Read More: A brief Q&A with Garrett Ashley
When given the option to either crush the murderer’s head with a rock or drown him in the river, I chose to drown him in the river. The decision had something to do with being in nature. Hearing the water running gently over the stones seemed like it might make things easier.
If I were to choose stoning, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice would require that the execution take place at the Huntsville Unit in a cement room with no windows. If I chose the river, there was no way to tell what would be allowed or not allowed, but at least it would be done in the open air.
I’d been out at the river since my son died. He’d been hit in the head with a rock and then drowned. My visiting the river several times was of growing concern to the people in my family. My brother, of all people, was the one to finally speak up at the end of Thanksgiving: “You’re so fucking depressing. We can’t take it anymore. If you go out there again, I’m going to come over to your trailer and kick your ass. What are you all looking at? You’re all thinking it!”
My ex-wife, who no one knew was my ex-wife, yet, asked to speak with him in private. I think she gave him an earful. She still cared about me, but statistically couples did not stay together after the death of a child.
My brother had always been an asshole, but he was right: I needed to move on from what had happened, but the coming execution made it impossible for me to move on.
My son was with Ellis, the murderer, at the river. They had been taking a bath. This was during the spring. They’d been living in and out of tents for months at different national parks. A friend had given them a truck.
He and Ellis just hit it off. It’s unclear whether they were in a relationship. I never thought to ask—not that we ever spoke anyway. There was no motive behind Ellis’s attack. He turned himself in soon after murdering my son.
Russ was found three days after his murder near a papermill. His body, in addition to having bloated from being in the river, had absorbed pollutants from the mill and had taken on a sort of dark hue around his bonier features, cheeks which I’d always thought looked like my mother’s cheeks.
The friend who’d loaned them the truck claimed there was nothing unusual about Ellis. He described him thusly: “He had a tick. Constantly looking around as if in awe of something. There’s a lot of trees around here. Pine. I don’t know what he could have been in awe of. I don’t know why he murdered Russel. They’d seemed fine. One would talk, they’d wait for the other to speak, then they would talk again. They were polite, and thankful for the truck. I would have loaned Russel a truck any day of the week. I hope you get to splatter the fucker’s brains out.”
The truck had been abandoned in a Chevron parking lot three miles from the spot where Russ was drowned and bludgeoned. Indicating Ellis didn’t care if he was caught—being mobile, though, I figured he would have gotten as far from the area as possible.
I’ve tried to analyze certain features of the murder. For instance, Ellis’s indication of the murder location and the body’s location was inconsistent—obviously, he’d dragged my son’s body from the river after changing his mind about letting it float to the ocean. Again, this indicates some form of remorse, which I can appreciate given the circumstances. I’ve been more reasonable about this whole thing than I should be, and that’s perhaps one of the reasons why my ex-wife left me: I was very fucking weird, but human, probably.
In truth, when I went down to the river where my son was murdered, it wasn’t to brood or try to connect with the universe in some obscure way that only the parents of murdered children understand. It’s just that I’d gone down once to see where he’d been drowned, and I couldn’t help myself: it was a nice place, and I liked being there.
I went down to the water and felt the rocks against my bare feet and the only thing I was thinking was here I am in this river, letting the water run over my feet, and over there is a couple of people sitting in folding chairs, looking at an opening in the trees where a great big bear had been spotted some months before.
It was missing the vista of a mountain against a slab of dark green; the silhouette of buildings peeked beyond a thick layer of trees. Otherwise, it was a normal enough river, and I promised myself to come back often.
It was good being the father of a murdered son. I could brood and stand out here by the river without feeling bad about it. I could miss my job as a lift operator occasionally, saying “I don’t think today’s the best day to operate a lift” or some such excuse, and my boss, being reasonable and having lost a son of his own (not murder related), would tell me to take a couple of days and get my mind back in order.
The TDCJ, however, specified that the river would in fact be a designated river and not the river where Russ was drowned. The designated river went through a gated section of land leading down to the water. They’d put out a net across the stretch of the river in case Ellis tried to get away.
“That’s great,” I said, referring to the location. “I was worried you’d just give me a bucket of water to drown him in.”
The woman on the phone didn’t laugh. It’s important that I say she didn’t laugh because a lot of people laughed at my jokes lately, my lawyers especially, even when the jokes weren’t funny. It was good to be held accountable for my awkward behavior—I told a joke about a bucket and drowning that was not funny, and was in no way deserving of a laugh, and like magic, she did not laugh. Just like things used to be before my son was murdered at the river.
