Death Sentence by Joe Sharkey

Author:Joe Sharkey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

A voice says, “Cry!”

And I said, “What shall I cry?”

All flesh is grass.

and all its beauty is like the flower

of the field.

The grass withers, the flower fades.

when the breath of the Lord

blows upon it;

surely the people is grass.

The grass withers, the flower fades,

but the word of our God will stand forever.

To some who were not members of the Redeemer fold, the pastor’s choice of scripture seemed to skirt the overwhelming issues of the day, violent criminality, blame, and grief, and they would just have seen the notion of the blameless perishability of life left unexplored by the murderer’s confessor and proclaimed good friend.

Among the members of the drama club, who were well aware already of Patricia’s contemptuous attitude toward the very church in which they now were gathered, the sermon was especially rankling. Even Ed Illiano, a staunch Roman Catholic who would brook no show of disrespect toward any clergyman, was barely out of the church before he began referring to the Rehwinkle invocation derisively as the “We Are Leveled, O Westfield soliloquy.” Said Ed: “I just thought, my God, what is this guy doing? Doesn’t he know how much injury John List has caused these people and how pissed off they are?”

The day was cold and sunny, with a brisk wind that whipped over the low hills and stung the faces of the mourners gathered by the plot, where fresh red earth was piled beside four newly dug graves. The funeral procession had stretched the length of Westfield itself; when the last car was pulling into the line from the parking lot at Redeemer, the first had already made its turn off Broad Street and under the gray stone arch at the entrance to Fairview Cemetery. The graves were dug beside a large fir tree, on a hill where the western edge of Westfield begins a gentle ascent toward the Watchung range.

Standing among the mourners, Eileen Livesey, noticing the large number of automobiles parked helter-skelter on the winding drives near the grave, thought of Pat, being laid in her grave a month short of her seventeenth birthday. We’re all so sophisticated and mature, Eileen thought. She never even got to drive a car.

Hundreds of people were clustered near the white graveside tents that flapped in the wind. Muffled sobs mingled with the pattering snaps of the photographers’ shutters. Glassy eyes of television cameras searched uplifted faces for emotion. Some of the photographers and television camera people perched atop nearby tombstones for better angles into the faces of the crowd.

Gene Syfert looked around from his place under one of the tents. He had never seen so many people with cameras. He was also surprised to see the glint of gun barrels from the crests of some of the hills. He counted a dozen police riflemen on the hills, waiting for John List to show his face. Gene thought how bizarre they looked in such a setting.

Both the undertaker and the minister were glad, though, for the presence of police sharpshooters.

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