Simon also mentioned he’d be flying out to speak with Abner Baxter and his son again, and she asked to go with him. It was too late for any major changes to her book, but she might be able to tweak her descriptions of Junior in galleys. And, anyway, she enjoyed Simon’s company. He was quick to agree. He enjoyed hers. Both Abner and his son had always refused to meet with Simon if she were along, and that was still true of the father, but the fear of death had softened Junior up, and Simon felt sure he’d accept her presence. She had had a glimpse or two of Junior in the past, and remembered him vaguely from high school, but this was her first time to sit down with him face to face. She had described him to her husband, based on things Billy Don and Simon had said, as ugly, stupid, sullen. She did not misspeak. Though barely out of his teens, he was already heavy in the jowls, soft and lumpy looking, with a witless, baggy stare. Sally had always associated self-flagellation with a certain intelligence and imagination. He didn’t seem bright enough for it, but there you go: no blanket judgments. His shaved head was a bright red where the new hair was growing, and she remembered that Billy Don had told her that after his humiliation and scarring, Junior had let his hair grow long to cover the scar and wore a headband, much as Billy Don hid his strabismus behind dark glasses. The exposed scar, looking raw as though he’d been scratching at it, somehow called to mind Billy Don as she’d last seen him — without his glasses and frighteningly vulnerable — and she felt a deflected tenderness toward the condemned young man in front of her. The scar, which could still be read, must draw a lot of ridicule from the other prisoners. Four letters like the four on Jesus’ cross, declaring him a king. Another “lier.” She didn’t tell Junior that. She told her notebook. While she took notes and risked a sketch or two, Simon went over everything once more, searching for any detail that might have been overlooked, from the gathering early that morning in the Meeting Hall, through the mass move to the mine hill, the troubles there, Darren’s hand-off of the gun, what Junior witnessed at the camp, and so on. Nothing really new, though Junior’s confused embarrassment about the fire made Sally wonder. They got up to go. “By the way, Abner,” Sally asked, not having thought of it before, “do you drive?” He flushed again, hesitated, looking guilty, shook his head. “You don’t drive?” He stared at her sullenly as though facing another accusation. She looked at Simon. Simon looked at her.
In bed that night, sharing a smoke with her, Simon laid out his case. He’ll go back to the trial judge with a motion for a new trial. He’ll ask that the defense attorney be called to testify at the hearing. The prosecutor’s scenario, starting from the phone booth outside the Meeting Hall, was almost completely wrong, but they would use it. All they had to show was that Junior could not move the car to the side road and ditch, no matter where one started from. That’s the secret. Not the truth, but a good story.
By the time of the revised second edition, The Killing of Billy D is banded with the declaration THE BOOK THAT SAVED A MAN’S LIFE! and the afterword and jacket copy have been adjusted to include the story of Young Abner Baxter’s release from death row and then from prison itself. His release, in turn, inspires a new round of talk show and news hour interviews, and on one of them the host, introducing the author, describes the book as an “affectionate portrait” of the title character, whereupon Sally breaks down in tears, as the pent-up grief for Billy Don, buried under all these strenuous months beginning to stretch now into years, bursts explosively to the surface. She has the presence of mind, when she recovers enough to speak, though blinded still by the memory of Billy Don standing waist-deep in moonlit lake water with his sunglasses on, to attribute at least part of her grief to that felt for Young Abner’s father, the last remaining cultist on death row, whose execution in the electric chair is imminent — two of the other three having been granted clemency, the third having killed himself — and that felt for all other persons around the country and around the world, facing the barbarism of state-authorized human slaughter.
Though partly stimulated by Sally’s book, Junior Baxter’s release, and a general shift of public opinion toward sympathy for the condemned evangelicals, the two last-minute clemency decisions followed directly upon the grotesque suicide of the third of the condemned, a Brunist preacher from a small church in eastern Tennessee. The man first went on a hunger strike and then secretly, before being force-fed by the prison authorities on the governor’s orders, swallowed the shards of a broken mirror smuggled in from the outside, the unspeakable horror of which, matched with the placidity of the dying victim, caused the prison chaplain and chief medical officer to resign or be asked to resign. The preacher’s farewell note, penned in perfect Palmer Method script, gave thanks to God, Jesus, and His Disciples and Apostles, to the Prophet Bruno, his martyred sister, and the Brunist “saints” Ely and Clara Collins and Ben Wosznik, and above all to his “spiritual guide, the great incorruptible holy man Reverend Abner Baxter.”
Unfortunately for Abner, such praise served as further condemnation, for the main charge against him from the outset has been his responsibility for instigating and directing that day’s most horrific events, the final episode in a long history of unrepentant criminal behavior. His followers, roaming vagabonds for the most part, chronically unemployed and disoriented by despair and poverty, were obliged to pledge blind obedience to him, following wherever he might lead in his uncompromising militancy. Even murder could become not a sinful breaking of the divine commandment but a sacred duty. Soldiers in God’s war to cleanse the earth of nonbelievers. That was the story about him, crafted by the prosecutor and the media. His three violent sons were believed to have been under his direct command — the motorcycle gang’s immaculately coordinated assault was said by the district attorney to have been Abner’s master plan, his march on the mine hill a sinister diversion to maximize the bikers’ damage, their attack on the town in turn serving Abner’s army on the hill by drawing away their adversaries, their final acts of murder and arson at the church camp aided and abetted by the oldest son standing guard for them (all right, he’s free, but new charges will be filed) — and his inflammatory rhetoric was likened to his early days as a communist agitator during the mine union strikes and internecine wars. He still cursed the haves on behalf of the have-nots, now under the cloak of religion, and prophesied the eventual redistribution of all property equally to all people, no matter by what means, as Jesus Christ, he heretically proclaimed, preached and intended. He was heard by several witnesses and on more than one occasion to call for a “day of wrath,” and the motorcyclists, led by his second son, wore “Wrath of God” on their leather jackets and tattooed on their bodies, as well as other cultic symbols. He was a major suspect in the death under suspicious circumstances five years earlier of young Marcella Bruno, sister of the founder of the cult (he has been heard to confess this crime), and was guilty of leading a destructive assault the next day on the St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church, though he jumped bail before he could be brought to trial. More recently, he was believed to have masterminded an armed invasion of the Brunist compound, and when jailed for his crimes, he attempted a forcible breakout, injuring the two police officers who eventually subdued him, for which reason he has until now been kept under close observation at the prison, mostly in solitary confinement. The legal occupants of the church camp were chased out by him and his followers, and those who lingered were ruthlessly exterminated. And yet, the only witness to any actual death caused directly by Baxter himself was his former closest ally Roy Coates, and Coates’ testimony, obtained in a plea bargain that spared him from a certain execution, was suspect. The specific victim in the Coates testimony was a member of the Knights of Columbus Defense Force and technically a deputized police officer, thereby adding cop-killing to Baxter’s crimes, though this Defense Force was an irregular and probably illegal group, and any such shooting, if it even happened, was arguably in self-defense. The brutal assassination of the county sheriff, however, was unquestionably the work of his sons and their gang, and this too was laid by the prosecuting district attorney, now the state governor, at Abner’s door.