Cargo of Orchids Read online

  Her doctor pleaded for her life. He said that if they tried to hang his patient, her stitches would come undone and she would breathe through the aperture in her trachea, suffering unimaginable tortures that surely even a judge would not wish to inflict upon any human being, regardless of her sex, no matter how heinous a crime she had committed.

  This girl was like me—she insisted on her right to choice, and she was hanged. As her doctor had predicted, her stitches came undone, and the hangman granted that the woman’s suffering might be relieved, on humanitarian grounds, by the “medical person” in attendance at her execution. Permission was given to this medical person (the nineteenth-century equivalent of a corrections officer who has recently updated his CPR skills, no doubt) to clamp his hand over the aperture through which the woman breathed. But the fake croaker’s hand wasn’t big enough, and after the woman had danced, gasping and twisting, at the end of the rope for as long as anyone watching could bear, she was cut down and given clemency as a result of a “technicality.”

  Rainy, who had been listening closely as I relayed these details to Frenchy, had only one question. “Why did her father come home unexpectedly?”

  Here’s the thing: nothing is more predictable and more certain than death, yet nothing is less predictable and less certain.

  “Whoopee fucking ding,” says Rainy, a sign that she thinks I am thinking too much. It drives me when Rainy says, “Whoopee fucking ding.”

  Something I have always thought about: every year, from the day we’re born, we pass the day on which we are going to die. We all know death is inevitable, but in most cases live in complete ignorance of its timing. Only two kinds of people are spared from continuing to live in this state of uncertainty: a) those who plan to take their own lives; and b) those who will be “put to death”—like Rainy and Frenchy and me.

  When you live on the Row, you don’t have a lot of opportunities to take your own life, even if you plan it that way. Our health and well-being are priorities here. If you catch lung cancer or wake up with a cold on the day of your execution, you’ll get a rain check. They’ll wait until you stop blowing your nose or coughing up blood before sending you on a trip to the stars.

  Frenchy’s a slasher; instead of getting jailhouse tattoos she mutilates herself, tattooing her rage on her skin. When she cuts deep enough it brings blood to the surface, so everybody can see her wounds.

  But Frenchy’s best-laid plans fail, over and over. She’s made nine attempts at suicide since the first time she was given the death penalty. “Of course, I have to fail,” she said. “I never, ever succeeded at anything I tried to do.”

  Rainy won’t speak to Frenchy after she cuts herself. Stitches are one of her “issues”: when she was eight years old, her father punished her for wetting the bed. “He thought if he sewed up my chocha, it’d teach me a lesson,” she says.

  Rainy went to school every day stinking and wet until a teacher reported her to the health nurse and they found out what her father had done. “He went to jail for it, but he never said he was sorry, and he never was. Sorry. He told the parole board he’d do the same thing again, if I didn’t grow up.”

  Rainy says she’s grown up a lot since then. “But I still pee the bed. Every night.”

  If the state decides to end your life for you, you don’t, at first, get an exact DOD (date of departure); it could be any time within the next twenty years, depending on your trials (your guilt trials and your penalty trials), your appeals, public opinion, and the electoral and political processes. In states that employ the death penalty, judges are subject to re-election. We always know when there’s an election coming up because the Row starts getting crowded, and then, one by one, the women are shifted to “death watch,” a holding cell in the Health Alteration Unit (or the dancehall, as we all call it), a few feet away from the execution chambers. This means their execution is less than thirty days away.

  When you get your “date certain,” you know the date you’re going out on, providing you don’t get lucky and get cancer first. Some people argue that it’s a cruel punishment, to be told you’re going to get gassed on such-and-such a day. What murderer has ever told her victim, “I’m going to kill you. It may be a year, three years or even fifteen years from now, but I am going to kill you. Meanwhile, I am going to lock you up in a cage and torture you in small ways until I am ready to kill you.”

