The guard chuckles, but the balding man isn’t smiling. The men on either side of him aren’t either.
“I imagine I can speak for the board when I say that we are denying your parole, Mr. Martin,” the balding man says. The others nod. “You will be eligible for a subsequent hearing in two years.”
“Don’t you need to deliberate?”
The man in the center writes in my folder. He doesn’t answer my question, but says instead, “I’ll hope for improvement in our next hearing, Mr. Martin.” His voice is definitive, severing. The guard pulls me away. I turn my head for a last clear view of that tower, and I think of the lighthouse I’ll never inhabit on the rocky coast I’ll never see.
CHAPTER 9
Marie didn’t hire a lawyer for Roscoe’s defense. She told the court there weren’t funds to pay an attorney, that he’d need a state defender. She made that choice, and Roscoe would be fine. She was sure because when a man was convicted in the state of Alabama in 1922, his prison assignment depended most on the color of his skin. White men were imprisoned in state-of-the-art facilities; Negro men were leased to private companies. Marie’s father had followed the state’s leasing system, and he’d spent much of his life fighting it—writing letters and petitioning state officials. The mining industry’s voice was louder than his, though, and convict labor was still the cheapest available.
Marie knew that Wilson would be leased if he was convicted, and as much for her father as for Wilson, she fought in his defense. The lawyer she hired was good, but he couldn’t get the charges dropped. Wilson had taken too much of the blame to walk away a free man. He was given ten years.
Marie thought of her father shouting on the courthouse steps, This fine state leases its prisoners to private companies for rates lower than mules and plow horses! She saw him walking next to Wilson. Alabama condemns her convicts to a fate worse than slavery. This young man will be joining those ranks!
“I’m so sorry,” Marie whispered to Wilson as the guards led him from the courtroom. She whispered it to her father, as well, and to Moa and their children.
She envisioned Wilson’s future—leased to a big coal company, one of the many in the state that she’d learned about with her father, and then more thoroughly with Roscoe, son of a Banner foreman. How could she have forgiven Roscoe that black past, a childhood raised in coal?
She remembered the night he’d admitted it, the two of them still courting, sitting in that awful mess hall in the village, some foul meal before them. She’d told him about her father, so he knew the stakes of his admission, knew that their families would never speak to one another.
“My father was a foreman at Banner,” he’d said. “He lost most of his hearing in the 1911 explosion.” He didn’t regret his father’s hearing loss, Marie remembered, but rather mentioned it like a curse the man had earned.
“I don’t know about that incident,” she’d lied, wanting to hear Roscoe’s father’s version.
“It was a Saturday morning in early April.” Roscoe then told a story she’d heard as a girl, a story her father had read to her from the papers. Roscoe had known more.
John Wright was one of the only white convicts in the mine, and he was doing electrical work near a detonation site deep in a central tunnel. Four shooters were down there with him. No one—not even Roscoe or his father—knew exactly what spark lit that powder, but the blast was big when it went. “John was blown apart,” Roscoe reported, “and the four shooters died instantly.” Marie vaguely remembered these specifics.
The blast blew out the fan that kept fresh air flowing through the mine, and the auxiliary fan didn’t come on. Roscoe’s father was down in a shaft, but he was close enough to the surface to get out before the black damp consumed him, the unbreathable gases left after oxygen is sucked out of a tunnel. Even with the ringing in his head, he stayed at the site. Marie resented the pride that fought for space in Roscoe’s voice. He should’ve died, Marie had found herself thinking. He should’ve died with the men he forced into those mines.
The first attempt at a rescue mission didn’t happen until the next day, and the twelve-person rescue team all collapsed as soon as they entered the mine, knocked unconscious by the pent-up gases. The team was mostly doctors, and they were pulled out quick. No fatalities. Their close call put a stop to any additional attempts at rescue until the fans were up and running. Marie hadn’t heard those parts. They made her hate Roscoe’s father all the more.
