The Accused, Harold R. Daniels [read out loud books txt] 📗
- Author: Harold R. Daniels
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Fascinated by her, he joined her group of admirers as soon as the last class was finished. When they came to the gate of the schoolyard, Marianna Cruz was waiting for him in the placid certainty that he would walk home with her as he always did. The queen called, “Alvin, your friend is waiting for you. I guess you can’t come after all.”
They had laughed, then, at him and at drab little Marianna. Morlock, desperate to show his maleness, had said loudly, “Oh, go on home, you little Portagee, and quit hanging around me.”
Marianna had turned, her shoulders straight, and walked away. Morlock wanted to run after her and comfort her as he had when the other children had called her that same name on Abram’s Rock when she first moved to the neighborhood. But he could not forgo the company of the gold-and-white girl and her court. A day later he came to the defiant conclusion that Marianna was worth ten times as much as any one of them; but at that time, when he hurt her, he did not go to her. And everything else in his life had hinged on his betrayal of Marianna. If he was a second-rate teacher, it was because he had been a second-rate friend to her when she needed him. If his life was a succession of failures, it was because he had failed her when he was sixteen.
That was the unbidden memory that came to Morlock in the cell where he was confined. Marianna never came back to school. He never saw her again. A week later he approached the school to see his classmates gathered in a gossiping little knot inside the gate. One of them said, “Wasn’t that awful about the little Portagee girl, Alvin?”
Morlock had been briefly dazed. “What about her?” he asked. “What happened?”
They told him, in fragments and phrases.
“She’s dead!”
“She fell off of Abram’s Rock.”
“Her father went out looking for her when she didn’t come home to supper.”
“The police were out there. They said she must have slipped.”
“My father says it’s dangerous up there and they ought to put a fence up or keep kids off it.”
Morlock had turned away from them, not ashamed of the tears in his eyes. If he had not hurt her, if he had been a faithful friend, he would have been with her and he wouldn’t have let her get too near the edge. Maybe she had fallen on purpose. Maybe it had been an accident. Nobody would ever know, but Alvin Morlock knew this—Marianna would not have died if he had been with her.
They had an elaborate funeral for Marianna. The entire school went and Morlock was pushed and shoved close to the front of the procession. “He was her friend,” they whispered busily. “Let him be up front.” So they made way for him so that he could be more ashamed.
The fad for scholarship passed and Morlock returned to the obscurity that he was never to leave until he went on trial for his life. Until the time he was arrested for murder he had never once permitted himself to remember the events leading up to Marianna’s death. The first time that he did remember it, he combined two memories: the happy time of the pact they had made on Abram’s Rock, and the terrible time he had deserted her. The recollection of the manner in which a body twisted and turned as it fell through the air acted as a trigger to his guilty thoughts. He no longer wished to live. He was overwhelmed by remorse that even extended to Louise. After all, he told himself, if he had not married her she would still be alive.
When Sam Liebman visited him and suggested that if he pleaded guilty he might be found guilty only of manslaughter, Morlock had already decided that he would do nothing, say nothing to mitigate his guilt. If he stood trial and was found guilty, he would accept it.
Sam Liebman sat beside Alfred Gurney, waiting for the jury to return. “Three and a half hours,” he said, glancing at the old-fashioned clock on the wall.
Gurney smiled. “You’ve waited for juries before, Sam,” he said. “Stop fretting. Change the subject. How is Morlock taking it?”
“I went back there again a few minutes ago. He was half asleep. You did a job on him—and me.”
“I had all the witnesses,” Gurney said.
“Sure you did. Where did you get that Stewart?”
“Stewart, the Chief of Police? He’s a wonder, isn’t he? He had F.B.I. training and it stuck. He’ll trip on his own cleverness some day. Still, he made quite a witness—Hold it, Sam.”
“What is it?”
“Here they come. They just talked with the bailiff through the door.”
A court attendant went scurrying for Judge Cameron while the spectators who had been strolling the grounds, smoking in the corridors, patiently waiting, rustled into the courtroom. When order was called and the jury filed in, a custodian brought Morlock in from the detention cell. He glanced almost blankly at the faces of the jurors. They stared straight ahead, their expressions indicating their awareness of the gravity of their verdict, whatever it was.
