The Accused Part 15

"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 ent.i.tled, 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 ma.s.ses 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."