their thoughts, he added, “However, his head has been shaved earlier this evening, and he has had his last meal.”
One of the reporters called out, “What was his last meal?”
The guard consulted his notes. “Two cheeseburgers, a milk shake, and a slice of blackberry pie.”
“Did he eat it?”
“I believe so.”
Charles Stanton narrowed his eyes. “My daughter had her last meal twenty years and ten months ago. Let’s get on with it.”
The guard looked startled at this outburst. It was his first execution, of course, and he had been unprepared for emotional reactions from the witnesses. He decided to ignore the comment. He cleared his throat and resumed his speech. “About ten minutes from now, the ‘tie-down team’-a group of officers in helmets and black body armor-will enter Mr. Harkryder’s cell. They will manacle his legs, cuff his wrists in front of his body, and attach a belly chain to the handcuff links. At that time, the prisoner will be marched the forty paces or so from the quiet cell to the room beyond that wall, where he will be seated in the electric chair. At that time I will open the blinds on the observation window. Are you with me so far? If anyone wants out, now is the time to leave.”
No one stirred. The two young men in dress shirts and running shoes were making notes on pads of lined paper.
Spencer was sitting on the left aisle of the second row, with a good view of the door that led to the hallway where the quiet cell was located. He wondered if the area was soundproof. He could hear no murmur of voices, no sounds of doors closing or footsteps. If there had been screams, would he have been able to hear them?
He looked at his watch. Two minutes had passed since the last time he checked it. He looked around at the other witnesses, wondering if any of them would be unable to handle the strain of watching a man die in the electric chair. Would the doctor standing by attend to fainting witnesses, as well as checking to see that the condemned man was dead?
Spencer could feel his heart beating, and his breath was coming in gulps. He wondered if he had overtired himself too soon after surgery, or whether he was feeling the anxiety that Sheriff John Boone had felt when the time came to hang Frankie Silver. He thought that Boone’s anguish must have been worse: in 1833 the Burke County sheriff had been executing a nineteen-year-old girl whom he knew to be innocent of first- degree murder. In those days, innocent people could and did go to the gallows, but nowadays, only the most heinous of crimes is punished by the death penalty: rarely a first offender or a single-victim killer, rarely an upstanding citizen driven beyond emotional endurance. With few exceptions, today’s death row is the pit of the sadist and the psychopath, the paid assassin, and the refuse of the drug world. No innocent young girl defending her child would ever reach death row today. It was harder to feel charitable toward these men than to feel sorrow for the plight of Frankie Silver. Their appeals for mercy were not the shining arguments of innocence but the specious claims of technicalities, loopholes, and political maneuvers. He could wish mercy for some of them, but he could not pity them, even as he grieved for a girl who died a century before he was born. She was not one of them.
Spencer heard the two reporters in the front row whispering to each other. “This is way cheaper, man,” one of them was saying. “North Carolina claims that it costs $346.51 to kill a prisoner by lethal injection. But the chair uses only thirty-two cents’ worth of electricity.”
“It’s more painful, though,” the other reporter said.
“Nah. Two thousand volts. You’re unconscious in two seconds. You never know what hits you.”
“You sure about that?”
“Guess we’ll find out tonight. See if he yells or anything.”
It seemed to Spencer a long time before the hall door opened. Fate Harkryder, hunched over his chains, shuffled into the room, surrounded by guards in black padded armor. A man with a Bible trailed the procession, reading aloud in a steady monotone. No one paid him any mind.
The condemned man wore carpet slippers covering his bare feet. The legs of his trousers were slit to the knee, and he had a close-cropped buzz cut that in any other setting would have made one think of boot camp. He was pale, with beads of sweat on his forehead, and his eyes kept darting around the room, looking for a familiar face, or perhaps a way out.
With practiced ease, the tie-down team backed the prisoner into the wooden chair and fastened the airplane seat belt straps to his wrists, legs, and chest.
“That was fast!” muttered the reporter in the front row. “Wonder who they practiced on.”
“Do they still call the chair Old Sparky?” his companion whispered back.
Spencer looked at his watch. Less than two minutes had elapsed since Fate Harkryder had entered the death chamber. They had made him wait twenty years on death row, but at least the end, when it finally came, would be mercifully quick.
The warden, who had been standing beside the right-hand doorway, approached the chair and said a few words to the condemned man. The witnesses could not hear what was said, but they could see Fate Harkryder’s face, and he appeared to make no reply. He was staring at the glass window in front of him, squinting a little, as if he were trying to make out individual faces. The guard dimmed the lights in the witness room.
As the warden turned to walk away, a member of the tie-down team placed a dark leather cap on the prisoner’s head. The top of the cap contained the metal fitting to which the wire would be attached. The current would enter the body through the headpiece. It was fitted with a snap-on flap that covered the top half of the prisoner’s face. Now he was merely a human figure, pinioned in a wooden chair.
As the warden took up his old position beside the control-room doorway, the peal of a telephone broke the silence. One of the reporters yelped and grabbed the arm of his companion. Charles Stanton held up a photograph of Emily. Spencer gripped the sides of his chair. He was holding his breath.
A voice from the other room said clearly, “No. This is the death house.” Then silence.
“Wrong number,” another witness muttered, with a giggle that was somewhere between embarrassment and terror.
The execution itself began without Spencer’s at first being aware of it. He knew that the room lights would not dim, as they did in old black-and-white gangster movies, but he had expected a loud buzzing noise, or some other indication that high voltage had been turned on. He let his eyes stray for a moment to the stricken face of the chaplain, and then a gasp from behind him made him look again at the man in the chair. Fate Harkryder had stiffened, and he appeared to be straining against the straps, or perhaps the force of the current had thrown him forward against them. For about a minute, although it seemed much longer, the current surged through the prisoner’s body, keeping him rigid against the restraints, and then the body slumped back.
No one moved.
