JEROME LEFT for the prison. He would deliver the news to O’Neill that we had lost, and then watch our client get executed. Kassie asked him whether he wanted her to go with him and drive. He thanked her and said no. He called at five, just as he was about to go visit with O’Neill in the holding cell. He wanted to know whether there was any news. I said there wasn’t. He said, That’s good, right? They would have denied us by now if they were going to deny us, don’t you think?

Being a death-penalty lawyer requires constant delusion. You have to convince yourself that even though you hardly ever win, this time is going to be different. I said, Don’t get his hopes up.

Jerome said, I don’t think it makes one bit of difference what I say to this guy.

He had me there. I said, Well, if you see his parents, don’t get their hopes up.

Fifteen years ago, before they changed it to 6:00 p.m. so that the guards could be home in time for dinner, Texas carried out executions at midnight. The death warrant instructed the warden to carry out the execution on a certain date, before sunrise. So the execution window lasted roughly six hours, from midnight until dawn. We represented an inmate named Lupe Hernandez. The day before his execution, the widow of Hernandez’s brother showed us a letter in which the brother claimed credit for the murder that our client was going to be executed for. We filed a last-minute appeal, on the day of the execution. After a flurry of skirmishes in the lower courts, we got to the Supreme Court around nine o’clock at night. At nearly five in the morning, there was still no word from the justices. Dawn would soon break over East Texas, and the death warrant would expire. At a quarter past five, a state court judge stayed the execution, with an opinion saying that the State of Texas should not carry out an execution while the highest court in the land was still considering the appeal.

But inherent in that state court judge’s opinion was a point that gave me a chill as we waited for the court of appeals to issue a ruling in the O’Neill case: Unless a court or the governor granted a stay of execution, the warden could carry out the execution at any time between six and midnight. The fact that we had filed an appeal meant nothing. We needed the court to tell the warden that he could not go forward.

At seven thirty there was still no word. Jerome had called half a dozen times, thinking that his cell phone must not be ringing. Each time I told him that the court had not called. In the office, we grew more hopeful. There would be no reason to take so long, if the court was simply going to issue its form-letter denial of our request.

The phone rang at a quarter past eight. The clerk of the court and a lawyer from the attorney general’s office were on the line. The clerk said, I am calling to let you know that the court has instructed me that it will be taking no further action tonight.

What? There were nearly four hours left in the execution window. We had gotten our appeal to the court five hours before. The judges had had plenty of time. How could they go home? I said, When will they make a decision?

The clerk said, The court has instructed me that it will be taking no further action tonight.

I said, Can we file a motion with the panel asking them to grant a stay until the entire court has an opportunity to rule on our motion?

The clerk said, The court has instructed me that it will be taking no further action tonight.

You have to beat me upside the head only so many times. I said okay and told the clerk good-bye, then told the assistant attorney general that I would call her right back. Gary said, I think we need to file in the Supreme Court.

Kassie disagreed, saying we did not need to do anything. She said, They can’t kill him with our motion still pending.

I was not so sure about that. We called the attorney general’s office. The lawyer handling the case was an experienced death-penalty lawyer named Eddy Martin. She said, I’ve spoken to my boss and the attorney general. We are going to advise our client not to go forward with the execution this evening.

I said, Eddy, can you assure us that the warden will follow your advice?

She said, No, I cannot.

I said, We’ll call you back.

I called Jerome and explained to him what had happened. I said, I need you to talk to the warden, or someone in his office, and find out whether he is going to follow Eddy’s recommendation.

Ten minutes later he called back. He said, The warden’s assistant was very nice. She said that the warden wouldn’t talk to me.

If death-penalty lawyers made a lot of money, this is where they would earn it. It was around nine. There were three hours left during which the warden could lawfully execute O’Neill. The attorney general’s office had told the warden not to go through with it, but we did not know whether the warden would listen. After all, he was holding a court order commanding him to carry out the execution. We had two options. One was to do nothing and hope the warden listened to a lawyer’s advice rather than adhering to a judicial order. I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance he would. The other was to file a motion with the Supreme Court and ask that Court to stay the execution. There were a couple of problems with the latter approach. One was an arcane legal problem having to do with on what basis we would ask the Supreme Court to intervene. Typically, when someone asks the Supreme Court to do something, the party making the request argues that the lower court got the wrong answer to the question. In our case, the lower court had not gotten the wrong answer; it hadn’t given an answer. There was, therefore, nothing to appeal from. Although I felt we could overcome that issue, the other problem was more pragmatic: If the Supreme Court refused to intervene, maybe the warden would interpret that refusal as authorization to proceed. I figured we had slightly under a fifty-fifty chance of getting a stay from the Court.

Call heads or tails, I said to Gary. Let’s just decide by flipping a coin. He and Kassie stared at me. I said, I’m kidding.

We decided to do nothing. I called Jerome to let him know. He said, What? Y’all are just going to sit there? I said that was the plan. He said, You want me to tell his parents? I told him that I would call them. I was not doing it just to be nice. I was doing it so that I had something to do.

I filled a coffee mug with crushed ice and took it and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and climbed out my window onto the fire escape. I called Katya and told her what was up. When I told her about the judges on the court of appeals calling it a day while our motion was still pending, she said, You need to file a judicial grievance. I told her I didn’t see what good it would do. She said, That’s not the point. You need to hold their feet to the fire. That is inexcusable. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with not justifying themselves.

I said, K, you’ve got a lot of spunk. But she wasn’t in a smiling mood. I told her I’d call when something, or nothing, happened.

At ten minutes past midnight, Jerome called. They’re taking him back to Polunsky, he said. Jerome told me that the warden had called him just before midnight to ask him whether he wanted to say anything to O’Neill before they drove him back. Jerome went back to see O’Neill in the holding cell. O’Neill had ordered a half a gallon of vanilla ice cream as his final meal. It was served to him when he got to the Walls Unit at four that afternoon. When Jerome went to see him, O’Neill was drinking the vanilla ice cream with a spoon, like it was soup. Jerome repeated to me what O’Neill said: Tell that gentleman that you work with that I told him not to concern himself. His wings and his breath surround me. Please tell him I thank him for his efforts all the same. Will you kindly ask whether I can bring this ice cream back with me?

WON AND ONE are homophones, spelled differently but pronounced the same, like two and too. My wife, on the other hand, says Juan when she means won, and she says it like a Mexican. I make fun of this habit. When she asks how things went at Lincoln’s Little League games, I say, It was great. Both teams Juan. Lincoln always corrects me. (My pronunciation, that is, not my content. It is t-ball. Both teams did win.) Before I walked down to my car, I sent her a text. It read, Oui Juan. She called as I was driving home. I asked her what she was still doing up. She said, Waiting for you to call me. I told her the story.

Lincoln was getting bored in Galveston. I told Katya that the two of them should come back to Houston for a few days. She asked whether I had a Plan B. This was a reasonable question. In the midst of futilely trying to save a client, I’ve been an asshole twenty or thirty times too many. I’m short-tempered and surly and altogether unpleasant to be around. Having client after client get killed can do that to you. But I was not going to be working on the Green case, and I was not yet feeling desperate about Quaker.

I said, I promise not to be entirely impossible.

She said, Pretty tall order, cowboy, but she still agreed they’d stay the week and leave the following weekend.

I was going to be driving to the prison first thing the next morning to see Quaker, so I decided to get some groceries on my way home. At one in the morning, you pretty much have the supermarket to yourself. The only other person in the produce section was a tall, lean, Marlboro-looking middle-aged man wearing a belt buckle the size of a cantaloupe and brown lizard-skin boots. He squinted at me while he filled a plastic bag with fat jalapeño peppers. Did I know him? He was too old to have been a student of mine. He walked over and said, Did I see you on the news tonight? I told him I wasn’t sure. He said, Wasn’t you one of the lawyers fighting for that retarded man?

There is always a point in my conversations with strangers where I have to decide whether to lie. This time I didn’t. I told him that I was.

I’m accustomed to what was coming. Whenever my name is in the paper, I get a dozen e-mails telling me my client is a worthless pig, and I’m even worse. (Sadly, most venomous e-mails tend to lack much creativity.) But here’s the thing about living in Texas: It’s a big state. The man with the peppers shook my hand like we were old friends. He said, My papa was shot in front of me when I was eleven years old. It happened right there in the kitchen. He was drinking a cup of tea. When I joined a group to fight against the death penalty, it just about tore my sister up. She doesn’t understand it at all, but I just don’t think we oughta be doing it. I told her, After you kill the bad guys, you’re just as angry as you were before, but there ain’t no one left to hate.

He was still holding my hand. He looked down like he’d forgotten about it, then he looked embarrassed and let me go and shoved his hands deep into his back pockets. He said, I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time. I just wanted to say I admire what you do.

WHEN I GOT HOME, I fixed a turkey sandwich and carried it and a bottle of Shiner beer up to my room. The ten o’clock news was repeating, and they showed the picture of me that the man in the grocery store must have seen. The video had been shot in the morning, when we were working on the papers we thought we would file in the Supreme Court. The scene was fourteen hours old. I could barely remember it, like it was something that had happened years ago. People sometimes think I am younger than I am, because my hair is short and not too gray, and all I wear is blue jeans. But I noticed my hands gesturing for the reporter. Hands always reveal age. The skin was thin and papery, dotted with sun spots. Through the wrinkles you could see the veins, thick and green. I looked at my fingers and thought, This is pointless. Then I thought, I’ve been doing this too long.

There is a relationship between those two ideas that I know to be true but that I will not acknowledge. There are certain truths in life you have to evade in order to keep being the person you have convinced yourself that you are.

BEING AT THE PRISON the day after staving off an execution is the closest I come to being a rock star. Inmates sitting in their cages look at you as if you’re magical. Chaplains and nuns, holding the tattered Bibles that they read to murderers, greet you as if you’re Joshua. Parents and spouses and children of the inmates stare at you the way Auschwitz survivors stared at the Allied soldiers who came to liberate them. It makes me want to slink out and never return. Most blind squirrels starve. When you see one find an acorn, you can easily forget that.

Quaker told me that he had dreamed about his family the night before. He was in a pit with smooth sides. He tried to climb out, but there was no way to get any traction. He sank down to the floor, shirt soaked with sweat, wondering where he was, and why. He looked up, and Daniel was peeking down at him from over the edge. His first instinct was to shout at Daniel to get away from the edge so he wouldn’t fall. Then he felt lightness and love, like he could float. Daniel dropped him a pair of platform shoes. Wearing them, he could press his feet against one wall and reach out to the other with his arms. In this fashion, he crawled up the sides of the pit. As he emerged, he saw Charisse, hiding playfully behind Daniel. He hugged them both and realized he was crying. He lifted his head and saw Dorris, wearing just a negligee, sitting in a bed. She said, Daniel, Charisse, can you two run off to your rooms for a little while and leave Daddy and me alone? Henry took a step toward her. He smelled her perfume. He woke up as the guard banged open the slot in the steel cell door and passed him breakfast.

He said, It was the best night I’ve had in years. We sat quietly for nearly a minute, then he added, I heard yours was pretty good, too.

I told him about the last-minute activity in the O’Neill case, and then I told him again about our plan for the hearing. But I had a bad feeling I had used up all my luck. Maybe he read my mind. He said, You remember that story I told you about when I was in the psych hospital in New Braunfels after the fire? I said I did. He said, I feel like that right now, man. My will is spent. I ain’t gonna tell you to give up or to stop what you’re doing, but if we lose, it’s okay. It really is. I’m ready to just be done with it, you know what I mean?

I knew exactly what he meant, but I didn’t say so. Instead I said, I’m not planning for us to lose.

WHEN I GOT HOME, Katya and Lincoln were there, playing a video game that I did not understand. Lincoln shouted, Dada, and came running to me. I kissed Katya and she hugged me tight, squeezing the air out of me.

I said, Hey, be gentle with me, and Lincoln laughed.

He went to the closet under the stairs and came back with our baseball gloves and a tennis ball. He said, Dada, can we play catch? I looked at Katya and she nodded. She said she’d go pick up Thai food while we were playing.

The temperature had dropped into the upper forties, which in Houston is cold enough to justify a fire in the fireplace. Lincoln and I carried in some logs, and Katya put the take-out cartons on the coffee table in the library. I said, Hey Linco, do you want to try this chicken with basil and peppers?

He said, In case you forgot, Dada, I’m a vegetarian. I told him I had not forgotten, that I was only kidding around. He said, Oh. Well, it’s not very funny. You shouldn’t kill animals to eat them.

Katya said, What a guy.

I said, I know it.

And I thought to myself, I wonder if I disappoint him.

FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, I went to my office at five so I could be home by eleven or twelve. Katya, Lincoln, and I rode our bikes, sat by the fire and watched SpongeBob, read books, went out to lunch, played board games, tossed the tennis ball, and saw some movies. On Thursday morning, as we were finishing our pancakes, Lincoln said, What are we going to do when you get home today, Dada? It was the day of Green’s execution. I told him that he was going to have to hang out with Mama today, because I had to go to the prison. He said, Are you trying to help some person? I told him that someone else was trying to help the man. I was just going to go visit him. He said, Why can’t you help him, too?

