation chores, Grace enjoyed fixing herself snacks and often had something ready when Thomas arrived.

She had even taken to wearing a little makeup, and seeing her in anything but nightclothes during the day made life seem normal again. Once Thomas splurged and paid to have a hairdresser make a house call. The next day he drove Grace to church, where she sat weeping through the entire service.

“It was like heaven,” she said.

The problem was, while Grace’s leukemia was in remission, Thomas’s spiritual life was in depression. He did everything he could to put a happy face on things, and there was no question he was warmed and encouraged by her rally—short-lived as the doctor warned it would be—but after nearly four decades of marriage, there was no hiding things from Grace.

She talked with him, counseled him, encouraged him, prayed for him, sang to him. “I’m no Pollyanna, Thomas,” she said one day. “Frankly, I wish our lives and Ravinia had turned out differently. But I still believe we were called to serve and that we should do that and leave the rest to God. If our reward comes only in heaven and not here, so be it.”

He knew she was right. Thomas also knew he would be admitting defeat if he allowed disappointment and frustration to interrupt his devotional life. His spiritual life needed to be fed.

And that was the rub. Many were the days at the state penitentiary where he felt incarcerated too. Maybe it was only eight hours a day, but it was in many ways as much a prison to him as it was to the men in the cages.

Only four inmates had asked to see Thomas in the past few weeks. All were lifers. One was a Native American complaining that the sweat lodge was inadequate and insisting that Thomas interact with tribal authorities and do whatever was required to bring it up to code, regardless what that meant.

Thomas did what was asked of him, willing to honor another man’s faith, no matter what he believed. He just hoped that perhaps by doing his part, as required by his job description, he might earn the right to discuss spiritual matters with the man someday.

But when Thomas raised the sweat lodge matter with Frank LeRoy, the warden said, “Yeah, no. He knows religious rights extend only so far as they don’t threaten security. You know what happened, don’t you? That man lost his last chance at parole after assaulting an officer while being escorted to the sweat lodge.”

The other three men Thomas talked with during that quarter told him of bad childhood experiences in church but pleaded for family phone calls—none of which met requirements. One settled for having Thomas lend him a couple of books from the chaplain’s library, but these soon were delivered back, apparently unread. Thomas had not heard from any of the three again.

Was it too much to ask that someone would ask to see him who was sincerely interested in spiritual things? Apparently it was.

Death Row

After sitting twenty-four hours in his undershorts and ingesting as much as he could stand of two single-slice, dry bologna sandwiches and two lukewarm boxes of fruit juice, Brady had suddenly become the man of the hour again. Four officers showed up, one toting Brady’s new clothes. But rather than allow him to change, he was instructed to back up to the meal slot to be cuffed, then was asked if he could be trusted to cooperate so they could open his door before manacling him at the ankles.

“Like I’ve got a choice,” he said.

“You’ll behave or you’ll wish you’d never been born,” one of the officers said.

I already wish that.

It made sense, he figured, that they would treat him as the murderer he was, but Brady wondered if there was another con in the whole place who was less interested in violence now that he had committed the ultimate violent act. Brady had been involved in a lot of brawls, in and out of jail, with cops and civilians, other cons, you name it. But these guys at ASP had nothing to worry about with him. He had lost the will to live, let alone to fight.

Brady found it hard to believe, but his need for a cigarette soon drowned out everything else in his mind. Maybe that was for the best. He knew he was just this side of insane anyway.

Why did they feel it necessary to parade him through the other pods and cells and security checkpoints in his underwear? He wanted to ask, but he had already learned that they resented questions. It was bad enough the whole place smelled and was variously too cold or too hot. Again, everyone seemed to know who he was. He was met with screams and whistles and comments all along the way. Brady just kept his head down and shuffled as quickly as he was able.

The reason for not letting him dress became clear when he was delivered to his unit and ushered directly to the shower, hands and feet unfastened, and handed a safety razor. “That comes back to us in one piece or you’ll regret it.”

