“I…I thought you liked the oysters that way, James. That’s why I fixed them,” she said, and I could hear each unshed tear on each word she said, so high and light and damp and filling up. She was trying very hard not to cry.
“I like them, Mother.” I moved an oyster, lifted it up toward my mouth, lowered it. If I had put it in my mouth I would have vomited.
“I didn’t write because I planned on coming down,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
“What do you think about, James?” she asked.
“Think about?” I was startled. “Nothing. I just keep my mind a blank. It’d be better if I didn’t have a mind—if I’d never had a mind.”
“You were so smart, James,” she said. “You might have become great and famous with your mind.” And suddenly she was crying. “Oh, my baby! My little baby! You were so brilliant!”
Oh, my God, and this, I thought, saying, “Don’t cry, Mother, please don’t cry. I’m all right! I’m all right, Mother!”
“Oh, my little baby! My poor little baby! My poor little baby!”
On top of all the rest…“Don’t cry, Mother. Please don’t cry…” All these tears, I was thinking. All these tears after all these years, now. All of this love for me, this pure and holy love, this mother’s love, and the pity. I don’t want the pity. And this son’s love for his mother. All this love, now, when it cannot help and does not matter…
“Don’t cry, Mother, please don’t cry.”
She got herself under control. Although I did not look at her I knew she was dabbing at her eyes, and when she took her hands down and held them, restrained and placid, on the table, the red work-coarsened hands with cracked nails, I could not look at them without crying so I looked away.
We were silent for a time.
“Do you still say your prayers, James?”
“Yes, Mother,” I lied.
“Things are not so hopeless as they seem, James,” she said. “The warden says that if you behave yourself and stay out of trouble you will receive time off.”
“Did you see the warden?”
“Yes. I was here before the visiting hour started and he came out of his office and talked to me. He said that you appeared to be a very nice boy.”
“He did?”
“He said they liked you very much.”
“He did? I haven’t seen him yet,” I said.
“He said in twelve or thirteen years you will receive a hearing by the parole board and if you behave yourself you will be paroled.”
“He said that too, eh?”
“Do try to be a good boy, James,” she said.
“I will, Mother, I’ll be a model…I’ll be a very good boy, Mother,” I said. So I won’t have to do but thirteen years, as the warden says, instead of twenty, I added under my breath.
She took a Bible from the bottom of the basket and gave it to me. “I want you to have this, James.”
“Thanks, Mother,” I said, taking it and thumbing the leaves. It was her own Bible. I’d seen it in her room since I could first remember. It was a very old book with a worn, soft-grained leather binding with the words The Holy Bible printed in gold leaf on the front, and written in ink on the flyleaf was my mother’s maiden name and the date, June 13th, 1919.
“I had that before I was married,” she said.
“I know.” The leaves were very fine and slightly yellowed from age.
“The time is up, madam,” the guard said, standing nearby. We had not seen him approach.
Her fingers, folded on the table top, and held so placidly, went rigid. Her whole body went rigid. Down the table I saw the others standing up, kissing, laughing, getting ready to leave.
I stood up quickly and she clambered to her feet and we kissed again. Her lips were trembling against mine and breaking up beneath mine and I thought, please don’t let her cry again. I loved her so, not looking at her. I loved her all in my chest and my throat and my head.
As before, I could feel her hands holding very tightly to my arms, and when she let go of me I could still feel them on my arms as before.
“Good-by, James. I’ll try to get down next month.” She was permitted to visit me once a month. “Be a good boy and pray and read the Bible.”
“Yes, Mama,” I said, “I will, Mama. Good-by, Mama.”
In all that time I had not looked at her again since the first time, when I had loved her so much. I turned away, holding the Bible in my hand, the book which was just so much dead weight since I had lost the God whom it promulgated. And I went down and got my cap and my yellow pigskin gloves. I held the gloves tightly in my other hand and it felt good to be holding them and knowing that they were good gloves and my very own, because they were something both good and tangile and had cost one dollar and fifty cents, and if I wanted to I could cut them up and make them not good, or I could burn them up and scatter the ashes to the wind so that in a little while they would no longer be tangible, only a memory of gloves that I had once owned which would neither give me anything nor take anything away from me, being unimportant.