  In China, they spring it on you. Some say this is a more humane system, that in keeping a person uncertain of the date and time of her death, the state is preserving her status as a human being. You’re in your cell, reflecting on the harm you have done to society and the terrible amount of money it costs taxpayers every year to keep you locked up, and suddenly there they are, at your door, calculating how much money they’re going to make when they’ve got your vital organs in their hot little hands. You eat the remains of your breakfast, because failure to clean your plate is considered an infraction of prison conduct, subject to disciplinary action, then they take you outside and shoot you in the head.

  Neither you nor any family member is notified beforehand, so there are no long goodbyes, no tearful partings. Just you, your bodyguards, a man with a gun and the croaker (who’s supposed to make sure you are dead enough for him to start operating on). As a courtesy, to let them know you have finally paid your debt to society, your family will be sent the spent bullet casing afterwards. And they’re required to pay for it.

  There’s one other way a woman can postpone her date certain (besides catching a terminal illness)—and that is by getting pregnant. Condemned women can “plead the belly” and get a stay, though a friend of Rainy’s pled and nobody believed her. Even after two male orderlies and a male midwife examined her, they sent her to the Chair. Flames shot out of her head when they pulled the switch, and milk spouted from her breasts into the flames. At the autopsy, they found an eight-month-old “healthy” baby boy dead inside her.

  Now when a woman pleads the belly, she’s allowed to have an examination by a panel of women gynaecologists. We’ve come a long way, baby.

  ——

  We are the prisoners of infinite choice. If you choose to be hanged, you next have to decide whether you wish to die from strangulation or from a broken neck. No drop at all, or a short one, usually results in strangulation—death from asphyxia, caused by stoppage of the windpipe, which causes convulsions (somewhere between the time it takes to drink a Starbuck’s and the time it takes to finish an anniversary dinner with your ex), or from apoplexy, by pressure on the jugular vein. The long drop ends in a broken neck. Death is supposed to be instantaneous and painless, though as one woman said to the executioner before she fell, “How the fuck would you know?”

  You’d think it would be straightforward after that—you choose the short drop or the long one, depending on how much suffering you feel you deserve—but it’s not. After you make up your mind how you want to be hanged, you then have to choose the kind of rope you wish to be hanged with.

  There are many different options—“No noose is good noose,” as Officer Freedman says—and some of the descriptions make it sound like haute couture. The Vogue model turned chainsaw killer, for example, might opt for the soft, pliable, five-ply Italian silk hemp rope with a three-quarter-inch diameter.

  Choices, says Rainy. Dead if you do, dead if you whoopee fucking don’t. It’s like being in a restaurant and finally making up your mind that you’ll have the cheeseburger platter and the waitperson says, “Would you like Cheddar cheese or mozzarella on your cheeseburger?” and you go for the orange Cheddar. Then she says, “That comes with french fries, baked potato, or garden salad.” You hum and haw, and then make a healthy choice, and say, “I’ll take the garden salad.” The waitperson says, “Will that be house dressing, oil and vinegar, french, thousand island or ranch?” You choose oil and vinegar, and then she says, “Will that be regular or lite?” It’s a form of harassment, like Frenchy’s train or guard humour. Why can’t they just bring
you the fucken cheeseburger platter without taking away your appetite? Why can’t they just kill you without giving you so much choice?

  It’s because for years women didn’t have options, my counsellor says. I don’t bother pointing out to her that my question was hypothetical. A pro-choice state means taking responsibility for your life—and your death, she adds. As if.

  The Science of Neck-Breaking uses mathematics to calculate the scientifically perfect drop for each person who might require one. There’s an art to hanging, the author wrote, as well. What works for one woman doesn’t necessarily work for the next. Her height and weight, age, whether she is physically fit or has spent a life horizontal on the couch eating Hostess Ding Dongs, and the length of the drop (controlled by the length of the rope)—these are the variables. The Vogue model will need less rope than a dwarf like Rainy to drop the same distance. Each person has a correct drop, and our drop is unique to each of us—like our DNA or our fingerprints. We can’t pass it off as someone else’s, or pretend it is not our own.

