Generally saying you break necks for a living is the purview of large men on football fields or MMA rings. It's the sort of boast you get to make if you're a hulking 250 pound plus guy with no neck and a series of skills in personal carnage and destruction.
So you'd be surprised to see that the person responsible for breaking necks at the prison was a young lady who stands about 5 feet two inches tall and might weigh 100 pounds if she just got out of the shower. She more closely resembled a pixie then a prison guard which is how she came to find herself doing this.
"Now what I'm doing is stretching out the rope. "She said tying the end of it to 4 fifty pound sandbags. Then pulling the lever that released the trapdoor which opened violently and loudly. A clanging sound reverberating through the room. The rope bounced and jerked as the weight hit the bottom then stopped.
"See that?" She said, indicating the rope. "That bounce? Can't have that, if the rope has give and the condemned bounces on the end it may not do the job right and then they strangle to death."
I nodded then asked her. "How did you get this job?" To me it seemed an odd picture. While I think women can do just fine as cops and soldiers I always have to wonder how someone finds themselves here. Doing this. Part of a lonely few who specialize in killing on behalf of the state. If asked I wouldn't serve and I wondered why she did.
"I volunteered." She said, turning to check the fittings on the machine. "After the first hanging we did went bad."
That was easy to remember. By all accounts the trap door opened and the guy on the end of the rope had jerked and twisted for 20 minutes. They said it was an accident.
"Why?"
"Tommy, the guy who set this up the first time? Yeah he said he made a mistake in adjusting for the drop, but I saw him place the knot wrong on purpose. He wanted that guy to suffer." She paused. "I swear that tiny little dick of his was hard in his pants as that poor guy squirmed."
Thinking about it made me glad I had gone for a light breakfast before I came here, I felt a need to be ill.
"So I contacted the warden and said I'd do it. I showed him the research I did after that, the drop tables the preparation guides everything."
"Drop tables?"
"Yeah an English hangman invented a table that matched up height and weight for the condemned to create the right amount of force to break a neck without causing them to stay conscious while they strangled, or if they fall too long pulling their head off. then there's the rope, you stretch it out like you do here to make sure the impact at the bottom does the job. When the neck breaks they're as good as dead, but the guys who developed the method said it was best to leave them hanging for an hour to ensure death by hypoxia."
Yeah the light breakfast was a seriously good idea.
"I know what you're gonna ask." She said. "Everyone else who knows asks too. Why?"
"Yeah well you beat me to it." I said with a smile.
"I saw that guy jerk and dance at the end of the rope and saw Tommy standing there. Smiling at his work when he thought no one was watching. Then I remembered something my grandfather said. 'Evil people will do a hard job because they enjoy seeing others suffer through it. A good person does a hard job because they know it needs to be done right or not at all'." She shrugged. "I don't like doing it, but I'd rather be the one who does then let Tommy or some other idiot go out of their way to kill someone as slow as they can."
Despite myself I smiled. Wondereing how it was this woman wasn't doing something more in line with her minds ability and her own ethic. Killing people seemed to be a waste. Yet somehow seemed in line with the notion of this whole sick system. Find a person with a good sense of morals and ethics then force them to do a hard thing, because frankly they would be the only ones who would do a good job. Never mind that their skills could be used to actually build things or save lives rather than take them. "So every week you prep this device and another person take a drop."
"Yeah I don't have to like it I just have to do it." She looked at the dangling sand bags on the rope and sighed. "Just wish I didn't have to." Part of me had to wonder what traumas she went through in doing this every time. Sending someone to their death, some who deserved it and others who didn't, but each one caught up in a web of a system that really cared less for them then it did for preserving some ancient status quo that we all somehow know exists but never bother to examine.
At every step there was a person who could simply say no. A Judge, a juror, a governor. A person who might notice that the person on the wrong end of the law in some cases was not some monster but a person who could, perhaps, over time be redeemed. Sadly the people who administered the system itself had no need for such thoughts. By the time it got to her she had to say yes because the alternative was horrid by any measure.
"Me too." I replied and knocked on the door to the gallows room.
"I gotta ask, when you write this what are you gonna say about me?" She asked her eyes were asking for understanding, but her body was braced like she was going to take a punch.
"That you might be the one of two people with any sense of decency in this whole sad story." Another guard opened the death house door.
"Come see me after. I like to blow off steam with a drink or twelve after it's all done." She said.
"Hell when this is all done I might need a drink or twelve myself." I replied.
"Mr O'Neil I'd be worried if you didn't."
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