"Damned."

By Robin Docherty

        Father Baker wondered what the protesters would think of him as the SUV's headlights swung across the group. Their signs and faces were lit up in the hard white of the LEDs, framed in his mind forever as if in a camera's flash.

        They stood in front of the gate and moved slowly, prompting the driver to lay on the horn which did nothing to speed them up. "Sorry Father," he said over his shoulder. "There's always a few, but this one's got some national coverage behind it. More people always turn out then."

        "It's fine," Father Baker replied automatically, as his gaze stayed on the protesters. "What time is it?" he asked, twisting in his seat, eyes still on the protesters.

        "Little before ten," the driver said, glancing at the dashboard. "Governor signed the bill about four hours ago and it goes into effect at midnight, so they pretty much immediately got the ball rolling and started calling around for one of you—at the guy's request, obviously."

        Father Baker swallowed hard, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the procedural details, and not needing to hear those he already knew, repeated. A tiny part of him couldn't help but feel—or feel as if others felt—that he was facilitating or legitimizing the practice just by being present. For all the column articles and impassioned opinions, the religious figure everyone knew was guaranteed never seemed to come up anywhere in the debate.

        "I'll have to frisk you once we're inside—policy for anyone going back to the cell blocks—but it's just a formality, not like a cavity search or anything." The driver laughed.

        "Alright." Father Baker had been tired, winding down his day when he'd gotten the call. Seeing a federal prison on caller ID had been a new experience, and ever since then he'd been awake like he'd downed a quart of espresso.

        The cell was larger than Father Baker had imagined, but he realized he hadn't thought much about it until he was standing in it. A shelf along one wall was crammed with books, the titles ranging from serial mysteries to books on theoretical physics. Another was filled with journals—and the journals themselves filled with writing, judging by their weathered, bulging nature.

        "You know they get a T.V. in some states?" The Inmate said.

        "No, I don't think I did," Father Baker replied.

        "I think they're afraid I'll smash it and slash my wrists with the pieces," he said, laughing. "Then again they let me have a pencil, so who knows."

        Father Baker laughed with The Inmate, but it felt forced to him. He was trying to shed his discomfort—by force—with limited success.

        One of the guards returned with a metal chair and set it down just inside the cell. "No time limit," he said, "but we'll come get you when it's time to go." He turned to the priest. "You can leave any time—or he can ask that you do—but otherwise you're free to go with him until the end. They'll talk you both through some last minute things once they come for him though. Good?"

        The priest nodded.  

        "Thanks, Walt," The Inmate said.

        "'Course," the guard said with a curt nod before turning away. Father Baker noticed a strange intertwining of coldness and familiarity in the guard's words as he sat down and heard the key in the lock with a heavy thunk.

        Once the guard was down the hall, The Inmate said, "He's a good guy. Daughter survived leukemia a couple years ago. He'd show me pictures of her sometimes through treatment, real cute kid."

        "Really?" Father Baker tried to square that with the distance he'd just seen between the two of them.

        "Yeah. Don't worry, he's a nice guy, really. The last time I almost got the needle, they were all the same way. Sometimes I think they're more uncomfortable about the whole thing than I am, but I guess that's natural. He goes home to a daughter and a wife, one of the other guys, Eddie, he takes care of his mother, and Joan's boyfriend just proposed to her like a month ago." He shrugged. "They've got places to go. Don't gotta think about the end as much."

        Silence welled between them and The Inmate coughed. The priest wanted to say something but nothing came to mind that felt appropriate—especially not "I'm sorry," or any other apologetic platitudes, despite the natural reflex to reach for those.

        "Do you practice?" Father Baker finally asked, trying not to sound like an interviewer.

        "Religion, you mean?"

        The Father nodded.

        "Not so much. Grew up going to Church with my mother, but once she died I never felt like going back. Didn't avoid it or anything, it just never really occurred to me to go, since I'd been going for her I realized."

        "Your father never went?"

        The Inmate snorted. "If he did, I think they'd have seen through him before the priest made it to the pulpit."

        "What do you mean?"

        "He wasn't a bad person I don't think, but not a holy one. Definitely a sinner."

        "Churches accommodate those just as well as the pious."