When they’d finally flushed out the tunnels, rescue teams set out for the deeper guts of the mine. “They ran out car after car full of bodies,” Roscoe told her. “My father got a group of convicts to dig a long trench in the convict cemetery.”
“Your father? Your father assigned the digging?”
Roscoe had nodded. Marie hadn’t been sure his head hung low enough for the weight it should carry. Marie had never swayed from her father’s politics—from his view of right and wrong—so it was hard for her to conceive of a child so far from its father. Weren’t we all, at heart, our parents? Wasn’t Roscoe his father’s disciple?
She’d swallowed her suspicions.
“Onlookers started gathering the day of the explosion, and more came through the weekend.” Roscoe told her that no relatives were present, which Marie already knew. Convicts were shipped to Banner from all over the state; their families were far away and didn’t know they were there. “The crowd got so big, they had to cordon off the scene with rope and armed guards.
“The mine decided to sell some food. The officials made a killing on tinned ham and crackers.” Marie learned that the foremen got a good piece of the profits from the blind-tiger stalls, too, allowing them to sell their illegal liquor in exchange for a kickback.
“You’re describing a sporting event,” Marie had said, “something for entertainment.”
“That’s exactly how it was by the way my father described it.”
The official body count was 128. Only 5 of those were free men. The other 123 were convicts, like Wilson now. The mine suffered little damage and started back up ten days later. It would’ve been sooner, but they’d had to wait on another shipment of prisoners.
“How could you live with him?” Marie had asked Roscoe. How could she live with him? This murderous past, so deeply contrary to her own, should have been enough to stall their courtship.
“I was already set on leaving when my father came home with the story,” Roscoe told her. “My apprenticeship with Wheeler was waiting for me in Birmingham.”
So he’d escaped, and Marie had forgiven him his father. She’d been wrong, she could see now. Roscoe had ended up doing the exact same thing. He’d used Wilson to meet his own ends, without thinking of the consequences. He’d wanted his electricity so badly that he’d sacrificed Wilson to get it. And not just Wilson, but George Haskin. Marie had read the accounts in the papers, all the damage done to that poor boy’s body. If Roscoe had been content to be a farmer, then none of this would have occurred. If he had shifted the narrative of his life, drawing his strength from his wife and son rather than his lines, then they could have quieted Roscoe’s past completely and replaced it with Marie’s, with Wilson and Moa and the kids, the farm and the library, big meals and long days.
She could have forgiven him the other pieces, too, the parts of her body that were lost, all those children they didn’t have, those years in the village when he was so far away, so distant, so deeply committed to his lines and mechanisms and turbines while she clung to their son, their only child, dear Gerald, her boy.
Marie knew that some threads of their story weren’t Roscoe’s to own, just as she knew her resentment was rarely rational. At moments this had been clear, long stretches, even, such as these past couple years with the lines and the thresher and the farm’s success. She had allowed herself to float on their prosperity, to hide her questions. She had kept quiet about the simple bills that
varied so greatly from the figures the prosecution provided at Wilson’s trial, never demanding to know why theirs was the only farm with electricity. She had allowed the secret, owned it, held it, and she’d done that in order to see her husband as a man she loved, a man who spent time in her father’s library, identifying and pressing plant clippings, a man she chose. Her father had insisted that she choose the man she would marry. “None of this assigned nonsense. None of this stability and household order. You pick the man you want to spend your life with. That’s what your mother did. God knows why she chose me, but it was her choice.” Marie missed her father. She missed Roscoe, too, but only in isolated scenes—there along the Coosa River where they would walk, an afternoon here in the farmhouse in their shared bed, the kitchen of their village house, infant Gerald in his arms. When she thought of him whole, though, she cringed. As a whole man—full up of his past and his choices and his actions—she wanted nothing to do with him.