It had been hard enough explaining to Lincoln that I try to help people who have killed somebody. It would be harder to explain that, in truth, I can’t really help anybody. Last summer, Gary, Kassie, and I spent a week in East Texas, in the Arnold Broxton case. The only issue in the trial was whether Broxton is mentally retarded. There was no jury. A judge would decide. With an impartial adjudicator, it would have been a close call. Of course, with an impartial adjudicator, we would have been somewhere besides East Texas.

Broxton’s IQ scores were right on the border of mental retardation, so the critical factor was whether we could produce evidence of what are called adaptive behavior deficits. People with mild mental retardation can live independent and productive lives, but they have limitations that result from their mental health. They cannot do certain things, like attend to their hygiene, hold a job, maintain a home, and the like. Lawyers prove that their mentally retarded clients have these adaptive deficits by calling witnesses who have known the inmate for a long time and can testify as to these limitations.

Broxton has a younger brother. He would be our key witness on adaptive deficits. He had seen his older brother fail and fail again. He had worked with Broxton at a flooring company and he recounted, among other things, that Broxton could simply never learn how to lay tile. In the days leading up to the trial, Broxton and his brother had several telephone conversations. The sheriff’s office recorded them. At the trial, the state planned to use the recordings to prove that Broxton was aware of what was happening in his case and was therefore not mentally retarded.

Now this argument is as moronic as it is a non sequitur. Mentally retarded inmates can often understand what their lawyers tell them, and we had told Broxton what the hearing was about, and how we were going to proceed. But that’s not the point of this story. Broxton and his brother had spent pretty much all their lives either in inner-city housing projects or in prison. Their idiom reflected that history. The language in their conversations was R-rated and coarse. Every other word was nigger-this or nigger-that. Broxton had been convicted of murdering a convenience store clerk; it was not a high-profile or an infamous crime, but we were in a small town, where every murder trial is a big deal, especially when the defendant is black. East Texas timber country is still a Klan-friendly place.

The local TV news stations were filming the proceedings from beginning to end. The lawyer for the state was the elected district attorney, and he was putting on a show. He played a CD-ROM of the conversations between the two Broxton brothers. The conversations had been transcribed. He handed me a copy of the transcript, and read aloud several lines of dialogue. He did so, mimicking the patois of the Broxton brothers. Even by East Texas standards, it was appalling. I stood up and said, Excuse me, Judge. I would like the record to reflect that the district attorney is no longer speaking in his natural voice, but is trying to sound like my client and his brother. The fact that he is failing miserably at sounding like either one of them does not make his effort any less offensive.

The judge had been checking her e-mail or playing Solitaire or doing something on her computer, and she looked up, baffled. She said, Is that an objection?

I said, Not really. It is a simple expression of moral outrage.

She stared at me and said, Treating it as an objection, the objection is overruled.

The district attorney smirked. He immediately resumed his effort to sound like a brother. I started to rise from my seat again. Gary gently put his hand on my arm and, in a whisper, told me to count to ten. I said, I’m already up to thirty-seven and it isn’t helping.

This is the reality: When you know that you are not going to succeed, and that your client is going to die no matter what you do, and that it does not matter a whit whether the facts and the law are on your side, you can either do nothing and accept defeat, or modify your definition of success, but what you also have to realize is that even if you choose the latter route and opt to redefine the meaning of winning, and therefore count it as a small victory (for example) when you don’t sit silently by while a district attorney puts on his black face and carries on for the cameras with an egregious display of overt racism, your client is still going to get escorted into the execution chamber, strapped down to the gurney, and put to death.

There are some philosophers who say that we create the world we live in with our language. I am sorry to say that that is not how it works. Reality is a relentless and crushing force, and it cannot be thwarted or outrun with a lawyer’s effete semantics.

I told Lincoln that I’d try to help the person I was going to see, and I headed for the prison.

AN ALABAMA SONG was playing on the radio. It reminded me of when I had picked up Lincoln from Rachel’s house after a playdate six months before. Alabama was singing about how angels come down from heaven to visit us when we’re sad. Lincoln asked me to play it again. I told him I couldn’t because it had been on the radio. He downloaded it from iTunes as soon as we got home and sat in front of his computer listening to it, over and over. When Katya called him to dinner he said, This song brings tears to my eyes.

I’d never seen him so morose. Katya gently pressed him to tell us why he was sad. He said, It’s because I don’t have any courage.

Yes you do, amigo. You have plenty of courage.

It’s not true.

His lower lip trembled like he was about to start crying. But he didn’t. Katya said, Lincoln, why do you think you don’t have any courage?

He said, Rachel was sad. I don’t know why. I could tell she was sad, and I didn’t have the courage to say anything to her.

Katya said, Sometimes it’s hard to talk to someone who’s sad, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Well, Lincoln, no matter what you say, if you are trying to make that person feel better, she will appreciate it. Do you understand what I mean?

Yeah. Thanks, Mama.

THE HOLDING CELL has a distinctly medieval feel. It is damp and dark and gray. There is no TV or radio, but there is a rotary-dial telephone on the concrete floor that might have been new in the 1970s. To get to the place where condemned prisoners spend the final three hours of their lives, you pass through two electronically controlled doors. Then you exit the prison through a heavy steel door that opens with a key that is eight inches long. The warden’s assistant, the key dangling from her neck as if she were a character in a Dickens novel, escorted me across a small courtyard, really just a rectangle of grass surrounded by concrete walls, and knocked on another door like the one through which we just passed. A guard inside peered through a slot covered with Plexiglas and visually identified my escort and me. Then he opened the door with another giant key. The warden’s assistant left, and I was standing in an L-shaped, windowless area.

The base of the L is the actual holding cell; the rest is a short hall where the three guards stood and watched over Green. To my right, as I faced Green, was another steel door that looks like it belongs on a submarine. It is the entrance to the room where inmates die. The holding cell itself has two walls of cinder block, and two walls of steel bars covered with a mesh that looks like chicken wire. A metal cot is bolted to one wall, and there is a stainless-steel toilet. It is five steps long and two and a half steps wide.

Green was sitting on the cot, inhaling through his nose and exhaling loudly through his mouth. Beads of sweat covered his forehead and his upper lip. For a brief moment I thought he had not heard me come in. The three guards lingered off to my left standing next to a small table, talking in low voices that were not quite a whisper. On the table was a plate piled with french fries and a second plate with a slice of pie covered with whipped cream from a can. There was a squeeze bottle of Hunt’s ketchup and a plastic cup with what looked like lemonade. Green looked at me and said, Hey. Just then the phone rang. A guard picked it up, spoke briefly, and handed it to Green. Green said, Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay, and handed the receiver back to the guard. He said to me, That was Mr. Roberts. I got turned down.

When my clients ask me to, I watch them die. When they don’t, I sit in my office until the courts and the governor’s office have all turned down our final requests for relief, then I close my door and call my client, just like Mark Roberts had just done. I make notes to remind myself not to say certain things, like Talk to you later, or Take care, or See you around, or any of the other meaningless expressions that pepper our everyday discourse and that become suddenly full of meaning when they aren’t true and can’t possibly be. I found myself standing next to Green with no Post-its to remind me what not to say and no script of what I wanted to cover. I said, I’m sorry. Green leaned forward and held his head in his hands. I wanted to be outside. I said, I just wanted to come see you to say thanks for trying to help me.

He said, All right.

I had no idea why I was there. Did I expect Green to say he had been making it up? Or maybe I hoped he’d reveal some proof that he wasn’t. What was I thinking? I got the attention of one of the guards and nodded toward the door. I said to Green, You have any messages or anything you want me to pass on to anyone?

He said, My old man used to beat me with a switch. Made it from a peach tree we had in the yard. He said he liked to use peach wood ’cause it left big ol’ welts. Mr. Roberts asked him how come he didn’t never beat me with his fist. He said ’cause he didn’t want to hurt his hands.

The guard put the giant key in the lock. Green said, Everything I done tol’ you is the truth. I swear to God.

There’s an old joke among death-penalty lawyers. Once you’ve killed somebody, swearing to tell the truth, so help you God, doesn’t pack quite the same punch it did before. I said, I appreciate it.

He said, Henry Quaker didn’t kill nobody. I know that for a fact.

I said, Thanks again, Green. I’ll see you down the road. He didn’t look up.

The guard opened the door, and I walked out into the twilight chill.

A SMALL GROUP of death-penalty opponents stood outside the prison, twenty or twenty-five people in all, a few black, the rest white. Each person held a small candle. Some had posters with the usual clichés: Why Do We Kill People for Killing People to Show That Killing Is Wrong? Et cetera. I nodded at several I knew. Brigitte walked over and asked whether I was representing Green. I said no. She asked whether I thought he would get a stay, and I told her they were moving him from the holding cell to the execution chamber at that very moment. She works in the French consulate’s office and is genuinely perplexed by the death penalty. She squeezed my forearm and said, This is terrible. Will you come stand with us?

Protesting against the death penalty in Texas takes a certain passion I do not have, or maybe what I lack is courage. The fraternity boys at the university across the street heckle the demonstrators and occasionally throw bananas and paper cups filled with warm beer. Sheriff’s deputies ticket their cars and threaten to arrest them if they chant too loudly or get too close to the yellow tape. My friend Dave Atwood spent the night in the Walker County jail after someone jostled him and his right foot momentarily crossed the police barricade. I stood several feet behind them, not part of them, feeling alienated, I suppose, and watched the minute hand of the clock on the prison tower slide toward six. At nineteen minutes past, the prison spokesperson came out. She reported that Green shook his head no when asked if he had a final statement, that he glanced briefly at his wife, and then stared at the ceiling as the injection began. He coughed twice, and was pronounced dead at 6:11 p.m. Another witness who covers executions for the local paper stood at the podium next. He said that the reporters could see bruises on Green’s arm and could hear Green saying, This is torture, before he lost consciousness. As another reporter stepped up to the lectern, I got in my car and drove off.

When I walked in Katya was in the kitchen. She asked how it went. I shook my head and asked her to tell me about her day instead. I went upstairs and kissed our sleeping son. I threw my clothes in the machine and got in the shower. When I came back downstairs, Katya was tossing a salad and heating up leftover red beans and rice in the microwave. Most death-penalty lawyers I know are married to other death-penalty lawyers. I’m glad I’m not. I am opposed to death. I want to come home and be far away from it. I asked Katya whether she had TiVo-ed American Idol. I said, Let’s carry our plates in and watch, okay?

She held my head in her hands, each hand cupping an ear. She kissed me and said, Sounds good to me.

IN MY DREAM I thought I heard a noise. I went downstairs to investigate. The wind had blown open the kitchen door. I drank a quart of water from the refrigerator, and the light blinded me. When I turned to go back upstairs I tripped over Lincoln’s stool. I’d told him dozens of times to put it away. I went upstairs and woke him up. It was nearly 3:00 a.m., and he had been sleeping deeply. He looked at me and then at the clock and said, Huh? I made him follow me into the kitchen. I asked him why he thought I had brought him there. He said he didn’t know. I asked him again. I told him he was a smart boy and he could figure it out. I waited. He said he didn’t know, and he started to cry.

I said, You left the goddam stool out again. I could have tripped and broken my neck.

He said, I’m sorry, Dada.

I said, Put it away.

He started to push it into the closet but a wheel had come off and it would not roll. He tried to pick it up, but it was heavy and unwieldy and he dropped it. It landed on my foot and sliced open my big toe. I said, Shit, and slumped to the ground. I grabbed some ice and wrapped it in a towel. Lincoln asked whether I was okay and I said no, but he didn’t seem concerned. I told him that it hurt a lot. He rubbed his eyes and said he was sorry. But he didn’t mean it.

I wanted real remorse from him. I stood up so I would tower over him. I raised my voice. I said he had really hurt my foot. I told him to look at me when I was talking to him. I said that when you hurt someone you have to apologize. I said that when you apologize you have to mean it. I said that I know that accidents happen but you need to take precautions to try to avoid them. I told him that he needed to be more careful, that he needed to put away his things, that when he hurt someone he needed to be sincere.

I was relentless. I wanted him to feel bad. I wanted him to cry. I knew at that point that it was a dream and that I was out of control, and I tried to make myself wake up, but I couldn’t. It was like a fat man was sitting on my chest. I was straining not to scream. I had that crazed, talking-through-one’s-teeth tone that people have when they’ve lost it but are trying to sound like they haven’t. But I couldn’t be kind.

He burst into tears. I had never understood that expression, but that’s what happened. He exploded with crying. His whole body was shaking. He was trying to control himself, to use the measured breathing we had practiced, and he couldn’t. He was shaking his hands, the way you would shake them in the cold to make them warm. He was saying, Dada, Dada, Dada. Again I struggled to wake myself up. I felt a fissure crack open inside my belly and a sensation like steam pouring out and I sagged to the ground. I hugged him. I told him that I knew he hadn’t done it on purpose. I kept saying that I knew it was an accident. I felt his tears on my cheek, but maybe they were my own. I squeezed him tighter, afraid it was too tight, and said that I knew he would not hurt me on purpose. I said, I just want you to be more careful, pal, that’s all. I’m sorry I shouted at you. He did not say anything. He wrapped his arms around my neck, like he was saving himself from drowning in my anger. I said to him, I’m sorry, Lincoln. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sweet boy.

