July 17, 1932

July 17, 1932, was the date of the execution of Arlen Bitterbuck at Cold Mountain Penitentiary—the first electrocution Paul Edgecombe and his E Block team carried out after the mysterious mouse that would become Mr. Jingles had begun appearing on the Green Mile. Bitterbuck, a Cherokee council elder from the Washita Reservation, had crushed a man's head with a cement block during a drunken quarrel over a pair of boots. The execution went smoothly by the grim standards of the time, but it established the procedural template—and the moral unease—that would shadow the later, far more troubled deaths of Eduard Delacroix and John Coffey.

The Condemned Man and the Final Day

Bitterbuck was allowed visiting hours in the Arcade, the long room adjacent to the cafeteria divided by mesh and barbed wire, where he said goodbye to his second wife and those of his children who would still treat with him. He was escorted there by Bill Dodge and two floaters while the rest of the E Block team crammed in rehearsals. Bitterbuck was a Christian, not a traditional Cherokee medicine man, and he was perfectly happy with Brother Schuster of the Heavenly Light Baptist Church, the same minister who had come for Tillman Clark. Schuster was fast and did not get the condemned men all worked up. On the morning of the execution, Bitterbuck's hands were shaking too badly to plait his own braids properly; his eldest daughter, a woman of thirty-odd, was allowed to weave them for him. She wanted to add the pinfeathers of a hawk, his bird, at the tips, but Edgecombe could not permit it—they might catch fire and burn. He told her it was against regulations. She bowed her head and put her hands to her temples to show her disappointment and disapproval, but conducted herself with great dignity, and by doing so practically guaranteed that her father would do the same.

The Walk and the Chair

When the time came, Bitterbuck left his cell without protest or holding back. He walked strong up the Green Mile to Edgecombe's office, where he dropped to his knees to pray with Brother Schuster. Schuster gave him a few psalms, and Bitterbuck began to cry when Schuster reached the one about lying down beside the still waters—Edgecombe suspected he was thinking of the pure, cold water of his youth in Montana. A lot of men cannot get up from their knees without help, but Bitterbuck did okay, swaying a little at first before finding his balance. Almost all the chairs in the storage room were occupied, the witnesses murmuring quietly among themselves like folks waiting for a wedding or a funeral. That was the only time Bitterbuck faltered; a low moaning started in his throat, and the arm Edgecombe was holding developed a drag. Edgecombe tightened his grip and told him, out of the corner of his mouth, that the only thing most of these people would remember about him was how he went out, so he should give them something good and show them how a Washita did it. Bitterbuck glanced at him sideways, gave a little nod, then took one of the braids his daughter had made and kissed it. He mounted the platform without help, and less than a minute passed from the moment he sat down in the chair to the moment Brutus Howell called "Roll on two!"

The Execution and Its Aftermath

The lights dimmed only a little as Jack Van Hay pulled the switch. Bitterbuck surged forward against the clamps and the restraining belt across his chest—a powerful forward surge, as a man may surge forward from the hips while in the grip of a powerful orgasm. There was no flopping and flailing, only that single, sustained tension. The doctor listened with his stethoscope after thirty seconds, reported "Disorganized" heartbeats, and Van Hay rolled on three. Bitterbuck surged forward again, twisting a little from side to side. When the doctor listened this time, he nodded. It was over. Smoke rose from the hole in the top of the mask, and one of Bitterbuck's braids was smoldering like a pile of wet leaves. Edgecombe slapped at the dead man's head until the smoke quit rising. The body was loaded onto a stretcher and carried down the twelve wooden steps to the tunnel, a brick tube that ran thirty feet under the highway, where a gurney waited. Percy Wetmore, who had been in the switch room for the execution, slapped the dead man's cheek and said, "Adios, Chief. Hope hell's hot enough for you." Brutus Howell told him to keep his hands off—Bitterbuck had paid what he owed and was square with the house again. The gurney's hard rubber wheels moaned on the boards as they pushed the body toward the far end of the tunnel, where the meatwagon was parked on the soft shoulder of the highway. Dean Stanton and Harry Terwilliger grasped the sheet at the foot and pulled it up over Bitterbuck's face, which had already begun to take on the waxy, characterless cast of all dead faces, the innocent as well as the guilty.

Significance and Legacy

The execution of Arlen Bitterbuck was, by the standards of Cold Mountain, a "good one"—a proposition Edgecombe himself strongly doubted. It was the first electrocution after the mouse that would become Mr. Jingles had appeared on the Green Mile, and the rehearsal had been interrupted when the mouse sat in the doorway of the storage room, watching with its beady black oilspot eyes. The execution also marked the first time Percy Wetmore was placed in the switch room, a position he accepted without protest because he was too green to know if it was a good spot or a bad one. The black wall telephone that could only ring in from the governor's office never rang—not for Bitterbuck, not for any of the seventy-eight men Edgecombe presided over during his time at Cold Mountain. In the movies, salvation is cheap; real life costs more. Bitterbuck's execution went according to plan, but the memory of the smell—the transformer humming, the hot metal, the burning hair—would stay with Edgecombe for the rest of his life, making it impossible for him to go down into his granddaughter's cellar where her little boy had his Lionel train set-up, because the transformer's hum and its hot smell reminded him of Cold Mountain.