  My mother says that before I got myself into this “bucket of hot water,” she had been all in favour of a death penalty. “I think there would be a lot more people alive today if we had the death penalty in this country,” she writes. But now she sees it would be a mistake to apply it in all cases. “What’s sauce for the goose isn’t necessarily sauce for the gander.”

  Frenchy is surprised by how many letters I write, and how many I receive. Prison for her, she says, is a place where you can’t think of anything to say.

  “What do you have to write about,” she says, “when you’re in a place where nothing happens to write about?”

  I tell her I write about getting through another day.

  The day before they hang you, you get weighed and sized. More technicalities. What is life but technicalities, details? “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” Frenchy says. But she’s wrong. The small stuff is important, because a lot of small stuff can add up to something big. Two plus two is the beginning of death, and so on. I’m starting to catch on to what Dostoevsky meant.

  The morning of your date, you put on your clean clothes, and you’re taken out to the gallows, smelling like Bounce, Frenchy says. To the right of the gallows platform, in a room with walls seven feet high, three guards are seated on stools. In front of the guards is a shelf, across which there are three taut strings. Only one of these springs the trap that causes the execution. The other two are connected to buckets of sawdust—the equivalent of blanks in a gun—which fall through the floor along with the hanging body.

  Each woman is armed with a sharp knife. She waits for the hangwoman’s signal before cutting the string. It takes between eight and fifteen minutes before the heart stops beating, the legal time of death.

  This time when Frenchy’s last meal was brought to her, she kicked the tray high into the air, the undressed garden salad and the Diet Coke Rainy had ordered for her. “At least no one else will enjoy my leftovers when I’m gone,” she said.

  But she didn’t go anywhere—except back to her cell. Something went wrong—or right, depending on your point of view—and the trap door wouldn’t open. Frenchy survived—again. “Death is not just dying” was all she had to say about it.

  A week later, an article in the local paper revealed that Frenchy’s femme was not so fatale after all. Shortly after the publication of the article in Lifestyles, the hangwoman’s roadhouse had been exposed as a notorious hang-out for cross-dressers, Leetia her/himself a female impersonator. She took early retirement. “I never liked to hang a woman,” she said. “It always made me shiver like a leaf.”

  chapter eighteen

  I don’t know how many days, weeks or months went by. Sometimes I would be let out “for air,” which meant a trip onto the balcony, but one evening I was taken down to the courtyard, where Consuelo sat on a partially submerged deck-chair, drinking tinto (strong, sweet black coffee) and eating pandebono, a kind of bread with cheese you bought on the street. She signalled for me to sit and help myself to her leftovers. Nidia, who said the power was still out in the kitchen, began frying zucchini strips on a charcoal griddle on top of an oil drum on the patio.

  The old man—nobody had introduced us and he hadn’t volunteered his name, so I’d nicknamed him Don Drano (he simply used people as a kind of sink, to push everything down)—had reappeared, and was complaining that communism had ruined this island, which was why you couldn’t get decent natural ices. One other thing he didn’t like about living here was the poverty, but you got used to it, he claimed, like the bad water and the noise and the unhealthy climate. He wanted to know what I thought of the squalid mess his daughter had left him to live in. The place was infested with every kind of living insect but fleas, and the only reason there were no fleas, he said, was that the bedbugs ate them.

  His daughter? I sat watching his lips as he talked, realizing now why he looked so familiar. Consuelo, meanwhile, paid more attention to the dying almond tree than she did to her dying father. Someone had decorated the tree with milk cartons, split open down the sides, to make ornaments that spun in the wind (though in the protected courtyard, I never saw them spin).

  When Nidia finally produced a meal, it was sobrebarriga, and other mysterious parts of a cow, and zucchini fried in an oil slick on the side. The food of the indígenas. I left my plate untouched.

