"It's a shame warden, the men are being starved. The beans are so old and withered and only famished men would besmirch themselves with that meat. We could at least require common wholesomeness."
"That's right, yes, that's right. You say the meat is absolutely tainted? Send it back. Write to them and tell them we demand good fare."
I made the letter strong enough to ring true. I informed the wholesalers that the Ohio penitentiary paid first-class prices. It demanded first-class produce. The meat we got after that was coarse, but it was fresh and clean.
I used this one authorization from the warden again and again to send back stuff. The contractors came to realize that the prison was no longer a garbage can for their spoiled supplies. They found it cheaper to send in a medium grade in the beginning.
"You've come to see there are worse things in the world, Bill, than an ex-convict," I suggested to Porter when I told him about the tainted meat. "When you get out will you brazen out their prejudice or will you keep to your old resolution?"
Porter had about four months more to serve. We kept a calendar and every night we would strike off another day. It is a melancholy thing to feel the separation coming daily nearer a separation that will be as final and uncompromising as death. We talked indifferently, almost flippantly at this time because we were so deeply touched.
"I have not changed. I will keep my word. What would you do, colonel, if you should get out?"
"I will walk up to the first man I see on the street and I will say to him. 'I'm an ex-con—just got out of the pen. If you don't like it, go to hell." (I did that very thing some years later.)
Porter burst out laughing. It was the first time I had ever heard him laugh outright. It seemed to come bubbling and singing up from his throat like a rich, sonorous tune.
"I would give a great deal for your arrogant independence. I wonder if I will regret my plan?"
I don't believe he ever did, even on the black day in New York when he all but admitted he could endure the suspense no longer.
"Is the fear of life greater than the fear of death, Al? Here I am ready to leave this pen and I am beset with anxieties lest the world may guess my past."
Porter didn't expect any answer to his question. He was in a sort of ruminating mood, liking to speak his thoughts aloud.
"How hard we work to make a mask to hide the real self from our fellows. You know I sometimes think the world would go forward at a lightning pace if men would meet each other as they are—if they could, even for a short time, put aside pose and hypocrisy.
"Colonel, the wiseacres pray to see themselves as others see them. I would pray rather that others might see us as we see ourselves. How much of hatred and contempt would melt in that clear stream of understanding. We could be equal to life if we tried hard enough. Do you think we could ever look into the face of death without a tremor?"
"I have seen men take a bullet and laugh with their last gasp. I have hidden out with the gang and every hide of us knew we were probably on our last stretch.
None of us were squeamish about it."
"But there was uncertainty to give you hope. I am thinking of death that is as certain, say, as my release. Take, for instance, a condemned man you know they are lashed with hideous nightmares. You have seen some of them die. Did any go fearlessly?"
"I don't mean gameness or bravado, but downright absence of alarm. Did any one of them seem to grin in the teeth of death as though they were about to enter upon a sort of adventure?"
"Bill, you speak now of the fellows who pay for the drinks at their own funeral. The jailbird ain't that kind of an animal."
"I would like to talk to a man who looked at death. I would like to know what his sensations might be."
"I wonder if that's the reason Christ called Lazarus back—sort of wanted to know what the big jump might be like?"
It occurred to me that Porter was writing a story and wanted to daub the color on true. He never stuck to facts, but he went to no end of pains to set up his scenery aright.
"I can't produce a Lazarus to gratify your curiosity, but there's a fellow due to be bumped off in a week or so. You come over tomorrow and I'll knock you down to the near stiff."
"What is he like?" Bill seemed all of a sudden to weaken and his fluent whispering became hesitant and uncertain.
"Don't know. But he'll sit in the chair in about ten days. He sent another fellow over the great divide some months ago. He says it's a lie and he's innocent just like a babe, you know."
There's nothing very esthetic in the prison soul. Men laugh and jest over death. For weeks we would know when the electric chair was due for a sitting. We would watch the condemned man walking in the yard with a special guard before he was finally locked up in the death cell and fattened for the slaughter.
"I'd change places, ---------them, I'd die for the pleasure of gorging myself with a week of square meals." Many a time I have heard raw-boned, hungry-eyed men in the ranges and shops fling out the challenge.
But as the day for the official murder draws near, the whole place seems overhung with mournful gray shadows. One can almost feel it in the corridors—the cold, clammy atmosphere of the death-day. It is as though drowned people with wet hair clinging about their dead faces went drooping up and down reaching out chilly fingers and putting their icy touch on each man's heart.
We never talked on those days but often in the night, screams, long, frightful and sobbing screams that trailed into broken agonized moans would split the air waking us with creeping foreboding. Some overwrought wretch whose dream tormented him had seen the death in his sleep.
There was that grewsome hubbub about the prison now for the Kid was going to be bumped off. They were extra busy in the electrical department—it takes plenty of juice to kill the condemned.
Porter came over to the campus to talk to the man who faced death. "There he is, the soft-looking fellow walking with the guard—he'll let you talk to him."
When a man has but seven or eight days of life they give him a few privileges even in a prison. They let him take a turn in the yard—they give him roast beef and chicken to eat. They let him read and write, and sometimes they let him keep his light all night. Darkness is such a dread magnifier of terrors.
Porter went over to talk to the Kid. The three men fell in together and walked up and down for about five or ten minutes. The condemned man put a hand on Bill's arm and seemed childishly pleased to have such company.
When Porter came back to me, his face was a sickish yellow and his short, plump hands were closed so tight the nails gored his flesh. He rushed into the post-office, sat down on a chair and wiped his face. The sweat stood out like heavy white pearls.
"Guess you got the scare, all right, Bill? Get a close enough squint at the old Scythe Dancer?" He looked as though he might have seen an unholy ghost.
"Al, go out and. talk to the boy. Be quick. This is too monstrous. I thought he was a man. He is but a child. He has no fear. He can't seem to realize that they mean to kill him. He hasn't looked at death. He's too young. Something should be done about it."
I had not talked to the fellow. I knew he was up for murder. I thought he was about 25.
"Colonel, did you see the way he put his hand on my arm? Why he's only a little, ignorant fellow—he's just 17. He says he didn't do it. He's sure something will happen to save him.
"Good God, colonel, can a man believe any good of the world when cold-blooded murders like this are deliberately perpetrated? The lad may be innocent. Al—he has gentle, blue eyes—I've seen eyes like them in a little friend of mine. It's a damn* shame to murder him."
As the warden's secretary I had to attend and make a record of the executions. A soft youngster of 17 would make an ugly job for me.