in the dream that he always awakened, to the same six-paces-by-nine-paces cell, filled with his books and his calendar pictures of mountains.
“Hey, Milton, you out there?” It was two o’clock in the morning, but nobody sleeps soundly on death row. Fate was shivering, even in the breathless heat of a Nashville summer night. It was not completely dark. It is never completely dark here. He listened for a sound from beyond the wall. “Milton?”
Milton, his neighbor, a skinny young junkie from Memphis, who copped the death sentence in a drug hit, didn’t answer. Fate didn’t like Milton much—but maybe, he reasoned, that was the point. Nobody that you could like very much ever made it to death row these days, because a jury wouldn’t ask for the death penalty if they could find any redeeming qualities in the accused. In the old days, maybe, but not now. Public opinion and liberal lawyers were making it harder and harder to execute prisoners, so it was mainly career criminals and second-time killers who made it into Pod Five now. Fate wondered if a new trial would get him taken off the list, but that didn’t seem likely now, as the dream reminded him.
“Milton? You up?”
Milton would stab his grandmother in the back and take bets on which way she’d fall, but at least he was there, and awake, and alive, and if anybody could understand what it feels like to dream you’re dead and know that the dream is going to come true real soon, it would be another condemned man on the row. He was better than nothing.
“What’s eating you, La-fay-ette?” The singsong drawl flowed out of the shadows; made him wonder if Milton could sing.
“Just wanted some company. Bad dream is all.”
Silence, and then a rumbling laugh. “Time is getting short, ain’t it? You dream you were in Virginia, La-fay-ette?”
“Dreamed I was dead. Buried alive. Couldn’t get out. Couldn’t scream for help.”
“Yeah, you musta been in Virginia all right, then,” said Milton. “They been killing prisoners right and left over there. You dead, you must be in Virginia, ’cause they damned sure ain’t killed nobody in Tennessee in thirty-some years. I don’t reckon they’ll start now with your sorry ass.”
“The appeals have all been denied.”
“I got money riding on your continued existence, homeboy. Well, cigarettes, anyhow. Two packs of Marlboros says you’ll be alive and kicking come New Year’s Eve.”
Fate took a long breath and waited to see if he felt any better. He didn’t. “Milton? I want to be cremated.”
“After you gone to the electric chair?”
“It’s the dream. I’m in a box and I’m dead but I’m still conscious, and it’s dark and I can’t get out. My mouth is sewn shut.”
Milton was silent for some minutes, and Fate had begun to think that he had drifted off to sleep, but then he laughed and said: “Cremated. Don’t you beat all?” He laughed again. “ Cremate your ass.Man, you know what I heard about Old Sparky? They say that the death squad has to wait half an hour before they even touch the body, it gets so hot. It’s cooked from all that juice they run through you. Sometimes the skin catches fire, they say, and the eyeballs fry right on your face. And you think you’re gonna stay conscious through that, homeboy? You won’t have nothing left to think with by the time they put you in the ground to cool off.”
“I want to be cremated. If they’re going to burn me, they might as well finish the job.”
Burgess Gaither
APPEAL My carefully written appeal went off to Raleigh on Newland’s stagecoach, as did Judge Donnell himself. Both would reach the state capital in three days’ time, but I knew that many weeks would pass before I received a reply from the North Carolina Supreme Court regarding the fate of Frankie Silver.
I watched the stagecoach lurch along the pike, churning up black mud in its wake, until at last it disappeared into the pines in the distance. I wondered if Mrs. Silver could see the road from the window of her cell. It is a high, barred window, and perhaps she is too small even to be able to reach it, but at least it will afford her a glimpse of the sky, and I must keep reminding myself that it is more than her poor young husband will ever see again. At least she has another summer yet to live, while the learned jurists in Raleigh deliberate. It