        The Inmate shrugged. "I think my dad was in that middle area."

        "Of what?"

        "Bad enough to need some redemption, but not good enough to go get it, you know?"

        Father Baker nodded. "Ah, I see what you mean. What about you?"

        The Inmate's eyes flicked up to meet Father Baker's briefly. "Suppose that depends on who you ask."

        "I'm asking you," the priest said, smiling lightly.

        "Asking the wrong person then." The Inmate's eyes cast downward and his hands twisted on themselves, elbows on his knees.

        The priest searched for what to say next. The fact he'd never done this before was catching up with him.

        "I've been here for 17 years, I've had a lot of time to think and I probably  feel better about things than most people think." He paused, drawing in a breath and looking across the cell as if there was a landscape to take in. "After a couple years, you just kind of stop thinking about 'out there.' It's like…Europe, or Japan or something. I know about ‘em, but  after a lot of time it feels like a whole other place. Even though it's just on the other side of the wall it feels distant since you only get to hear about it in books and newspapers. Not even T.V.," he said, glancing back at Father Baker with a smile and they both chuckled.

        The silence again. Father Baker could hold a conversation any place or time about God, the Bible, or spirituality. A priest was often asked to play the role of therapist and Father Baker could imagine how his superiors and those with many years of priesthood behind them would seamlessly blend the two but everything he could say seemed hollow and unimportant. They may not have the language of a clinician, but men of the cloth got to much the same place. Father Baker though, still learning the names of his first flock of parishioners, felt tongue-tied and useless.

        "When did they call you?" The Inmate asked.

        "Uh, two hours ago or so."

        "What did you think?"

        Father Baker rolled a reply around on his tongue, unsure of what to say. "I felt a lot of things."

        "Like what?"

        "Well, seeing a federal prison on caller ID was a new one,"

        "Ha, I bet! How'd they tell you why they called?"

        "They didn't really need to. Federal prison calls a priest—especially late at night—it's not much of a puzzle. Plus I get the newspaper. They've been talking about…this."

        "Fair, fair. How many of these have you done?"

        The priest chuckled and his face reddened slightly. "Well I hope you don't mind, but this is my first."

        "Well no shit! The last time they almost got the bill passed, it never got signed so I never got a priest or anything. So this is a first for me too! S'pose it's a first for most guys though. Guess that means we can figure out how to do this together, huh?"

        The pair started laughing, and a vague part of Father Baker acknowledged how absurd it might seem on the outside to be sharing a joke with this man. But within the bars of the cell, it was beginning to feel entirely natural.

        "Now I really gotta know what was going through your mind."

        Father Baker shook his head slowly and took in a long breath. "Honestly I don't even think I can say. It was kind of blank, it was surreal. Guess you could call it autopilot, actually." He started to chuckle. "I think I started to feel normal again as we started talking."

        The Inmate laughed too. "The guy on death row brings you back to the world of the living."

        Father Baker laughed harder and never forgot that sentence. He started to wonder what was written in The Inmate's notebooks—and what would happen to them the next morning.

        After a moment their laughter died and Father Baker asked, "Not everyone in your—on death row, requests a religious figure."

        It was, and wasn't, a question.

        "Yeah," The Inmate answered. "S'pose I didn't really want a religious figure, if I'm honest—or didn't need one, I guess I mean. They don't offer 'friend figures' though, and I think the only people I could talk to like that anymore wear a badge anyway."

        "Hey, I can be that too. But a friend can't take confession if that's what you want," Father Baker joked. As soon as it passed his lips, he wondered if that was the right thing to have said and if The Inmate would actually find it funny. Before he could begin to apologize though, The Inmate started to chuckle.

        "No offense Father, but twelve people from this great state seem to agree I'm past that."

        Relief at having not offended The Inmate washed over Father Baker, but at the same time he knit his brow in some confusion over what The Inmate had said.

        "They didn't do anything like that, they just agreed with a prosecutor."

        The Inmate paused for a moment. "You think I'm innocent?"

"I don't think it matters, killing you doesn't seem to make a lot of sense."

        "The priest isn't so hot on Old Testament punishment?"