Just before I stepped through the doorway I looked down the long, dimly lit range with the three cells rising in a sheer steel cliff above and the high concrete ceiling of the cell house, sixty feet overhead, and the dusty, grimy cell-house wall with the barred, grimy windows; and she was standing there, very small in the middle of all that immense masonry of steel and stone to keep in convicts who wanted out, picking up the food which I had not eaten after she had fixed it and brought it down to me, and putting it back into the basket—looking very small and very frail and very old.
7
THE NIGHT BEFORE I had let a hunky called Big John have a dollar’s worth of chips in the poker game for a monkey which he had carved from a peach seed, and he broke me. When time came to pay off, Book-me, who was doubling with me, said he was flat and I had to pay him off myself. I didn’t have enough and I had to owe him seven dollars and ninety-five cents.
Before breakfast the next morning Hunky Hank sent me word to send him something. They had broke him in the poker game down there in the coal company.
I wrote him a note telling him they had broke me, too. Big John got me with a dollar’s worth of chips for a peach-seed monkey, I told him. Book-me was flat and I had to pay off out of my pocket and I’d come up short at that.
On the way to dinner we passed the coal company coming from the barbershop and I flipped Hunky the note. Old man Warren saw it sail through the air and snatched Hunky out of line. The last thing I saw he was frisking Hunky.
We had fried salt pork and potatoes for dinner. I was saving the salt meat to the last because I liked it best. Before I got to it Warren and Donald Duck came into the dining room and called Book-me, Big John and myself from the table.
“What’ve I done?” asked Book-me.
“Come on, come on, no back talk,” Warren rasped.
Warren hadn’t made out a report card and either of our company guards, Bull or Clem, could have stopped him from taking us, but they didn’t. We went out of the front entrance and turned down in front of the hospital.
“What you taking me to the hole for?” Book-me asked again. “I ain’t done nothing.”
“Gambling, that’s what. You’ve been running a big poker game every night.”
“What the hell you got to do with that?” Book-me said. “You ain’t my guard.”
Book-me and Big John and I were walking ahead of Warren and Donald Duck. Warren hit him across the back of the head without warning. Book-me fell forward in a sudden arc, caught himself halfway down, turned slightly and staggered off balance. The blow had knocked his hat askew and when he started into Warren it fell on the sidewalk and his hair fell thinly across his forehead. I turned quickly to face Warren and stepped back off the sidewalk.
In looking at Warren I did not see Book-me but I saw Warren draw back again, and when he swung I switched my gaze to Book-me’s face and saw his mouth loose and his eyes w
ide as he came in. I saw the stick hit him across the forehead just above the eye and underneath the flagging hair. A dead white slit appeared on his forehead as if it had been cut open with a knife, and all the sense went out of his eyes. Still in a crouch he went down again, falling into Warren’s legs. Warren hit him again and I said, blinking out the nausea, “Goddammit, son of a bitch, don’t hit him again! Don’t hit him again! Can’t you see he’s down?”
He had his stick raised and, turning slightly, he struck at me. I caught the blow on my arm and backed up, backing across the ankle-deep slush. He came on and I turned away from him and began walking rapidly toward the hole, pride holding me down to a walk, and fear pulling at my nerves like a million tiny hands until I felt stiff as wood. With every step I kept bracing myself for the blow across the back of the head, and listening for his footsteps behind me, telling myself that if he hit me and didn’t knock me out I’d kill him. All the while I kept trying to determine whether the indignity which I had already suffered was worth dying for. I went as far as the hole without looking back, feeling as if I’d fly into a million pieces with the slightest touch.
