Featured in Elm Leaves Journal, Winter 2016
Sandra went with me to visit my boy at the state penitentiary, an unforgiving castle-like fortress with a splendid view of the lake from the cellblock. We were walking past the pleasant house outside the gates. It had a dog house inside a chain-link fence. The dog, a cute pug, was running around in the yard loose. And then I saw the kitten, who was meowing at the front door. The dog jumped up on the porch and the kitten playfully chased it off. I was thinking how sad it was that they had to live next to the pen. And then I saw the little girl open the door and call her pets inside.
“That could be me,” Sandra said. “When I was growing up in that house. We moved away when I was fourteen.”
“Weren’t you afraid to live next to the pen? Weren’t your parents afraid to bring up children so close to the worst mess of hardened criminals in the state?”
“Honey, my parents knew one thing for sure—if one of those guys busted loose, he wasn’t going to tarry. He wasn’t going to come to our house and ask for a sandwich and a change of clothes. He was gone.”
“So you weren’t afraid.”
“Oh, no. We played in the yard on the grass. We would peek through the wire and watch them do their exercises. There were some mean looking guys. There was one guy with a scar right down the middle of his face, top of his forehead, down the nose, down the middle of the lips and chin. A big slash. It was fascinating.”
Sandra has a sweet nature and a sense of fairness, all maybe gained from growing up next to the pit of evil.
But they’re not evil. I can’t believe they are all evil. Some of them maybe. Not Kevin. Not my sweet boy. That trouble in California? He says it wasn’t him. I believe him. It has been nothing but agony and despair from the beginning, from the first news of his arrest to the time they locked him up here. I should be grateful they brought him back here, close to home. I can visit him. I can lay eyes on him.
“They still used the electric chair when I was growing up here,” Sandra was saying. “Sometimes if I stayed up late—and I did on the scheduled executions, they couldn’t stop me—the lights would flicker around midnight. I knew what was happening, but my parents never said a word.”
I was gazing into eternity when suddenly I saw another kitten shoot across the grass and leap onto the porch.