“So we’ll ride like hell once the tree falls.”
“That’s right.”
Wilson had spent a few days there already, and the tree swayed under the axes they took to its roots and the ground. They hitched their horses to long chains looped round the trunk and whipped them forward. The pine came easily, crashing against the lines, sparks and snapping branches spooking the horses into high-kneed gallops.
Roscoe and Wilson unhooked and wound the chains, swung into their saddles, drove their ankles into their horses’ flanks. They raced along the trail slashed wide for the power line, and Roscoe found himself whooping like a boy, Wilson there with him, an adventure on their hands.
Back on their land, they tethered their horses to the fence and positioned the ladder against the pole that belonged to Alabama Power. Roscoe grabbed a wooden stick and climbed to line height. “If we failed, there will be sparks,” he shouted to Wilson. “Best stand clear.” A binder was on the line, coupling wires together. He needed to make the lines touch—different currents on different wires. If they touched quietly, the lines were cold. If not, Roscoe could be thrown from the ladder by the shock. He hesitated, knowing the power he might touch.
“Ross,” Wilson called from below. “This is what you do.”
Roscoe nodded. Camaraderie, companionship, a joint destination. This was what he did. These were his elements, his knowledge, his home.
He felt everything pause—the breeze, the birds, the trains on their tracks and the fish in their ponds. Even the great turbines back at Lock 12 stopped spinning, the water holding back its movement, the powerhouse winding down. The lines had gone cold.
“Clear?” Wilson said.
“Clear.”
Now, Roscoe would work.
He strapped his tool belt round his waist. He looped the connecting line over his shoulder and climbed back up the ladder. Carefully, he removed the rubber coating from the binder, exposing the wires underneath. It was simply a matter of more weaving, more winding. The individual strands of copper from his new line were ready. He’d been doing this for a month, and then for years before that.
When his line was attached, he cut a new opening in the binder coating and replaced it over the coupled lines.
It was done.
“How long will it take them to clear that tree?” Wilson asked.
“Could be within the hour, and certainly no later than evening. We’ll come back and test then.”
Roscoe wasn’t patient, but he didn’t mind the long stretch of that afternoon, the prospect of power meeting him at the day’s end. He was content to unsaddle the horses, brush them down, pump water into their trough. He found Gerald round the back of the house collecting ants, putting them in a jar with dirt to study their habits, and Roscoe knelt next to the boy to help pluck the small bodies from the hole they exited. Gerald was smart to choose small, black ants that didn’t sting. He didn’t tell his father to leave, and Roscoe took encouragement in that.
AT dusk, Wilson and Roscoe met at the fork in the trail and walked back to the transformers. Roscoe had made a small electric motor, a simple circle of coiled copper, bound together with rubber and mounted on small iron rods over a magnet. The current would probably be too strong for it, but if it was flowing, they would see a reaction.
Roscoe connected the last wires—smaller bundles—to the line from the last transformer. These, he connected to the iron rods of the motor.
“Time to flip the levers,” he told Wilson.
They repositioned the ladder against their own pole, and Roscoe climbed to the transformers, lifting all three levers into their on positions. Then he was jumping to the ground to the sound of Wilson’s shouts. The coil circle was a blur of hot, fiery proof. They stared at it like men bewitched by beauty or magic until the small wooden base of the motor caught fire, and then with more shouts from Wilson, Roscoe knocked the connecting wires away. They stamped out the small flames and shook hands over the trifling of smoke.
BUILDING the thresher’s electric motor had moments of difficulty, but nothing compared to the initial acquisition of wire and tapping the line. Roscoe worked steadily, dividing his time between the thresher and the poles. He continued bundling wire to string along the ceramic insulators he’d brought from the village—boxes of them that were slightly flawed and given to him for nothing. Marie had insisted they stay behind when they moved to the farm, but he’d insisted they come, and it was one of the few standoffs in their years of marriage that he’d actually won. The boxes of insulators had followed them to the land, and here they were—being put to use.
Roscoe ran lines along the fence where he’d first told Wilson about the idea. They raised tall poles through the woods, one right at the fork toward Wilson and Moa’s quarters—“We’ll get you two power soon enough,” Roscoe promised—and they kept the lines high all the way to the final pole between the barn and the house. The farmhouse still had to be wired, but Gerald was the only one itching for that particular luxury.
Marie stood by, showing an interest she hadn’t shown since their courting times, back in the village. She visited Roscoe in the shop and walked with him out to the lines. “Tell me again how the transformers work.”
He would take her to his drawings, saying, “As you remember, it all starts with dual attractions,” explaining, again, how some bodies are graced with extraordinary attraction lurking below their surfaces. “You have to awaken the attraction, though, create it. You remember the Faraday experiment with the wax and the flannel?”
“No. Show me again.”
He was sure she did remember, but he had no qualms demonstrating the base of electricity for her yet another time. “We’ve been seeing electricity forever,” he said, taking a round stick of wax from a shelf, “in the shocks we feel when we’ve become charged.” He rubbed the wax against his flannel shirt and held it close to Marie’s head, his wife laughing as the thin threads of her hair rose to meet it.
