Tomorrow will be my fortieth birthday, and I will have spent 21 years in prison — fourteen years longer than I was married, eighteen years longer than the life of my precious baby girl. When I look back – and I have no choice but to look back – I can still see the ways that brought me here. They’re easy to see, like the seam of black water that remains when your boat has passed beneath moss-dripping trees, pushing the weeds and algae aside. You can see what the oars disturbed, the signs of your passing, and if you’re knowing, you could almost follow those signs and go back the way you came. Except, you can’t. At least, I can’t. But I can tell you all about it.
I was born somewhere close to Morgan City, Louisiana, is what I was always told, but there’s no proof of that. The actual place has been swallowed up by the sea. Or the swamp. Just as there’s no proof of who my Daddy was – we moved around, a lot, when I was little, and Momma’s line of work didn’t lend much to certainty about that sort of thing. I do know she drank, she took drugs, she rolled drunks, she traded sex for money, and we moved – a lot – right up until I was ten. That was the year Momma got religion, the most serious kind, and she quit all her wicked ways. Most of them.
She started going to a tent meeting and kept going when they all decided to make it a church building. Then she moved in with the youth minister, and a few weeks later, she married him. So, he became my official Daddy then, instead of Brother Dennis, and we had a quiet couple of years. Nothing really happened – the church women took to Momma after she confessed some of her sins, and it was only now and again I’d see one or two of them looking at her kind of sideways. I remember once or twice a couple of them came to the house, after bible study, wanting to correct some error in the way she dressed — you must wear a bra, dear, even in this hot weather – you don’t want to put that temptation out there on your brothers in Christ (meaning, their husbands) — and things like that. Maybe she was still, just a little, too much inclined to touch people when they were talking, or get into their personal space – but they would try to remember she’d been in the personal space business for a long time, before she saw the light.
One of the things that did happen, though – a couple of things – I started to get my figure, and I started getting my period. Wasn’t any mystery to either of those things – I took after Momma, and she was built generous, with long legs on her and dark curly hair and dark beautiful eyes. I took after her in all those things, except I wasn’t so big in the chest. But I began to notice that Dennis would look at me sometimes, in a certain way, and I knew enough that he hadn’t ought to be noticing me that way. And I overheard a couple of the church ladies, too, talking to Momma about she ought to find me a husband quick, while I was still a virgin. If I was still a virgin. Really. Like it was any of their business who tried to get a hand up my skirt at the crawfish boil – alright, it was Brother Tom — and I’m not saying anything else, because I didn’t allow it, even if he did show me his thing.
Long and the short of it, Momma married me off when I was twelve, to the Reverend Eli of all people.
“It’ll keep you on the right path,” Momma said, “being married to a good man, a god-fearing man – and I don’t want you to make none of my mistakes. Besides, he’s not that old, not really – not even forty-five yet, with a lot of good years ahead of him.”
So, they got special permission, and they married me off to Eli, and I remember his mouth tasted like chewing tobacco and bourbon, same as Brother Tom’s had when he’d tried to kiss me, and I remember I never even got to take off my wedding dress before Eli hoisted up my skirts, yanked off my pants and did it to me. Once from the front, once from behind – both places.
“You’re mine now, Melody,” he said to me then, “till the day you die, or I do – properly married – and I can plow your field whenever I want. That’s what marriage is, so keep a civil tongue in your head and we’ll get along fine.”
Eventually he got tired of me crying, every time he wanted to have me. He hit me good – slapped me so hard that two of my teeth came loose. But I didn’t lose them, not that time.
“You really disappoint me, Melody. A man’s got his rights without a whole lot of snivelling. You keep that up, I’m really gon’ hafta show you what’s what.”
For a while then, a few months, I managed to bite my lip and let him have what he wanted, and I tried not to mind too much. I mean, a woman who can’t be submissive and mind her manners, she’s just crying out to be corrected by a loving and dutiful husband – that’s what he said, often enough, from the pulpit, or with a belt in his hand, and then, increasingly, with his clenched fist. He’d come home from some counselling session with his tie all crooked, and once or twice with his shirt mis-buttoned and before I knew what for he’d correct me into the middle of next week.
On my thirteenth birthday, he come home late with a hickey on his neck. I probably spoke up harsh because I’d been waiting all evening to give him his favorite meal and break the news I was carrying his baby. Anyway, I spoke right out.
“I hope you took some of those rubbers with you, that you got hidden away, for your counselling session,” I said. “I sure don’t need any of what that Louisa’s got.”
