I know, I tell him. I know. But there are forces here in the dark I don’t recognize, their attractions great mysteries. I don’t know what I should awaken and what should stay hidden. Help me, Faraday. Give me a spark.
“Hah!” laughs my father. “Electricity doesn’t reach down here.”
But then the door opens, and the light bleeds through my eyes quickly, shuttering them closed.
“Son of a bitch!” I hear someone shout. “Who the hell approved this without an order?”
There is no answer.
“Martin!” the voice shouts. “Come on out of there!”
I have my back to one of the walls, my legs angled out in front, just a foot from the hole that is my toilet. The lids of my eyes allow themselves to lift into a slit, and I see the warden himself is here to save me. I tell my feet to move toward my body, to prepare for standing. Come, I tell them. We will gather this body into a small thing and push it up the length of this wall. My feet are slow to respond, and before my knees have fully bent, the warden shouts, “Jesus, pull him out of there.”
Hands are under my shoulders, and I do everything to force my mouth into speech, but they are pulling before the words can come, and the sound that escapes me is black and wet.
The guards put hands on their clubs, and the motion makes the noise louder and louder until it finally breaks into the sound of an actual word.
“Please.”
I am a coward.
“Please,” I say again, my voice thick. I cradle my right arm like the dead thing it is. “No clubs.”
The guards look to the warden.
The warden looks to me. “Watch him close. Now come on out into the corridor, Martin.”
I pull myself forward into the brilliant light. I know it’s dim, the bulbs dampened and covered, but it’s a cloudless sky to me, sun on water. I breathe it in.
“That’s it,” the warden says. “Now, it stinks like hell in here. Do you think you can let these gentlemen lead you to my office without making any more of those damn noises?”
“Yes, sir.”
I don’t know if it is good to have my voice back.
I should tell the warden that the stink will follow us, my clothes and skin thick with the contents of that hole.
We’re able to get to the administration building through hallways and doors, never stepping outside, though I want a breath of air more than I want anything. I want the dirt of the yard under my feet.
I’m ashamed to enter the diamond-shaped lobby.
The guards from solitary accompany us to the warden’s door, then he excuses them.
“Are you sure, sir?” one asks.
The warden doesn’t answer, and I follow him into his office. The man’s desk is wide and clean. The lamp on it has a green-glass shade, and the windows let in a heap of light. My eyes can’t take it all in.
The warden leans against his desk, pulls a cigarette from a box, lights it. “Show me your shoulder, Martin.”
“Sir?”
“I’m giving you an order, and you are to follow it. Show me your shoulder.”
I set to unbuttoning my shirt, a slow endeavor. I have to shake my left arm loose before I can pull the sleeve from my right. The shirt is stiff in places, smeared and filthy. My undershirt stretches tight against the spot.
The warden smokes. “That one, too.”
It’s an impossible task.
“So long as you have one working arm, you can get a shirt over your head, Martin.”
This isn’t true. But I tell the warden my shoulder is fine. “It just needs a day or two.”
“You don’t think you’ll need to shed that shirt before then? You’re ripe, Martin. Worst-smelling man I’ve ever let into this room. Now pull your damn shirt off or I’ll do it for you.”
I take a breath and grab on to the fabric at the back of my neck, pulling it as quick as I can over my head. The right side of my body howls, ribs to pit to neck, then back down my arm to the pointed brown tips of my fingers.
“Good Jesus.” The warden tucks the cigarette in his lips and leans in close to inspect. The smoke tastes good. “That’s a hell of a shoulder, Martin.” He’s smiling. “Guard or inmate?”
“Corner. Corner of the cell house.”
He keeps smiling. “Brick doesn’t leave a mark like that. Have you gotten a look at it?”
“No.”
He opens the closet to a length of mirror on the inside of the door. “All yours.”
I can see his suits hanging inside, a few changes of shoes, a pair of work boots, a coat. A tan cowboy hat sits on the shelf overhead, and a couple of red and blue ties hang on hooks set into the wall.
I haven’t looked myself in the eye for some time, and it’s my face that scares me the most when I find it in the mirror. The time in solitary has given me a stubbly beard that does nothing to cover the bones jutting out of my face every place they can. The skin around my eyes is dark, and the eyes themselves seem to be sinking, as though I’ve slept every night with stones on them. My hair is rough and oily and strung with filth. The scar on my stomach stands raised against the skin, red still, and then, there is my shoulder—a great, contorted mass of purple and blue and red. The mark of Beau’s club stands out clearly, a deep rut in the line of my body, deeply purpled with spiderwebs of burst blood vessels. The whole shoulder is shiny, the skin stretched tight over the pooling of liquids. It’s a great blister, and I’m taken with the desire to slice it open and watch it drain here on the warden’s floor.
“Guard or inmate?”
“Inmate. I won’t name him.”
The warden crushes out his cigarette in the ashtray on his desk. “I can make you tell me the truth, Martin. You have plenty of privileges I can revoke.”
“I’ll lose more than privileges if I tell.”
