Work Like Any Other

by Virginia Reeves

  “You’ll be healthier here than you’ve ever been, boys.”

  Roscoe had always had good health, but he spent his first night in discomfort, waking every half hour to fits of dry coughs from the dust they’d sprinkled in his hair. He’d been issued a scratchy gray suit, and his bed was a thin mattress on a narrow, bottom bunk. Five other men were in the cell with him, and he hadn’t learned any of their names. Through the night, they took turns telling him to shut his goddamned mouth.

  “Shove your goddamned face into your cot if you have to make that much noise.”

  “Only thing I got going for me now is sleep, goddamn it.”

  “That’s it. I’m gonna come down and smother it out of you myself.”

  Roscoe didn’t respond to any of it. He coughed and he waited, a good part of him still expecting the admission of a mistake. George Haskin hadn’t been electrocuted by Roscoe’s lines, he’d simply died of a heart attack or some other malady with a quick onset. The jury had been swayed, the sentence suspended. He was home with Marie and Gerald and Wilson. They were working with Alabama Power to put in a meter for the power they were using. All was well.

  He wouldn’t have to fight off his cellmates.

  Morning was a subtle creeping of gray light, and a guard came right afterward.

  “Eaton!” he called, and the man on the bunk over Roscoe heaved himself down to the floor. He was a short, thick man with muscle through his torso. The right half of his face looked as though it’d been boiled.

  “You get used to the dust they throw at ya,” he said to Roscoe before heading to the cell door. “Once you been here awhile.” The skin of his right cheek didn’t move when he spoke, stretched and thick as leather. His voice didn’t match any of the ones Roscoe had heard through the night, and he saw the man’s words as the first decent thing the prison had offered him.

  He nodded, trying to convey the gratitude he was feeling.

  “Eaton!” the guard yelled again.

  The man stepped to the gate.

  “Rest of you stay put till we come for you,” the guard said, pulling the gate open, its hinges singing. Then he clanged it back closed. “You’ll be brought food soon. No fussin’ till then.”

  One of Roscoe’s cellmates spat on the floor.

  The guard gave him a half-lipped smile, wry and laden with threat. He didn’t say anything as he led Eaton away.

  Roscoe stayed in his bunk as his cellmates rose from theirs. He was tired, and his cough had retreated, so he closed his eyes. He couldn’t have slept long, but he felt rested when he woke to the calling of his name.

  “Did I miss the food?” he asked the remaining men.

  “Nah,” one of them said.

  “Martin!” the guard yelled. “Let’s go!”

  It was a different guard from the first, and he spoke less, the gate the only noise as it swung open and then closed.

  Standing outside the cell didn’t feel any freer than standing inside.

  “Walk in front of me,” the guard said. “I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  Roscoe followed the man’s curt instructions down the cell corridor, then into a hallway that looked more like a hospital’s, then to a door that opened into a small room with a single table and two chairs. A man was seated in one of the chairs already, facing the door. He wore a white shirt and a red-and-blue-striped tie. His shirtsleeves were rolled up. His hair was greased and slicked to the side, and his glasses were thick. Behind him, an unbarred window looked out the side of the building toward fields and a line of trees.

  “Take a seat,” the man in the chair said.

  The guard nudged Roscoe gently forward. He sat. Behind him, the door closed, and Roscoe looked over his shoulder to see that the guard was still there, guarding.

  “Are you comfortable?” the white-shirted man asked.

  “No.”

  The man smiled. “First honest reply I’ve gotten today. Still, do you need anything? A glass of water? A cigarette?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m an interviewer. I’m going to take down your history. I’d like you to be as comfortable as possible.”

  “I imagine you already have my history.”

  “We have your court records, Mr. Martin, but we’re interested in more than that.” The man looked down at the file and papers in front of him, and his voice switched to recitation, clearly reading from a text. “ ‘The State of Alabama has adopted a new convict intake process, where convicts will receive a thorough study of their history, a mental and physical examination, a course of treatment to remove any remedial defects, assignment to the prison and employment for which the convict is best adapted, and a systematic course of reformatory treatment and training, in order that the prisoner may be restored to society, if possible, a self-respecting, upright, useful and productive citizen.’ ”

  The man looked up.

  “I’ll take a cigarette.” Roscoe had had few since Sheriff Eddings first came to the house, and the taste sat warm and thick on his tongue, the smoke clearing the last of the dust from his lungs.

  The man watched him smoke for a moment. “Your name is Roscoe T Martin, is that right?”

  “Does everyone come through here?”

  “This is the central distributing prison, so yes.”

  “Did a black man come through named Wilson Grice?”

  The man looked at the folder again. “I didn’t conduct his interview.”

  “Can you find out who did?”

  “No.”

  Roscoe took another drag.

  “What does the T stand for?”

  Roscoe shook his head. “Nothing. My father liked the look of the letter.”

  The man wrote something in the folder. “Your parents. Can you tell me about your parents?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “And before that?”

  “My father was a foreman at a coal mine.”