I felt him relax. I felt him trust me. I said, Hey how about if I hurt you to make it even? He said okay. I asked him to get me a hammer. We both started laughing.

Katya appeared. She said, What’s going on?

I said, I thought I heard something in the kitchen.

I bolted upright. I was clasping my pillow so hard that my arms were sore. In the distance I could hear a train whistle. Katya was sound asleep. I walked into Lincoln’s room and sat on the edge of his bed. I watched his eyelids flutter and his lips twitch.

I feel like I understand some crimes and criminals. I could kill someone who killed someone I love. I could rob or steal. But I’ve never understood people who can hurt children. Knowing how they get to be who they are is not the same as understanding.

I kissed Lincoln’s forehead and touched his cheek. I watched him sleep. At the parent-teacher conference we had gone to a month before, his teacher, who’s been teaching thirty years, said to us, Lincoln is possibly the happiest child I have ever met. She could have told us that he was smarter than Einstein and it wouldn’t have been as good.

I asked myself, How can I not spoil this beautiful boy’s happiness?

Katya came in and asked me what was wrong. I said, I broke my promise, and I was also a shitty dad. I told her about the dream.

She said, You’re kidding, right?

No, I’m not.

It was a dream. That doesn’t count. And anyway, even in the dream, you weren’t shitty. Maybe a little harsh, but not shitty. You’re not shitty just because you’re not always perfect. And as per usual, you melted as soon as he started crying.

I said, So you’re saying that I was harsh and imperfect up until I hugged him?

She said, Yep.

I said, That’s an awfully thin line between good and bad.

She said, Actually, it’s not that thin at all.

BEFORE LINCOLN AND KATYA headed back to Galveston the next morning, he and I went to get donuts. He said, Dada, which kind do you think I should get, one with sprinkles, or one with chocolate icing? I told him I thought he should get one of each. He said, That sounds good to me.

Standing below the drive-through window, where the parking lot emptied into the street, a strategically savvy panhandler was hoping to collect change from donut lovers who would find it easier to give away their coins rather than put them in a purse. He had on a pair of Walkman headphones and a fat watch on his wrist. I drove by him and waved. Lincoln said, I think that man would get more money if he wasn’t listening to his iPod and wearing a fancy watch.

Later that morning, we all sat in the conference room to iron out the narrative we would try to construct at the hearing that was ten days away. It had two strands. One was that there was no evidence at all that Quaker had committed the crime or that he should be on death row. The blood in his car had an innocent explanation, as did the life insurance. The fact that his gun had disappeared was curious, but hardly proof of murder. He did not have any blood or gunpowder residue on him when he was arrested. No one had seen him at the house. By all accounts, he adored his wife and kids. Mark Roberts had asked me how he could even have been convicted, and the answer to that question had two words: Jack Gatling. Quaker had a lawyer who was a burned-out case.

In theory, there is a presumption of innocence in the American legal system, innocent until proven guilty, but in practice, it is just the opposite. Juries trust the police and the prosecutors, especially when all the jurors are middle-class white folks, as they were at Quaker’s trial. They think that if someone gets arrested and goes on trial, there must be good reasons to believe that he did it. Quaker’s lawyer could have called the neighbors as witnesses and asked them whether they had ever heard Henry and Dorris fight. He could have asked them to describe how Henry interacted with Daniel and Charisse. He could have called Henry’s coworkers. He could have called a scientific expert who would have explained that Henry would have had blood or gunpowder residue on himself and on his clothes and in his car if he had committed the crime. But Jack Gatling did none of those things.

Nor did he challenge the state’s expert who single-handedly persuaded the jury to sentence Quaker to death. James Grigson is known as Dr. Death. He was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association as well as the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians, but that did not stop him from testifying in hundreds of trials. Grigson claimed to have examined somewhere between two hundred and four hundred capital-murder defendants—the number varied from case to case, because Grigson could not keep his answer straight from one trial to the next. But that did not stop juries from believing him. Sometimes he would not interview the defendants at all; other times he would visit with them for fifteen minutes or so in the county jail, asking them what they saw when they looked at ink blots. He would then sit on the witness stand for as much as five hours, telling jurors that the defendant before them would undoubtedly be dangerous in the future if not speedily put to death.

His flamboyant predictions were spectacularly wrong. By some estimates, he was wrong more than 95 percent of the time. But that too did not stop juries from believing him. Juries would even sentence people to death who had not committed any crime. In one famous case, Grigson testified that Randall Dale Adams would commit more violence if not executed. Adams had been convicted of murdering a state trooper outside of Dallas. Errol Morris made a documentary about the debacle of the trial. As it happened, Adams did not actually kill the officer; someone else did. Adams was released from prison after his innocence was established. He had not committed any crimes prior to his wrongful conviction, and he has not committed any since. But Grigson was nothing if not charming. His avuncular demeanor and white lab coat endeared him to juries. They did what he asked them to. He told them that Henry Quaker would be dangerous if they did not send him to the execution chamber, and the jury obliged.

When it was time for Quaker’s trial lawyer to cross-examine the doctor, perhaps to ask him about the inconsistency in his numbers, or his expulsion from professional societies, or the many cases where his prognostications had proven so unsound, Jack Gatling stood up at the defense table and said, I have no questions for this witness. Gatling had been so convinced he would win an acquittal that he had not prepared even for the single witness that even he could have discredited.

Quaker had a spotless prison record. Part of our narrative would emphasize that Grigson had also been wrong in his case, and testimony from Nicole and other guards would help us there. But the problem we had was that this first theme in the narrative ultimately pivoted on the fact that Quaker’s trial lawyer had been so inept, and even though he had been, it was too late for us to raise that claim. Some people think that law is about truth. It isn’t, exactly. It is about timing. The time to prove that Henry Quaker did not kill anyone was years ago, at his trial, not now, a week and a half ahead of his scheduled execution.

But we also had a second strand to our narrative. We could identify the murderer. His name was Ruben Cantu, and the proof that Cantu did it was the sworn words of Ezekiel Green.

Kassie said, It sure would be nice to know why Wyatt interviewed Cantu.

I said, I agree. Why don’t you ask him?

Kassie said, Me? I’ve never met the guy. What makes you think he’ll talk to me?

I said, Melissa Harmon told me that he got divorced six months ago, that he drinks every night at El Tiempo, and that he’s a skirt hound. I’ll pay for dinner if you get him to talk.

Gary said, You buying dinner for all of us?

I said, If she gets something useful from Wyatt, sure, why not.

Gary said, Hey Kass, be sure to wear something nice.

I said, That’s my line, man.

Kassie said, Yeah, and it’s just as clever, no matter who says it.

THE NEXT NIGHT, we were all sitting at El Tiempo, with a platter of mariscos a la parilla and beef fajitas. The amount this dinner was costing me was out of proportion to how hard Kassie had to work. She told Wyatt who she was and what she wanted to know, and he bought her a drink and told her. The neighbor who had seen the strange pickup truck parked in the street had remembered the last three numbers of the license plate. Wyatt did a computer search and came up with Cantu. He had arrested Cantu before for drug possession and decided he was worth talking to. Kassie asked why he hadn’t arrested him, and Wyatt told her because he had no physical evidence, because Cantu had no motive, and because there was no evidence that Cantu even knew Dorris Quaker or her kids.

I asked Kassie whether she had asked him about the gun they found on the floor next to Dorris. She said, I’m not a moron.

And?

He looked right at me and said that he had no earthly idea what I was talking about.

Now I do not mean any disrespect by this, but police officers are some of the best liars in the world. Their philosophy seems to be, so far as I can tell, that they are the good guys fighting the forces of death and darkness, and that entitles them to break the rules when they think they need to and lie about it later when they deem it necessary. Wyatt would have sworn a lie on his dead mother’s grave if he thought it would help him convict someone he was certain was guilty. If I knew anything, I knew that. But knowing means nothing. Proof is what matters, and I had no proof, and no prospects of getting any. Wyatt was not going to bare his soul, not to Kassie and certainly not to me, and every second I spent fantasizing that he would was another second I might as well have spent in prayer, for all the good it was going to do Quaker.

She said, He seems like a nice guy. He played football at LSU.

I said, Started dumb, finished dumb, too.

Jerome said, I know that one. It’s Randy Newman, sort of.

When people start to get your references, it can be because you have become obvious and transparent. It can also be because they are learning.

That night at home I put on a Tony Bennett–Bill Evans CD and carried a snifter of cognac out to the patio. Bennett was singing My Foolish Heart and I was thinking about lines. Wyatt didn’t care that he was lying and probably didn’t even acknowledge that he was lying, because in the world where he lived, Quaker was guilty of a triple murder, and any facts that got in the way of that conclusion weren’t facts at all. He used one set of concepts to make sense of the world. I use another. Why is that? I wondered. Why do some people care about ends and others care about means?

Last August we sat on the beach and watched the Perseid meteor shower. Hundreds of them fired across the sky. Lincoln kept saying, Look, there goes another one. I explained to him that we see them because the earth itself moves through the Perseid cloud. He said, It reminds me of dodgeball, Dada. It’s lucky they don’t hit us.

I looked up and found Orion. The hunter. I was just drunk enough to feel insightful, and the sky felt ominous. Our case hinged on a murderer we couldn’t locate who had been identified by a murderer who was dead. Quaker was in big trouble. A part of me hoped he did it. A big part.

A WEEK BEFORE the hearing we got the results of the blood testing. The drops leading from Dorris’s body to the spot where the kids were killed all belonged to Dorris. So unless she shot herself, went into the other room, murdered her two children, then walked back to the sofa, lay down, and died, she too had been murdered. It would be a lie to try to save Henry by pointing the finger at his wife.

Then again, there are only so many truths I can accommodate. Our finite lives have only so much capacity. You can’t let every little truth exert an equal hold on you. It’s called prioritization. My central truth was that Henry Quaker did not kill anyone. That truth and no other staked a claim on me. If I had to be less faithful to some other ancillary truths in order to demonstrate that fact, who could fault me? Who was even around to blame me? Dorris’s dad was dead, and her mom was not exactly standing by Henry, but she wasn’t blaming him, either. She seemed unsure what to think, and I didn’t see her blowing any gaskets if I implied that Dorris killed herself. I don’t think I could be an army general and send teenaged kids to their certain deaths. But Dorris was already dead. I didn’t see the harm of killing her again.

Jerome thought it was a terrible idea, though, and he was right. At a trial, a lawyer can throw the whole platter of spaghetti at the wall and hope that a strand or two sticks. That’s all it takes, one juror with one reasonable doubt. If Quaker’s trial lawyer had not been comatose, he could have pursued that strategy. Point to Dorris, point to an intruder, point anywhere that was away from Henry. But it was too late for us to do that. At a trial, the defendant wins if it’s a tie. At the stage we were at, a death-row inmate doesn’t win unless it’s a blowout. We had to prove that Quaker was innocent, and if we were going to succeed, we needed a single story. Our story was that Ruben Cantu was the murderer. That was our story, and we were sticking to it.

What did we have? We would go over all the evidence of Gatling’s incompetence. We would point out that the neighbor had seen a strange pickup in the driveway. We could suggest that the truck belonged to Cantu. (Suggest being a euphemism that meant we could not prove a damn thing.) We could prove that Wyatt had interviewed Ruben Cantu. And, for the coup de grace, we would pull out Green’s declaration, stating that Cantu had murdered the Quaker family in a case of mistaken identity.

Gary said, Why do you even think the judge will let us put on any evidence of attorney incompetence?

Jerome added, And everything from Green is hearsay. She might not let in any of that evidence, either.

I said, It might be a short hearing.

FRUGALITY IS the mother of all virtues. Ben Jonson wrote that in 1598, in his play Every Man in His Humour, and the line is inscribed above the lintel of the twelve-story downtown office building where I sometimes work. My father is the cheapest—or, as he would say, the most frugal—man that I know. Once when we grilled hamburgers, someone in the group preferred his sandwich open-faced, so we were left at the end of dinner with the bottom half of a toasted bun. My father neatly wrapped it in wax paper and placed it in the freezer, next to a tub of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream, where it remained for nearly eight months, until I gained the confidence that he would not miss it and dared to throw it away. For his seventy-fifth birthday, Katya took a picture of Lincoln and me, standing beneath the lintel, pointing up to it with our right hands, and holding half a burger bun in our lefts.

Some months later, I saw my brothers admiring the photograph I thought I had given to my dad. As it happened, they were in fact looking at a photograph of the building where I work, but it was not the picture taken by Katya of Lincoln and me. It was a picture that my grandfather took of the building in 1924, when he opened his law practice in the very same building where I now have an office on floor eleven. Visible on the third-floor window facing Main Street were the words Harry Dow, Lawyer, and the six-digit number of his office phone. No one in my family had any idea. The building is in decrepit disrepair and ought to be condemned, and we’ve been looking for new space for the past two years, but at that moment, I believed I belonged there.