He smiles again, then chuckles. “See, this is why you’ve gotten so far in here, Martin—you understand the place.” He rubs at his jaw and looks out the windows. “I know it wasn’t another inmate. Looks to me like a club did that, and I’ll assume the guard of mine that took it upon himself had good reason. You want to tell me different?”
“No, sir.”
“All right. Let’s walk you on over to the infirmary. Doc will tell me when we can expect you back to work.”
“Yes, sir.”
I reach for my shirts.
“Best keep those off.”
I ball them up in my left hand and let the warden lead me out of his office, through the lobby, down the corridor to the cell house, and then into the yard. It’s hard to walk, my feet refusing to lift off the ground. The office folks stare. The guards stare. Outside in the yard, the men stare. My arm dangles. The sun is hot on my exposed skin. The warden is using me as an example, I’m just not certain of what. Maybe it’s credit he wants. If the men think he’s done this to me—one of his trustees—then he must be willing to do any sort of horror to them. I might be walking through here shirtless for the guards, a warning to keep their hands off me, or it could just as easily be an invitation to do the same, to make more of these marks.
The chapel is past the infirmary, and I am glad I don’t have to face Chaplain. He has words for every occasion, and I am in no state to hear them.
Nurse Hannah is there to greet us. “My goodness. What’s happened this time?”
“Got attacked, sure enough,” the warden says. “And a misunderstanding got him a stint in solitary. I’d like him fully evaluated.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, then,” the warden says. “Get yourself healed, Martin.”
Hannah leads me back through the room of beds. I count four men, then five, a sixth toward the end. They all look sick, ravaged by some great disease.
“It’s disappointing to see you back so soon,” Hannah says, and I agree.
&
nbsp; MY second parole hearing has arrived—second trip to the infirmary, second hearing. I am running a circuit, passing through the same points over and over. There is only one change. Unlike my first hearing, I have no expectations for this one. I will match my voice to that of the balding man. I will not hope.
Guards lead me through the same corridors, and the same guards heckle me on my way through.
“Been stripped of those trustee ranks, have ya, Martin?”
“You a threat, now?”
“Should I be scared?”
“Parole board,” one of my guards says, and the others switch their tone. A few of them wish me luck.
“It’s only his second one,” the guard on my left says.
“Ah, well. Luck to you anyway, Martin.”
My right arm is still bound to my body—I have orders from the doctor not to move the limb for a month—an obscene lump under my shirt, my right sleeve slack and empty.
The balding man is balder now. He still takes up the center seat at the table in the room, and the man on the right seems to be the same one as well. The man on the left is most certainly new, a great beast of a man with hair sprouting from his shirt collar, climbing his enormous neck. He, too, wears the customary dark blue suit.
“Please take a seat,” the bald man says, and I lay my left hand flat on my thigh and sit up tall. The bald man delivers the same opening script, and I tell him—again—that it makes sense. I understand that this board does not doubt my guilt, that they are trying to assess only whether I am ready to return to society without endangering the public.
Again, they review my crime. I see George Haskin’s face before and after his electrocution on the pirated lines I ran. I hear again the figures of money I stole. I see Sheriff Eddings on our porch.
“I’m sorry, Roscoe,” he says, opening the car door for me.
“I see you’ve been working with Deputy Warden Taylor and the prison dogs, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How do you like that work?”
“I find it enjoyable.”
“Can you see yourself continuing it outside of Kilby?”
“No, sir.”
“Why is that?” the new man asks.
“All due respect, sirs, I don’t imagine there’ll be much need for prison dogs outside of Kilby.”
The large man laughs unexpectedly. “Right enough.” He turns to the bald man. “What kind of outside training is dog work giving them?”
“Tracking skills,” the bald man says. “And animal husbandry.” He is defensive, and the large man looks skeptical.
“You’re still working in the library as well?” the large man asks.
“Yes, sir.”
“And do you see yourself continuing that work?”
Again, I tell them I will organize my father-in-law’s books.
“You’ve suffered injuries since your last parole hearing,” the large man says. “Do they have any lasting effects?”
I point to my right arm hidden away under my shirt. “The doctor doesn’t know what the range of motion will be once it heals. I have a fourteen-inch scar up the center of my abdomen and another scar on my leg. Both of them still hurt when I run.”
No one gets paroled their second time. There doesn’t seem much point to try.
“What about psychologically?” the large man asks. He has taken over the bald man’s job.
I find too many obvious questions here and have no idea what this large man would have me say in response. I’m unclear what constitutes a wholesome psychological reaction to physical violence. Had George Haskin lived, what would his psychological reaction be? Anger? Relief at having lived? Regret? I could tell these three men that my injuries have done little more than everything else in this place, that they are just one more piece, like the wall and the mess and the heat in the cell house. My injuries are not more or less than the dust in the yard and Yellow Mama and Ed’s boat and that damn lighthouse. I did not expect the injuries, but they did not surprise me, and so, I could tell this board that they did nothing, that their impact was neutral, that they were a decent dinner one evening or a painful sermon one Sunday morning or the sounds of the dogs giving chase.
