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

by the art class at the local high school. I moved down the line, examining each piece in turn. Most were nothing to write home about. A few were outright bizarre and even a little scary. When I reached the end of the line I stopped dead in my tracks and held my breath. I was witnessing something both miraculous and cruel. Someone, some high school kid, had painted our house. Here it was displayed to the world in all its squalor. It had been rendered in perfect detail. One side of the porch was dilapidated and had caved in on itself. There were wild roses growing over all the ruins. The flesh prickled along my spine and I looked around, as if perhaps the artist were standing nearby and watching to see my reaction. There were no customers in the bank except us. The teller didn’t even glance in my direction.
    I stood in the bank staring at this painting of our house with its collapsing front porch, surrounded by cotton fields, when my mother walked up behind me and asked, “Is that our house?” Her brow furrowed in concentration before exclaiming to herself in a low voice, “Oh, wow.” When my stepfather came over to see what we were looking at, she said, “Look, it’s our house.” He put on his glasses and leaned forward to study it intently. Finally he said, “Maybe. It might be some other house, though.”
    I knew my stepfather wasn’t the brightest guy in the world, but this was pushing it even for him. I pointed out the details, elaborating. “Look. Half the porch done fell in. It’s ours.” He dug his heels in, stubbornly. “That don’t mean nothin’. The porch fell in on other houses, too.” I knew better than to try to argue with him. When you proved he was wrong he’d just make your life miserable for the next week.
    I wish I had that painting now. I’d keep it locked away somewhere, and take it out every year or so, just to remind myself where I came from. I’d show it to my wife and son, and try to tell them how hard life was out there, and the effect it had on me. That never works, though. I learned a long time ago that you have to experience something for yourself or you never really comprehend it.
    Looking back, the worst part about the shack wasn’t the poverty, the heat, the cold, or even the humiliation of living in such circumstances; it was the absolute and utter loneliness. For many years in that old house, I didn’t have a friend in the world to keep me company. It was far out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but fields. No kids or neighbors to even speak to you. I was so lonely that I thought even death was preferable. If not for my small battery-powered radio, perhaps I would have died inside.
    Years later, I read a book by Nick Cave called
And
the Ass Saw the Angel
. It struck me because of how close he comes to catching the feel of life in that lonely shack. None of the more well-known southern writers like Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor have done it for me. It’s like they may have witnessed life, but never lived it. Nick Cave comes damn close, though. More so than anyone else.
    Books helped me to survive out there. The only places close enough to walk to were the courthouse and the library. I had no interest in reading anything but horror at this age, so I read the few tattered paperbacks housed there numerous times. I read Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels more times than Billy Graham read his Bible. They kept me company on many a long and maddening summer day.
    Later I discovered the ultimate horror—the Inquisition. The first time I stumbled across this atrocity was in a book by some demented adult that was titled something like
The Children’s Book of Devils and Fiends
. It was filled with tales (and woodcuts) of witches having orgies, standing in line to kiss the devil’s arse, eating children, and cursing people so that they went into convulsions. The book didn’t explain that all these things were nothing more than the fevered dreams and insane concoctions of religious zealots that the educated world now knows them to be. It put them forth as being true, much as they were originally published during the Inquisition itself. Then there was the additional horror of people being tortured and burned at the stake simply because someone accused them of being witches. It explained how they were strangled, burned, cut, drowned, and dismembered in an effort to make them confess to flying on broomsticks to attend secret meetings.
    It’s not