while we sat silently.
“Well, you’re very good at what you do,” I finally said. “I feel much better.”
She slapped my arm playfully. “Oh, don’t you try to charm me, young man. You felt just fine before you saw me. Them men are going home and you were fine walking around here. I just do what I do, nothing more.”
When I finally excused myself, giving her a kiss on the cheek and telling her I needed to sign the prisoners’ release papers, she stopped me. “Oh, wait.” She dug around in her purse until she found a piece of wrapped peppermint candy. “Here, take this.”
The gesture made me happy in a way that I can’t fully explain.
“Well, thank you.” I smiled and leaned down to give her another kiss on the cheek.
She waved at me, smiling. “Go on, go on.”
Epilogue
Walter died on September 11, 2013.
He remained kind and charming until the very end, despite his increasing confusion from the advancing dementia. He lived with his sister Katie, but in the last two years of his life he couldn’t enjoy the outdoors or get around much without help. One morning he fell and fractured his hip. Doctors felt it was inadvisable to operate, so he was sent home with little hope of recovery. The hospital social worker told me that they would arrange home health and hospice care, which was sad but dramatically better than what he feared when he was on Alabama’s death row. He lost a lot of weight and became less and less responsive to visitors after returning home from the hospital. He passed away quietly in the night a short time later.
We held Walter’s funeral at Limestone Faulk A.M.E. Zion Church near Monroeville on a rainy Saturday morning. It was the same pulpit where over twenty years earlier I had spoken to the congregation about casting and catching stones. It felt strange to be back there. Scores of people packed the church, and dozens more stood outside. I looked at the mostly poor, rural black people huddled together with their ungrieved suffering filling the sad space of yet another funeral, made all the more tragic by the unjustified pain and unnecessary torment that had proceeded it. I often had this feeling when I worked on Walter’s case, that if the anguish of all the stressed lives, the pain of all of the oppressed people in all of the menaced spaces of Monroe County could be gathered in some carefully constructed receptacle, it could power something extraordinary, operate as some astonishing alternative fuel capable of igniting previously impossible action. And who knew what might come of it—righteous disruption or transformational redemption? Maybe both.
The family had a large TV monitor near the casket that flashed dozens of pictures of Walter before the service. Almost all of the photos were taken on the day he was released from prison. Walter and I stood next to each other in several of the photos, and I was struck by how happy we both seemed. I sat in the church and watched the pictures with some disbelief about the time that had passed.
When Walter was on death row, he once told me how ill he had become during the execution of one of the men on his tier. “When they turned on the electric chair you could smell the flesh burning! We were all were banging on the bars to protest, to make ourselves feel better, but really it just made me sick. The harder I banged, the more I couldn’t stand any of it.
“Do you ever think about dying?” he asked me. It was an unusual question for someone like Walter to pose. “I never did before, but now I think about it all the time,” he continued. He looked troubled. “This, right here, is a whole ’nother kind of situation. Guys on the row talk about what they’re going to do before their executions, how they’re going to act. I used to think it was crazy to talk like that, but I guess I’m starting to do it, too.”
I was uncomfortable with the conversation. “Well, you should think about living, man—what you’re going to do when you get out of here.”
“Oh, I do that, too. I do that a lot. It’s just hard when you see people going down that hall to be killed. Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain’t right. People are supposed to die on God’s schedule.”
Before the service began, I thought about all the time