When the courtroom was still, Judge Cameron asked, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict in the case now before you?”
The foreman said, “We have.”
“How find you?”
“We find the defendant, Alvin Morlock, guilty of murder in the first degree.”
Judge Cameron hesitated, then asked, “Do you have any recommendations?”
“We do not.”
Judge Cameron turned to face Morlock. He said quietly, “Alvin Morlock, you have been found guilty of murder in the first degree by a jury of your peers. Since there has been no recommendation that mercy be shown you, in accordance with the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts I now must pass the sentence of death by electrocution on you. On the 15th day of October, the warden of the penitentiary in which you are confined will see that the terms of this sentence are carried out. And may God have mercy on your soul.”
*
In the two months that Morlock served on death row in Charlestown, he had three visitors. They were Sam Liebman, Thomas Dodson, and Dominick Palaggi. Liebman visited him twice, uneasy with the thought that Morlock was deliberately destroying himself and that he did not deserve to die.
“Alvin,” he said, on his last visit, “let me go to the governor and ask for a stay. Man, even if you killed that woman she isn’t worth your life. Even a commutation would get you life and you would be a free man in twenty years.”
Morlock said, “I appreciate how you feel, Sam. I think that you mean it for me and not as a professional matter. But I don’t want to fight it.”
Tom Dodson came and sat for half an hour in the visitors’ room with Morlock. In that time he did not say half a dozen words. Morlock, at the moment he was sentenced to die, had become entitled, in Dodson’s eyes, to some of the respect reserved for the dead. There was an ethereal, a spiritual quality to the atmosphere of death row that frightened and impressed Dodson, and their conversation consisted of Morlock comforting his visitor. When Dodson rose to go, Morlock put his arm around his shoulder. “Don’t come back, Tom,” he said. “I appreciate your coming and I wish things had been different. You’re probably my only friend and I’d like to make it up to you. If it will make it easier for you, I’m not frightened. It’s going to be all right.” And Dodson left, his eyes streaming.
Last to come and most unexpected was Dominick Palaggi. He came into the visitors’ room shyly, and he sat in his straight-backed chair staring at the floor and cracking the knuckles of his big hands while he asked Morlock if he was being treated all right and if the food was all right and was there anything he could get for him. After ten minutes of this he looked squarely at Morlock.
“Louise was no good,” he blurted out. “She isn’t worth it that you should die if you killed her. I should have killed her myself a long time before she met you.”
And Morlock comforted Dominick as he had comforted Dodson.
When Dominick rose to go, he shook hands very formally with Morlock. “Try not to be afraid,” he said. “On Federal Hill a lot of us will have masses said for you.”
Morlock, as he had told Dodson, was not frightened even when the weeks dwindled to days and the days to hours. He became frightened for the first time when the chaplain came to sit with him for half an hour before his execution—and even then he was more afraid of dying than of death.
When the warden came to read the death warrant and to follow Morlock down the long corridor to the chamber that they referred to only as “the room,” Morlock had lost the momentary fear he had known during the chaplain’s visit. He shook hands with the three remaining prisoners in death row and accepted their last words. “Don’t chicken out, Al.”
“Wait for me. I’ll be with you in two weeks.”
“It’s going to be all right. You wait and see.” But even as he accepted them and made reply in kind he was moving away from them, caught up in a great wind that swept him out of the chilly corridor of the cell block and back, whirling and spinning, to another time and another place.
He was standing in front of the frame house where he had been a boy and he was waiting for Marianna Cruz; he was telling her that he would walk to school with her and hearing her say, “Then I won’t be afraid.” Morlock felt the touch of a small hand creeping into his as he walked behind the chaplain and he, in his turn, was not afraid.
*
“Alvin Morlock, 35, a former teacher at Ludlow College, paid with his life last night for the murder of his wife, Louise. Morlock, who during his trial was icy calm, maintained his composure through his last hours. He showed no sign of fear as he was strapped into the electric chair. Some witnesses, in fact, claimed that they observed a defiant smile on Morlock’s face just before the lethal charge was routed through his body.”
From the Fall River Bulletin
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