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

he says that his child was born when he was serving time in Angola for stealing a truck, and the first time he laid eyes on her was the day he got out of prison because he went right to where his “first old lady” was living and there was the child, playing in the front yard, and he had swooped her into his arms and said, “I’m your daddy,” and her mother had appeared at the front door with a shotgun because she thought someone was trying to kidnap the child and and he had called out to her, “It’s me. I’m back. I want to see my kid.” But the first thing he had done when he stepped out of the gates at Angola was to get a case of beer, and by the time the Greyhound bus had pulled into St. Martinville he was pretty “tanked” and he and the woman had “gotten into it” that night and he smashed up some furniture and she threw him out and he had gone to his mother’s.
    He never has been one to share his feelings, he says, because when he was a kid growing up his mother and father used to fight a lot and they separated when he was six and his sister was three and Eddie was just a baby. His mother went on welfare because his daddy never did come through with child support and the welfare check would run out and they’d be hungry and he and Eddie would hunt deer and rabbit. He chuckles remembering how his mother would help them with the rabbit hunt and it was always her job to put the dead rabbits in a sack and to “finish them off with a stick if they weren’t dead yet. “And we’d be stalking along and behind us we’d hear
whack, whack, whack
— Mama beating the hell out of those rabbits.”
    I cringe, but he tells the incident nonchalantly. I am thinking of the clobbered rabbits. He is thinking of the food.
    Once, he says, he and Eddie couldn’t find a deer so they shot a neighbor’s cow and skinned it and brought it home. “Mama knewthis was no more a deer than the man in the moon, but she didn’t say nothing ‘cause we were all so hungry. She fixed us up a good roast that night and you could smell it cooking all through the house.”
    They often hunted at night. “Isn’t it against the law to hunt at night?” I ask. “Yeah,” he says, “but we didn’t worry about that.”
    As kids they moved from mother to father and back again, he says, and by the time he was fourteen he had changed schools seven or eight times. He got only as far as eighth grade, dropped out when he was fifteen, forged his mother’s signature on an application form, and went to work as a roustabout on the oil rigs. Later, he got his license and drove eighteen-wheelers and he had liked that best. From the age of nine, he says, he was on probation with juvenile authorities for burglaries, disturbing the peace, trespassing. “Mama couldn’t do anything with me and she’d have Daddy come get me out of trouble.”
    His daddy was a sharecropper and one of the best things he got from him, he says, is his love of work. At the age of seven he picked cotton, potatoes, and peppers alongside his father, and as he got older, when it was harvesting time for the sugar cane, “there I’d be walking to school and see those open fields and I’d drop my books on the side of the road and head out into the fields.” He hopes that maybe some day he can “hand back the chair” and work in the fields here, driving one of the tractors.
    He stands up and I try to adjust my view of him because it is hard to see through the heavy mesh screen and he tells me to look down sometimes. “This screen can really do a number on your eyes.”
    He talks and talks and talks, and I am easing up inside because I was wondering how much I’d have to keep the conversation going, and now I can see that all I have to do is listen.
    “Daddy took me to a bar when I was twelve and told me to pick my whiskey and there were all these bottles behind the bar and I pointed and said I’d take the one with the pretty turkey on it and the guys in the bar laughed