After Burl and Sheriff Grazer have left his cell, Willie lies down on his cot to wait. He’d thought to pick up the Bible Father Hannigan gave him months ago, or one of the magazines the deputies give him when they’re finished with them, but it doesn’t seem right to read about movie stars when you’re about to die, and the stuff in the Bible he doesn’t believe, though he’s tried—he’s read the Bible, he’s prayed, he’s gone through all the Christian motions, hoping to believe. Wanting to believe. He figures it would make this whole thing easier if he did, but he can find no comfort in religion, in the book his mother lives by. And so he lies on his cot, watching his cell fill with the golden light of evening, just waiting. Waiting: he is tired of it.
He shuts his eyes. Water drips rhythmically from the pipe in the corner of the cell. From down the hall, he can hear radio voices talking in the bullpen and an inmate weeping. Outside, the clock bells sound; it is six-thirty. Five and a half more hours. Something briefly slices through his body: the hint of a shiver, maybe; the trace of a tremor. But it is so slight he can’t discern its origin: expectation or terror. Maybe both. He is as glad for the waiting to be over as he is frightened of the death he’s waiting for.
Willie’s known many people who’ve died. Mo Bunyon’s heart stopped cold one day as the old man sat in the shade of an oak tree, his legs crossed and his lip full of dip. Frankie Dunham disappeared in the bayou and Butch Clover got crushed at the mill by a rolling log. But these deaths don’t come to mind when Willie considers his own. These are stories, legends, experienced communally and at arm’s length, part of his childhood vocabulary. Only once has he actually seen the passage from here to there, and this is what his mind turns to, when he thinks of death, over and over again.
His Uncle Breeze had been dying before their eyes, growing thinner, frailer, reedy-voiced, but somehow they hadn’t really noticed. Or Willie hadn’t noticed—he was twelve, he was busy, he was a boy—until one day he came home at midday and found Breeze laid up on the couch. Resting, the old man said, but he never once got up again. Willie and Darryl and their parents sat on a stool beside him, taking turns at vigil, giving the old man ice chips, pudding, juice. Willie remembers the man’s fattened legs, the way his feet became lost in their own swelling, the brittle foot skin stretched and cracking. He remembers the heat of the fire, those cold, fat feet so cold anyway. He can remember the smell: sweet, rotten, beets and dead mice. He remembers the old man’s swollen belly and the strained wheeze, the rasp and rattle of saliva and air in his throat. When it was Willie’s turn to watch, he was afraid to look away, afraid also of those rare lucid moments when his uncle’s eyes would open and, back from wherever he’d gone to, Breeze would have something to say. Those moments had terrified Willie, but the aftershocks of death had terrified him more, the shuddering of the lifeless body. After that, any notion Willie had of death as something peaceful was gone.
He tries not to imagine Grace’s death. But sometimes the visions come to him unbidden: her blond hair matted with blood, the shattered skull, the crimson pool spreading beneath her, her lips—which hours before had been against his own—gone slack around the gun. And when these visions come, it is all Willie can do not to beat his head against the concrete walls of his cell, his soul aching with regret; he ran away. He’d have never let it happen if he’d stayed.