Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  “All right, Eat-um-up.” The man moved away. Hal said, “That old boy used to work for us on Matagorda. I ran into him in the commissary here one day. He said he never had expected to meet up with me in prison. I said I never had expected to be here. As you can tell, he got the name because of eating. On the place, the Negroes called Daddy ‘Mister Big Hal,’ so I got my name.” He laughed. “They say when Eat-um-up went to trial for killing his wife, he claimed he killed her by accident. Then the judge leaned down and said, ‘Shot your wife four times in the back by accident?’ That boy later tried to drown himself in a rain puddle.”

  She laughed, wondering if the anecdote was true. “I see prison is no equalizer.”

  “I don’t think I follow you.”

  “You’re both inmates and trusties, but he calls you Mister.”

  “Isn’t that the way it should be?”

  Laurel was glad Hal laughed. She teased him back, saying he was no better than his redneck cage mates. “Who are all the people in with you?”

  “Middle-aged repeaters mostly. There are twenty men in my cage.” Then in a moment he said, “Twelve of us have killed someone.” She asked a few questions, and he spoke haltingly, telling her about the people in with him. “One man raped his niece and was paroled and raped her again. Another guy got his daughter pregnant. Daughter-daubers, these men are called. In prison, you never ask why a guy is pulling time. Eventually you find out. There’s a real social hierarchy. Child molesters are on the bottom. Most cons won’t speak to them. Those guys are so lonely, sometimes I have to feel sorry for them.” He lit a cigarette. “My case was different, Laurel. When I came in, I’d received so much publicity, everybody knew who I was. The night I first walked into a cage, a local newscaster was just going off saying I’d been taken to prison that day. Everyone tried not to look at me.”

  That must have been terrible for you, she was going to say. But a different look had come over Hal’s face. He seemed to be grinning to himself. She had no right to criticize him, Laurel thought. It was human nature to enjoy the limelight, even for the wrong reasons; human nature to want it. Hadn’t she been warding off imaginary autographs because of her fictionalized tap dancing since she was six years old, preparing her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature since she published her first short story? She had been proud coming here today to know the place’s most prestigious prisoner, proud not to be some ordinary housewife at home baking cookies.

  “We don’t have any big-time criminals here,” Hal went on. She took notes. “No Mafia or Chicago racketeers. A lot of the guys have robbed filling stations or small-town banks or churches. In case you’re interested, I’m told Baptist churches are the ones to hit. I sit around in my cage now talking about stealing the way my friends and I at home sat around talking about farming. At first, I kept my things in a footlocker with a padlock. Then one day a guy bet me he could open the lock quicker with a straightened-out paper clip than I could using the combination. He won. Since then I’ve never locked it and never had anything stolen. The funny thing is, I like these men. But they’ll kill.” Hal leaned an elbow on the open car window. He spoke as if to himself. “It’s so damned easy to kill a person.”

  She looked toward the chinaberry tree where Buddy stood talking. She wanted to grab him by the lapels, crying out, What happened, Buddy? What happened out on that plantation that night? But Buddy wouldn’t know; there was the possibility even those involved didn’t really understand what had happened. She looked down at Hal’s hands resting on his knees, at tapered fingers she would call artistic. Their padded tips looked capable only of gentle touching. Her own hands were blunt and square. William called them honest-looking and said they showed the sturdy, good stock she came from. She bent fingers into her palms to hide her nails, always unsightly.

  Sitting so long in the heat and waiting for Buddy, she began to find even the crotch of her pants was wet. She suspected this could be because of her closeness to Hal. She thought back to his describing himself as the terrified man who entered the prison one winter night. He was unloaded out of a van full of men, then left to lie on a cot in a processing camp for days believing that was to be his existence for the next nine years; an enforced idleness. One night his cage mate Purvis said, “MacDonald, when you last slept? You ain’t spoke to nobody for days. Every time I wake up, I see your cigarette glowing in the dark. You better ask to get out for some air.” Instead, they took Hal to the psychiatric camp; he was lucky there was one in this day and time. In times past, men who didn’t seem to adjust were called troublemakers. They were taught to conform by being beaten, purged with water hoses, having milk of magnesia thrust down their throats, and being immersed in cold water. He was kept in the psychiatric camp only a short while. There, a psychiatrist had said, “How do we rehabilitate you? A college graduate. And you’re no habitual criminal.” Hal had ended his article by saying that the first time he heard a hall boy close a cage door behind him, and a lock snap, it was a sound he never got over. Laurel had another thought: she would never have had to go to a psychiatric camp. She grew tougher in exact proportion to however difficult her situation was.

  Shortly, Hal said, “What terrified me most about coming here was being locked up with men I knew had raw nerves. These guys’ self-control and ability to reason can leave them at any time. I’ve seen a lot of fistfights break out. They’re over quickly. But the fear is getting caught unintentionally in the middle of one. It’s strange, but politeness is a way of life in prison. You knock yourself out not to step on someone’s toes. We had two fistfights in my cage last night. The guy who’s cage boss called the sergeant. Then the man who had done the beating went totally out of control. He and the cage boss went at it. Others joined in. The cage boss ended that fight by hitting the man on top of the scuffle with a metal chair. The man who started it all gave up finally when the cage boss pulled a knife.”

  “You live in such constant fear?” She thought of how peacefully asleep she had been in the solitude of her cabin. She thought of Hal with awe that he lived as he did, and that he was able to endure it: a man soft-spoken and of gentle breeding. She yearned to spare him everything.