It wasn’t the left hook that did the damage, but after he knocked me down, he hauled me back to my feet and punched me hard, three or four times, in my gut. And lower down. Then he took his coat and went out again, into the night, left me crying and crumpled up and still alone when the horrible pains and the bleeding started. I lost my baby.
After, when my Momma came to visit, I told her what happened. She just shook her head.
“I thought you’d be wiser, baby girl,” she said to me. “I thought you’d know better.”
“What are you saying? That he was right?”
“You brung it on your own self, is what I’m saying, no right or wrong about it. He’s your husband – he’s there to chastise you in the Lord, teach you to be respectful and obedient.”
“Sure, Momma,” I said. “He ever does it again, I’m gonna shoot him dead, six ways from Sunday, with his own gun. You mark my words – he can explain himself to God, as God is my witness.”
We say these things, in an angry moment. Who expects them to be remembered?
I always wondered, if maybe Momma hadn’t told Eli what I said. For a long while, he was almost decent and kind, and even thoughtful. It got so when we laid together, it was less like rape and more like… what I’d always imagined it could be. But we ran into some hard times, round then – there was a hurricane or two, the fishing was crap, and work got scarce for many of the families in our congregation. No amount of ‘believing things’ or ‘name it and claim it’ or “take it on faith” would put meat or even bread on the table, and the collection plate was skimpy or even empty, ‘cause nobody had anything to give. Tithing? Well a tenth of nothing is still nothing, and the church had to cut back. Of course, the first cut was to Brother Dennis, but he stayed around, just like always, even though he wasn’t making anything. Then Dennis started my Momma back to working nights, or maybe, she started it again and he never said no. The women of the church stopped talking to her, ‘cause she got all the gossip she needed from their husbands, and every now and then I’d see that Dennis had done some correcting of his own. In truth I took no real satisfaction when I saw her bruises, but I could see that she remembered what she’d said to me, and it would eat her up a little bit.
“You think you’re better than me now?” she asked me once, outside the church. “You want to tell me I had it coming too?”
“No Momma,” I said to her. “You’re my Momma, and I don’t think or feel those kinda things. I just wish things were different – better – for both of us.”
But she looked away, and I never saw so much of her, after that. She left town for a short while, the two of them did, but she came back alone, a few weeks later. I think Dennis left her, or she threw him out, but I think she also started to drink again. I mean, to excess.
It was about then I got pregnant again, and then I had my own little baby girl – beautiful Carla, who came into the world with so much pain and blood I thought for sure I would die, but I understood more of what my Momma felt, after that. I thought I did. Even when Carla cried all night, or pooped all the time, or wouldn’t suck and screamed and fussed – all the things that babies do – I thought I was happy, and blessed. And I guess I was.
Time went by and things began to improve again, around the parish, and Eli started to go out more at night. Counselling, he’d call it, but I suspected it was the same old thing. There were a couple women I knew about for sure, and a time or two, I wondered if he’d been seeing Momma. Ministering to her needs. Still, I had baby Carla to look after, and I made sure to get what we needed, before Eli could spend all the money on drink and loose living. Then one day he came home early, walked up to me fast, and just cracked me a hard slap across the face. Left my ears ringing and blood in my mouth. Clara just looked at us both and started to wail.
“What’s that for?” I asked, but I thought I knew.
“You took thirty dollars from my pants pocket, ‘fore I went out.”
“What if I did?” I said. “There’s no groceries in the house, hardly, just booze, Clara needs some of that medicine for her ears, and she won’t sleep if she can’t get it, they hurt so bad. You got responsibilities, husband.” I’m afraid I said it kind of sarcastic; he didn’t take it well. He commenced to slapping me again – two, three, four times, till I almost couldn’t stand up, and Clara just stood there screaming, her eyes wide with shock and fear, tears on her cheeks, and her nose dribbling. I’d have a job to clean her up, get her calmed down, after.
“You shut her up,” Eli said. Then he spoke to her directly. “Stop that caterwaulin’ right now, you hear me Clara? You just quit it, y’hear?”
Clara just stared at her Daddy as he towered over her shouting, and her crying got louder, and then he hauled off and hit her. Just the once, with the back of his hand.
I don’t expect he meant to kill her, but he’s a grown man and her just a little speck of a baby girl. She went down like a stone, and he went into our room and started pulling my dresser apart, looking for his money. I rushed to Clara and gathered her up into my arms, but then I saw she wasn’t breathing.
“Clara!” I said. “CLARA. Oh Lord Jesus God Christ help me. Clara??”
