Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

a situation and keep from getting hurt again.
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    I hate it. I hate the signs and symptoms of age I see more and more in myself as each day passes. I’m now the same age that Hank Williams was when he died. Our situations and circumstances made us both old before our time. Don’t think me cynical, though. I believe it to be wholly reversible. I believe love can fix damn near anything. Love and iced tea. I just need larger doses of both than I can get in here. Perhaps soon someone will correct this injustice and rescue me from this nightmare. Until then I have no choice but to struggle on as I have been. “Saint Raymond Nonnatus, hear my prayer . . .”

Three
    T he year, the idea of a year, has become paper-thin. I can almost reach out and tear a hole through it with my fingernail. December is coming. I can feel it waking up. It brings me a haunted place to rest my head and a clearer vision of all I see. The whole world seems to be putting on its holiday trim, and every day that passes is another mile traveled through the ice-cold desert.
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    W hen I was in second grade, a friend of Nanny’s decided to rent the tiny three-room brick building in her backyard to my family, because her Social Security check wasn’t quite enough for her to survive on. In hindsight it strikes me as incredibly odd that someone would have had such a structure in the backyard of a small suburban home. It was more like a bomb shelter.
    Someone had wired the place for electricity, and the water worked well enough, but there was no heat. Sometimes it would get so cold in there that the toilet would have ice in it. To keep from freezing to death my mother would turn the oven on as high as it would go and leave the door open. We had a small cat who would hop up onto the oven door and make herself at home by curling into a ball and sleeping.
    After a while my mother and father managed to borrow a small portable heater. My mother would stand my sister and me in front of it as we dressed for school in the morning, so that we wouldn’t shiver ourselves to pieces. One day as we were getting dressed, my sister backed into the heater. You could hear her shrieking all down the street, a loud, wordless wail of pain. I can still see my mother on her knees, clutching my sister and rocking back and forth as they both sobbed. After things calmed down my mother examined my sister, and nothing looked to be seriously wrong, so we were sent off to school.
    As we walked back home that afternoon, the back of my sister’s shirt and pants were soaking wet. The parts of her that had touched the heater had blistered during the day, and all the blisters had broken open. When my mother saw it, she started crying again. That year was one of the poorest my family ever lived through.
    There was much excitement one day about a week before Christmas when three older men in suits showed up at our door carrying boxes and bags of food. I think they were either Shriners or Masons, but I can’t remember. I do remember my mother hugging them all and thanking them over and over while my sister and I ran around their legs like hungry cats, anxious to see what treats were in those sacks. My mother was crying uncontrollably and kept hugging the men. They didn’t say much, just told her she was welcome and left as quickly as they came. This was our Christmas dinner. We received gifts from such groups more than once. Most often it was the Salvation Army.
    My father was deeply ashamed for having to accept a handout. That’s something that gets drilled into the heads of white males in the South from the moment they can speak—never accept anything that you haven’t earned for yourself. Having to accept the handout deeply wounded my father in some way that pushed him close to the edge of an emotional cliff. I wasn’t old enough to really understand it; I just knew that my dad was acting strange, and that he was chewing his nails so viciously that sometimes it looked like he was going to put his whole hand in his mouth. Now I know it’s because a man who accepted a handout wasn’t really seen as being much of a man—especially by the man himself. Any man with two working arms and legs who signed up on welfare wasn’t seen very differently from a thief, a liar, or a rapist.
    In the end I think that’s part of what caused my parents’ marriage to begin falling apart. The stress of poverty. I usually think of these things around Christmastime. Probably