Ginny’s stomach turned a somersault when she saw her car wasn’t the only vehicle in the driveway. Roscoe’s prison truck was parked so close to her Chevy their bumpers appeared to touch. She eased the Cadillac past both vehicles and under the carport.
Even with her eyes trained on the steering wheel, she could still make out Roscoe standing near her mama’s porch, his arms crossed. Ginny got out of the car and walked back toward the front yard to face him.
“What you doing here?” she asked, going on the defensive.
“I got worried when you didn’t return to the prison before dark, so I called your mama. She told me you didn’t make it to Baton Rouge after all.”
“That’s my business, Roscoe.”
“When you lied to me this morning, you made it my business.”
Frustration, more than anger, tinged his words. It seemed like the weight of their relationship made him more tired than he’d ever been.
“I only lied because I didn’t want to upset you.” She took two steps toward Roscoe, but he backed up to keep distance between them.
“Look where that got you.” Miriam offered her commentary from the front porch.
“Shut up, Mama.”
“This isn’t her fault.” Roscoe took off his hat, revealing sweaty dark hair plastered close to his scalp.
“Why would anyone be at fault?” Ginny asked. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m a grown woman and can do as I like.”
He shook his head as if he had a retort, but it never made it to his mouth. The sinking feeling in her stomach grew heavier. It pained Ginny to think she’d upset Roscoe. He struggled with enough at the prison without seeing her as a nuisance or an outright problem.
“Can we talk later?” she asked. “This is none of Mama’s business.”
“See how she disrespects me, Roscoe? Joe would never have stood for it.”
“Joe’s dead, Miriam, so you don’t know what he would and wouldn’t have stood for.”
Ginny smiled at Roscoe’s retort, but his scowl said, Watch yourself.
“You have no right to talk to me that way,” Miriam told him. “Not after what we’ve been through.”
“Been through what?” Ginny asked.
“Nothing. Just your dad’s death and all,” Roscoe said.
Ginny looked from Roscoe to her mama to try to decipher what hidden language they might share.
“And you got no right to be mad at me for telling Roscoe you went to Jonesville,” Miriam said. “Shouldn’t have lied and told your boyfriend you were going to Baton Rouge.”
She used the word boyfriend the way another person might use a curse word. Not a hundred words spoken between them and she’d riled Ginny up to the point she wanted to rip the blooms off all the black-eyed Susans along the fence line.
“Why does it always have to be like this?” Ginny asked.
“Like what?”
“Like this! What do you have against me and Roscoe? It has nothing to do with you.”
Her mama’s jawline hardened. “Nothing to do with me? Oh, little girl. Your father and I were friends with Roscoe long before you started up with him.”
“Miriam—” Roscoe pointed at her mama, almost as if in warning.
“It doesn’t matter now, Mama. We really do need to be going.”
Roscoe touched Ginny’s shoulder. “Come on and ride with me in the truck,” he said. “I don’t want you on the road at night. I’ll have Tim get your car tomorrow.”
She wanted to keep her car so she could sneak away after breakfast to find those pig necks for Samuel’s meal. Not wanting to rock the boat, she nodded and headed toward the truck. She could always drive back to town the next afternoon.
“And good night to you, too!” her mama called from the porch. Neither of them said a word back to her.
* * *
Roscoe flicked ashes from his cigarette out the window. Since Ginny couldn’t read his face in the dark, she watched the end of the cigarette flare with every draw he took. He’d started smoking again. Stress always loosened his resolve.
She couldn’t get her mama’s words out of her mind. Your father and I were friends with Roscoe long before you started up with him.
Her mother hadn’t really said anything Ginny didn’t already know. Roscoe and her daddy had been inseparable, at work and in the evenings, too. Roscoe was always over at their prison residence drinking beer or having dinner. As a young child, Ginny recognized that both her mama and daddy seemed happier when Roscoe was around. She’d come to look forward to his visits just so Miriam wouldn’t be so short. Ginny tried to remember whether or not her mama flirted with Roscoe or he with her. The laughter they shared was the strongest memory, not their faces.
After her father was killed, when she and Miriam moved from the prison housing and into town, Roscoe would check in on them. He’d stay for dinner sometimes, but they didn’t laugh the same way they had when her daddy was alive. Roscoe loaned Miriam money from time to time. Ginny used to think he had purchased the Cadillac for them as well, but Miriam insisted the money for it came from the prison, in reparation for her father’s death. If the prison had intended those payments to help with living expenses, they didn’t know her mama that well.
Ginny fondly remembered Roscoe always giving her a dollar and a pat on the head as he left the house. But he stopped coming by after a couple of years. He did show up for her high school graduation, but by then he seemed more a stranger than Uncle Roscoe.
Now, his anger seemed a wall between them.
“I wish you’d understand,” she said.
“You ask a lot of me, Ginny.”
She scooted across the seat and laid her head on his shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t push her away. He didn’t.
“Are you worried the prison board’s going to find out about the meals?”
“They already know,” he said.
