licence within narrow confines of truth and credibility. Nonetheless, all scenes are recounted as closely as possible to how I witnessed them or how they were told to me.
Oh, how well do I remember the night Poor Willie died,
The flowers lay lowly drooping in the mud,
And the warden had agreed that to suit Poor Willie’s need,
He would stop the circulation of his blood.
—Underground ditty,
Kentucky State Prison
Execution
Eve
Raymond S. “Willie” Baxter lay clutching his blue woolen blanket close beneath his chin, gazing up through the barred window high in the rear wall of his cell. For twelve months that tiny window had provided Willie’s only view of the outside world. Through it he had watched the seasons change, had gazed at the stars long into the night, and—his greatest pleasure—had listened to the songbirds that nested in the towering black gum tree in the prison yard. Willie liked birds.
This February morning the sky was leaden. A mantle of low-hanging clouds had induced a chill in the usually mild pre-spring Kentucky weather. Worse, it had blotted out the sun. That annoyed Willie, for he and the sun had conspired in a pastime that delighted him. On better days the golden rays filtering through the bars cast a latticework of shadows that inched their way across the barren cement floor and slowly climbed the opposite wall. Willie watched the shadows intently, trying to guess the time of day as they made their slow progression. Despite months of trying, he’d never mastered it—not the way Tom had. Tom could predict the hour within two minutes of the actual time registered on the face of the large Seth Thomas clock mounted above the green-and-tan door directly across the corridor from Willie’s cell.
Sun or not, Willie had slept late this morning. The muted hubbub of sounds rising from the main prison yard just below his window told him that the day was well underway. Captain Rankin had let him sleep late. Captain Rankin did that often, for Willie never ate breakfast anyway. But there’d be coffee, rich and freshly brewed by Captain Rankin in his office, with plenty of sugar and canned milk to stir in it. Death house inmates were the only convicts allowed unlimited amounts of sugar and milk for their coffee. Even on the outside, Willie had heard, few people in these wartime days of 1943 could obtain unlimited amounts of sugar and milk—even if they could find coffee. Willie smiled at the thought. Captain Rankin was good to him.
Willie kicked back the cover, stood, and stretched long and hard beside his bed. A small man, he stood only five-and-a-half feet tall and weighed 115 pounds. He was twenty-eight. Beneath a thick shock of sandy hair, which on most days he brushed straight back without a part, his pock-marked face, deeply sunken cheeks, prominent off-center nose, and melancholy brown eyes gave him the look of an emaciated weasel. His ever-sallow complexion, accentuated by months of incarceration, extended over his entire body. On the inside of his arms, at the bend of his elbows, an unsightly patch of long-healed scar tissue bore mute testimony to a life of drug addiction.
Standing there nude, as he always slept, Willie was nonetheless comfortable. The death house, intolerable during the scorching summer months, was pleasantly steam-heated during colder weather. He stepped to the opposite corner of his cell and urinated into a lidless steel commode fixed to the wall. When he finished, he pushed the handle and watched the amber waste swirl and disappear down the drain. Flush toilets, too, were luxuries for condemned men only. Convicts in the general line had only wooden slop pails, which they carried out each morning to be emptied at the prison sewage plant, rinsed with Lysol, then hung on wooden pegs to dry for use the following night. Seldom did an inmate get the same pail twice.
Willie grabbed his khaki trousers and lightweight denim shirt from the foot of his bed and slipped them on. His inmate identification number was stenciled in bold white numerals across the shirt pocket and again in even larger numbers across the back. He sat on the edge of the bed and picked up a pair of thin white cotton socks that lay wadded in a ball on the floor. He pulled on the socks, then stepped into a pair of frayed corduroy house slippers. He hadn’t been outside the confines of the death house since his arrival a year before. Every third day he was escorted by two guards to Captain Rankin’s office at the head of the corridor for a shave from a convict barber. Every third week he received a hair trim, every Monday a bath. During all those months he hadn’t worn shoes, underwear, or a belt. The absence of a belt was a death house rule. The foregoing of shoes and underwear was Willie’s choice. The wear on his slippers was the result of a daily one-mile walk, five hundred trips wall-to-wall, back and forth across the length of his cell.
After dressing, Willie pulled a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes from his shirt pocket and shoved one in his mouth. He had seldom smoked ready-mades before coming to prison. They were too expensive. On the outside he smoked Bull Durham, five cents a bag, including twenty sheets of roll-your-own paper. Here it was different. Churches and other charitable groups vied for the privilege of providing permissible items to condemned men, and cigarettes, purchased from the tightly controlled prison canteen, were high on the list. Cigarettes purchased from sources outside the prison were not allowed.
Willie patted his pockets and located a match folder. It was empty. Shit.
He went to the front of his cell and pushed his face against the bars. “Archie”—his voice had the timbre of a clarinet with a bad reed—“gotta match?”
No reply.
“Archie?”
This time a clear baritone voice answered from the end cell down the corridor to Willie’s right. “He’s not there, Willie.”
“Hey, Tom!” Willie said. “What’s with Archie?”
“They moved him to Block Three early this morning,” Thomas Penney replied. “Gray, too. There’s no one left down here but you, me, and Bob.”
“How come?” Willie asked.
“Think about it, Willie.”
There was no response.
“We’re the stars of the show tonight, Willie,” Tom explained. “This place will be crawling with reporters all day, and Big Jess doesn’t want two more cons down here confusing things.”
Willie pondered this. Slow of wit, he found it difficult at times to follow Tom’s oblique way of explaining things. After a moment he grasped Toms meaning. “Hey . . . Governor Johnson’s not gonna let that happen, huh, Tom? Not all three of us on the same night. One of them reporters that was down here yesterday . . . that guy from Paducah . . . he told me it’d never go down like that.”
“That guy from Paducah’s not the governor, Willie.” Tom’s voice was caring, like that of a concerned parent explaining things to a confused child. Talking to Willie was like that sometimes. “Yes, Johnson will let it happen. Tonight. Prepare yourself for that, Willie.”
Just then, another voice thundered from the opposite end of the death house. “Penney, you miserable asshole, clam up! Willie, you hear me?”
“Yeah . . . I hear you, Bob.”
“Don’t listen to that crazy son of a bitch, Willie. He’s been aching
