Читать книгу Purity of Absence - Dave Margoshes - Страница 18

Deadman’s Eyes

for Charlie Niehuis

Luis José Mongi, last man executed

in the United States before the high court

blew the whistle, gassed June 27, 1967,

in Canon City, willed his corneas

to two convicts, one at Buena Vista,

the other to Rick Gardner, hospital orderly

at Canon who’d done him kindnesses,

a trustee who’d embezzled clinic funds,

hands shaking with blindness closing in

the way death sniffed around at Jose’s heels,

“I won’t need them anymore,” he told

the warden, Big Jim Patterson, who

would pull the switch hissing in the gas,

flip to the end. He’d beaten his

common-law wife to death with his hands.

Patterson took sick, wound up

in hospital, and called for Gardner

to be brought from the pen to look

after him, doze in a hard-backed chair

beside the bed through the night

when ghosts of José and other spirits

came back to dance their death jigs

around him, the twitches of gas

rushing through blood to claim it,

José’s eye in Rick’s head gazing

through the night at Patterson’s face

without rancour, without compassion

but with calm.