Big John was standing in the waiting room door. When I came in he said, “They’re taking Book-me to the hospital.” Looking in the direction I saw two nurses lifting Book-me onto the stretchers.
“They could pick him up and throw him into the hospital,” I said. “What they need the stretchers for?” I was just making words.
Big John grunted. Suddenly I was sweating like a horse, all up in my hair and underneath my eyes and back of my neck and in the palms of my hands. I could feel it on my legs, turning icy cold as it seeped from my skin.
We saw Warren and Donald Duck coming toward us. We went to the back and sat down. They brought the deputy and Gout with them. Gout was a short, pot-bellied man with turned-in toes and a swagger, if you can imagine a pigeon-toed, pot-bellied, wrinkled squeezed-in face without teeth, owlish-looking under the pulled-down visor, with a swaggering walk. He had evil, dirty-gray eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. The other convicts called him Froggy Hitler. But I always called him Gout. I couldn’t improve on that.
His cap bore the legend: Personnel Officer. But his duties were those of a transfer clerk. Most of the transferring of the convicts from one company to another was left to him, although the deputy could overrule his decisions. During the court sessions he acted as prosecutor. Between transfer officer and court prosecutor he had built up the reputation of the dirtiest, meanest, lousiest, lowest, rotten-est officer in prison. It was also said that he was a stool pigeon for the warden, who did not get along with the deputy warden, and that he told the warden everything that went on inside the walls. The warden seldom came inside the walls. Before taking that job Gout had been captain of an ore freighter. That had been years before. I never learned why he gave up a good job like that to become a prison guard. But I always wondered. I could never see him as anything but a little old man with a big warped belly.
He gave me one look and reared back, his bloated, froglike body pulling his uniform askew, and put his hands on his hips. “I’ll put this one in the soup company,” he said, referring to me, “and this one in 1-11.” He turned to the deputy. “Give them a taste of the hole first.”
“Wait a minute,” I began. “I haven’t even had a trial.”
The deputy ignored us both. He had a sardonic hipped look that morning, aloof and amused and indifferent. I’d heard that what he didn’t know about convicts wasn’t in the book; that he had a perfect espionage system. He had been deputy warden for seventeen years.
Before he’d come after us Warren had gone over to our dormitory and searched our bunks for cards and chips. He hadn’t found any. I kept them at another convict’s bunk who had a locked box. But he had found a slice of bread underneath Big John’s mattress.
He showed the deputy the note I’d written to Hunky and the slice of bread he had found. The deputy put Big John in the hole. He told me to sit there. They went outside, the deputy walking straight with short, fast steps and Gout rearing back and trying to swagger, and Warren walking stooped over like an old man, looking out the sides of his eyes at the deputy while he talked, and Donald Duck bringing up the rear, placing his tender feet down on the pavement as cautiously as a man playing chess.
From where I sat I could see across the yard. After a time the companies began emptying from the dining room, the short leaders setting the pace, the tall men tapering off behind them, two by two, stepping out as the line closed up. White men in front, colored men behind. One line and then another until they strung out in four solid lines from the dining room to the four cell houses. And still they came, like an unending story, like the locusts out of the rock. Then suddenly without a trace they were gone. They were gone without a sign that they’d ever been there, without their footprints in the slush. It was startling.
After the guards had eaten, Gout transferred me to the coal company. The first person I saw was Hunky.
“What the hell did you put all those names on that note for?” he greeted me.
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“Did they hurt Book-me bad?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’d they do with Big John?”
“Put him in the hole.”
Old man Warren came up and chased him away. Warren was happy to have me back with him. “Look at him, men, here he is,” he said, stopping the whole job so they could hear him ride me. “Got one fellow’s head whipped and another put in the hole. Look at him. A big shot. The chaplain wanted him for a teacher but he couldn’t even do that. Running a big syndicated poker game.” Some of his rats laughed for him. “Look at him, right back in the coal company.”
He looked at me over his glasses. “Which would you prefer to do, Mister Monroe? Would you prefer to roll or is rolling beneath your dignity?” That got another laugh out of his rats.