My philosophy is: live well, love others, and hope that someone loves you. We live one life on this earth and then we return to dust. We have our bodies and our brains but nothing I would call a soul. I have no faith in higher powers, and I believe that there is no fate, but coincidence is nonetheless a real and curious thing. I keep the 1924 photograph hanging on my office wall, right next to a copy of the picture that Katya and I gave to my dad eighty years later. I touched my finger to it and decided to take a walk around the block. The day was cool and crisp. It made me not want to smoke. I found myself at Treebeard’s, where I had not aimed to be. I was not hungry. I walked inside, scanning the tables for Judge Truesdale. I bought a bowl of crabmeat gumbo and a bottle of Dixie beer and sat near the cash register, where I could see everyone who came through the line. I finished the first bottle and bought a second. I sat there for two hours wondering if she’d come in, wondering why I was wondering, until the manager locked the door, and the busboys ate leftover links of boudin sausage standing in the kitchen and began wiping down the tables and stacking the chairs.

SEVEN-EIGHTHS OF THE TIME, in the week leading up to the hearing, I was a monk. Lights out at eleven. Up at four. A forty-five-minute run, a half-hour swim, an orange, a banana, a bowl of Grape-Nuts and a pot of coffee, and at the office by seven. For twelve hours I’d cram like a medical student, memorizing every line on every document in every one of the dozen banker’s boxes on the floor of my office. My plan was to be so busy that I had no time to appreciate how hopeless it was, but even hyperactivity cannot keep hopelessness at bay.

At precisely eight every night that week, like Swiss clockwork, my heart would start to race and my vision would blur and I would feel flushed even though my office window was open to the chilly air. I saw Quaker strapped down and his mother, Evelina, sitting in a wheelchair, watching through one-way glass, a canister of oxygen in her lap, plastic tubing running up her nose. I’d see flashing lights—my eye doctor calls them floaters—and I’d have to stand up and shake my head like a boxer beating the count to chase the image away. I’d walk two blocks to McElroy’s and sit at the bar with a double Jack and a cigar. I’d call Lincoln to tell him a story before bed and then Katya would get on the phone and for the first time that day I quit pretending that I believed that everything was going to be all right. She and Lincoln would get on the phone together and tell me what they had done that day, about Schlitterbahn Waterpark or the Harry Potter movie or the long walk with Winona. In the mirror behind the bar I could see myself smile.

I’d drive home and make a sandwich. I thought, I wonder if Quaker is sleeping now? On our last visit, he told me that if he did not go to sleep, tomorrow would never come. I’d turn on the TV and drink just enough bourbon to keep Henry from visiting me again until the following day.

THE HEARING WAS SCHEDULED to begin at eight thirty. We got there at eight. Judge Truesdale’s clerk came up to me when we walked into the courtroom and said the judge wanted to see me for a moment in her chambers. Kassie cocked her head. Gary said, That’s interesting.

She was wearing a short V-neck gray dress. Her legs were crossed and the bottom of the dress reached barely to the middle of her thigh. She had on a necklace of what I think were diamonds that brushed the tops of her breasts. If she was aiming for sexy, she had definitely nailed it.

Here I should probably confess what is probably obvious, which is that I find women completely inscrutable. When I was a young lawyer in Washington, there was another lawyer at the firm, two or so years senior to me, who was my friend. Our offices were adjacent, so we would see each other every day and talk about ordinary things. A group of us would go out for a beer after work most evenings. Jane and I worked for the same boss. We’d talk about him and our work. Once, after I bought three dollars’ worth of tunes from the jukebox, we discovered that we both played jazz piano just well enough to entertain ourselves and that neither one of us really understood Ornette Coleman. I said, You know the line in Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise is at Renee Zellweger’s house and she puts on a Miles Davis record and he says, What is this music? That’s what I think about when I hear Ornette.

She said, People think it’s a Miles Davis record, but it’s actually Charlie Mingus. Anyway, don’t tell anybody, but I feel that way, too.

Possibly she mistook my expression of surprise for something else. Our apartments were a block away from one another. As we were walking home from the bar, she grasped my hand in both of hers and said, What is going on between the two of us?

Later I would admire her forthrightness. But at the time, I was completely nonplussed. I didn’t know what to say. I was impressed with her, not in love. I considered her just my friend and was pretty sure there was no good way to say that under the circumstances in a nonhurtful way. So I stood there, mute as an idiot. I had no earthly idea what I had done or said that would even make her question conceivable. How could she apparently be thinking something that had not even crossed within a thousand miles of my mind? Was she delusional, or was I? If you ponder that question for a moment or two, you realize that it has no good answer.

Subsequent evidence would indicate that I may have been the one with problems of perception. During my first year as a law professor, I was assigned the job of sitting in on a course taught by a practicing attorney. She was a trial lawyer, and the course was a practical one. We would visit briefly before each class. Afterward, while a group of students clustered around her to ask her more questions, I would wave and drive home. After the last class of the semester, we walked out to the parking lot together, and I told her how much I had enjoyed the class. It was not a line. I had enjoyed it. We got in our cars, but I had left my lights on, and the battery was dead. She offered to drive me home. When we pulled into my driveway, she asked if she could come inside and use the toilet. I was standing at the kitchen counter, sorting through the mail, when she walked out of the bathroom, wearing nothing.

At some point, when you think you see the world one way, but the rest of the world apparently sees it another, then, no matter how big your own ego happens to be, you need to acknowledge the numbers and concede that the world must be right, and that you are therefore wrong. That idea is what leapt into my brain as I sat there in Judge Truesdale’s office. But Henry Quaker crowded her away. He was in a holding cell next to the courtroom, less than a hundred feet from where we were. He popped into a cartoon bubble, just like in Annie Hall, and whispered to me, Kiss her, man. Kiss her.

A prosecutor in a different case walked in with an order she wanted the judge to sign and leaned against the door frame. I told her hello. Judge Truesdale reached out her hand to take the order, but she kept her eyes on me. She said, I just wanted to tell you off the record that I’ve read everything you’ve written, or your associates have written, and I have real reservations about this case, but I am not sure there is anything I can do. From the corner of my eye I saw the prosecutor nod.

I said, Well, Judge, I think there is.

She said, We’re off the record here. I’m Jocelyn.

I said, Jocelyn. We are going to ask you to withdraw the execution warrant.

Her right leg was crossed over her left. She said, Hmmm. She smoothed her skirt and brushed something invisible off. She stood up and said, Can you help me with my robe here?

CONTRARY TO OUR WORST FEARS, Judge Truesdale let us put on every piece of evidence we wanted. Maybe she really was bothered by the case. We called the insurance agent, who recalled that she had aggressively pushed a life insurance policy on Henry when he had been shopping for auto insurance. The custodian of records for Daniel’s pediatrician provided records that indicated that Daniel did in fact get frequent, spontaneous nosebleeds. Six guards said they believed Quaker was innocent and shouldn’t be executed even if he wasn’t. He was a model inmate, doing exactly what authorities asked him to. Detective Wyatt testified that he had interviewed Ruben Cantu because Cantu owned a truck with a license plate that could have meant it was the truck the neighbor saw in front of the Quakers’ house. He said he never took Cantu seriously as a suspect, because, so far as he knew, Cantu did not know the Quaker family, but he also conceded that he had not looked into Cantu’s alibi.

I did decide to ask him about having tested Dorris’s hands for gunshot residue. He said it was routine. I said, Was it routine because you found a gun near her body? He said that there had not been a gun near the body. I said, So you thought she might have shot and killed herself and then disposed of the gun? The district attorney objected to that question and Judge Truesdale ruled in his favor and told Wyatt not to answer, but I was happy about that because I didn’t want to trade this trivial battle for the bigger war. I just hadn’t been able to help myself. I looked over at my team, making sure there wasn’t anything I’d forgotten to cover. I noticed Henry. He was barely suppressing a glare. I had to turn away, like he was a flaming sun.

Henry was sitting between Kassie and me. Jerome and Gary were right behind us. The guards prefer that when death-row inmates are in court, no one is sitting between them. I asked the guard whether he wanted me to change places with Henry. The guard folded his arms and shook his head. He said, Nah. Far as I’m concerned, he can stay right where he’s at.

We had a tussle over Green’s sworn statement. The hearsay rule prevents people from saying what other people supposedly said. The idea behind the hearsay rule is that the best evidence of whether someone said something is to ask her directly, rather than allowing someone else to give a secondhand report. But there are exceptions. Green’s claim that he paid Cantu to kill Tricia Cummings was admissible under a doctrine known as a statement against interest. Because Green was saying something that incriminated himself, the judge could consider it. But his statement also reported what Cantu supposedly told him—that Cantu had mistakenly killed the Quaker family, and that he had left a gun there to make it look like suicide. That was hearsay, and the district attorney strenuously fought to keep it out of the record. In the end, the judge decided that she would think it over, and we did not really care what she decided, because either she believed Green or she didn’t, and I was clinging to the hope that what she believed about what had happened would mean more to her than what she thought the rules of evidence allowed.

She asked us if we wanted to make a closing argument. We did. The prosecutor went first. He pointed at Quaker and said, Your Honor, a jury found this man guilty of murdering his wife and his two children. He turned and stared at Henry, and Henry looked back. He had a serenity to him, like he wasn’t entirely there. I thought how Lauren Bacall reacted in To Have and Have Not, when the Vichy officer took her passport and slapped her in the face. Later, Humphrey Bogart told her that she hardly blinked an eye. I think it was because her hatred was tempered by understanding. At least that was how I interpreted Henry’s stare.

The prosecutor reminded the judge that someone who has been convicted cannot overturn his sentence unless he can prove that every reasonable person would think he is innocent. We were nowhere close to satisfying that standard, the prosecutor said. There were any number of reasons—the insurance money, the blood in the car, the fact that Henry’s marriage was in trouble—to believe that he might have done it. If there was any reason to believe he might have done it, the judge’s hands were tied.

Everything the prosecutor said was correct. The law might not have been on our side, but principle was. When it was my turn, I reminded the judge that the only reason Quaker had ever been convicted was that his lawyer was so bad. I stuck to our story: that the evidence of guilt was massively underwhelming, and that there was good reason to think that Cantu had committed the murders.

Judge Truesdale said, I sure would like to hear from Mr. Cantu. Where is he?

I said, I’d like to know that, too, Judge.

We’d gotten Cantu’s DNA off the orange juice carton, but he was not in any police databases. He could have been dead, back in Mexico, or living next door.

She banged her gavel, and we were done. We stood as she walked out. As we were packing up our files, one of the guards who would escort Henry back to death row came over and said to me, Good luck, sir.

WE’D GOTTEN A SHORT LETTER from Walter Buckley. He was scheduled to be executed in two days. He had sent it two weeks earlier but it took awhile to reach us because he had misspelled literally every word in my address. He was not my client. He was being represented (using that term in its loosest possible sense) by Karl Christianson, a notoriously inept lawyer. Under a Supreme Court case called Atkins v. Virginia, the states are not permitted to execute people who are mentally retarded. It was difficult to figure out exactly what Buckley was talking about, but it seemed he was writing to say that his lawyer had never raised an Atkins claim. If true, this was an unimaginable dereliction. One criterion of mental retardation is an IQ of 70 or below. According to our database, Buckley had an IQ of 54. Based on his letter, I would have thought it was even lower.

As usual, Jerome felt like we needed to do something. I felt like we couldn’t. Quaker’s execution was a week away. And even though we had already written everything that I expected we would need to write, you never know. Things always come up. We didn’t know how Judge Truesdale was going to rule, and if she ruled tomorrow, I’d want to turn our attention immediately to appealing if we lost, or to holding on to our victory, if we won. I also wanted to meet with the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, who had the power to recommend that Quaker be released from prison, or at least moved off of death row, and to talk to the governor and the warden. We couldn’t be jumping into a case about which we knew almost nothing less than forty-eight hours before an execution. I said so.

Presaged by the envelope, virtually every word in Buckley’s letter to us was also misspelled. He used quotation marks apparently at random and no punctuation except commas, again seemingly randomly placed. Maybe he was retarded. Maybe, too, Christianson had raised an Atkins claim, and Buckley didn’t realize it. Who knew?

Jerome said, Is it okay for me at least to call Christianson and see if he raised the claim and get whatever records he has?

You don’t have to be hard-hearted to do this work, but you have to develop some defenses. We can’t save everyone. We can’t even try to save everyone.

I said, Sure. Go ahead.

MY BROTHER STEVEN was in town for the day on business, and he had brought with him his daughter Hannah, who is Lincoln’s age, so the two cousins could play. I got home an hour before they would head to the airport. The kids wanted to have a relay race against the dads. The rules were numerous, if not complicated. In good nature, I repeatedly violated one rule. I was just clowning around, but seven-year-olds don’t always laugh at the same things I do. Lincoln began to get angry and raise his voice. He told me not to cheat. I told him not to scream at me and promptly cheated again. He raised his voice again. I told him that if he did it one more time the game was over, and I cheated again. His entire body tensed up and he shouted at me, Stop cheating, Dada.