His clothes were left just outside the stall. The water seemed to come on and go off on its own schedule, so Brady just hurriedly showered, shaved quickly in front of a reflective sheet of metal on the wall, handed the razor back, and reached for his clothes. He found strangely inviting the idea of finally being clothed.

“Not so fast. Body cavity search.”

Brady complied with this humiliating exercise, wondering what bit of contraband he could possibly have found between the intake cell and here. Finally allowed to dress, he was hooked up again and led to his final home, which the people inside referred to as his house. His was on the lower left of a ten-man, two-level unit on death row. Every one of the other nine men would pass his cell when led to their thrice-weekly showers or to the exercise area for their one hour of each twenty-four.

Brady was released from the cuffs and shackles again, handed his induction packet, and finally locked away. Once the officers were gone, the noise became almost unbearable. Besides the radios and TVs and conversations, everyone within earshot began calling out to Brady, asking him obscene questions about the heiress, describing the murder, recounting everything they had heard and read about it, demanding that he answer.

Brady laid his envelope on the steel desk with attached stool, knowing it would probably be his only reading material for three months. He sat there, studying the cot and the combination toilet/sink in the corner, in full view of any passersby.

He decided not to answer, to say absolutely nothing. But as the yelling and the questions rose to a deafening din and he sat on his cot and covered his ears, Brady realized that some cons in certain cells of other units in the pod could see him. They told his unit mates every detail of what he was doing.

“Don’t plug your ears, trailer trash!”

“Too early for bed, lover boy!”

“Tell us the story! Did you really think she loved you, Romeo?”

“Did you hear what Daddy North said? He wants you to burn in hell!”

Brady had seen similar hazing at County and knew of newcomers who wound up burying their faces in their blankets and crying themselves to sleep, opening them to even more ridicule. He decided to just busy himself in the farthest, most private corner of his cell, reading over the stuff from his packet.

But it was no good. He couldn’t block the noise, and he had resolved not to respond.

“Miss your smokes, sweetheart?” someone hollered.

Boy, did he.

In some recess of Brady’s mind, he realized that his nicotine addiction and all the racket were at least keeping him occupied. One thing he feared above everything else was having to face his own darkness.

Fighting the withdrawal and the unending harassment, Brady sat with his back to the wall, his head between his knees. He was unaware of having slept the night before and wondered if this place ever quieted enough for anyone to sleep. Brady was exhausted, and yet there would be no dozing, at least for now.

His absolute refusal to give the hecklers what they wanted eventually cooled them down. But even when the shouting was not directed at Brady, the noise level seemed to abate only during the counts of the inmates with every shift change and meal delivery. Like everyone else, Brady began to look forward to the food, meager and unappetizing as it was.

Each time the officers brought his meal, Brady was required to sit on his cot at the back of the cell. Holidays and weekends the men got just two meals a day. The rest of the time, three were delivered, almost always with the same fare: a simple TV dinner–style entree, salt and pepper packets, a fruit drink, a combination plastic fork and spoon, a packet of instant coffee, and a tea bag. The irony of the last two was that no hot plates or heating units of any kind were allowed in the cells, so the men had to mix these with barely warm tap water.

When the officers came to pick up his tray, again Brady had to be sitting on his cot, and his tray was searched every time to be sure everything was still there—all the packaging and the spork. That, he was told, was to ensure that he didn’t keep anything he could use to fashion some hybrid weapon. If only he had the courage. He was barely eating anyway, and if he ate less, he knew he would be reported and likely hauled away for intravenous feeding.

At the end of his first month, the drone of Brady’s life had been established. The sharpest bite of his withdrawal from a lifetime of smoking was over, yet he occasionally caught a whiff of something that reminded him of cigarettes, and the cravings came back.