  El Chopo came back drunk from the North Pole Tropical Bar and Restaurant. Perfectamente borracho, he said: the manager had been aggressive and forced him to drink whisky. Nidia served sabayon, a milky drink made from aguardiente, instead of coffee, but I wasn’t going to risk passing out from the effect of the potent liquor again. Consuelo told El Chopo she had business to take care of, and when she left El Chopo sat staring at the immobile milk cartons, then, after a drink that seemed to render him even more catatonic, passed out with his head down next to his cup.

  Don Drano got up from his chair and asked if I would like to accompany him to the garden. It was the first time in many months I had been asked if I’d like to do anything, and for a moment I hesitated, not certain how to respond. This could be the moment, I realized slowly, to try to make my escape.

  I looked to make sure no one was watching, then followed him, making myself as small as possible, out of the courtyard, over a weedy lawn, to a footpath that led to an iron gate and then through a walled garden of straggling fruit trees, big-leaved avocados and orchids with fleshy, tongue-shaped leaves. In the twilight I could make out only shapes and smells—the blousey ruffled lips, the fragrance of sweet, wet orchid blossoms, the enormous odour of the sea and the wind. Through the garden gate—which Don Drano locked behind me, proving to me he was more aware than he pretended to be—I could see the dark sea rolling in waves, moving further and further away from the shore, and the mouth of El Río Negro. I stood staring out to sea as, overhead, the sad pelicans flew south, hundreds of them. Don Drano told me this meant it was going to rain.

  I have now read Chocolata’s story in a book I found in the prison library. When she and her crew were hanged, their bodies had been gradually submerged by the swirling waters of the incoming tide. Three tides were allowed to pass over the women before their bodies were cut down and hung in chains in the port of the City of Orchids.

  Don Drano told me when they cut Chocolata down and carried her ashore, her body was covered in white plumage. Some said her soul had become a pelican, and after that whenever a pelican flew south the rains would come; these were Chocolata’s tears.

  A green-grey mist rose off the glazed sea, where a fleet of banana boats drifted. The book, The Pirate Queen, said the executioner was almost as famous on the island as Chocolata herself. He had a club foot, and as she stood waiting to die on the gallows, the fierce woman pirate had cursed all male children born on the island by giving them bad legs so they would be doomed to be led by women.

  The islanders worshipped their pirate queen. She was a hero to many, a goddess to some, Don Drano said; some isl
anders stole her body from the authorities and laid her to rest on a bed of orchids at the summit of Nevada Chocolata. The place was, to this day, known as Chocolata’s Shrine.

  “Virgin orchids,” he said, “like these.” He showed me the white, fragrant orchids, still favoured by the islanders, that grew wild along the Tranquilandian seacoast and were inhabited by biting fire ants. “You never pick them,” he said. “They are not what they appear to be.”

  Consuelo was waiting for us in the courtyard. She scolded Don Drano for taking me away without her permission. The old man muttered his excuses and went to bed.

  After my brief taste of freedom, I despaired of returning to my room and being locked in again. But Consuelo told me to sit as Nidia brought more food—frijoles, fried rice and guacamole. For a long time I sat gazing out at the ocean, listening to the screeching of the birds in the dining room, until Consuelo started an argument with Nidia over the best way to cook rice. When she seemed to be losing the argument, Consuelo broke a chair over the table and stormed off the terrace.

  Nidia began wailing; she didn’t want to lose her life on her night off. Consuelo soon returned—not, as Nidia had expected, with her .38, but with the keys to the Jeep. She told Nidia to take me upstairs to my room and lock my door properly before she went home for the evening.

  When Nidia wouldn’t stop sobbing, Consuelo picked up a piece of the chair she had broken and lifted it over her head. I thought she was going to kill the poor woman right there, and felt my arm reaching up, as if it were someone else’s arm, and saw, out of the corner of my eye, Consuelo hurl the piece of wood over her shoulder. I saw the red stain of the bougainvillea.