MY JOB TO REMEMBER?
After my second divorce, I went to change my driver’s license back to my maiden name. I was filling out all the paperwork in my neat and purposeful handwriting and came to where it asked for my two emergency contacts. I put my mom and dad. I was a 41-year-old single mom with two failed marriages under her belt, whose parents would be called if I died in a car crash, because I had nobody else to make arrangements or grieve for me. When my number was called, I joked with the woman behind the counter about how glad I was to be divorced, so I could get a new photo on my license. Then I sat in my car and cried, because I felt more alone than I had in a very long time.
That fear of being forgotten was still deep within me. For so many years, that 16-year-old boy from high school, who left me devastated by moving on so soon, had convinced me I was easily discarded. But when I really thought about some of the most significant relationships I’d had, I realized that was never true. I was never immediately forgotten, there was never a clean break, people always tried to come back, and I never left anyone who didn’t ask for another chance. They all wanted to hang on to at least a part of me. One old boyfriend recently said that he sometimes pictures me driving along with the windows down, singing along to a particular song on the radio. I didn’t remember that at all, but I loved that that was how I existed in his mind. And I finally realized that I had confused a hormonal boy who just wanted to spend the summer with a girl, any girl, with being easy to forget or insignificant. I let the misconceptions of that naïve, impressionable teenage girl color my world for decades and bleed into other parts of my life. Why should I care if someone remembers me or not? I started telling myself, “You know what? You have your shit together, you really do bring a lot of stuff to the table. If they tear you up and forget about you, that’s their problem.
“Time to take stock and move on.”
*
Peckerwood Hill, where Texas prisoners have been buried for more than 150 years, is a peaceful place on a fine summer’s day, somewhat creepy when the weather isn’t so great. It is also a memorial to wasted lives and what it truly means to be forgotten. You don’t see many flowers on graves at Peckerwood Hill. If you die in prison in Huntsville and nobody wants your remains, chances are this is where you’ll wind up. Hundreds of dead men and women lie beneath unmarked crosses, a relic from the days when nobody cared if you had ever lived, let alone died, on their watch. Nowadays, if you were an inmate in the general population, they’ll furnish you with a solid headstone made by other inmates, and with your name and date of death painted on in crude lettering. Until recently, if you were executed, all you were afforded was a date of death, your prison number and an “X,” a symbol that you’ll never escape the horror of your crime. If you were executed today, they’d at least include your name.
But none of the headstones contain clues as to when they came into the world, where they died or why they wound up in prison in the first place. If you were a con artist or a car thief, you might end up buried next to a rapist or a baby killer. On a recent visit, I noticed the headstone of a Tillman Simmons, which tells me he was led to the electric chair on September 26, 1927. Google tells me he was sentenced to death for the murder of a man named Frank Usry, in Bexar County on August 20, 1924. Except that it wasn’t Simmons who shot Usry, but his accomplice Matthew Briscoe. Would I have given Simmons the death penalty? Probably not.
Not far from Simmons’ grave is that of George Hassell, who killed his wife and eight children on the night of December 5, 1926, with a hammer, a razor, some stockings, an axe and a shotgun. He was sent to “Old Sparky” on February 10, 1928, and I’d say he’s rotting in hell. About 50 yards away from Simmons lies Thomas Mason, the man who reminded me of my grandpa. When Mason was arrested, he laughed and said, “I don’t know what the big deal is over just getting rid of my mother-in-law.” I think he probably deserved what he got. A few rows from Mason is the resting place of Spencer Goodman, the guy who looked like my childhood friend. And over by the road lies Kenneth McDuff. The guy buried next door doesn’t have a name, but pity his poor soul.
It troubled me that I could discover the crime of Tillman Simmons in a couple of seconds and not remember some of those men I saw executed. What does that say about me? Is it normal that I’ve forgotten? Maybe there’s something wrong with me, or maybe it’s to be expected, given that there were just so many. I tell people I saw 280 people executed, but the truth is I don’t really know. It might be 278, it might be 283. But if you’re a journalist, you don’t remember everybody you’ve interviewed; if you’re a surgeon, you don’t remember everybody you’ve operated on.
They’re all there, in a big, red filing cabinet in my office. But sometimes I’ll pull out a file, read the notes in my own handwriting, all the accompanying documents, and still remember nothing about watching them die. When I got home from Peckerwood Hill that day, I opened up that filing cabinet, which is ready to burst, to get a few facts straight. In Napoleon’s mugshot, he looks confounded, and repentant. But maybe that’s just what I want to think, because Gary Graham’s expression doesn’t look too much different. In fact, you could define most of the mugshot expressions as “doomed.” The day that picture was taken was the beginning of the end. It was the end, at least of any life worth living.
I discovered that the last inmate I saw die wasn’t George Rivas, as I’d thought, but a guy named Keith Thurmond, who I had no recollection of whatsoever. It tells you how shattered I was, that the memories weren’t even going in, never mind disappearing. Thurmond murdered his wife and her boyfriend in a fit of jealous rage, after they moved in together across the street. Despite all the evidence pointing toward him, he angrily protested his innocence on the gurney. According to my notes, the last words I heard in the death chamber were, “Go ahead and finish it off.. you can taste it.”
But where was the man whose name and crime I couldn’t remember, but whose face was etched on my mind for all time? I could still see him, staring at the ceiling, a single tear running down his cheek. I could still visualize the witness room, containing nobody he knew. But he remained elusive. Maybe he deserved to be so lonely and forgotten. Or maybe it was my job to remember.
I began pulling files, eliminating the maddest, baddest and most notorious; the men who’d written me letters, intrigued me with their intellect, made me laugh. And then I found him: Caruthers “Gus” Alexander, still young in his mugshot, but with the same unmistakable contours, and only second alphabetically in my cabinet. I could have saved myself a lot of searching.
In the early hours of April 23, 1981, Alexander collided with the car of a nightclub waitress named Lori Bruch. Prosecutors said he lured her from her vehicle, tied her up, raped and strangled her to death. Two children found Bruch’s naked body in a flooded gutter the following morning. She had a two-year-old son. Alexander was on death row for 18 years before DNA testing proved him guilty. He called the results “bunk.” According to his attorney, he was intelligent, articulate, good-natured, likable and unlikely to reoffend. He was executed on January 29, 2001. A clipping from the Item, written by me, says the execution was witnessed by members of Bruch’s family, and it troubles me greatly that I can’t remember them being there. But I was right in that nobody was there for Alexander.
At the time of his arrest, Alexander had a common-law wife and two stepchildren, who would have been adults when he was put to death. I wonder if they forgot about him and moved on, or if he told them not to come. I wonder if I walked past his little stone, up on Peckerwood Hill, that nobody ever visits. I wonder if his execution made anything better. Did it give his victim’s family peace? Did it make anyone feel victorious? Or was Napoleon Beazley right? Did it just make victims of all of us?