Free Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean

He can unpack his toothbrush, his underwear, his paper bag of stuff, and put his things back into their regular place in his cell. Over the next days and weeks he will get his taste for food back, and perhaps he will be able to sleep when he climbs into his bunk for the night.
    In a letter I quote to him lines from Psalm 107. “It was written for you,” I tell him.
     … Some, driven frantic by their sins,
made miserable by their own guilt
and finding all food repugnant,
were nearly at death’s door.
Then they called to Yahweh in their trouble
and he rescued them from their sufferings …
he snatched them from the Pit …
    He, too, has a favorite psalm, Psalm 31, he tells me in his next letter. After his death I will see this psalm highlighted in his worn Bible. He will hand me this Bible shortly before he dies.
     … I am contemptible,
loathsome to my neighbors,
to my friends a thing of fear …
I am forgotten, as good as dead in their hearts,
something discarded,
 … as they combine against me,
plotting to take my life.
But I put my trust in you, Yahweh …
    On my next visit to the prison I follow the routine I have set up over the last several months — visiting Pat first, then Eddie.
    When Eddie comes into the visiting room he looks almost as bad as Pat looked a couple of weeks ago when he had come close to execution. He greets me somberly. He is carrying a heavy load. His shoulders slump. His hands are shaking. As we sit down at one of the tables, he lights a cigarette. “I’ve got something really, really bad to tell you,” he says. I assume that Pat must have written him a letter, telling him that he had told me about the murders.
    I reach over and put my hand on his arm. He is swallowing and his Adam’s apple moves up and down in his throat. He is trying hard to say the words. He is trying to push the words out with sheer willpower.
    I say, “I think I know, Eddie. Pat told me you’re the one who killed those children.”
    I say it first, but he needs to say it. Does he absorb it, take it in, own it? One moment like that. Six small pieces of metal from his hand destroying two human beings? And he is trying to find the words to tell me that he has done this.
    He speaks in a measured, flat voice like a cancer patient, giving the history of his illness again and again to this doctor and that. How many times, I wonder, has he gone over these events in his mind trying to make sense of them, trying to grasp the catastrophic consequences: two families with two dead children, a brother facing the electric chair, and himself sitting here in this blue denim shirt and the bars, gates, fences, and guards that will be around him for the rest of his life.
    He seems remorseful about the killings, but I can tell his most tangible regret is his own fate behind bars. Self-survival seems to dominate his moral horizon.
    He lays out the facts of the crime, and I can only guess what they mean to him: his girlfriend pregnant, his offer of marriage spurned, the “coldness like a deep-freeze” by her family when he had gone to her house to ask to marry her, she in the back room, refusing even to come out and talk to him, another man in her life named David who’s now her boyfriend; going home enraged and coming back to the girl’s house with his shotgun, cutting the telephone wires to the house, threatening to kill them all, the arrival of the police, arrest, jail; then some talking back and forth, an agreement reached, his release on bond, the record expunged; at home again, rabbit hunting, the kids in the car, the abduction, the boy, Davidsaying, ‘Put down that gun and I’ll show you who’s a man,’ rage, the two Davids blurring, the gun in his hand.
Snap
.
    I see no reason to doubt Eddie. The weight on him is tangible. I can see the pain and bewilderment in his eyes at the enormity of the evil he has done.
    I have heard that this is the way most murders happen — an explosion of passion, not a cold,