My scars ache and my shoulder, but that is a response to a question I’ve already answered.
“There’s been no psychological effect, sir.”
The large man starts to speak, but the bald man interrupts, “If we were to grant your parole today, what would you do to become an upright member of society?”
“I would go home and help my wife run the farm her father left us.”
“You wouldn’t seek out electrical work?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“Because I couldn’t get electrical work, sir.” I don’t know if he remembers giving me this answer in my first hearing.
“Any other questions, gentlemen?”
I expect something more from the large one, and at least one word from the silent fellow, but both of them decline. The guard leads me to the bench in the lobby, and I watch the clerks go about their filing and typing. The warden’s office is directly across from us, and I picture him in there smoking.
They keep me out in the hall for at least ten minutes, but when I return to that unfortunate chair, their decision is the same.
“The board feels that you would benefit from more rehabilitation,” the bald man says. “We are denying your parole. Your next hearing will be held in two years.”
“Thank you.” I go with my guards back through the corridors and gates and doors, back to the yard, where they will turn me loose.
CHAPTER 17
The prosecution hadn’t been able to prove exactly when the transformers and the lines went in and finally settled for $1,000 in reparation. The farm carried the debt, and Marie had wanted it gone as soon as possible. Without the men and the thresher, the farm wasn’t making enough money to cover its own expenses, let alone any additional payments, and so she’d sought out a teaching position in Rockford the following fall. Roscoe had been away nearly a year, and Wilson’s sons were doing good work keeping the farm in order. Marie felt she could take herself away. She trusted her father’s land in the hands of Wilson’s family. Gerald came with her to the schoolhouse, though he kept his distance, his nose in his books and his thoughts on his father. Marie saw Roscoe there in the boy’s eyes and his cheekbones and hair. She saw Roscoe in his desire to leave—a son wanting to run from his home. “Gerald!” she would call in class. “What is the answer?”
Only when she directly confronted him would he speak: “Columbus. The capital of Ohio is Columbus.” He always knew.
Marie’s salary was meager, but she was able to put most all of it toward the power debt, and by the spring she’d paid it in full.
Marie wasn’t expecting the man from Alabama Power who arrived on her doorstep a little over a year later in mid-June, summer vacation stretching long and difficult for her and her son. Because the man’s appearance was a surprise, it reminded her of when the sheriff came for Roscoe. She was bristly when she opened the door, stiff and curt.
She spoke through the screen, keeping the latch held tight. “May I help you?”
“Marie Martin?”
“Yes.”
He explained his position with the power company, as well as his intent. “Do you have a moment?”
She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone with his hands or mind in electricity. The whole enterprise was slippery, dishonest, alternating. Here and then gone. She thought of Roscoe’s explanations, all those passionate lectures he’d given her about forces and impulse—circulation, laps, and runs. All of it was ugly, now, a deeply channeled ugliness that was burned like the body of George Haskin. She saw the prosecutor’s description—the blackened fingers and darkened veins. A book—Pa
rnassus on Wheels—would join this image, and Marie would watch it fly over her head to hit one of her mother’s ceramic plates that hung on the wall, the porcelain falling slowly to the floor, where it shattered against the wood her father had laid, board by board. Gerald came next, his arms bruised purple and blue, yellow tinged at the edge, marks the shapes of his father’s fingers. There was so much to see.
“I have a moment,” Marie told the man from Alabama Power.
The day was already warm, the night’s chill burned away. The mockingbirds were loud in the pecan trees, and a solitary crow called out from the roof of the barn.
Marie sat down in one of the porch rockers.
“Is this a bad time, ma’am?”
“No worse than any other.” She motioned to the chair across from her. “Please sit.”
Marie knew that the girl who’d made her dead mother’s bed had grown into the cold woman she was now. She hadn’t meant to turn out this way, but once the push started, she’d been incapable of reversing it. She was not a welcoming woman, not kind. She was strong and reasonable and disciplined.
“Ma’am?”
She recognized the man’s youth, a child really. What was he doing on this errand? So innocent-faced, rough-cheeked, haphazardly shaved, a bit of stubble near his ear and again under his nose. Marie couldn’t tell whether he was handsome. “You want to bring power back in?”
“Yes, ma’am. The company’s started a rural electrification program, and your property is high on the list.”
Marie nodded.
“There’s very little that needs to be done, really. We’ll have a crew examine your existing lines, and then they’ll put in a meter. From what I heard, your place was fully wired. Imagine it’d be nice to get back to that.”
“I don’t much care for electricity.”
The young man looked perplexed. She could tell that he knew their story, knew her husband was a convict, far away in a prison somewhere, charged with the death of a man who’d held a job like his own. The young man clearly knew that they’d turned a nice profit in their time of electricity—the newspapers had reported as much—and that, were it not for the illegality of it, their experiment would’ve been lauded as revolutionary, the next great frontier of modern agriculture. His face asked her why she wouldn’t want to return there. Why not retrace those steps?
Work Like Any Other Page 14