“When you run the wax through your hand, the attraction will go away,” Marie said, drawing a smile from her husband.
“You were paying attention to your lessons, weren’t you?”
He could see her back in the village, young and eager and inquisitive, sitting across from him in the dining hall while he talked on and on. She’d once told him it was a poetry of sorts—his lectures on electricity.
“We can introduce attractions and remove them,” he continued. “And Faraday took it further by showing how we can transfer the force, how we can harness and move it to other places.”
“Through copper.”
“And other materials. But copper is one of our best conductors, yes. That’s why I’ve used it in these cores.” Here, he’d take her to the guts of the transformers, showing her Wilson’s ironwork and his own windings of wire.
WHEN Marie wasn’t with Roscoe, she was educating Gerald, teaching him his geography and history, reading and writing, arithmetic, science. The two of them could be found in the front yard, studying more ants, or off in the fields taking notes on the crops. Marie felt like a teacher again—all this time with this one student—and Roscoe watched their son grow with his education, changing from the resentful boy he’d been into a young man ready to learn. They were all in their right roles—electrician, teacher, son.
Roscoe worried, at times, about Bean coming to call, looking for payment on his copper. Roscoe had sent in one small check, not enough to cover a quarter of one spool, along with a note promising the rest in full soon. Bean had sent a note back with clear numbers, Roscoe’s token payment deducted. Roscoe needed just a few months. That time would see the corn ready for harvest, and a great surge of income not spent on temporary pickers. They’d knock the stalks down with the tractor and send them to the thresher. They’d be the first farm in the county to have corn, and the money would come. Roscoe knew it. He’d pay off Bean, and his family would
settle into the comfort of prosperity—lamps blazing in the living room, Gerald reading one of his adventure books, Marie studying up on her birds, Roscoe returning to Faraday’s words like a religious man to his Bible. Maybe, under those new bulbs, Gerald would take an interest, and Roscoe would be given the chance to be a father, explaining a part of the world to his boy.
CHAPTER 4 / ROSCOE
We are packed in tight, but they’re always reminding us about Kilby’s first-rate ventilation system. We have windows, more of them than walls, and they vent top and bottom. The cell house is cross-sectioned like a chimney, and its open-pitched roof holds a line of huge ventilators, squat cylinders that from the back edge of the yard look like side-lying tires. Chimney effect, our guards say, and Enjoy the breeze, gentlemen.
In the summer, they can run fans that flush the house with fresh air, but even though the guards have to suffer the heat and stink, too, those fans are one of their favorite things to withhold. Someone takes that fork from the mess, and we spend a day sweating ourselves out of our skin until it’s found.
“Fork coming down,” someone will shout from up top, and we’ll listen to those tines hit the metal grates in the open floors, chiming their way to a sticking point, footsteps, and then the creak of belts and holsters as guards bend down. That fork will play its way along whatever row of bars it’s near, and Beau or Henry or Stanley will say, “You boys hear that? That’s a pretty noise, ain’t it? Let’s listen on it a while longer.”
The fans are loud.
The guard towers are made of the same concrete aggregate as the wall, the same sand and gravel from the prison’s own pit. The towers are on every corner, and they’re lonely looking things, barely higher than the wall itself, slits for windows. The one out front is something else, though. A hexagon with a cement base and brick sides, its top stacked full of beautiful paned windows. The roof is a great turret, and the spotlight perched in its tower is more the beacon of a lighthouse than the glow of escape. I can see it from my cell.
“Why’s the front tower look like a lighthouse?” I’ve asked.
“When have you ever seen a lighthouse?” the guard or foreman responds. “Get on back to your work.”
The oaks in the grove across the highway are southern red oaks. Many of them were cut down to build the prison village, which stands just beyond the gravel pit. A community hall is over there in the village, and a hotel for the single employees. It sounds like our village at Lock 12, just drier without the Coosa flowing by.
The coffee here is stretched and weakened by ground acorns from the oaks. Even better than tarring the walls is gathering acorns. Few men get that job. They are short-timers with no risk of flight. Before anyone can resent them, they’re gone.
Today is Sunday, and I am in church, sitting next to Ed. We share a cell, Ed and I, along with four other men, and he’s the only person in here I’d call a friend. Ed Mason. He’s a cabinetmaker by trade and a burglar by profession, serving a ten-year sentence for grand larceny. He got here ten months before me, right after Kilby first opened, and they assigned him to the woodshop, where he makes picture frames and cradles and baskets. The prison sells his work, and it does me some good thinking about those mothers settling their infants into one of Ed’s cradles.
The warden came to him a few months ago, saying, “You think you could make us a certain type of chair, Ed? Following these designs?” The warden handed them over.
“This the kind of chair I think it is?”
Relaying it back, Ed said, “And you know what he told me? Bastard said, ‘You’re not making it for yourself, Mason.’ ”
Which is true. Ed’s done nothing to earn him that seat, so when the warden was willing to throw in a month’s furlough, Ed said all right. A month is a long time, and Ed’s from London. He’s confused as anyone as to how he got to Mobile, and then to Kilby. He’s been looking for a way out since he arrived, and the warden gave him one.