I said, That’s it. Game’s over, amigo. Tell Hannah and Uncle Steven good night and go get ready for bed.

Dada, you’re being too hard on me.

I pointed toward his room. He stormed up the stairs. I walked into the kitchen and poured myself a drink. Steven followed me in while Hannah stood by the front door. I asked whether Hannah would be disappointed if they left without finishing the game. He said, She will be, but don’t worry about that.

Steven and his wife have three children. Hannah is the youngest. I asked whether he thought I had been too tough. Steven said, He seemed to me like he was trying to control himself. You got him pretty mad.

I said, He needs to learn to do what I say, no matter how mad he is.

Steven said, I agree.

I said, I’ll go upstairs and get him. We’ll be right down.

After we finished the game, and lost, of course, with me playing strictly by the rules, and after Lincoln had brushed his teeth and we had read a book and told a story and sung a song, I said, Amigo, I’m sorry I cheated and made you mad, but when Mama or I or Nana or one of your teachers tells you what to do, you have to do it, even if you don’t want to, and even if it makes you really mad. Can you try to do that?

He said, I’ll try, Dada. But it’s hard sometimes. I told him I knew, but I wanted him to try hard. He said, Okay, I will. Will you sleep with me for five minutes?

I’m no expert on the Holocaust, but I do know that one group of scholars blames the tragedy on an essential feature of the German personality. Katya and I have discussed this, of course. When we were in Germany visiting her relatives, she pointed out to me all the ways that Germans defer to authorities that Americans do not even notice. Once, riding the train from Manhattan to New Haven, she commented on how the riders were oblivious to the conductors as they walked through the cars asking for tickets. On German trains, the riders treat conductors like they are lords. It’s the uniform.

Which is worse, too much deference, or not enough? How do you insist to a child that he do what others say, without raising him to be an adult who says he had to do what he did because someone told him to?

TEN HOURS BEFORE Buckley’s execution, at eight o’clock on Thursday morning, Jerome walked into my office with a sheaf of papers and reported that Buckley had dropped out of school in the seventh grade, that he had taken three IQ tests and scored between 53 and 59 on all of them, that he had never been able to live by himself, that three doctors, including one employed by the state, had deemed him mentally retarded, and that, in spite of all that, his lawyer, Attorney Christianson, had decided not to raise a claim that Buckley’s retardation made him immune from execution. I asked Jerome why not. He said, Christianson told me that when he went to visit Buckley, Buckley just didn’t seem that slow.

Kassie and Gary were doing research to determine whether there was some way that Judge Truesdale could call off Quaker’s execution in a way that would not allow the state to appeal to a higher court. I called them into my office, and the four of us debated. It wasn’t much of a debate. I was the only one suggesting that we were too busy to do anything, and that there wasn’t enough time besides, but it’s hard to be passionate in advancing the proposition that we should stand idly by and allow the state to execute someone who the Constitution says can’t be executed. They overruled me again.

The harder question was what to do. I wrote three lines on the whiteboard in my office: the Supreme Court, the federal court of appeals, state court. The problem with the first option was that the last time the Supreme Court ruled in favor of someone who had used the legal device we would be forced to use was in the 1930s. We’d spend a lot of time writing with virtually no prospect of victory. I scratched through it. The problem with the court of appeals was even larger. Many of the judges on that court are an embarrassment, and I was still thinking about the way they had gone home the night of O’Neill’s scheduled execution. In addition, federal law mandates that, with few exceptions, inmates present their legal claims to state court before proceeding to federal court. I knew we couldn’t satisfy any of the exceptions in Buckley’s case, and I couldn’t even think of a decent argument for saying that we could. State court is what we were left with.

But even getting in to state court would be a challenge. We had to present significant evidence that Buckley was in fact retarded, and we had to explain why it took us so long to locate the evidence. Proving he was retarded was not going to be the problem. Explaining why we were coming forward with the proof only hours before the execution was. The truthful answer is that the court-appointed lawyer who had represented Buckley for the past two years had not done his job, but that is not a winning answer. Under federal law, Buckley did not have a constitutional right to have any lawyer at all. Therefore, even if Buckley’s lawyer was comatose, he still got more than he was entitled to. I told Gary, Kassie, and Jerome to divide up writing the part of the petition that would lay out the evidence of Buckley’s retardation, and I would try to come up with some explanation for why we should be allowed to raise the claim at this, the eleventh hour.

The federal courts accept emergency pleadings by e-mail. The state court does not. We have an office in Austin, where the court is located. We let them know that we would be sending them the Buckley petition later that afternoon. They would make a dozen copies and run them across town to the court. At two that afternoon I finished what I was working on and asked Jerome to send me what they had. I made some revisions, combined our two parts into a single document, and sent it back to Jerome, so he and the others could put it in the proper format for filing. Actually, what I should say is that I tried to send it. It wouldn’t go through. Our whole computer network had crashed.

Initially I was calm. I called Austin and told them to call the court and let them know we might be a few minutes late. It was nearly four. Austin called back. The clerk of the court had said that they close at five on the dot. I didn’t have time for this. Gary was trying to get our computer system running. I screamed at Kassie to deal with the clerk. She called the court of appeals again and insisted that the clerk tell his superiors that we were planning to file something for Walter Buckley, who was scheduled to be executed in two hours, that we had finished writing it, and that we were experiencing catastrophic computer failure, which was delaying our delivery of the petition. He called her back and said that the presiding judge of the court said that the court closes at five o’clock.

At four thirty Gary got everything restored. It was going to be close. We e-mailed the document to Austin. Including exhibits, it was 107 pages long. They printed it and made the required copies. They called the court to let them know they were on the way. The clerk answered. It was not quite ten past five. He said, The court closed at five. The paralegals drove over anyway. The door was locked, and no one came to open it when they banged.

We had a problem. It was almost five thirty, and the papers that we had been working on for the Supreme Court were based on the assumption that we had lost in state court, not on the assumption that we had never managed to get anything filed in that court. We couldn’t file an appeal from the state court’s decision, because there was no state court decision. I won’t bore you with the details of why this is a complicated problem, but it is. So I quickly wrote something up, asking the Supreme Court to issue a stay of execution, promising the justices that we would get something filed in the state court the following day. I knew as we were e-mailing it to the Court at minutes before six that it had all kinds of technical legal problems, but I hoped they would not matter, that what the justices would focus on was the fact that Buckley had an IQ score somewhere in the mid-50s. But hope is an impotent indulgence. One day soon, I swear, I am going to give up on it completely. The justices unanimously turned us down.

By the time I called Buckley to tell him the news, at a few minutes after six, they had already strapped him to the gurney. I did not get to tell him that our pleas had been turned away because the judges do not really care about principles or justice. I did not get to tell him that we had tried, and that I was sorry. I did not have to tell him that if our office had state-of-the-art computers, he would have lived to see another day.

Gary came into my office. His eyes were swollen. He said, This is my fault. I should have replaced that server six months ago.

I said, Pal, there is a long list of people whose fault it is, including nine in Austin and nine more in Washington, and your name is not on it.

I called Katya with the news. I asked her to put Lincoln to bed without me and told him a story over the phone. I gathered up the team and we walked next door to Cafe Adobe. We went through two pitchers of margaritas without exchanging barely a word. At nine I stood up, told them they were the best lawyers I knew, and that I’d see them in the morning.

ON THE SIDE of the freeway, a woman standing next to a pickup truck with a blown-out front tire was frantically waving her arms. I stopped. She had no cell phone and wanted to use mine to call a tow truck. I didn’t think I would feel comfortable driving away before the wrecker got there, so it seemed just as easy to change the tire. I pulled the truck as close to the shoulder as I could, turned on the flashers, and asked her to stand a ways up the road to wave people away from the shoulder. Twenty minutes later she was good to go. She had a folded-over stack of bills in her hand that was two inches thick. She said, Please, take this. Buy yourself dinner. I told her there was not a chance. She said, Please. I am going to feel terrible if you don’t.

I said, Ma’am, I promise you that I will feel worse if I do. She said thank you a half dozen times. Disproportionate gratitude, I believe, is always sincere.

I waited for her to drive off, then pulled onto the freeway behind her. At home I checked on Lincoln and told Katya the story. She became angry. She wanted me to file an official grievance with the judicial conduct commission. She wanted us to hold a press conference. I wanted to share her sense of outrage, but I couldn’t. I felt peaceful.

The definition of lucky in life is a wife and son and dog like mine to come home to, and the good fortune to have not the slightest inclination or need to take a couple of hundred bucks a stranger is offering as compensation for doing a tiny act of kindness that any decent human being would do.

KATYA AND I both have five names on our lists. They are the celebrities we have given each other permission to sleep with, should the occasion ever present itself. All married couples have these lists, right?

Last winter a cab driver in Utah told me that her best friend and the friend’s husband had the same arrangement. Angelina Jolie was on his list. The week before, during the Sundance Film Festival, Jolie was standing in front of him at the Starbucks in Park City. He was a ski instructor in the winter and a raft guide in the summer. He probably made less than $25,000 a year. He told her that the latte was on him. I am clearly not the only delusional man in America.

Judge Truesdale called my cell phone. She invited me to coffee on Tuesday afternoon, the day before the execution. I was pretty sure Katya was wrong about her and I was right. Once we were watching a movie where a man called his wife to say he was working late. He went to a hotel with a client. When he got home, his wife, son, and daughter were eating dinner in the kitchen. He kissed his wife and then his children. Katya said, I could forgive you if you were to cheat on me, but if you kiss me when you get home afterward I’ll kill you. It was an empty gesture. There are two kinds of men: those who can cheat, and the ones who can’t. I’m not saying that either is better than the other. I’m just saying that Katya knew which group I was in.

When Ezekiel Green called me from death row on a cell phone he was not supposed to have, I didn’t want to know the terms of his barter. Now I did. Perhaps it is possible to be unfaithful without being disloyal.

IN 1924, CLARENCE DARROW saved Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from the gallows. The two young men had kidnapped and murdered a young boy named Bobby Franks, just to see if they could. Leopold and Loeb might not have been geniuses, but they were both supremely bright. Darrow made the astonishing decision to eschew a jury. His clients pleaded guilty, and Darrow threw their fate at the feet of the judge:

Your Honor, it may be hardly fair to the court. I am aware that I have helped to place a serious burden upon your shoulders…. I have always meant to be your friend. But this was not an act of friendship. I know perfectly well that where responsibility is divided by twelve, it is easy to say: “Away with him.” But, Your Honor, if these boys hang, you must do it. There can be no division of responsibility here. You can never explain that the rest overpowered you. It must be by your deliberate, cool, premeditated act, without a chance to shift responsibility.

What Darrow understood is that our system of capital punishment survives because it is built on an evasion. It permits everyone to avoid responsibility. A juror is one of twelve, and therefore the decision is not hers. A judge who imposes a jury’s sentence is implementing someone else’s will, and therefore the decision is not his. A judge on the court of appeals is one of three, or one of nine, and professes to be constrained by the decision of the finder of fact, and therefore it is someone else’s call. Federal judges say it is the state court’s decision. The Supreme Court justices simply say nothing, content to permit the machinery of death to grind on with their tacit acquiescence.

Darrow didn’t let them hide. He demanded that people who uphold the law take responsibility for their actions, especially when those actions are momentous. I think he was right. Jurors and judges who send someone to the gallows should be required to witness their deed and observe the execution. Every court of appeals judge who upholds a death sentence should have to visit death row and deliver the news personally. Supreme Court justices who refuse to grant a death-row inmate a stay of execution should have to deliver the news face-to-face to the inmate as he waits in the holding cell eight steps down the dank hall from the execution chamber, instead of having one of their law clerks call the inmate’s lawyer. If we are going to execute people in our society because we believe that it is an appropriate punishment for people who callously and irresponsibly take another’s life, then the people with the power not to execute ought to take responsibility themselves for imposing the punishment, or at least not negating it. It’s easier to kill somebody if it’s someone else’s decision, and if somebody else does the killing. Our death-penalty regime depends for its functionality on moral cowardice.

In Texas, the most gutless of all is the governor. If he wanted authority to decide for himself whether a convicted murderer should be spared, the legislature would give it to him in a heartbeat, but he doesn’t. He hides behind the jury, and behind the courts, and most of all, behind the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. The Board consists of seven feckless people who gave him a lot of money. The governor appoints them to six-year terms, and they do what they think he wants them to. If the Board recommends that an inmate be spared, the governor can go along with that recommendation or not, but if the Board votes against the inmate, then the governor’s hands are tied. Governors, like George W. Bush and Ann Richards, want the Board to turn the inmate down, and, through back channels, they let their cronies know that. Later, they stand outside the governor’s mansion and shrug their shoulders and say that the inmate received a fair trial, that it was reviewed by the courts, that his appeal for clemency was turned down by the Board, and that there is nothing they can do. Then they head off to dinner at the Four Seasons and talk about bearing the weight of permitting someone to die.

Is there any phrase in the English lexicon more immoral than There was nothing I could do?