The news caught her off guard. She moved back to her side of the truck, trembling. “What’s going to happen?”
“Let me worry about it,” he said, roughly.
“You have to worry about everything. Tell me what I can do.”
He stared at the road, not even turning occasionally to look at her. “Short of stopping those meals, nothing.”
Closing her eyes, Ginny shut out Roscoe and the conversation, listening instead to the hum of tires against asphalt. She couldn’t stop cooking. Her heart would break if Roscoe outright asked her to quit. Surely, he knew better than most how much it meant to her.
“There was another death today,” he finally said. “And another inmate almost dead. Probably won’t make it through the night.”
By death, he meant murder—a beating that went too far. Either by his guards or the inmates who were given power to serve as guards themselves. Somewhere along the way, some genius thought it was a good idea to arm inmates and allow them to keep their own in line. Their violence far surpassed those of civilian guards and created its own power structure. Roscoe had always thought inmate guards were a bad idea, but didn’t voice his opinion when he was just a guard himself. After his promotion to warden, he recommended doing away with inmate guards and hiring more civilian staff. The state was big on reform talk, but not on action. The recommendation was soundly denied.
“I’m sorry, Roscoe.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. It is what it is.”
With each year Roscoe served as warden, he grew less hopeful one man could make a difference. In 1951, he had a dozen paid guards and 600 unpaid convict guards, which took far less money from the state’s pocket than Roscoe’s original plan for 150 guards overseen by ten captains. Eight years later, he’d been allowed just under eighty guards total.
“I’m more worried about you,” he said.
She lifted her head from his shoulder. “Why me?”
Even in the dark, she could see he shook his head.
“You take things too far. You don’t even know why.”
“This isn’t about Dadd
y.” She’d said those words so often she’d almost begun to believe the lie. But the last suppers were tied to him, or at least his killer’s execution. Roscoe thought Ginny was trying to make up for something—like she believed the family of her daddy’s murderer blamed her somehow.
“Roscoe, if I’m not hurting anyone, why does it matter why I do the things I do?”
“You don’t think straight.”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“Tim told me you coerced him into taking you to see LeBoux,” he said. “I told you to leave it alone, but you went behind my back. Tim’s probably flapping his mouth to anyone who’ll listen.”
Her face burned hot. She didn’t intend to undermine Roscoe’s authority. She pushed it too often, thinking their relationship gave her privileges.
“You make me look weak, Ginny. It’s got to stop,” he said.
“I don’t know why Samuel’s indifference bothers me so much. His family was just so grateful I wanted to do something special for him. I was late getting back because his grandmother was showing me how to cook pork neck stew—”
“Listen to yourself. You’re getting excited all over again. This is about how it makes you feel. Not how it makes Samuel feel.”
She would have insisted it wasn’t true, but she knew otherwise by the tightness in her chest. Ginny was just too embarrassed to admit it. Every death row inmate accepted her offer of a last meal. Samuel’s rejection felt personal.
She thought back to what she’d told Aida. It’s what I do. The line between doing something kind for a desperate man and doing something solely for herself had blurred along the way.
“Sam asked to see me today. He wants you to leave him alone,” Roscoe said. “I want you to leave him alone.”
They asked the unthinkable of her. What about Samuel’s baby son? And his favorite dish? She’d promised his grammy she’d do a good job of the recipe. She’d promised.
She slid back over to her side of the seat and leaned her head against the window, trying to slow her breath. “He doesn’t know he has a son. His girlfriend asked me to tell him.”
“Can’t you please let this one go?”
Ginny wondered what that meant—to let one go. She never thought one inmate was less deserving of a last meal than another. She never took into account their crimes. Giving up on Samuel—on any one of them—was unfathomable.
She wanted to erase the image of Eileen clutching that photo, begging her to tell the man she loved he was a father. It was no longer clear what Samuel deserved to know. He’d murdered a man who was also a father, and stole precious time he could have spent with his children and grandchildren.
“He just wants it to be over. And that’s his right,” Roscoe said. “Did you ever think having a meal that reminds him of his grandma and learning he has a boy of his own might make it even harder on him?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “All I can do is imagine being in their position, and ask myself what I’d want. And I’d want one last human connection.”
“That’s because you don’t think something better is waiting after we die,” he said.
“Then let it be about human decency.”
“You act like these men are the same as you and me. Don’t forget they’re on death row for a reason. They’re the ones lacking human decency.”
They didn’t speak the rest of the drive, and he didn’t kiss Ginny good night when he dropped her off at the women’s barracks.
1951 She Won’t Make It Easy on Anyone
Roscoe Simms felt older than his forty-two years. He’d only been warden for two months and the job had stooped his shoulders and caused a permanent case of sour stomach. It had been a particularly rough week, and the last thing he wanted to do was meet with Miriam’s daughter.
Miriam had called just two days earlier asking if he’d consider hiring a woman for one of the kitchen jobs. He figured she was asking for herself and was surprised when she said her daughter, Ginny, wanted the post.