CHAPTER 10 / ROSCOE
April brings a stretch of heat that lingers so thick and hot even the cows complain. The early calves exchange their bucking and snorting for the low moans of their mothers, and the herd clumps together in the shade of the buildings and trees.
Ed’s time is close. The warden and his men have finished their tests on his chair. It is painted its bright yellow. We even know the first man they’re going to put in it. He has been here since January, and we don’t know him except by his name and crime. Horace DeVaughn. The name is as famous as Taylor’s nineteen steps, whispered and passed along the cell rows.
We have heard that DeVaughn is a murderer, that he killed two folks up in Birmingham.
DeVaughn has never left that first stop in the detention house. I wonder if they bothered to take his history, or if they assumed they already knew it. The men scheduled for execution have their own row in that house, a floor above the dark row of solitary cells. All of those are singles, so there is space, at least.
They will execute him sometime between midnight and daybreak, and if it all goes well, they will give Ed his furlough. I have drawn directions to Marie’s land and tied up a bundle of letters I’ve refused to send after the first year’s went unanswered. I want to know my words have been delivered, that Marie’s silence isn’t born of a delivery error or a negligent postmaster.
“You think a whole year’s worth of letters got lost?” Ed asked once.
“No.”
Ed clapped me on the back. “Just need the lie, then, don’t you? I tell you what—let’s make it a good lie, how ’bout? Let’s put some villain in the mix, some bastard lying in wait for the post, intercepting every letter that comes through. See, he’s got eyes for your lady, and he can’t have your lofty words tickling her ear. He’s gotta keep you quiet. Every day, he sits there, jumping that poor deliveryman, until the man tires of it and starts pitching your letters himself.” Ed smiled. “Yeah? It’s good, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Hell”—he laughed—“you don’t know.” Then he got himself serious. “Honestly, Ross, I’m sorry for it all—whatever the reason. It’s a bloody shame.”
I thanked him.
“And I’m happy to deliver your letters. I’ll beat the little bastard should he try to get at them before they’ve reached your wife’s hands.”
“I know you will.”
For a moment here, waiting for the warden to come for Ed, I worry about my wife and my friend, alone there in the house that was once mine. Ed is tall and wide in the shoulders, thicker than me. I don’t know if he’s the sort Marie would be looking for, but his mere existence in my old home jars me. Just for a moment. Just now. Then, it is gone. Wherever Marie’s mind is, Ed’s is on the ocean. He will leave my letters and push himself east.
He’s cleared his bunk of anything personal, and it is a sleepless night, this last of Horace DeVaughn’s.
“Do you think we’ll know?” he whispers to me. “Think we’ll know when they do it?”
If every light in the cell house were blazing, we might see the bulbs weaken under the pull, but with dark on us and few other demands on the current, I don’t know.
“Watch the outside lights,” I tell Ed. “They may dim a bit.”
Our windows face the oak grove and the front guard tower. The globes at the entrance glow all night, and the guard-tower lights its beam once every quarter hour to draw across the cell house and the wall, a flash through our windows, out the interior bars, across the well. Were it to linger, it could be the moon, this ghostly light, white-blue and pointed. It shines on quiet places. The outsides of these cells and walls are empty. We are never there. We do not escape from the cell house.
But tonight is different.
“Do you think I’ll feel it?” Ed asks.
“You?”
It is not a question, though, because Ed is still talking. “I think I will. I think I’ll know. I’m scared of it, Ross.”
The light passes.
I imagine the current running through Ed’s chair, running through Horace DeVaughn, all that voltage pushing through his body, his blood and muscles becoming reluctant conductors. His veins go dark, like George Haskin’s, his heart and brain trying to quiet the current, everything lit like a filament, a bulb about to burst. I see the current knocking out the power all round the perimeter, deadening the heat in those lines at the top of the wall, silencing the siren. We would pry loose the metal grates at our windows and shimmy down the brick sides of the house, men pouring out like roaches and mice, our fingers in the cracks like claws in bark. We’d build steps out of tar, using them to climb. We’d be down and over and out before anyone knew. The tower light would trace paths in the leaves overhead, shining on the same brick and cement, unaware. Everyone would be looking at Horace DeVaughn, no one left to catch us.