But some people are changed by responsibility. Paul Brownwell, a cattle rancher in Giddings, was one of them. He called me at my office at seven o’clock on Monday night. He said, I wanted you to know before we tell the press that the Board just voted against recommending commutation in Mr. Quaker’s case. The vote was four to three. I’m just sick about it. It was the best clemency petition I’ve ever read. I’m sorry to be telling you this.

I thanked him for the call. I walked into the conference room where the others were eating a pizza and told them the news. We have among us fifty years of death-penalty experience, but everyone was stunned. In the extraordinary case—with an inmate who is mentally retarded, for example—we expect the Board to recommend relief. In the typical case, we expect the Board to deny relief, usually by a vote of seven to nothing. We had little experience with a vote of four to three. I had thought the clemency petition was a waste of time. It turns out that the real waste of time was not spending another hour on it to try to pick up one more vote. I’m not a cheerleader, but their faces were breaking my heart. I said, It’s not even close to over. We’ve got lots of arrows left in the quiver.

What I didn’t say was that I had a bad feeling we had already used the one with the sharpest point. I didn’t need to. They didn’t believe a word I was saying.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON Judge Truesdale called and asked whether we could meet for a drink at the Magnolia instead of coffee at Diedrich. She was sitting at a table in the back when I got there. The waiter came over and I asked him for club soda with lime. She said, I’ll have another. Bring him one, too.

When I’m in a bar or restaurant and I run into a judge presiding over one of my cases, I become a stick figure. I want to say what I think, but I feel like I can’t, and it is a short step from there to feeling like I am someone else, someone I recognize but do not really know, the way most people know their neighbors. I used to think it was because of ethical restrictions on what lawyers are supposed to say to judges about cases pending in their courtrooms, but that’s not really it. It is because they are not mortal. They hold the power to spare my client. For a short moment in a tiny space, they are God. I want to know what they are thinking, so that if they are thinking wrong, I can try to nudge them. If Moses can rebuke Yahweh, I can implore a judge. I want them to see the human reasons my client deserves to live, not the legal ones. I want them to be moral agents, not judges. But Moses turned away from the burning bush. I know exactly what I will say, and I also know I won’t.

When Katya was practicing law, she negotiated settlements with insurance companies. She would quibble over every last dime. When someone knocks on our door asking if we want him to power-wash the exterior of our house, she pays him whatever he asks. It is easier to negotiate on someone else’s behalf. But sometimes it can be hard to separate your own interests from your client’s.

I thought to myself, I will not be begging for my own life. I will be pleading for someone else who ought to live. No one has done that for him. Someone needs to. It is the very least he deserves.

Our drinks came. She raised her glass. I picked up my glass of soda to clink against hers. She nodded to the martini the waiter had also set in front of me and said, Use that one.

She said, What do you want to talk about? I told her I was uncomfortable discussing the case. I had no idea why I was there if I was not going to talk about the case, but there I was. I’d stew over that contradiction later. There were two olives in her drink. She used her thumb and index finger to lift one out. She ate it, then put both fingers in her mouth together to lick off the brine. Under the table her right leg was crossed over her left. She leaned forward. I felt her toes against my shin. She said, I walked here from my office. When I drink too much, I stay the night. I’ve already checked in. Bring your drink and come upstairs with me.

She was wearing a black silk blouse open at the neck and a string of pearls. She tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear. I wondered whether I would tell Katya. It’s one thing to sleep with someone because you want to. It’s a different thing to sleep with someone because you want them to do something. I once told Katya that I couldn’t sleep with any of the famous people on my list because if I did I wouldn’t know myself anymore, and if I didn’t know myself, I’d have to kill myself. I can’t live with a stranger. She had said, No one knows himself as well as he thinks he does, including you. People surprise themselves all the time.

In college I memorized chunks of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Future things then are not yet: and if they be not yet, they are not. And if they are not, they cannot be seen. If you could alter history with a minor transgression, wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t it be immoral not to?

She signaled the waiter and showed him her room key. She said, Put this on my bill. She stood up and drank down the rest of her martini. She leaned over and her lips were nearly touching my ear. I smelled the gin on her breath. I felt heat coming off her face. I felt her breasts pressing against my shoulder. She said, I think you’ll find it worthwhile. I felt a drop of sweat in my armpit. She whispered, Come on.

I saw Quaker in his cell, sitting on his metal cot, reading. Everything was dark, except for the book, illuminated by the 25-watt bulb of a small gooseneck lamp. I saw the crime scene photographs: Dorris, Daniel, and Charisse, their skin hued yellow, their blood almost black. I saw Lincoln sleeping. I heard Quaker say, In case you’re wondering, I didn’t kill my family.

I said, Judge, I can’t do this.

A VAN BACKED UP to a loading dock at the Polunsky Unit at two o’clock. Half an hour before, guards had led a shackled Quaker to the shower and given him fresh clothes. He felt nothing, neither courage nor fear, neither bitterness nor forgiveness, neither hatred nor love. He could not recall whether he had requested a final meal. He had written his mother a letter and had asked the warden to mail it once it was over. He told her about it when he talked to her on the phone that morning and told her good-bye. She would not be watching him die. He stood under the hottest water he could stand while three guards watched him, their hands resting on holstered cans of Mace they knew they would never need to use. He dressed and walked into the back of the Chevy van. One of the guards said, Inmate Quaker, I hope I see you tomorrow. Quaker nodded, his eyes soft. The other two guards got in the van. The one who had spoken wiped away a tear.

I TALKED TO HENRY just after he arrived at the Walls Unit at four and told him about the vote of the Board. I reminded him that we still had a petition pending in the Supreme Court, but that we all expected it to be denied. I told him that our indications were that Judge Truesdale was going to deny our request for a stay. I didn’t tell him why I was sure of that. He hadn’t said a word. I knew he was still on the line because I could hear electric doors clanging shut in the background. He said, You’ll be here watching tonight, right?

At five o’clock, Judge Truesdale called. She said, You’re not Joan of fucking Arc, you know. I was not sure how to respond to that. She said, I just signed an order withdrawing the date.

I said, Thank you, Judge. She hung up without another word.

The others were in Jerome’s office, discussing whether there was a way to create a legal claim out of the fact that Judge Truesdale had not issued a ruling. I told them she had called. I asked Kassie to call the district attorney’s office to confirm. She said, To confirm? You don’t believe her?

I said, Just call.

Ten minutes later they were standing in my office. Kassie had talked to Shirley in the DA’s office. Shirley believed that Judge Truesdale did not have any legal authority to withdraw the execution date. Under state law, unless a legal action challenging a death sentence is pending in state court, the trial judge cannot issue a stay of execution. The DA’s office interpreted legal action narrowly, and it was true that we had not yet filed a traditional challenge to Quaker’s conviction. Our theory was that we were entitled to gather the evidence to support our claim that he was innocent, and then file a claim based on his actual innocence after we had gathered the evidence. We believed that so long as we were using the judicial process to gather that evidence, which we were, the trial judge could intervene and halt the execution. Kassie explained that to Shirley. Shirley was unimpressed. Shirley told Kassie that the district attorney’s office was going to appeal.

Here’s why I could never be a prosecutor: because I could never be driven to kill someone. I understand death-penalty supporters. I used to be one. I can relate to the retributive impulse. I know people I want to kill. I’ve tried my hardest to save all my clients, but some executions don’t make me cry. There is very little that fire-and-brimstone Bible thumpers and I agree on when it comes to issues of crime and punishment. I believe the world would be better off without religion. But we do have one thing in common: I believe in evil. There are people who commit acts of cruelty so monstrous you have to barricade your senses from contemplating them because if you don’t their images will ruin every pleasure you know. When you are petting your dog, hugging your son, kissing your wife, they will slither in between you and the object of your affection and make you ashamed to be human. That’s why I shower when I get home from the prison and wash my clothes in a load of their own. I have friends who quit doing this work because they couldn’t keep the images from burrowing deep down into their consciousness and stealing all their joy. I doubt the evil men I know were born that way, but maybe some were. Nobody really knows. But I’ll also tell you this: Even the worst people I’ve ever known are sympathetic strapped to a gurney. They’re no longer cruel or evil. Some are repentant, some aren’t. What they all are, at that moment, are helpless, deeply broken men.

I have a recurring dream: Someone has killed everyone I love. He’s tied to a chair, his arms cuffed behind him, his legs bound. There’s a blue bandana tied around his throat and he can barely breathe. Both he and I are bloody and bruised. I whip him with a gun. His head sags. Blood is pouring from his mouth and nose. I reach my right arm out and press the barrel to his left temple. He is not defiant. He is not contrite. And always, moments before I wake, I try to imagine how this is going to feel.

In the Hebrew Bible, the government does not carry out executions. The death penalty is inflicted by the goel, the avengers, family members of the victim. In Islamic law, the family can spare from death the criminal who caused them harm. I think that if we are going to have the death penalty, the family members should carry out the executions. Some of them would do it. Maybe I would, too.

But not in the dream. In the dream I drop the gun. It clatters to the floor, and I walk away. It’s not a betrayal not to feel a need to kill.

At five thirty the clerk from the Supreme Court called to tell me that our petition had been turned down. He asked whether we were going to be filing anything else. This is a boilerplate question that he always asks, and the answer is always no. He wants to go home. The law clerks want to go home. The justices want to be able to concentrate on their poker games. A judge on the court of appeals once wrote an article saying it was hard on him to be at dinner parties on the night of an execution because the possibility that a last-minute appeal might be filed made it hard for him to enjoy himself. When I told the clerk that I was not yet sure I could feel him stiffen. He thought I was being flip. He had not heard that the judge had withdrawn the date and that the state was appealing. I said, Sorry for making y’all stay late tonight.

I called Henry again. It was about the time they’d move him from the holding cell to the execution chamber. The guard who answered the phone was unusually polite. He used the word sir three times in our three-second conversation. Hello, sir. Yes sir, he is right here. One moment, sir. I told Henry that Judge Truesdale had withdrawn the date. He did not say anything, but he must have reacted. I heard the guard saying, What is it? Henry told me to hold on, and I heard him tell the guards. I heard one of them shout, All right!

I told him that the DA was appealing and we were a long way from out of the woods. He said, I don’t even count the chickens once they’ve hatched. I wait till they’re supper.

That’s what he said, but in his voice I thought I could hear relief.

AT JUST PAST SIX, we got a copy of the district attorney’s appeal. The argument was brief. They wrote that because no appeal was pending in Judge Truesdale’s court, she did not have any authority to withdraw the execution date, and they requested that the court of appeals order her to reinstate it. We were in the conference room. I zinged my Super Ball off the thick glass door. I said, I think they blew it. Everyone looked at me. I said, They asked the court of appeals to order Judge Truesdale to reset the date. I don’t think they can do that. Setting an execution date is a discretionary act, and courts of appeals cannot order lower-court judges to do something if that something is discretionary. I paused to see whether anyone disagreed. No one did. I said, I guess we should file a response, just in case.

Gary started to crank it out. All he planned to write was that the court of appeals had no authority to order Judge Truesdale to do what the DA had requested. But the court of appeals beat us to it. At seven we got their opinion. Gary said, This is unbelievable. They gave them a friggin’ road map.

It was true. But now here is what you have to understand to appreciate exactly what we were feeling: When the court of appeals rules against us, as they do pretty much all the time, they ordinarily just tell us that we lose, and that’s it. You can write a sophisticated appeal that is three hundred pages long, and the court of appeals will say, We’ve considered your argument, and we reject it. They do not tell you why; they do not reveal their thinking; they do not tell you which features of your argument they don’t accept. They just say: You lose. But not this time. The court of appeals wrote:

Under state law, a court of appeals may not compel a lower court to perform a discretionary act. However, when a lower court’s act is ultra vires, the court of appeals has authority to overrule that act and restore the status quo ante. Because we have not been asked to do so, we express no opinion on the desirability of such correction in the current proceeding.

Ultra vires is legalese for beyond its authority. That phrase made my heart race. The court of appeals was agreeing with the DA.

One Saturday night when I was fourteen and my brother Steven was ten, he was cooking himself a hamburger for dinner. I flipped it from the skillet onto the floor. The dog ate it in a flash. Steven waited up for my parents to get home and told them what I had done. My dad asked him how he thought I should be punished. Steven proposed that I be forced to go a week without dinner. My dad said, That seems a little severe. What if he had to cook you a new hamburger tonight and another one tomorrow? Steven said that sounded like a good idea to him, and so that’s what happened.

It is a grievous insult to my honorable and deeply principled father to have been reminded of that childhood episode by the Texas court, but there it was. The court of appeals told the DA that they could not correct the problem the way the district attorney had asked them to, then added that the district attorney had not asked them to do the one thing they did have the power to do. I could see my brother Steven nodding at my dad’s advice. And despite what some others may tell you, the district attorneys are not imbeciles. At eight o’clock they sent us a copy of their newest filing, which was identical to the previous one, save for the last page, on which they asked the court of appeals to declare that the decision withdrawing the execution date was void and of no effect, and that the warden was therefore still under an order to carry out the execution before midnight. At eight fifteen the court of appeals issued an order saying that Judge Truesdale’s attempt to nullify the execution date was null and void.

