Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean Read Free Book Online Page A

booths constructed of heavy plywood painted stark white. A heavy mesh screen separates visitors from inmates. On the visitor side is a loud, whirring fan. There are plastic chairs stacked in a corner and several large tin cans painted red which serve as trash cans. I am the only one in the room. The place gives me the creeps.
    The reality of this waiting place for death is difficult to grasp. It’s not a ward in a hospital where sick people wait to die. People here wait to be taken out of their cells and killed. This is the United States of America and these are government officials in charge and there’s a law sanctioning and upholding what is going on here, so it all must be legitimate and just, or so one compartment of mybrain tells me, the part that studied civics in high school, the part that wants to trust that my country would never violate the human rights of its citizens.
    The red block letters say “Death Row.”
    My stomach can read the letters better than my brain.
    I pace slowly back and forth in the room and keep trying to take deep breaths, to settle down. I am allowed two hours for my visit. That seems like a very long time. I’m doubly tense. One, I am locked behind four — I count them — doors in this strange, unreal place. Two, I’m about to meet and talk to someone who killed two people. Letters are one thing, but just the two of us like this talking for two hours?
    I hear him before I see him. I can hear the rattle of chains on his legs scraping across the floor and I can hear his voice. He is laughing and teasing the guard. I detect a Cajun accent.
    “Hi, Pat, I made it,” I say.
    “Am I glad to see
you
, Sister,” he says.
    He is freshly shaven and his black hair is combed into a wave in the front. A handsome face, open, smiling. Not the face I had seen in the photo. He has on a clean blue denim shirt and jeans. His hands are cuffed to a wide brown leather belt at his waist. He has brought me a gift: a picture frame made out of intricately folded cigarette packages. “I made it for you,” he says, and he explains that the biggest challenge had been collecting enough of the wrappers from the others on the tier. He is bright and talkative and tells me of some recent letters from college students whom I have referred to him.
    “I was always a loner growing up. I’ve never had so many friends,” he says, and he tells in detail what each pen pal has said and how he has responded. He keeps a checklist: “letters received — letters answered” and the date next to each.
    He smokes one cigarette after another and he has to lean his head far down to reach the cigarette because his hands are cuffed to the belt. He is obviously very happy to have someone to talk to. Contact with someone in the outside world goes a long way in this place, where, as I soon learn, mail is rare and visits rarer.
    As we talk I find myself looking at his hands — clean, shapely hands, moving expressively despite the handcuffs as he talks. These hands that made the nice picture frame for me also held a rifle that killed. The fingernails are bitten down to the quick.
    He tells again of receiving the first letter from me and how the name Helen had made him think at first it was from his ex-“oldlady,” and he wanted to have nothing to do with her because she was the one who had told the sheriff where to find him, warning that he was dangerous and heavily armed, and the scowl is there and he stares past me as he talks. He can’t believe his good fortune, he says, that I have come into his life out of the blue like this, and he thanks me profusely for making the long drive to come and see him.
    The way he was teasing the guard and the way he thanks me and is talking to me now — I can tell he likes to please people.
    He hasn’t done well with women, he admits — lived with several but always “busted up.” He has a little girl, Star, eleven years old, but she is with foster parents and her mother is in Texas and