She sent a list of rules I was to follow regarding the execution:
- You will provide an impact statement upon arrival at the river. Before and after the impact statement, all parties shall remain silent.
- While you are present in the company of the guilty party, you shall not speak or respond to anything E. THURMAN says.
- You may put your hands around the guilty party’s throat, if you wish.
- While the guilty party will be restrained, you may still feel threatened; if this is the case, you may provide a hand signal to the constable.
- You may not speak to any members of the press who may be present at the execution itself, but you are free to speak to the press after the constable has called the guilty party’s time of death.
Number four frightened me. I’d never felt scared of the man who had killed my son. But now something felt different: like he was out in my yard waiting for me to step out for a cigarette.
The trailer’s door was locked. I went into the den and closed the curtains. I listened for the sound of the gravel road, afterwards, and for the cries of the dog next door that always barked at every little thing that passed by.
Fears aside, it was really amazing that I was going to participate in an execution. I have really good lawyers. One in five executions were performed by the state behind closed doors. Really good lawyers, though, can put your finger on the trigger.
Although I’ll admit that I didn’t want to do it. My lawyers talked me into doing it. “Getting revenge on Ellis would be better than years of therapy,” they said.
The truth is, I couldn’t afford these lawyers. They were loaned to me by the state. This was made possible because of how my son was found: three kids, all under the ages of nine, had been playing on the outskirts of the papermill and found him in the rocks looking like a bloated summer sausage. They were all in therapy now, and a big conversation had gotten started as a result about the intricacies of childhood and death. That gave the case a lot of attention, and the state thought well why the hell not, let’s give this poor fucker a chance to avenge his son. Perhaps someone will be reelected as a result.
My brother came to stay the night at the trailer. We drank together. We took our jackets off and smoked pot and drank and listened to 80s rock music. We slammed vodka late into the night and gave each other high fives. I thought very hard in my drunken stupor about the possibility of going back to school someday and going into law somehow. I told my brother about possibly going back to school to become a lawyer and he just sat quietly, rotating the glass in his hands.
In the morning we went to go find something to eat. He felt bad about giving me shit the other day. That’s life, though, I said. We ate at a little backroad diner with hamburgers and chicken strips. I ordered the chicken. He asked how I was doing.
“I made a garden. I have cabbage growing in a box off the ground about like—” I showed him the size of the box with my hands.
“Cabbage,” he said.
“It doesn’t stalk. Bloom. It doesn’t—”
“I don’t know what cabbage does or doesn’t do,” he said, noncommittally.
Towards the end of our talking about cabbage, he got up to go to the bathroom. The waitress came by and asked if I wanted another coffee.
The more coffee I drank, the more anxious I became: I worried about the murderer and his unlikely appearance before me at night at the foot of my bed to strangle me or kill me with a rock. I already considered these things often, but coffee did it worse to me.
My ex-wife said I should start drinking tea. But I just couldn’t get into tea, so I continued drinking coffee.
When I met my ex-wife for dinner one evening, she asked me a lot of the same questions as my brother: how are you doing? What have you been up to? Am I holding it together?
These were starting points: good starting points, I guess, for someone in my position, though I don’t know much about how to go on small talking after initiating it. I was more concerned with whether she’d announced, yet, that we’d split. She’d never liked living in a trailer, and the death of our son had pretty much done us in.
Sometimes my ex-wife and I would hook up at a motel. Sex was still fresh on our minds even if romance was out of the question. We were both single and there were no strings attached aside from the emotional baggage of having to be alone after hooking up—and she would always bring forth the topic of “we can’t keep doing this” even though she was smiling when she said it and we both knew that, so long as we were both single, this would probably keep happening.
But realistically, we were both fighting something that neither of us were equipped for—she was angry she didn’t get to take place in the execution. It had fallen on me for gender reasons. That’s what my lawyers told me. It didn’t make sense but I don’t think a lot of anything makes any sense. We had sex and then we left and I knew I’d hear from her again at some point.
It was difficult writing a second impact statement. I didn’t know what else to say about my son. I didn’t know what to say about the murderer, either. Everyone, including the murderer, already knew that what had happened was wrong, that I was feeling bad, would always feel bad, and so I didn’t see the point in going through with this again. I’d already given a brief statement during the hearing; that had taken me a week to write.