It was no use. She was so still. I laid her down on the sofa chair, and I picked her up again and I sat with her on the sofa and rocked her and whispered to her and I crooned over her and begged her to come back. But it wasn’t any use. Then I laid her back down, and I went into Eli’s study – the room that he used when he needed to make up his sermons and such – and I opened his desk drawer. There was a pistol there, a big black heavy thing with a long barrel, and I carried it with me into the bedroom. Eli was all done tearing apart my dresser, and he hadn’t found the money, because it wasn’t there. I had it hid in my shoe. What I didn’t have hid was Eli’s gun. I showed it to him.
“Now, you listen, Melody, you listen—”
“Clara’s dead,” I said. “You killed my baby girl. You killed her. How could you? HOW COULD YOU?”
Then I pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. I hit him square in the chest and his eyes got big and round and he grunted and the gun kicked up but I pointed it again, and I kept on pulling the trigger till the gun just clicked and clicked again. My ears were ringing. I stood there over him, looking down, till his mouth stopped moving and the light was gone from his eyes. Oh, what a stink he made – I never knew that, about dead people. Then I dropped the gun and went back to my baby girl. I sang all of her favourite lullabies to her, over and over, until the police came and took her away from me. Then I wailed like a baby girl, myself.
Clara was nearly three, when they buried her. I was just shy of sixteen, when they arrested me. Said I was to be tried for murder, in the first degree. Whatever that meant.
***
At the trial, Momma tried her best not to put me in a bad light. But they put together a jury of real bible-believing folks, some from our own congregation, and the Prosecutor, he made me out to be a real problem child. He started out with my Momma, and how we’d lived, and went to how I’d been married so young and was fractious and disobedient, and a trial to the patience of a godly man. Then he got my Momma on the stand, and got her to repeat those words I said before, how if Eli did it again, I would shoot him dead.
Truth is, that Prosecutor sounded real regretful when he summed things up – how it was a terrible tragedy, how the baby’s father had accidentally killed her like that, and it could happen to anyone, but that wasn’t the matter they had before them, right now, so don’t be distracted by it.
“He will pay for whatever he did, in a higher court than this one. Only goes to show, even a godly man, a saint, can fall into a grievous error, like your late brother Eli. Shooting him once, I could understand,” he told the jury, “in her moment of grief. A mother’s grief. But she didn’t stop there. Premeditation,” he said, “makes what happened a premeditated murder. She said she’d kill him… and then she did kill him. She kept on shooting him, until he was long past dead. You’ve seen the photos. Do I need to show them again? No, I thought not. Now, in this state, the penalty for premeditated murder is death. That’s the verdict you need to settle on. Get your minds around it. That’s the only choice you can make, a case like this, and it’s your sad and solemn duty to choose it.”
The jury was only gone long enough for a pee break and a coffee, it seemed like, before they filed back in and delivered their verdict, as instructed. I had a defense attorney – I’m sure he meant well, but he wasn’t up to much. Not then, not ever. Not him, or the ones who came after. Hardly matters, now.
Momma came to see me, after. She was pale as a ghost, when they let her in, and she just wrapped me in a hug so tight, I thought I would die right then, with her tears running down my neck.
“I’m so sorry, Melody, my baby girl, how they made me repeat those words. Look what they done to you.”
“I did it myself, Momma. Like the man said, the first shot was free – but five times more, that was on purpose. He shouldn’t have killed my baby Clara.”
“Maybe we can do something… an appeal.”
“I don’t hope for much – but I don’t suppose they’ll kill me right away. You can try.”
I’ve occupied this same cell for close to fifteen years, and I suppose it’s about as comfortable as you could expect, for a room on death row. It was never supposed to be home, and never going to be. You could call it a room with a view, but like I said before, the only view is looking back.
Momma did try – she kept her word — and a whole bunch of other people who got all exercised on my behalf. They pushed for new trials, and appeals, and then asking for some kind of mercy. I hoped, but I put no stock in it. Still, every year, Momma used to get them to bring me a card on my birthday; it always said the same thing, “Happy Birthday, Melody Mine.” Once she even talked somebody into bringing me a chocolate cupcake on my birthday, with a little white candle on it, besides the card. Used to – Momma died earlier this year. I heard she killed herself, when all the appeals ran out. Or maybe it was something else. It’s unlike her to move on without me, but she always had her reasons. I don’t hold it against her – I’ll tell her, when I see her. If there was a card this year, I know what it would have said: Happy Birthday, Melody Mine.
[Image Credit : Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash]
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