  “You’re married?”

  “Yes.”

  “And does your wife have a vocation?”

  “She was a schoolteacher.”

  The man flipped a page. “Did she continue teaching once you moved to the farm?”

  “No.”

  The man flipped back. “How would you describe your profession at the time of your arrest?”

  “I was an electrician.”

  “You weren’t working for Alabama Power, though.”

  “I was working for our farm.”

  “Ah, yes, the farm you inherited from your wife’s father.” The man flipped again. “Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about your childhood.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your childhood?”

  Roscoe thought immediately of his sisters, all of them—Anna, Margaret, and Catherine. He thought of the barn he’d shared with Catherine while Anna and Margaret died in the house, drowning in a room full of air. “Little to tell.”

  The man in the tie looked disappointed, but he moved past it, scratching something down in the folder before asking his next question. “You had a Negro family working for you, the Grices?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Wilson Grice—who you were asking after earlier—he was your accomplice?”

  “No.”

  “He was convicted.”

  “That was wrong.”

  The man pushed his glasses up his nose and wrote in the folder. “Were you angry with Alabama Power, Mr. Martin? Is that why you targeted the company?”

  “No. I love that company.”

  The man made one more note, then flipped several pages ahead. “We’re shifting gears here, Mr. Martin. These next questions aren’t about your own life. Please answer them the best you can.”

  Roscoe’s cigarette was down to his fi
ngers.

  The man noticed at the same time. “Help yourself to as many of those as you’d like.” He nodded toward the box. “Now, Mr. Martin, if you had only one match and you entered a cold and dark room where there was an oil heater, an oil lamp, and a candle, which would you light first?”

  Roscoe laughed. He was just pulling a match from its box, so he held it up for the man to see.

  “The match, then?”

  “Yes.”

  Roscoe lit his cigarette.

  “Take two apples from three apples. What do you have?”

  “Two.”

  “How many animals did Moses take on the ark?”

  “Is this an intelligence test?”

  The man smiled. “You’re full of new responses, aren’t you, Mr. Martin.” He shook his head. “How do you know what this is?”

  “I don’t. How can you measure my intelligence by my knowledge of the Bible?”

  “What’s your answer?”

  “Moses didn’t take any animals on the ark.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Zero is my answer.”

  The questions continued. Divide 30 by half and add 10. Numbers were easy for Roscoe. That was 70. Dividing by half was the same as multiplying by 2. They were games, those questions. Tricks.

  The man in the tie stood when they were finished. “I’m sorry you’re here, Mr. Martin.”

  “Me, too.”

  Roscoe shook the man’s hand.

  CHAPTER 16 / ROSCOE

  Taylor has given me back my Fridays in the library, and Rash is the one to tell me about the end of convict leasing, a newspaper spread on his desk when I arrive.

  “Governor Bibb Graves finally bowed to the pressure,” Rash says, pointing to the front page. “He signed in new legislation that makes it ‘unlawful to work any convict, State or County, in any coal mine in Alabama.’ ” It’s been seventeen years since that Banner mine explosion, long enough for a child to be born and grow to age, get taken in, and sent off to a mine. That’s a life we’ve let pass before making any changes.

  What’s become of this state? I hear my father lamenting, and his voice makes me wonder—for the first time in years—about my little sister and her coalman.

  I didn’t realize I was working alongside convicts when I was down in my father’s tunnels. He only told me later, after I’d left. There wasn’t any difference in our appearances, anyway, and I imagine it’s always been the same—just a host of men covered in coal dust, black and blacker. I know the mines. I know the life Wilson must have been living there.

  I can see him, deep in the guts of the earth, his skin grown darker with the dust. Wilson is a farmer. He belongs aboveground, sprayed clean by the sun and air. He needs soil and growing things, seedlings just coming up in their furrows, the great blades of corn grass slipping out of their first sheaths. If either of us should’ve been assigned to the mines, it’s me with my mining history and my electrical experience. They could’ve made me a shooter, like those men who set off the Banner explosion, one of the few whites in the shaft, running the wires in, escaping back to fresh air before things blew. Though it hadn’t worked that way for the shooters in Banner. It might not have for me, either. But that fate seems fitting, too—blown to bits belowground, a death I was primed for.

  Rash has stacks of newspapers and articles about the lease system—his own fascination, he’s explained, men’s twisted desire to own other men—and I sift through them as I shelve. Photos show the offices at one mine, the brick rising into a triangle of a point above the main doors. Some eight hundred men block out the rest of the building, lining up with their shovels and lamps. One shot captures the growing pile of tools, all those handles and scoops, a jumble of elbows. I look for Wilson in the crowds, but few faces are showing. Just backs, bent, dark backs. I’d like to think I’d know the pieces of him anywhere, but I don’t. The back of Wilson is the back of every man.

  THE yard is overrun with newcomers, all these men to back up the papers in the library. They’re coming from mines all over the state—Banner and Flat Top, Warner and Sipsey and Pratt. Kilby needs to process them and reassign them, but for now, they’re stuck.

