The ceiling seems to move, to zoom in at him then out again, in the same dizzying way the observers seemed to swing in the execution room. Willie shuts his eyes. He lies heavily on the cot in the holding room, his lips throbbing and his limbs tingling with the memory of the current that tore through his body, yet didn’t kill him. I’m not dead, he thinks. The chair didn’t kill me.
He’d thought at first that it had killed him, that even in death he could feel the deputies’ hands unstrapping him from the chair, the same as it feels when you’re alive. They’d moved so quickly, as if they couldn’t get him into the grave fast enough, and then the thought of the grave terrified him, if this was what it was to be dead. But then he could stand, he could walk, and as the buzzing in his brain faded, his understanding grew that something had gone wrong, that the chair hadn’t killed him after all.
Soon, he hears hushed tones in the corner of the room, and shortly he feels a hand on his. He opens his eyes; Father Hannigan is standing at the edge of the cot. “Willie,” the priest says gently.
Willie takes a long breath, in and out.
“How do you feel?”
Willie looks at the ceiling, the gray concrete now holding still. “Tired,” he says. He is, overwhelmingly. He would like to sleep forever. He feels the priest’s hand tighten around his own.
“They gonna put me back in the chair?” It is an effort to form the words.
“I don’t know.”
Willie lets his eyes drift from the ceiling to the priest.
“They’re calling the governor.”
Willie doesn’t even try to understand. “They got to put me back in the chair. But this time they got to do it right. I been waitin’ so long.” He shuts his eyes, and sleep is like an undertow, pulling him irresistibly beneath its surface. He can still hear the sounds of the jail; voices in a nearby room, the scrape of a metal chair leg against the floor as somebody sits down, the slamming of a door. The sound of the crowd outside is a steady thrum, soothing as rain on a tin roof, and then it is rain on a tin roof, the tin roof of his childhood home, where he lies in bed in the early morning, his eyelids heavy with sleep, sealed shut, impossible to open as much as he might will them to, because his mother is waiting for him in the kitchen, then she is not waiting—he can hear her footsteps approaching, hears the door open, hears, “Git up, boy,” but it is not his mother’s voice. It is the voice of Sheriff Roselle.
Willie forces his eyes open and sees Roselle thrust a pair of handcuffs and shackles toward Sheriff Grazer, who stands in the corner of the room. “Shackle ’im up,” Roselle says. “He’s going back to Iberia.”