“There,” Ed says. “Do you feel that, Ross?”
I look out the window, trying to catch a change in the glow of the bulbs. Are they weaker? Quieter? They are unchanged.
“What are you feeling, Ed?”
“My feet.” The bunk rattles. He shakes out his legs, kicking. Now, his hands. He’s making too much sound for the hour. His arms and legs thunder.
We both have low bunks, and I am level with him, level with his noise. “Quiet, Ed. Hank’s on row tonight.” Hank is a night guard known to beat the noise right out of a man. He likes silent cells. If he doesn’t get them, we are all rattled awake by his hammering and shouts.
I’m surprised the noise hasn’t woken our cellmates.
Ed steadies his body. “What are the lights doing, Ross?”
“They’re holding.”
“You’d have done it, wouldn’t you?”
He is asking whether I’d have made the chair. The question is an embarrassment. I didn’t tell him about my offer to the parole board.
“Yes. I would have done it.”
The light from the guard tower passes again.
Before dawn, the warden and a guard come for Ed. Not a bit of light is in the east. We haven’t slept. The light has passed eleven times since Ed’s shaking. I don’t know what to call this thing I watched in him. Nothing in my mind can explain the current that jumped from DeVaughn to Ed, that ran itself along the walkway from the detention house, into the main house, and up here to our sixth floor, to tap only Ed, not the man over him, not me next to him. Is it DeVaughn’s blood calling?
“Mason,” the warden says. “It’s time, now.”
“You kill him, sir?” Ed asks.
“Without a problem.”
Ed is not moving. “How long did it take, Warden?”
“Don’t see that that’s any of your business, son. You want your furlough or don’t you? I’m only offering once.”
Ed swings his feet to the floor. He pulls my letters from under his pillow, taps them against his knee. “I’ll let you know when they’re del
ivered.”
I nod.
“You’ll get yourself out of here, Ross.” He names all the ways like he does. My own furlough. Early parole. “You’ll see Marie and Gerald, soon.”
I don’t believe him.
“Ross.” Ed stands, his hand outstretched.
“Ed.” I stand, too. We shake. He has been a good man to know.
“Let’s go,” the warden says. “Martin, back in your bunk.”
I lie down and watch Ed’s back. The keys in the cell door clang, and the bars swing out. It’s a great sound, that of a cell door opening. Even though it’s nearly identical, the sound of a cell door closing is as ugly and lonesome a sound as we get in here. The door settles with its clang. The guard bolts it shut, hangs his keys from his hip, and follows Ed and the warden. The men are quiet. It is still dark. The day Horace DeVaughn died has not yet started for them.
It has for me, though, and for Ed. I wonder if I would’ve felt the death if those wires had been mine. Would DeVaughn have run his last breaths through my veins, a throbbing rhythm that skewed my pulse?
I did not feel George Haskin. He does not call.
Ed holds Marie’s letters in his hand. He will carry them out those front doors. He’ll walk into Montgomery and hitch a ride down to Coosa County. I see him in the open bed of a pickup truck. The morning air will be cool, and he will love the sting of it on his face. Wind like we don’t know in here, kicked up strong from moving fast down roads. He’ll look at the map I’ve drawn him, recognize the turnoff at the pecan orchards, and tap on the cab of the truck. “This’ll do,” he’ll tell the man driving. “I thank you, sir.”
He’ll carry those letters up the clay road to the farmhouse, Marie’s house. He’ll knock on the door, and Marie will answer. It’s still early when Ed arrives. Marie and Gerald are just sitting down to a breakfast Moa cooked. Corn cakes and ham and rich, dark coffee.
Work Like Any Other Page 8