EVERY CASE HAS its own unique moment of panic where the last best hope has just evanesced and the only honest corner of your rational brain tries to convince the rest of your emotional and effectively delusional self that you can keep pulling the trigger for as long as you want but the target has left the room, but of course if you were rational you would have stopped doing this work long ago when you realized that nearly all your clients end up dead, so you horde a hundred tricks, a thousand, for convincing yourself that what appears to be reason is actually surrender, and surrender is never reasonable, or at least never honorable, and so you start firing wildly like Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs where she can’t see an inch in front of her face but is going to go down shooting, and just because it’s a movie doesn’t mean it couldn’t really happen that way, and so you are convinced that the fact that she killed the bad guy means that you will, too. Justice will prevail.

Jerome said, We need to file an original writ.

Ah Jerome, my very own Jodie Foster.

An original writ is an appeal filed directly in the U.S. Supreme Court. Most pleadings that are filed in the Supreme Court are appeals from a lower appellate court’s ruling. We had not filed anything in any lower court of appeals. We had placed all our eggs in one basket, the highly remote possibility that Judge Truesdale would do the right thing, and our million-to-one shot had paid off. If it had failed, we would have filed something. Once it succeeded, we relaxed. How many ways could we have been wrong? We didn’t expect to succeed. When we did, we didn’t expect the DA to appeal. When they did, we didn’t expect the court of appeals to intervene. When they did, we didn’t expect them to do the DA’s work for them. I had explanations for all these decisions, but as I tell my students at the law school, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. The bottom line is that there was nothing we could appeal to the Supreme Court, and it was too late to file anything in the lower courts. So in a way, Jerome was right. This is known as the mathematics of small numbers. When there is only one option, that option is the right answer.

I did not need to remind him that we were coming up on the hundred-year anniversary of the last time the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a death-row inmate on an original writ, because he already knew. Our lone option was a puny, shriveled, impotent protest.

I said, Go ahead. Tell the Court it’s coming. I’ll call the governor and tell them we’re filing a reprieve request. Then I’m going to the prison. Call me every ten minutes.

In several moments of realistic lucidity, anticipating this southern turn, I had drafted a letter to the governor, laying out the argument that Quaker was innocent, and would have been found innocent if his lawyer had not been inept. I asked Kassie and Gary to tinker with it and send it by e-mail. Gary was in Kassie’s office, his hand resting on her shoulder. They looked lovely together, and I thought I was going to cry. How could I know so little about the lives of these people with whom I spent so much time? To how much of the world was I utterly oblivious?

THE PRISON WAS two hours away. I did not have two hours. I had maybe an hour and a half. I had called and told the warden I was coming. I asked them not to move Quaker out of the holding cell until ten. That would still give them two hours to carry out their protocol, more than enough time. They told me they would wait until exactly ten, not a minute later.

During the daytime, the drive from Houston to Huntsville is beautiful. The piney forest presses against the interstate from both the east and the west. At night, it’s inky black. Once I got north of Conroe, the road was empty and dark. Kassie called every ten minutes, just as I had requested. Every call went like this: I’d answer by saying, Any news? She’d say, No, nothing yet. I’d say, Thanks for the update. Talk to you in ten.

I had no interest in being alone with my absence of ideas. I called Katya. I told Lincoln good night. I turned on a country music station. Katya once suspected that her iPod has a brain, because the random shuffles produce perfect juxtapositions. It’s just math, I said, not divine intervention. I wish she had been there with me. Gordon Lightfoot was singing about books you won’t read because the endings are too sad. It was too obvious to be ominous. I changed to a Motown station. There was Gladys Knight, right on cue to challenge my rationality, singing a song about saying good-bye. Proximity to death is religion’s most successful proselytizer.

When I was taking flying lessons, before my first solo flight, Quan—the instructor—and I headed out over the Katy Prairie. It was a perfect day, not a cloud in sight, not a whisper on the radar. I turned south and flew us toward the Gulf of Mexico. But summer weather on the Gulf Coast can be confounding, and a dense fog blew in fast. The typically calm Quan took the controls and said, a little too loudly, I’m flying the plane. You couldn’t see a thing. He was flying by the instruments, but they don’t help you see the runway. The wind was ferocious. I did not know enough to be scared, but when Quan finally flew us into visibility, he opened his window, lit a cigarette, and shook one out of the pack at me. I suddenly started shaking so hard that the cigarette fell from my mouth. It rolled under the seat. Quan said, Dive. I looked at him. He said, You’re flying now. Dive the plane. I did. The cigarette appeared. Quan reached over and picked it up, then he stuck it back in my mouth.

Lessons in life are context specific. Contexts are never the same. If there are no lessons you can use, does that mean there are actually no lessons? Driving to the prison, I struck a match to light a cigar and somehow dropped it. I couldn’t very well make a car dive. I reached down to put out the flame before my car caught fire, and when I did my front right tire briefly ran onto the shoulder. At nearly a hundred miles an hour, it made quite a racket. I yanked the car back into my lane. I almost laughed out loud, imagining killing myself on my way to an execution, imagining what the hell else could go wrong. That’s when the flashing lights appeared behind me.

I PULLED ONTO THE RIGHT-HAND SHOULDER and left the engine running. I was looking out my sideview mirror, hoping to get a measure of his attitude from his gait. The trooper managed to approach my car from the passenger side, completely out of my sight, and when he banged on the window, the surprise caused my bladder to leak. He asked for my license and proof of insurance and appeared ready to take his good old time. I handed them over, fighting the temptation to ask him to hurry up and write me a ticket. He asked if I knew why he had pulled me over. I didn’t have time to play this game. I said, I know I was speeding. Can you please just hurry up and write me the ticket. I have to get out of here. He was holding a flashlight he had been shining down at my license he had placed on a clipboard. He clenched his jaw and shone the light in my eyes. The bright beam reflected off my seething anger, and I felt no impulse to look away.

He said, What exactly is the hurry?

Recently on a stretch of highway near where I was a trooper had pulled over a young college student who was speeding his dog to an emergency veterinary clinic. The encounter was caught on the trooper’s dashboard-mounted video camera. While the driver pleaded with the trooper to let him get back on the road, the trooper took his time, telling the driver there were plenty of other dogs out there if his died. The dog did die. Sometimes I consider modifying my opposition to capital punishment where child and animal abusers are involved.

I said, Officer, I am a lawyer and I have an emergency. He waited for me to go on, skeptical there is such a thing as a legal emergency at nine o’clock at night in the middle of nowhere. I said, I am a death-penalty lawyer and there is an execution scheduled for right now.

He hadn’t heard that one before. He lowered the clipboard and shone his light at the ground. He said, Prosecution or defense?

If you’ve never been tempted to lie, you’ve never been in love. Truthfulness is overrated. The world works the way we want it to because of a thousand little innocent lies. I suddenly realized that in the back of my mind I had started fashioning my story as soon as I saw his strobe. Any story would do. I had to get out of here. My phone rang. I said to the trooper, It’s my office, and I answered. Still no news. He said, I asked whether you are prosecution or defense.

Fuck it. I was just so tired of this. I practically spit it out. I said, I represent the defendant.

He had started to glance down at his clipboard, but his head jerked up, like a fishing pole when the diving fish snaps the line. He had the heel of his right hand on the butt of his holstered gun. He bent forward from the waist so his face was framed in the window. I was not going to look away. He would have to blink.

I won. He broke the stare and stood upright and looked down at my license. I thought to myself, Shit. What have I done.

The trooper placed the clipboard under his arm and grasped the door frame with both his hands. He said, Sir, I have been in law enforcement for thirty years. I had a friend, a guard in Huntsville, who was killed when the Churrasco gang tried to break out. Do you remember that? He left a wife and three baby daughters. I still sit next to them in church every Sunday. I am a Christian, sir. I do not believe it is man’s province to carry out God’s punishment. Not all my fellow officers agree. I’ve always found it perplexing that God’s word is truth, but His creatures disagree as to its meaning.

He tore my ticket in half and dropped the pieces on the passenger seat. He said, I’ll radio up ahead so you don’t have any more problems. Please do me a favor and keep it under a hundred.

THE WARDEN WAS WAITING for me when I got to the prison at ten minutes after ten. A guard started to pass a metal-detecting wand over me. The warden waved him away and said, Follow me. We walked back to the holding cell where I had visited with Ezekiel Green not two weeks before. It was nighttime, like the old days, when they carried out executions at midnight, and as we crossed the small patch of grass, I looked up and saw a sky full of stars. I saw Saturn and next to it Regulus, brightest star in Leo, Leo the Lion, king of the jungle, powerful and fearless, the opposite of me.

Sitting at the ocean’s edge and staring out to sea, or lying in an open field and looking at the heavens, I experience the same feeling that might well be the opposite of awe. It is the powerful realization that nothing means anything. The universe is so big and so old, and we are so small and so ephemeral, that the very concept of our place in the world is an absurdity. None of my dichotomies makes any sense. Whether I am a good husband or a philanderer, a loving father or an absent one, a caring lawyer or an indifferent hack, is so trivial as to be irrelevant. Trivial is too big a word. They matter about as much as whether Winona chews up half a pair of Katya’s expensive shoes or whether I smash a cockroach. You can laugh at your smallness or cry. The result’s the same. Nobody cares whether Quaker lives or dies, and nobody should, because nothing is worth caring about.

Well, at least that’s what I tried to tell myself.

The danger of perspective is that it can cause one to conclude that everything is just an aesthetic choice. Whether you are good or bad, assuming those words even mean anything, is, morally speaking, roughly equivalent to whether you prefer chocolate or vanilla. You can disbelieve that if you want. Like I said, belief is a choice. But truth has nothing to do with whether you believe it.

WHEN THE WARDEN SWUNG OPEN the heavy door and I saw Quaker in the holding cell, he was listening to an Al Green CD and—I am not making this up—dancing. The warden looked over at the three guards and furrowed his brow. They dropped their heads but made no move to unplug the music. The warden quietly closed the door behind me. I did not hear it lock. Quaker held up his right hand like a cop stopping traffic and sang a song about being tired of being alone. He asked one of the guards to turn it down a little and said to me, I love the reverend. Then, What’s going on? Why’s this taking so long?

I asked one of the guards if I could sit in the cell with Quaker. He said, This’ll probably get me fired, then he swung open the door and I walked inside. I stuck out my hand. Quaker paused, still cautious and reserved, then smiled a huge smile and took my hand in both of his. He pulled me toward him, like I was a scared dog on a leash, which wasn’t far from the truth, and when he let my hand go, I felt as awkward as a boy on a first date who doesn’t know whether to kiss the girl. Quaker wrapped his arms around me, and I hugged him back. His eyes were moist, but—and this is the craziest thing—he seemed almost happy.

The phone rang and one of the guards answered it. Quaker said, It’s peculiar, I know, but I feel really good. I know why they call it being at peace. I’ve been buzzing on the inside for so long, and now it’s calm, like the ocean with no waves. Even this morning on the row, all this noise and banging, all the usual shit, but it was like muffled, like I was underwater or something.

The guard hung up the phone and told us it was time to go. Quaker smiled again and nodded at me. Shouldn’t he have been shackled? Was he shackled? He said, I hope Pascal bet right. I want to see my Dorris, and my babies. But you know what? Even if I don’t get to, I don’t want to be here anymore without them. You know what I’m saying, Professor? Either way I win.

I said, It’s been a privilege to represent you, Henry.

He said, Do me a favor and don’t be second-guessing all your decisions for once. I know what you did for me. I know you believe me. Tell them lawyers in your office how much I appreciate it.

I will. I will.

And here. Please give this to my mama and tell her I love her.

He handed me his Bible. He hugged me again. He whispered in my ear, Thank you. I might have felt his lips brush against my cheek.

The guard who had answered the phone said, I think we got to go now, Henry.

The guard called Henry by his name. Funny that’s what I remember.

TWO OF THE GUARDS took Henry by either arm. The third opened the door to the courtyard for me and pointed me toward the door for the witnesses. When the door closed behind me, I heard Henry singing.

My phone rang. Kassie told me what I had already inferred. She said, The Supremes denied us. It was five to four. The governor turned us down, too.

I felt my heart quicken. In the Supreme Court, there is something called the rule of four. With only a few exceptions, nobody has an automatic right to have the Supreme Court consider his appeal. You have to get permission. The legal device used to make this request is the petition for writ of certiorari. By a long-standing convention of the Court, if four justices want to hear the case, the Court will hear it. This rule of four can create an anomaly. When a death-row inmate is facing execution, it takes five justices to grant a stay of execution. So it is possible for four justices to want to hear the case, but unless a fifth justice votes to grant a stay, the inmate will be executed before the Court can consider his case, and if the execution goes forward, there will be no case to hear. In the esoteric language of the law, the case will be rendered moot by the death of the petitioner. Many years ago, Justice Lewis Powell would always provide the fifth vote for a stay if four of his colleagues wanted to hear a case, but since Powell’s retirement, nobody does that. Over the past few years, there have been more than a dozen inmates executed even though four justices wanted to hear their case, because no fifth justice would provide the necessary additional vote for a stay.