        "Just because I vote for a guy for President doesn't mean I'm co-signing on his every statement, right? We've revised the book enough times that the 'letter of the law' isn't the same anymore. You could be here for having a boyfriend if the Church still abided by the Old Testament. If the crimes can change, so can the punishments I think."

        "Some people would prefer it the old way."

        "And I'd rather not have those people in my audience on Sunday morning."

        The Inmate crossed his arms, narrowed his eyes, and leaned back in his chair. "I figured most of you for the fire and brimstone types. 'Bring it on, he violated God's will!' That sort of thing."

        Father Baker nodded. "I've known a few of those. They never seemed especially happy to me, and their parishioners…they didn't seem much better." He smiled a thin smile that said, Let's just leave it at that for now.

        "Regardless," The Inmate started, unfurling his arms, "a vote to convict can't help but feel like 'a vote of unconfidence in one's character'." He affected a noble tone as he spoke, mocking the court's pretentiousness.

        "That's what I meant when I said they just agreed with a prosecutor. That doesn't mean anything about your character, they didn't get to know you, they got to know an argument presented by an attorney."

        The Inmate was silent.

        "You don't have to use me for confession or last rites or anything if you don't want to—you can send me away or we can talk about baseball if that sounds better to you—but I don't think you sitting here, no matter how you got here, is so severe of a judgment of your character that God is going to turn his face away from you." Without really intending to, Father Baker had leaned forward in his chair and grown serious as he spoke.

        The Inmate let quiet hang between them before allowing a small smile onto his lips. "So you think I'm guilty, I just don't deserve the needle—or a bullet, now?"

        Father Baker laughed at The Inmate's insistence and said, hands splayed as if proving his honesty, "If you have to know, I barely know the details of your case.  I didn't live here when it happened and they never even bothered to ‘brief me’ or anything on the way here." He'd been nervous to admit as much at the beginning, but now he didn't feel like he had a choice.

        Fortunately The Inmate burst out laughing. "They sent me a first time priest, new to the area, and no idea who I am."

        "Don't forget, they sent the first one that picked up the phone," Father Baker said, smiling more broadly. The Inmate laughed harder and slapped his thigh as he doubled over.

        "Swear to God," he said between breaths, “can't make this shit up." The Inmate didn't notice, but Father Baker smiled inwardly that stuffier priests would’ve taken umbrage at his use of the Lord's name.

        The laughter between them subsided and they both sat in quiet, getting their breath back.

        "Somehow I thought this was going to be more somber than it is," Father Baker said.

        The Inmate shrugged. "You had to go past the other cells on the row, I'm not alone. Some of 'em, newer guys on the row mostly, they don't handle being here as well." His voice got quieter. "I know I didn't, when I got here."

        Father Baker felt more comfortable now, enough to risk asking a question he wouldn't have earlier. "Does it feel…closer? When you first get here?"

        "Yeah," The Inmate nodded. He kept nodding for a moment and continued, "I think in your head you know this shit takes years, there's always appeals, dates get scheduled and then moved around, nowadays they gotta get the drugs in the first place—or used to anyway—that kind of stuff. So you know it's not gonna be tomorrow or even next year probably, but it feels…you already feel like they killed you, I guess. You've spent years behind bars before you get to trial and everything, but somehow that day, going back to the cell after it's all over. It's like going back in a cell for the first time, only a thousand times worse because now they took away the one last thing you had." He paused, fighting a closing throat and encroaching despair that rose to his face and clouded over the genial quality he'd worn since Father Baker arrived. "Hope is for the living, and it feels like they killed you the moment they read out that verdict."

        Something uncoiled in Father Baker as The Inmate spoke. The contrast of the lightheartedness a moment before revealed a frustration, some lashing, tear-stained thing squirming and fighting under the weight of an astonishing needlessness. The fact that "why" didn't seem to have any answer—let alone a reasonable one—felt disqualifying all on its own as he sat across from one of the few men on Earth whose life could be set to an alarm clock. It wasn't as if Father Baker hadn't thought some about it beforehand, either in the black SUV that had picked him up or in the years prior as the debate over capital punishment routinely made its way into the newspapers, but it wasn't the same sterile, philosophical debate that it had always been presented as.