I didn’t say anything. I hated his guts. He put me to rolling, without even assigning me to a bunk. But I beat that rap. When old man Warren picked up the afternoon sick call I said I had cramps. That was the one sure thing they’d take you to the hospital for.
In the afternoon the prison doctor was usually absent. His convict assistant held sick call. The regular sick-call line formed at the back of the hospital on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. It was usually a half-mile long. But once each day the company guards took the critical cases over to the hospital lobby.
It was an old gabled building of century-old American architecture. It had a brick base beneath the clapboards and a cupola with a weathercock. There was the main section, extending fore and aft, flanked by wings. Part of the basement was used for a storeroom. A colored cripple company bunked in another part. During the winter the two prison alligators, Ben and Bessie, were housed in a tank of tepid water with the colored cripples.
Warren lined us up in the main hall before the reception desk. There were eight of us. The convict doctor was dressed in a starched white uniform. When it came my turn I told him my back pained me severely and that I was a patient of the industrial commission and drew compensation for total disability and they had me rolling coal which I wasn’t able to do. I said it all at once without giving him a chance to interrupt me.
He sent me back into the minor-surgery section to see the convict supervisor, who was a short, curly-headed Italian called Tino. He had gray in his hair and a husky voice, and a way of looking at you as if he didn’t believe a word you were saying but that he was on your side, anyway.
After listening to me he went into the chartroom and drew my chart. I told him it wasn’t on my chart because I’d been afraid to tell the doctor. He looked up at me, curiously. “It’s all on your chart, all right,” he said. He put me to bed in C ward. He didn’t like old man Warren, anyway, and he would have put me to bed even without the history of my injury being on my chart.
Warren was plenty burnt up about it. But there wasn’t anything he could do.
C ward was for new patients and convalescents. The beds were arranged against the wall down each side of the wide center aisle. At the front was the nurses’ desk; across from it the bath. It was wonderful to take a bath in a real bathtub again. There were windows opening on the yard. I could see all the activity from my bed. At the back of the ward was a built-on porch containing another row of beds. But those seemed to be reserved for the nurses’ afternoon siestas. The windows from the porch opened on the areaway by the wooden dormitory where I had bunked.
Just before supper Mal came around and sent for me to come to the back window. He wanted to know if I needed anything. He couldn’t stay but a moment and he kept moving his feet and legs as if he was walking. I said I needed some smoking and my toothbrush and tooth paste. He said I looked funny in the white cotton gown. I told him to go to hell.
The day staff of our ward was two nurses and an orderly. They wore white shirts and tight-fitting white pants. All of them were very bitchy. The little cute one came into the bathroom while I was bathing and said he’d wash my back. I let him. He said his name was Harry. I’d been in too many hospitals to be nurse-shy, and I didn’t know then that this was something else.
They served our supper on bed trays. There were two diets, the solid which was No. 1, and the liquid which was No. 2. I had the solid diet. It consisted of milk (or coffee), vegetable soup, bread and butter, steak, fried potatoes and a slice of pie. No wonder everyone tries to get into the hospital, I thought.
That night the paper boy brought me my toothbrush, paste, soap and towel, my bathrobe and some Bull Durham which Hunky had sent me. Later on the magazine man brought a new toothbrush, a new tube of tooth paste, a new bar of soap, a new towel, and another bathrobe which Mal sent me. With my belly full of steak, newspapers and magazines to read, plenty good service, two fine friends, I felt solid good. I could do my time there, I thought. I could lie up there without moving and be satisfied for twenty years.
At six o’clock, when the shift changed, the day nurses donned their uniform coats and took a brisk walk about the yard, grouping off in two and threes. They had yard privileges. That night Book-me slipped over from A ward to visit me. He gave me hell about putting all those names on that kite. I gave him some Bull Durham and tooth paste and loaned him one of the robes. That mellowed him.
Cast the First Stone Page 8