The prison chapel is simple, like the one I occasionally attended with Marie and Gerald, and were it not for the men around me, I might well be in the same place. The windows are tall, but not colored, and the pews are plain pine, like the pulpit and the cross.
Today, Chaplain reads from Genesis. He reads to us about Joseph, which he does often. Why Joseph is our man, none of us know.
Chaplain doesn’t mention Jennings, though his death is still fresh.
Because I am literate, Chaplain has made me one of his readers. At mealtimes, he stations a reader at each end of the long tables in the mess, a Bible in our hands. We must read at the start of dinner for five full minutes while the men wait with their food in front of them. It is the worst of the jobs I’ve received.
“You think Chaplain’s getting any?” Ed whispers to me.
I shake my head.
“He’s allowed to, isn’t he?”
I nod.
“Not like them priests, who’ve got to hold out their whole lives. God’d have to promise a hell of a lot to get me to swear off that treat.” I nod again. “That furlough is close. Going to find me a woman straightaway.”
“Raise up your voices, brothers,” Chaplain is shouting. It’s the Lord’s Prayer we’re raising, and the men around me shout it loud. Ed stops his whispering.
“As though any woman would have you,” I say, the voices draining off around us. “We ask in Jesus’s name.”
“I’m not above praying, brother.”
Ed has told me that he doesn’t plan to return. “You have the date set?”
“Nah. They have to be sure they don’t need me anymore first. They’re giving me a month, Ross. A month. Even Taylor’s dogs couldn’t catch a trail that cold.”
The desire to run is something deep, I think. We had this boy Oscar—just a kid, really, barely eighteen—who’d drawn a four-week sentence. Some misdemeanor, we didn’t know what. We’d had a recent opening in our cell, and they stuck him in with Ed and me and the others.
“I got a holdover,” he told us. “They’re going to come back with something that’ll keep me here forever.”
“Wait,” we told him. Holdovers pan out, or they don’t. Lots of times those other charges don’t have legs. They don’t stand up. But other times, they try you all over and give you everything they can, start you from scratch. It can go either way.
Being such a low-threat case, they sent Oscar over to the farm. He ran his first day. The dogs came back tired, Taylor saddle sore. Folks say Taylor puts the same effort into every escape, murderer or vagrant. Escaping is about pride, not sentence. A man walks off before he’s done, it reflects badly on his overseer.
Six months went by after Oscar ran, and we forgot about him. Someone else took his bunk. Someone else took his job. Someone else was younger. And then—one day—Oscar came back. He walked right up to the front doors, saying, “I heard I don’t have a holdover, so I thought I’d finish out my time.”
The State doesn’t have a sentence for escape, not anything official, so Oscar finished his sentence—those few weeks—and he walked out a free man.
“Why’d you come back?” Ed asked him in the mess.
Oscar was a funny-looking kid, big teeth and a tall forehead, hair that stood straight up, a big old birthmark down the right side of his jaw and neck. You could pick him out of a crowd.
“You ever tried being an outlaw?”
I laughed, but Ed said, “I’d take outlaw any day.”
In church, Ed says, “They give me that furlough and I’m gone.” The men around stand from their pews, tired already by the jobs they’ll return to. Chapel is full because it gives us a break from work, a spot to sit down. An hour of rest can make a believer out of any man.
“Your sentence is too long for them to forget,” I tell Ed. I am embarrassed by the resentment in my voice, the envy I feel not just of my friend’s furlough, but the work that’s bought it. If
they’d come to me with the wiring for the chair, I would eagerly have said yes.
They didn’t come to me.
“You’ll be all right, Ross,” Ed is saying. We’re standing, too. He’ll go to the woodshop, and I’ll go to the barn. “Early parole. I know it.”
I shake my head.
“We’re not the ones they’re after.”
But he’s wrong there. We’re exactly what Kilby wants. These prison guards can’t do anything but shout and whip and run dogs. They don’t know wire or wood. They’re not skilled. They couldn’t dig a stump out of the ground or sow a row of corn seed. They couldn’t get the current going back through those strands of barbed wire along the wall should someone cut them. They couldn’t build Ed’s chair.
“They’re going to paint it yellow,” he tells me. “Highway yellow. They’ve got leftover paint. I asked them to keep it the natural grain. Made it out of maple and oak.”
It only took him six days to build. Ed is a fine woodworker. I’m sure it’s a hell of a chair.
“You get any word about that friend of yours in the mines?” Ed asks.
“Nah.”
“Marie?”
“You know better than to ask.” Ed knows about Marie’s silence, that I haven’t heard from my son. He knows my best guess to Wilson’s whereabouts, that he’s likely been leased to Sloss, sentenced to a dark life underground.
The sun is slanted sideways—winter light. It’s a bit cold, this early in the day. I have always preferred winter to summer, Alabama’s version of the season that is, mild and sun soaked. I have preferred mornings, too, the way they forgive a night’s indiscretions or a yesterday’s. Prison mornings are a different kind, but I cannot say it is an altogether awful thing to be walking across this dusty yard toward a barn where I’ll work my back sore shoveling out stalls, my arms and legs aching from the pails and buckets I carry.
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