        Like a car struggling to start, a smile flickered across The Inmate's face before catching and settling there with a sigh and a shrug. What can you do? his expression seemed to say. Appeals had all been roundly defeated, the reality was that the next morning's paper would bear his name across the front page, and at that moment he would become a statistic, a number added to a graph for social workers and activists to present with fervor in making their case to a generally apathetic public.

        Father Baker had never figured himself for a very political person and he knew that many around the country would point to the more torrid elements of the bible as evidence of his hypocrisy—a fact he wouldn't attempt to deny—but sitting across from The Inmate, none of it felt political. It didn't even really feel barbaric, as so many would claim. In the small silence that let Father Baker's thoughts whirl, it struck him as…illogical. Again, that question of "why" floated across his mind, but instead of becoming imbued with frustration and rage, this time there was a sort of pleading confusion. A lack of understanding, as if someone was insisting to him that two and two was five, but with a man's life dependent on the accuracy of the sum.

        The Inmate took a deep breath, sucking out the silence from between them. "Why did you become a priest?" he asked.

        Father Baker was taken somewhat aback by the question. The transition in The Inmate's tone and expression was gradual, but fast—faster than his own, without a doubt. "Um," Father Baker swallowed, "My, well, I had some troubles in college, in my freshman year. Before that, too, I guess, but it was…college made it harder." He made the decision to cut himself off before realizing he'd only intimated an answer to The Inmate's question.

        "So you went to, like, priest school instead?"

        Images came to him of white hospital sheets spattered with blood, gauze wrapped around both wrists, shouting voices and rushing footsteps.

        "Something like that," Father Baker said, pushing the images aside and putting on a smile like a cheap suit. "It focused me. Gave me something to look for."

        The Inmate nodded, eyes distant. Father Baker wondered what was going through The Inmate's mind, whether he should say more. Whether he should tell him that his roommate came home from class early, still hungover, only to find him collapsed on the bathroom tile, slick with bright red arterial blood. Or so he'd been told later, at the hospital.

        "Would you pray with me?" The Inmate asked, eyes still downcast.

        "Of course. Do you have a passage you like?" Father Baker asked, producing a small traveling bible and leafing through its thin pages as he welcomed the distraction from his own thoughts.

        The Inmate said no and the pair of them bowed their heads. In the car ride, Father Baker had frantically thought of some passages that seemed appropriate but suddenly none of them felt that way anymore. So he shut the bible and rested it on his knee to say something of his own.

        Father Baker spoke for a minute or two and was about to wind down his prayer when he heard the squeak of leather boots on polished linoleum. He swallowed hard and felt his pulse spike as he and The Inmate opened their eyes and straightened at the same time.

        "Hey Walt," The Inmate said, the brightness in his voice not sounding forced at all.

        The guard took a deep breath and said, evenly, "Time to go."

        The room had been retrofitted quickly and obviously. The gurney with its straps and thick padding was gone, the hole in the floor that held it covered with an X of blue painter's tape. On the far side of the room, away from the spectating windows, a metal chair was placed with small mountains of sandbags around the legs and straps attached to the arms. A crenelated wall of sandbags was nearer the windows with gaps for the shooters to place their rifles, aimed toward the modern crucifix at the other end.

        From behind the glass, Father Baker watched. He hadn't given thought to it, but defaulted to sitting on the side of the family—only a sister—along with a handful of reporters. A man in National Guard fatigues—presumably the provider of the sandbags—packed down the last of them and made sure the wall was solid before leaving the room. Father Baker felt a bit like being at a concert with the man in fatigues making final adjustments on instruments and sound equipment before the band came out for the main event. The comparison sat in his stomach like bad tequila.

         The way they happened to file into the room, Father Baker ended up next to The Inmate's sister in the front row. On the one hand, the idea of being so close to the glass made his pulse quicken uncomfortably, but he did his best to calm down by reminding himself that ten feet back in the third or fourth row wouldn't really be any different.

        He cleared his throat. "Are you his sister?"

        She jumped slightly. "Yes."

        Father Baker nodded dumbly, realizing he'd started a conversation with no means to continue it.

        "Are you a reporter?" she asked, looking for either a recording device or pad of paper and pencil.

        "No, no. I'm a priest, but we generally leave out vestments at the Church—they're not exactly right for grocery getting."