But I remembered something. Fifteen years earlier, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the appeal of a Texas death-row inmate, and after the Court announced that decision, a trial court scheduled the inmate’s execution. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stepped in and granted the inmate a stay. According to the Texas court, if the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case, then it would be unseemly for the State of Texas to carry out an execution in the interim. I said to Kassie, We have to file something in state court and ask for a stay so that the Supreme Court can consider the appeal. I told her of another case where we had made a similar argument, so she and the others could work off those pleadings as a template. I said, Call me as soon as it’s filed.

Then I called the attorney general. Charles Allred was the assistant assigned to the case. I’d met him once. He looked barely old enough to shave. People who are so young that they still believe themselves to be immortal should be barred from facilitating death. I told him we intended to file something and explained our theory. I said, I know your usual practice is not to go forward with an execution while an appeal is pending, and I just want to make sure that you all will wait to go forward until our appeal is disposed of.

But nothing is pending yet, right?

It will be within the next few minutes.

It was ten fifty. He said, I’ll give you until eleven, and he hung up.

After the fiasco surrounding the Buckley execution, when the court of appeals had closed before we could file our papers, that court instituted a system for electronic filings. Kassie called. She said, It’s short, and it’s not very good, but it’s ready. Do you want to look at it? I told her just to file it and then to call Allred.

I said, Thanks for getting it done. Call me as soon as you hear something.

I had been standing in the courtyard, right beside the door that opened into the area for the inmate’s witnesses. There were separate doors leading to other areas for witnesses related to the victim, and for the press. There were no witnesses for the victims, so both those rooms were being used for press. A reporter named Marcus Godbold walked outside and said to me, Aren’t you going to come in? They’re getting ready to start.

Are you sure?

Well, they just opened the curtain, and your guy’s on the gurney.

ONCE ON THE LOWER Guadalupe River, a five-mile stretch of whitewater in central Texas that’s mellow except when it’s flooded, one of the kayakers in a group a quarter mile downriver from me missed his roll three times on the swollen river and had to swim. He got pinned between his boat and a massive tree. Water was pouring over his head. He was screaming, I don’t want to drown, don’t let me die. I was running the river with Craig. We both had throw ropes, and I had taken a swift-water-rescue course, but that was pretend. My real-life experience with treacherous rescues was nil. Craig paddled into a two-boat eddy behind a boulder as big as a truck. I followed him in. He pointed to a spot on the bank, and said, Let’s set up rescue lines there. It was so loud I wasn’t sure I had heard him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear him. He wedged his boat between two rocks and went scurrying toward the spot.

Two hours later, we were at the takeout, washing down Snickers bars with bottles of Fat Tire, which tastes a lot better than it sounds. I was glad Craig had been there. If it had been up to me, I might just have paddled on, hoping the guy would make it, leaving his rescue to his buddies and the EMTs. I would have read the papers and checked out the whitewater paddling Web sites, looking for news. It would have bothered me forever. I don’t know anybody who wants to be paralyzed by panic.

Maybe I learned something from that experience. But like I said, lessons lose something in translation. When the reporter told me Henry was on the gurney, I had no idea what to do.

INMATES ARE EXECUTED by a cocktail of three chemicals. The first is a barbiturate that makes the inmate go to sleep. The second causes paralysis. The third induces cardiac arrest. They give the second drug for the sake of the witnesses. If the inmate were not paralyzed, he would flop around like a fish out of water when the third drug stopped his heart. The first drug is for the sake of the inmate. If he doesn’t get enough of it, he will feel himself suffocating to death after his diaphragm is paralyzed from drug number two, and the third drug will inflict excruciating pain, like pouring muriatic acid into an open wound.

Two executioners sit in a separate room and watch for the warden’s signal through a strip of one-way glass. The warden stands at the inmate’s feet, next to a phone. He reads the death warrant out loud, and before he nods to get things under way, he calls the attorney general and the governor’s office to make sure it’s appropriate to proceed.

I called the office. Gary answered. I said, Get the goddamned thing filed.

It’s almost done.

They’ve got Quaker on the gurney. Just file it.

He said, Hold on. I heard him shout to Kassie.

Impotence is unremarkable. Of the millions of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust, some of them were children who died while their powerless parents watched. Hundreds of people a year get executed in China, Iran, Iraq, and Sudan, and the government bills the family for the cost of the bullet to the brain. I read about a woman who was watching her husband and their two children climb a mountain in Austria. The daughter fell, their arrest lines snapped, and all three plunged to their deaths. Did she scream? Did she run toward them? I read about a man holding his twin boys on a roof in Haiti during a hurricane. One slipped and the raging flood waters carried him away. Did the man think about jumping in after him? Did he cover his other son’s eyes?

Is there any shame in not going through meaningless motions? You can throw yourself into the gears, but most of the times jet engines suck in a bunch of birds, the plane keeps on flying.

I called Connie, the warden’s assistant, and asked her how I could call the phone in the chamber. She said she didn’t know. I did not believe her, but I didn’t have time to argue. I called the one judge on the court of appeals whose cell number I know and got her voice mail. I called Allred’s office and got his, too. Who else could I call? What could I do? I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do a thing. I called Allred’s boss. After the fourth ring, Marcus Godbold opened the door to the courtyard again. He said, You better hurry up.

I RAN INTO THE WITNESS ROOM. I said, I’m here, Henry, but I had no idea whether he could hear me. I heard him talking to the men who were next to him.

He was saying, I truly am innocent. One day, I hope somebody will prove that. Dorris was the love of my life. Daniel and Charisse were our greatest joys. I could never have harmed them, and their deaths destroyed me. Not a single minute of a single day has gone by that I haven’t missed them terribly. He looked at me. He said, And you believed me.

I could see a single tear spill out of each of his eyes. He looked at the two guards standing on either side of him. He looked into the room where the executioners were. He looked at the warden. He said, When the truth comes out, I do not want any of you to feel guilty for what is happening here tonight. I mean it sincerely. You all have treated me fairly and with respect. You’ve done what you had to do. I respect that. This is not your doing, or your fault, or in your control.

The warden squeezed the bridge of his nose. One of the guards wiped his eyes with his forearm. Henry looked at the warden. He said, That’s it.

The warden seemed lost for a moment. Then he took a copy of the death warrant and read it out loud. He asked Henry if he had a statement. Henry said, Warden, I’m ready.

The newspaper the next day would say that Henry started softly to sing a Psalm. It wasn’t a Psalm. I recognized it. It was a Tracy Chapman song. He was singing about saving a space in your heart. But who was he singing to? Dorris? The children? Was he saving the space, or was someone else supposed to save it for him? These are the questions I wanted to ask. He turned his head and faced the window separating him from me. Could he see through it, or was he seeing his reflection? I think I might have shaken my head. He smiled, like it was a joke. He had to be able to see me. He said, Thank you, man. Thank you. Then he faced the ceiling and sang again.

This could not be happening. We had an appeal pending. My head fell against the window, like a Muslim in prayer. The warden nodded at someone, and instantly a guard was behind me, his hand on my shoulder. I said to no one, We have an appeal still pending. Could anybody hear me?

He seemed to relax. I said, I’m here, Henry. I’m here. I’m standing right here.

He turned his head toward me. He mouthed, Good-bye. He coughed gently and closed his eyes.

No.

I slumped down onto the floor, my back against the wall separating me from him. I heard a chaplain repeating a monotonous prayer. I watched him play with his beads. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I did not look down to see who it was.

At 11:37 p.m. the doctor pronounced him dead.

EARLIER I SAID life has no lessons. That’s not exactly true. There are lessons, but only for the wise. If you don’t learn them, you have only yourself to blame. There might not be anything you can do about it, but it’s still your own fault. Fault and free will are unrelated ideas.

We represented a death-row inmate named Darrin Grand. The judge who presided over his trial had carried on an affair for more than ten years with the district attorney who prosecuted Grand. At the time, each was married to someone else. They kept their relationship secret.

People don’t care about murderers, or about the constitutional rights of men like Darrin Grand, but right and wrong aren’t a matter of popular sentiment. If you were getting a divorce, and you found out the judge was sleeping with your spouse’s lawyer, how confident would you be that the judge was fair? Maybe you can’t imagine getting a divorce. Do you want the pitcher’s father calling balls and strikes when your kid is standing at the plate?

Two weeks before Grand was supposed to be executed, an assistant district attorney gave us an affidavit confirming that his boss had been sleeping with the judge. We filed an appeal citing the alleged affair. The court of appeals ruled against us, saying that all we had was rumor and statements from third parties. They demanded proof of the affair with firsthand evidence. The appellate court’s theory boiled down to this: Since the trial judge and the DA weren’t talking, the state could go ahead and execute Mr. Grand, even if everyone else in the courthouse, from the other judges all the way down to the nighttime cleanup crew, swore the affair had gone on.

Some days murderers steal my spirit. Most of the time, though, it’s judges.

But for every ten or twenty gutless panderers, there’s a soul that houses righteous indignation. One of them lived north of Dallas, and we won the lotto when our case was randomly assigned to his court. He ordered the former judge and prosecutor to sit for depositions. One of law’s mysteries is the power of the oath. Witnesses swear to tell the truth, and they usually do. Even presidents can’t resist. The DA and the trial judge both admitted to the affair.

But none of that happened until many months later, and it never would have happened at all if Grand hadn’t managed to escape being executed on the night the court of appeals turned us down. After the state court denied our request for a stay at eight o’clock in the evening, we decided to file something else. We more or less made it up as we were writing it. It had no chance of succeeding. None. It was such a feeble theory that, as I write these words, I can’t even remember what it was. All I know is that it was like heaving the ball toward the hoop after all the fans have left the arena, the lights have been dimmed, and the officials have taken the basket down.

Pursuit of futility, however, is not necessarily a futile pursuit. By the time the other side filed its response, and by the time the appellate court ruled against us yet again, it was half past eleven. Prison officials said they could not carry out the execution in the remaining half hour. They put Grand back in the van and returned him to death row.

We had run out the clock. We kept Grand alive for a little longer, and in that time we stole, we proved what the judges on the court of appeals probably thought—what they secretly hoped—we never would, which is why Grand is still alive today. There is no such thing as delay for the sake of delay, because delay’s shadow is where relief often lurks.

Why hadn’t I remembered Grand? Why hadn’t I done something to stall? I could have kept banging on the window. I could have struggled with the guard if he tried to pull me away. I could have barged into the press witness area and shouted to them what was going on. I could have tried to barricade myself in the holding cell. Maybe the guards would have cooperated. Nobody knows. I did not even try to stop them from escorting an innocent man to his death. I was a German watching the brownshirts take my neighbor. I could have rushed into the execution chamber. I could have caused a commotion. I could have tried. I did none of that. I stood there. I was idle. I was a man making phone calls, a wordsmith, a debater, an analyst.

I could have, I could have, I could have. The three words that enable all evil.

Quaker needed action. I gave him tears.

I CALLED THE OFFICE. Kassie put me on the speaker and I told them all what had happened. I could hear their silence. My brother Steven keeps telling me I need to hire a grief counselor. He should know. He also works with people who are staving off the flood with teaspoons. One committed suicide last year; she hanged herself in the basement, right next to the washer and dryer. I talked to them until I was sure they were as okay as one can be, and told them I’d see them tomorrow.

Katya was in bed watching TV. I said, I can tell you about it in the morning. Don’t wait up for me.

I want to. Are you okay?

Not yet.

I returned phone calls from reporters at the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American Statesman, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times. I like all the reporters, but that’s not the reason I called them back. I called them so I did not have to be alone with my thoughts.

MAYBE HE DID do it. It’s not impossible.

JENNIFER HECHT WROTE a book called Doubt. There’s a thirteen-question quiz near the beginning (e.g., Do you believe that some thinking being consciously made the universe?; Do you believe that the world is not completely knowable by science?). According to Hecht’s scoring scale, I am a hard-core atheist… of a certain variety: a rationalist materialist. I took offense at that. That’s not me at all. I’m a deeply spiritual person.

I was tempted to go back over the quiz and change a few of my answers from yes to not sure so that my grade would accord with reality. But I couldn’t bring myself to lie.

Doesn’t that prove that I was right and she is wrong?

Maybe belief isn’t a choice after all. Maybe truth is.

I GOT HOME at a little after two. Winona was waiting for me in the kitchen and followed me up the stairs. Lincoln was sleeping on our bed. Katya was reading. She said, He asked if he could sleep in here so we could all be together.

I sat down next to her. I rested my head on her shoulder and stifled a sob and told her all of it. Lincoln woke up. He said, Hi, Dada. What time is it?

I said, It’s late, amigo. Go back to sleep.

Okay. Good night.

Katya and I held hands and watched him. I ran my fingers through her hair. Neither of us said anything. There wasn’t anything to say.

When I got out of the shower, Katya had fallen asleep with the book on her chest. Winona’s legs were twitching, her head on Lincoln’s hip. I poured brandy into a snifter and sat in the rocking chair at the foot of the bed. I picked up a book of Anne Carson poems. Anger is a bitter lock, she says. But you can turn it.

I turned off the lamp and closed the book. I sat there rocking, watching them sleep, hearing them breathe, my pillars.