be mercifully quick.
The warden, who had been standing beside the right-hand doorway, approached the chair and said a few words to the condemned man. The witnesses could not hear what was said, but they could see Fate Harkryder’s face, and he appeared to make no reply. He was staring at the glass window in front of him, squinting a little, as if he were trying to make out individual faces. The guard dimmed the lights in the witness room.
As the warden turned to walk away, a member of the tie-down team placed a dark leather cap on the prisoner’s head. The top of the cap contained the metal fitting to which the wire would be attached. The current would enter the body through the headpiece. It was fitted with a snap-on flap that covered the top half of the prisoner’s face. Now he was merely a human figure, pinioned in a wooden chair.
As the warden took up his old position beside the control-room doorway, the peal of a telephone broke the silence. One of the reporters yelped and grabbed the arm of his companion. Charles Stanton held up
a photograph of Emily. Spencer gripped the sides of his chair. He was holding his breath.
A voice from the other room said clearly, “No. This is the death house.” Then silence.
“Wrong number,” another witness muttered, with a giggle that was somewhere between embarrassment and terror.
The execution itself began without Spencer’s at first being aware of it. He knew that the room lights would not dim, as they did in old black-and-white gangster movies, but he had expected a loud buzzing noise, or some other indication that high voltage had been turned on. He let his eyes stray for a moment to the stricken face of the chaplain, and then a gasp from behind him made him look again at the man in the chair. Fate Harkryder had stiffened, and he appeared to be straining against the straps, or perhaps the force of the current had thrown him forward against them. For about a minute, although it seemed much longer, the current surged through the prisoner’s body, keeping him rigid against the restraints, and then the body slumped back.
No one moved.
Fate snuggled against his brother Ewell in the darkness, shivering in the crisp July night, watching the sky and breathing grass scent. He was four years old—maybe five—not the youngest child in the field, but surely the only one out alone with his older brothers instead of cradled on a blanket between doting parents. It was late. Daddy usually chased them off to bed before now, so they had learned to slope off before he started his serious drinking, knowing that as long as the boys were out of sight, the old man did not care whether they were in bed or not. It was better not to be home before the rage took him. They had scars to remind them to find somewhere else to be.
Fate couldn’t remember Mama being around; maybe she had already started running around by that time. She died when he was eight, but as far as Fate was concerned, she’d been gone much longer than that.
Tom gave him brown sugar on bread for breakfast, and Ewell made him trucks out of scrap wood and bottle caps. And they took him with them, like a cute but useless puppy, wherever they went. His brothers grew up loving to roam the night, as free as the raccoons and the possums, and often as destructive. Later, in adolescence, they would take to Daddy’s ways—drinking themselves into that state just before insensibility, when they became strangers even to themselves. He would come to dread going with them. Afterward, they never remembered the things they had done. He never forgot.
Not tonight, though.
Tonight Tom and Ewell had brought little Fate down the mountain, to the Wake County High School football field, where no one noticed them among the laughing crowd in the dark. They had bought him a package of cheese crackers and a grape Nehi with money swiped from the old man’s coin jar, and they’d helped themselves to his stash of beer for the road. It was a night of celebration.
Fate willed himself to be still, but inside he was squirming with impatience to see the wonders his brothers had promised. He held his breath, thinking that surely the magic could not happen unless you kept very still for it and wished ’til your teeth hurt. “Is it time?” he whispered to