        The corners of her mouth twitched slightly in the smallest smile. "How was he?" she asked in a hollow voice.

        It was an impossible question. Father Baker wanted to tell her that he'd been laughing, that he seemed to be okay and that the years waiting for this moment had inoculated him to the worst of the emotions around it. But at the same time he felt he would be torturing her by saying as much, as if he was robbing her of her last chance to see him that way simply by recounting it.

        "We prayed together. I think it helped him."

        Her eyes flashed. "He prayed?"

        Father Baker said yes.

        "I didn't know he'd started believing again."

        "I think he just wanted to believe in something."

        She nodded and hung her head. For a moment Father Baker thought she was lost in thought, but then noticed that her eyes were jammed shut and her shoulders rocked with tears she was straining to keep in. A loose grouping of reporters started to take notes which made Father Baker more self conscious about how he should respond.

        "I-I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-"

        She interrupted him with a wave. "No," she said, digging in her purse for a wad of tissues. "It's, um, damn near anything can…can do this, right now."

        "D-do you want a hug? Or something? I can get some fresh tissues I think."

        "It's fine."

        Father Baker had been expecting a certain amount of consoling with The Inmate but strangely hadn't needed to do as much as he expected. Now that he was being asked to console, it caught him off guard and he felt foolish, as if he were making things worse.

        You've got to be kidding me , Father Baker thought as he saw the door in the execution chamber open while The Inmate’s sister barely got her tears under control. A pair of guards walked through with The Inmate in the middle, hands and feet shackled, constraining him to the shuffling gait of the old man he would never be. His sister heard it and looked up, her shoulders sagging at the sight as if she'd gone light-headed. She took long, slow breaths and managed to force a sense of calm back onto her exterior, but just sitting beside her Father Baker could feel that it was a facade—a matter of appearances.

        The two guards sat The Inmate in the chair. Attaching his shackles to its frame, they then slipped a black hood over his head and pinned a white target to his left breast.

        As the black cloth covered The Inmate's face, Father Baker felt a primal fear stab at him from a deep part of his brain. Something deep in the evolutionary history of man that had been taught that all things are a matter of avoiding or delaying death began to shriek at him. A visceral wrongness, a horror as existential as it was physical. Without intending to, he extended his hand, palm up, to The Inmate's sister. She took it, squeezing with a ferocity that would have caused Father Baker to cry out at any other time.

        The door in the execution chamber opened again. Four men and a woman walked through, all dressed in plain black with serious faces. Each one carried a lever-action rifle which struck Father Baker as darkly comedic, like a cruel joke alluding to frontier justice. A moment later the warden and a man with a leather satchel entered.

        The fivesome lined up behind the sandbags, rifles rested on them, barrels pointed up.

        The warden and the seventh man took their place behind the shooters. After a brief pause the warden began, in a loud voice as if delivering a speech, to inform The Inmate that, by the power of the state and by the will of the people, he was sentenced to death and the manner in which the deed would be done was, in accordance with state and federal law, a firing squad.

        The warden paused a moment before addressing The Inmate again.

        "Do you have any last words?"

        Everything paused. Reality itself seemed to halt and look up from its duty, as if to say, It's really happening , with wide-eyed disbelief. Dust motes hung in the air, lungs and hearts paused as if in deference to the event. The world collapsed to a single point in which a man's final agency was given him by his killers.

        "Even if I could find the words, I'm not sure we've got the time."

        The warden looked taken aback, but covered it well. The riflemen stayed impassive like they hadn't heard anything.

        But Father Baker heard a twinge of fear in The Inmate’s words he hadn't before.

        "Rifles," the warden called, back to his commandant's authoritativeness.

        The riflemen leveled their barrels at the target on The Inmate's chest and leaned into the butt of their rifles as the warden began a countdown.

        141 seconds after entering the chamber, The Inmate was dead.

        For the rest of his life, any time he put on a mask or had his vision obscured unexpectedly, Father Baker would hear the synchronized crack of five rifles and see the slack-jawed face of The Inmate as the man with the satchel pulsed a light across his eyes and felt his jugular a moment later.

        Father Baker would go on to perform last rites and advocate for death row prisoners at every opportunity. But he would never again be present for an execution.