Both men expect to die. They say so, and the conviction is written in grave, serene characters on Vanzetti’s face.... A ferocious mustache covers an expressive, smiling mouth. The stamp of thought is in every feature; the marks of the man whom strong intelligence has made an anchorite.
It was at the conclusion of this visit that Vanzetti casually made his utterance that has been so often quoted in anthologies. They sat there with Vanzetti doing most of the talking, Sacco breaking in only occasionally. Yet as these Italians talked in their imperfect English, even joked at times, the effect of their personalities gave Stong an overwhelming conviction of their innocence. He had brought a newspaper with him containing an account of some college students’ suicides, a sensational topic of the last few days. “I think Dr. Frood wrong,” Vanzetti remarked on glancing at it, “when he says student kill himself to make someone sorry. It is when he cannot make someone sorry, he kills himself in anger at world which pays him not attention—in despair—” Sacco disagreed, maintaining that if he himself were dead it would be the best way to free his wife and children. Vanzetti observed that “only sick mind kill himself.” Then he spoke of a Charlestown inmate who had murdered his wife when he had caught her with another man. “You know what he says to me once? ‘Vanzetti, you know what I think of all night? My wife—my home. Every night—all time. Now—all gone.’”
A bell rang, a gray line of prisoners began to file past on the way from the workshops to the cells, blank-faced men, their arms folded. Seeing them, Sacco grew bitter about his own enforced idleness. “We’re capitalists,” Vanzetti jollied him. “We have home, we eat, don’t do no work. We’re nonproducers—live off other men’s work; when Libertarians make speech, they calling Nick and me names.”
Sacco’s mood changed and he seemed amused. Then a deputy approached as a sign that Stong’s time was up. He had managed so far to cover his feelings by a forced cheerfulness but, as he rose to go, Vanzetti spotted the lurking dismay in the other’s feature. He then began to speak very quietly and simply as if to comfort the young man, and as he spoke Stong jotted down the words in shorthand on the margin of a newspaper:
If it had not been for this thing, I might have live out my life talking at street comers to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by an accident.
Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all!
That last moment belong to us—that agony is our triumph.[25]
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had expected Fuller to appoint his review commission. “That would impose freedom,” Vanzetti told Mrs. Winslow, “and the men of the judiciary and of the executive want save America by dooming us.” As for Governor Fuller’s own private investigation, Vanzetti’s conclusion was: “He may give us justice—I expect nothing.”
At times, when he was temporarily overcome by a mood of obsessive frustration, Vanzetti would crudely appropriate the symbolism of the Passion to express his dilemma. In such a mood he first learned of Fuller’s appointment of the Lowell Committee. “His this double investigation,” he wrote Mrs. Evans, “going to be another mockery? spitting on our face? sponge of vinager and bitterness on the top of a lance? the last stubbing between our ribles?” As the sun moved higher in the sky, as the elms again arched their spring greenery over the High Street, the two Italians behind the jail walls sensed their lost freedom in all its urgency. “Oh! that Sea, that sky,” Vanzetti wrote, “those freed and full of life winds of Cape Cod! Maybe I will never see, never breath, never be at one with them again.”
On June 29 Governor Fuller gave Sacco, Vanzetti, and Madeiros a stay until August 10, to allow his Advisory Committee time to review the evidence and examine Madeiros’ confession. The Dedham interlude ended abruptly and finally at midnight on July 1 when the prisoners were waked, manacled to deputies, packed in a car followed by a second car with armed guards, and driven along the empty Dedham streets and across the drab brick outskirts of Boston to Cherry Hill. In this midnight scurrying Vanzetti lost some of his books and papers. Both men saw the hurried transfer as another example of deliberate spitefulness on the part of the authorities. Actually it was a strict following of the rule that a condemned man must be sent to Cherry Hill ten days before the date set for his execution. Sheriff Capen, anxious to get rid of his notorious prisoners, interpreted the rule to the letter. Even though the executions had been deferred, their official date as set by the court was still July 10.