“Well,” the woman told me over the phone, “this is a separate thing. The post sentencing statement. You can say whatever you want.”
“I’ll keep it short.”
“You might have your lawyers work on it with you. They can do that.”
This part of the judicial process has always intrigued me. I’m a somewhat literate person but I’ve seen court cases where people who’d probably never written a word in their lives were asked to pen this monumental, passionate thing which frankly must be difficult for any professional writer to come up with, particularly when they’re in a state of emotional turmoil. But I didn’t want my lawyers to do it; they were good people, but I didn’t want them to have to write anything for me.
I couldn’t even remember what I’d said in my previous impact statement. I thought I might could go back and look at the notepad file and see if I could salvage anything from that.
I started talking to animals after the death of my son. I had full conversations with the creatures that took shelter under my trailer. You know how possums are—they stop and look at you and they don’t get in a big hurry to run away or anything, so they’re exciting to talk to about life etc. I asked about her possum family. I wanted to see those baby possums hanging off her like a possum coat. In addition to the possum, I talked financial advice over with the cat. I got into fights with the cat, too. There was a huge bat population in the trailer park, but they wouldn’t sit still long enough for me to talk to. You never knew where they’d flown to—they’d zip through the air and I’d catch a glimpse of them making an arc beneath the orange light, then they’d be gone. They reminded me of growing up in an apartment with my mother in Hammond—I’d be alone at six or seven waiting for her to come home and the bats would swoop down to catch the bugs that clouded the lights of the apartment’s swimming pool.
Neighbors came to congratulate me on the execution. They’d say things like “make it last” and “I wish you” and all that crap they didn’t really mean.
I nodded and smiled; despite my shyness about all the attention, it still felt like a powerful position to be in, and I’d tried for a long time already, even before the murder of my son, to be okay with his loss—he’d always been long gone. Part of me had gone with him. This was even before he’d said goodbye—he’d gone to high school and a part of me had simply left the house and didn’t come back. I think it was the part of me that liked cooking and tasting: a good bit of the spirit of the kitchen had simply vanished.
One of the neighbors had an unusual request: she wanted me to gouge the murderer’s eyes out with my thumbs as I held him under the water. I showed her the rules and explained that it would be a bad idea if I gouged the murderer’s eyes out with my thumbs, since it only specified putting my hands around his throat. She went on to explain that I could hold him under the water and do it out of sight of the guard that would be there with us, but I couldn’t help but think that this was still a human being and if it weren’t for this woman telling me to do something horrible to the man’s eyes I might not have considered the fact that for whatever reason the murder of my son must have been some kind of fluke, that had circumstances not aligned just so he might still be alive and the two might still have been able to get through the spring. He might have come home to say “Dad, I want you to meet someone.” That kind of thing crossed my mind.
Later that night I went out and waited for the possum to show up. I could have talked to my brother or ex-wife about my inability to cope, but I wanted to talk to the possum about her possum babies—where were they at this time of the year? What were you avoiding, possum?
My brother came to see me again. He’d been coming to see me a lot lately; this was fine. He asked if I’d been down to the river.
No, I’d not been down to the river, I told him.
He seemed glad of this. But he wanted to talk to me about something. I wasn’t sure what his problem was. He always looked like an angry individual. He had big thumbs and knuckles and he was always scratching his chin with his fingers.
Then he told me about my son—something he knew that he thought I should know about too. “When I was working in Garcia, Russ came to me with a request. I said anything, son. He said you’re a good uncle. I said I try to be, Russ. He said he’d been trying to contact you. It’d been a long time since you’d spoken. He said you didn’t hate each other, that he’d met someone, finally, I didn’t know who he meant, but it was someone he felt he could have a meaningful few months with, if not longer—and then—” my brother paused, like he was taking a breath. The whole thing seemed very staged; this conversation, one-sided, and my taking it like a champ: “then—what did he say? It was just that when he came to see me, he felt very bad about it. He was close to you but he felt a kinship to me that—I didn’t mean it like that, only that—do you know how hard this is for me to do? To tell you all this shit?”
“I understand.”
“The hell you understand.”
“I hear what you’re saying.”
“But now you’ve heard it, and that makes some kind of difference doesn’t it?” […]
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Garrett Ashley’s work has appeared in The Normal School, Asimov’s Science Fiction, DIAGRAM, PANK, and Sonora Review, among other places. Garrett is an Assistant Professor of English at Tuskegee University.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Garrett Ashley