Behind her the teakettle screeched and rumbled, breaking the silence.
“It’s hard to know what’s best to do,” said Pauline. “He was a sweet young ’un, but he growed up wild, same as the other two. I did what I could for those boys after their mama was gone.”
“You can write to him,” said Nora Bonesteel. “Ask him what he wants you to do. Aside from that, all you can do is pray and wait, because only one person can save him, and that isn’t you.”
A plain wooden chair sits on the tiled floor of an otherwise empty room. The chair is dark oak, with wide, flat arms. Its back is a solid plank, except for the three rectangular openings on either side, positioned to accommodate two pairs of blue nylon restraining straps ending in metal seat-belt buckles. Behind the chair a round wall clock familiar to schoolrooms hangs high on the pale cinder-block wall. The chair faces a large glass window covered by blinds, concealing a viewing room with space for perhaps twenty chairs. The only ornament in the observation room is a wall plaque, approximately one foot in diameter: a circle with the words “The Great Seal of the State of Tennessee 1796” encircling a drawing of a plow with “Agriculture” written beneath it, and below that a sailing ship designated “Commerce.” The walls to the left and right of the chair are fitted with ordinary doors. One leads to the corridor of holding cells and a kitchen such as one might find adjoining the reception hall of a modern country church. The other door opens into another plain, bright room, containing a small metal cabinet with lights and dials fitted on the gray surface. Beside it a power-supply box containing a transformer converts the standard 220-volt current coming into the room into a charge of 2,640 volts at the proper time. A wall telephone hangs a few feet away.
The chair was made for the state of Tennessee by the firm of Fred A. Leuchter Associates in Boston in 1989, but in style and composition, it looks much older. Parts of it are. The state sent the Leuchter company wood from the first Old Sparky, built in 1916, to be used in the construction of the new one, a ritual that was not without precedent. Some of the wood from the 1916 electric chair had been salvaged from Tennessee’s old gallows and used to construct its replacement when hanging went out of fashion. Now its successor contains the wood of both, so that more than a century of tradition has been incorporated into the new device. The new chair cost the state $50,000, and it, too, was called “Old Sparky.”
It has never been used.
Once a month, though, it is tested.
Once a month a jar of salt water—a much more accurate representation of a man than the biblical image of dust—is placed on the flat wooden seat; electrodes are inserted into the water; someone presses a button on the gray machine, and current surges through the water, proving that all is in readiness.
At least that is how the prisoners believe the chair is tested. They recount the story to one another in bull sessions, and engage in private speculations about who among them will be the first to go. Who will christen the new chair with his bodily fluids? But the prisoners also say that there are claw marks in the wide arms of the wooden chair, a chair that was built in 1989 and has never been used.
Even when the power is not turned on, the electric chair generates its own current of legend.
Burgess Gaither
ARREST I remember the first time I ever heard of Frankie Silver.
Constable Charlie Baker was pounding on the door of the courthouse in snow-caked boots, bawling like a branded calf, “Sheriff! Where’s Sheriff Butler? There’s been murder done!”
It was January 10, 1832, the Tuesday morning after Twelfth Night. I was shivering in my office, still worn out from Saturday’s Old Christmas revels at Belvidere, but determined that a headache and a touch of fever should claim no more of this fine new year, my twenty-fifth year of life and the third year of my profession of law.
I was trying to write legibly in the Burke County record book without removing my gloves. The fire burned bravely in the grate behind me, but it was no match for the wind that knifed through the cracks in the wooden walls, and I could see my breath hanging