  I seek out the miners by their black nails and skin, and I ask after Wilson. “Nah,” they all say. “Never heard of no Wilson Grice.”

  Others ask me questions. “You know the secrets of this place?”

  “Tell me what I’ve got to do to get put out on the fields.”

  I tell them I have no secrets, but one man reminds me of myself when I first came—pointedly out of place—and I want to give him an answer. I may even want to see him run, to do the thing I’m too cowardly to do, escaping for us both.

  When he asks me what he can do to get a job out of eyesight, I tell him to go to the chapel. We’re in the yard, enough inmates and guards around us to grant a sense of anonymity. “Get Chaplain on your side,” I say.

  The man smiles, but it drops quick, his expression moving toward fear as Beau springs up between us, his weasel’s face slippery with excitement at what it’s about to do.

  “Hell you say, boy? Sounds to me like you’re putting Chaplain in harm’s way.”

  “Jesus, Beau,” I say, sick of him enough to let my Yes, sir slip away, regretting it immediately.

  His face shifts. “You talking back to me, you little son of a bitch?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, trying to bring it back in balance, realizing too late it’s No I should’ve said. Beau’s club comes out and up and then down before I can correct myself. Something gives at my collarbone, and I am on my knees, sound roaring from my mouth. It is the bray of the dogs in their pens, needy and pitted.

  The yard has quieted around us, and my hollering fills in the empty air. Then Beau joins in. “Shut your goddamned mouth,” he yells. He repeats himself again and again, one of his hands yanking at the elbow on my good side, trying to get me up. “Get the hell off your knees, and shut your goddamned mouth. I didn’t whack you but a bit. Get the hell up.”

  I can’t speak, can’t even move my lips. They are stuck half-open, slack and dumb.

  Beau pulls on my arm, another guard appearing from the cluster of inmates to take my other side. Together the two of them drag me to my feet. The second guard’s hands on my elbow make the pain bloom in my shoulder, a ripping apart, the limb leaving my body thread by thread.

  I let out a sound of resistance, something drowned and gurgling.

  They’re pulling me in opposite directions.

  “Jesus,” Beau says. “This way.”

  My thoughts are not clear, nor is my vision, but I recognize the direction Beau points me. We’re going toward the detention house, to Yellow Mama and the confinement cells.

  Beau knocks on the exterior door, and another guard unlocks it from the inside. My thoughts are graying, quiet and slack as my lips. I can feel my feet shuffling, as though they’re shackled, and the throbbing in my shoulder burrows deeper, knocking against bones and muscles and veins. The pain is a rusted saw blade, its teeth varied in length, turning and cutting of their own accord. Beau is talking to another guard at a wooden desk and they’re laughing, and the desk guard says, “We’re not picky,” and they’re laughing more and the saw plumbs deeper and there is another door opening, another corridor, a little sun to my left, and dim quiet to my right that swallows me in its evening tone, then another door, heavy and metal and dark, and a great heaving shove that sends my fumbling feet into themselves, where they betray me and send me to the floor. The saw explodes in my shoulder, a hundred small beasts eating away.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been lying here. Years, I imagine, years I spend pulling down my trousers and shitting in a hole in the middle of the room that I locate by groping in the dark. For years I feel the floor dampen with the contents of that hole when the guards choose to flush it. I sit in sewage in the
dark for years. Water and bread come through a small slit at the bottom of the door, and I hunger for that meager thread of light as much as I hunger for the food.

  The dark is thick and palpable, pressing up against my face, my hands and arms. It’s moist and warm at times, cold at others, though it could be my body that’s changing temperature through its fevered sweating and shaking. After a time, I no longer need to use the hole, my systems slowing. I can feel all those workings hunkering down into hibernation, only my mind spinning at its regular speed, possibly even faster, frantic. My name is Roscoe T Martin. My wife is Marie, my son, Gerald. My friend is Wilson, and I’ve condemned him to my father’s coal mines. “Thanks for the extra hands,” my father says. “Came around to my side, after all, didn’t you, Son?” Catherine asks for a story: “Tell me the one about the cat and the fox.” Marie and I are walking the village streets, the dam so close, the water loud and rushing. Our village has a church, an infirmary, Marie’s one-room school with its double doors and windows, its clapboard painted a dirty red. The streets are dusty clay. Near the water, old claw-rooted cypress trees are draped with Spanish moss, cottonwoods tuft their seeds, boulders and shelved rock croppings offer seats. I am twenty. I am eighteen. I am an electrician. A laundress courts me and a nurse, but I only have eyes for the teacher.

  “You’re the teacher,” I say, startling her in the dining hall.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “Teach?”

  I nod.

  “When they disobey, I hit them on the hand with a yardstick.”

  I laugh and tell her I’ll have lots of children. We will have so many, I know it. Sons and daughters.

  Faraday speaks in my ear: “Chemical affinity depends entirely upon the energy with which particles of different kinds attract each other.”