“She’s a hell of a cook. You won’t find better,” Miriam had said. “But she won’t make it easy on anyone.”
Roscoe hadn’t bothered to ask what she meant. He hadn’t spoken to Miriam since the night of Ginny’s high school graduation three Junes ago. That was the last time he saw the girl, too. Even though he promised Joe he’d look after them both, it got too complicated and soon months turned into years.
He sent a guard to meet Ginny at the main prison gate and escort her to his office. After a few minutes, she was standing in his doorway, holding out her hand for a formal handshake.
“I suppose I need to call you Warden Simms,” she said.
“Probably best.”
Roscoe couldn’t get over how much she looked like her father had at twenty-one. Hair like a squirrel’s nest, a strong chin, eyes a little too large for her face. She didn’t get Joe’s height, though, or Miriam’s curves for that matter.
“May I sit down, or should we stare at each other a little longer?” she asked.
He laughed out loud. “You have your daddy’s mouth.”
The girl turned ten shades of purple. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to come out that way,” she said.
“Don’t matter to me. At least when we’re alone,” he said. “But if you get this job, I’d be your boss. I can’t have the people who work for me smarting off or being disrespectful.”
“I understand.” She sat straight up, her fierce eyes locked on his. “It won’t happen again.”
Miriam’s comment came rushing back to him: She won’t make it easy on anyone. Roscoe began to wonder what can of worms he’d opened in even agreeing to see her today. The least he could do is describe the nature of the job and why he’d let the former head cook go.
“I read about the prison reforms in the paper,” Ginny said. “Terrible about those men who maimed themselves.”
He winced. The incident would be the first thing everyone remembered when the prison was mentioned. Truth be told, Roscoe almost didn’t accept the promotion to warden because of it. The new governor had used prison reform in almost every damn stump speech. Even the folks in town began to treat the guards differently, as if they were criminals themselves. Hypocrites. Everyone knew what went on. Louisianans had long scared their boys into behaving by threatening prison time. They looked the other way until the press got involved. Suddenly, Boucherville was best known as the town closest to the penitentiary.
A few of the men quit rather than deal with a new warden, whom they were sure would come from the outside. No one was more surprised than Roscoe when the prison board recommended his appointment.
“Ginny, I have to ask . . . why in the hell would you want to work in a prison?” And especially this one?
“Do I even have a shot at this job, or are you meeting with me as a favor to Mama? If it’s the latter, I don’t want to waste any more of your time explaining my reasons.”
Of course he’d agreed to it to appease Miriam. But now, for reasons he couldn’t comprehend, he found himself wanting to hear more from this young woman who reminded him so much of his dead best friend.
“Let me show you the kitchen,” Roscoe said. “We can talk on the way.”
* * *
Once given free rein to speak, Ginny took every advantage, peppering him with questions until he was exhausted. She tested the stoves and inspected the pantry. She asked intelligent questions about the farm and the canning facility, the kitchen’s budget, how many prisoners worked in the kitchen and how they were selected, how many hours the cooks worked, and whether the cooks had some say in what and how much the prisoners ate.
By the end of an hour, he felt she’d interviewed him and not vice versa. He suggested they take a drive in his truck so he could show her the grounds. She’d lived in the guard housing until she was eight, but he didn’t know how much she remembered.
“There’s sandwich makings at the warden’s residence,” Roscoe said. “Let’s grab a bite to eat
and finish talking there.”
“You say warden’s residence as if it’s not your house,” she said.
“I don’t stay there much. There’s a small room with a bathroom in the admin building. I just sleep there.”
“Hmmm.”
She didn’t expand on her muffled grunt and he wasn’t about to ask what she meant by it. He drove them past the houses where guards with families could choose to live. Most didn’t.
“Is anyone living in Mama’s and Daddy’s old house?” she asked.
“Nope. Why do you ask?”
“Can we stop there?”
Ginny jumped from the truck as soon as he cut the engine. She ran up to the small front porch and looked through the window.
“Go on in,” he said. “I’ll wait out here.”
Roscoe sat on the porch steps he and Joe had sat on many an evening, drinking beer and listening to baseball on the transistor radio. They hardly ever spoke about what had happened during their shifts, as if they’d made a pact not to speak it aloud. Miriam would usually be inside making dinner while Ginny, then only six or seven, would play in the front yard. Calling it a yard was being generous. The dusty patch of hard ground had nary a blade of grass. Sometimes she’d jump on Joe’s lap and beg for a slug of beer. He’d oblige if she promised not to tell her mama. In those moments, Joe almost seemed a decent man, capable of at least loving his daughter.
Now that the house was empty, Roscoe could hear Ginny’s footfalls as she walked from empty room to empty room. Her voice echoed as she yelled out her observations about the place needing paint and a good scrubbing.
When she rejoined him a few minutes later, he edged over so she could sit beside him on the stoop.
“I remember you and Daddy out here,” she said. “You ate with us a lot, didn’t you?”
“Quite a bit.” He kicked his heel against the dirt. “You haven’t been back here since, have you?”
The Last Suppers Page 5