The inmates all around him apparently found him no fun due to his silence and eventually gave up hassling him entirely. But his only respite from the other constant racket came in the evenings when those with televisions all watched the same show and then discussed it to death.

During that time, Brady could hear every word of dialogue from all the TVs, so he would stretch out on his cot and pull the end of his scratchy blanket up behind his head, forcing it into his ears. Sometimes that allowed him to doze, but only briefly, because then his hands would relax, the blanket would slip away, and the noise would invade.

TVs had to be off at midnight, and some of the men actually seemed to sleep, though Brady could hardly imagine how. The other clamor seemed to go on and on until it became white noise to him. Part of him wished he had not grown used to it, because when he had been unable to think, at least he was spared the wide-awake nightmares that showed him for who he really was.

What Katie North’s father had told the press was right. He deserved to burn in hell.

Brady slowly came to understand that there were two types of prisoners—those who lived to make trouble for little other reason than that they were bored and craved attention, and those who were content to just get along.

He fit the latter category, but he could understand the others. They couldn’t really be punished any more. Even being sent back to an intake cell for Administrative Segregation was at least variety. And the chance to fight and bite and spit and throw blood or feces or try to make some creative weapon out of whatever could be found—well, Brady wasn’t interested, but something about the efforts of the desperate reached him. It reminded him of how he had felt at Forest View High School years before, when negative attention was at least better than none.

In his more fanciful moments, Brady had imagined himself simply passing his time doing nothing. But the deprivation of everything he knew—human touch, conversation, something to read, not to mention the ability to come and go as he pleased—changed his entire system of values.

While he could not sleep, never ate his entire meager portion of food, and felt nauseated all the time, still Brady found himself looking forward to every scheduled event that marked the passing of each day. He anticipated being roused by the banging on his door for first count, the delivery of every meal, even his short walk to the shower every week. The head counts helped him mark the time, and he was expected to stand and show himself at the predinner count. Hardly a week passed without someone refusing and having to be forcibly extricated from his cell.

Brady tried to be cordial to the officers, hoping one might engage him in other than just stilted conversation. Whenever he said anything more than please or thank you, however, he was quickly barked back into submission. Someone—he couldn’t even remember who now—had told him, “Treat the officers with respect, but don’t expect to talk to them much.”

Hardest to get used to were the creatures that invaded his house. Sleep was so evasive that he didn’t think he had to worry that something would bite him if he happened to doze. But he was wrong. In the weeks he had been inside, he had already seen roaches, flies, mice, crickets, moths, spiders, mosquitoes, and gnats. Brady suffered so many bites on his feet and ankles that he had taken to wearing his soft slippers to bed.

He looked forward to the end of his ninety-day probationary period so he could have a TV and something to read besides the juice boxes—which he had memorized. He had also read and reread his induction materials so often that he could have recited every word, subtitle, and page number.

Brady didn’t know what he would do with his hour a day in the exercise kennel. There was only one man in there at a time, and each either strolled or just leaned against the wall or sat, apparently enjoying the slight change of scenery and more space. A few exercised, but Brady couldn’t imagine doing that. He had already lost weight and muscle tone, and in his cell he moved as little as necessary. He knew that was unhealthy, but what was the point?

Brady was alarmed every time he was taken to the shower and got a glimpse of himself in the makeshift mirror. He had begun to look older than his years, gaunt, wasted. Three years and the lethal injection couldn’t come soon enough.

Those first ninety days, he knew, were meant to break him. Again, that puzzled him. Break him from what? He supposed it was good for him to have quit smoking, though it had not been voluntary. But he didn’t have to be persuaded to follow orders, do what he was told, not cause trouble, not trust anyone.

Apparently this initial period of deprivation didn’t have its desired effect on every inmate, as many newcomers went crazy within a week or two, finding themselves dragged from their cells to Ad Seg and—depending on how much of a fight they put up—having years added to their sentences. Brady had no interest in making trouble. He found himself simply sad, depressed, and mostly sleepless.