  Hal had said, “I’m scared a lot. But not about being hurt. The idea of being killed scares me. I’m determined to avoid trouble. Though, Jesus, it’s bound to catch up with you in this place sooner or later. I’ve learned to turn blind in seconds. I’ll take any kind of insult, any kind. Fortunately, I’ve only had to accept the generally degrading kind free-world people make about all prisoners.”

  “I’m sure those aren’t personal about you.”

  “I guess not. Everybody here knows I’m not a habitual criminal. The psychiatrists I’ve seen called mine a crime of passion. Statistically, then, it seems I’m the least likely person ever to commit another crime.”

  Laurel was relieved, but that was something she’d somehow known all along. She had to tell him, “I certainly do admire you, Hal,” meaning the way he handled the situation he was in.

  Buddy drove them back toward the administration building. “I can leave you alone in the library till I’m ready to leave the farm.”

  Laurel felt the day’s whole thrust had been toward the time when she and Hal would be alone. She sensed the others had the same thought, and, uneasy, she broke the silence. “Why don’t they have you doing agricultural work here with your expertise?”

  “Free-world people rent out these fields,” Hal said. “They don’t want some con giving them advice.”

  “Local country boys rent out this land,” Buddy said. “They don’t want big landowners giving them advice, is what it amounts to.”

  “How many acres is Matagorda?” she said.

  “Five thousand.”

  Wow. “Have you-all been as worried about rain as in that little town where I’m staying? They had a special church service to pray for rain. Last year they prayed for it to stop.”

  “Has it been that dry?” Hal bent closer to t
he window to look out. “The crops are a little stunted for this time of year.”

  A little! Her head was filled with statistics about how awful things were. Prison would cause his sad lethargy; she wanted to rouse him from it by showing her own interest. “What is that crop there? Soy beans or cotton? I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to tell the difference.”

  He looked out the window again. “Those are field peas.” Hal spoke in the intimate, chuckling manner she liked. Laurel knew she fell in love that moment over two words, field peas.

  After all, here was the man of the soil she had come to see; a farmer. Those two words contained the whole of her Southern past, bringing to mind summers when she woke in a feather bed to find her grandmother already gone to her garden before the sun was too high. She came back in muddied garden shoes and carrying sacks full of warm vegetables and flowers. Country people talked all summer long in soft cadences about the kinds of peas there were: Black-eyed, Lady, Speckled, Crowder. These names filed past in her memory now, evoking the same magic, until in this strange and contradictory place, Laurel finally felt at home.

  7

  Buddy in his kindly bearlike manner said, “I’ll leave you as long as possible.” He opened a door into a large sad room. In its center stood a conference table surrounded by chairs. But what is wrong? Laurel wondered, stepping forward over the doorsill. What was wrong, when the room was brightly ringed with books whose shelves met cordially in all the corners? It was the table itself, she decided, in its varnished emptiness, for there were no ashtrays. No one was coming here to convene; nothing of importance would ever be decided here, no secrets shared.

  Feeling she owed the room something, she started around to read titles. Hal remained in the doorway in conversation with Buddy, making arrangements. Since these concerned her, she was annoyed that, malelike, they did not think her important enough to be consulted. She went past the bookshelves, her back to the room, and felt like a virgin bride now that she and Hal were to be alone. What were they to talk about further when conversation was not her forte, and what had they in common besides being born in the same city?

  Names, Laurel thought, names would surface, as Pete’s had, common ground. Southerners always played who-do-you-know-I-know, forming bonds any unlikely place. Hal would have grown up among people whom she came to know through the fluke of going to private school, which changed her life’s direction. The hallowed hallways of Miss Poindexter’s School for Girls rose up for review in this prison farm. Entering into a new society, how gingerly she had trod, sensitive to the slightest nuances of behavior. By the time she dined at Mrs. Perry’s, she’d come a long way.

  A click meant the library door closed but, entering, Hal had made no sound. Laurel turned to see him through a nimbus of sunlight as he sat down, deflated; she looked at the smallish man thinking if he were a child she would hug him, saying, Everything will be all right. He made her have that instinct. He looked back at her with a sad, waiting expression, and she thought, What will happen? She needed to start a conversation.

  “You have a lot of good books here. Does anybody ever read them?”

  “I’ve never seen anybody come in or out of here.”

  “You don’t?”

  “My friends and family keep me supplied with books and subscriptions to everything but the Sears catalog.”

  “That’s nice.” He seemed to have a support network of people who also must think his whole situation was a terrible mistake.

  “A cousin sent me The New York Times.” He smiled in recognizing this would be her paper. “I can’t say I see too much in it.”

  “I suppose not when you’re in prison. There’s even a Eudora Welty here. An old edition. I wish I had it.”

  “Tell me why I know I should know that name.”

  “A Mississippi writer.”

  “I’m an unlettered cotton farmer, Laurel. I don’t know much about literature. But I’m willing to learn. I’m looking forward to the books you’re sending.”

  “Unlettered.” She laughed. “You may have read everything at Choate and Chapel Hill. What was your major in college?”

  “Spanish history.”

  “Why that?”

  “I had to major in something. The class wasn’t filled. I know now I’d have been better off going to Ole Miss and studying agriculture. People like me didn’t go there back then. I’ve been a snob all my life. If I had mentioned it, Mama would have had a fit.”

  “All of us were snobs,” she said. “Would your father have let you go?”

  “He wouldn’t do anything Mama didn’t want. Being in this place has helped me overcome a lot of old attitudes.”

  “Living in the East helped me. Nobody knew who your parents or grandparents were, and nobody cared. You made it on your own merits as a person.”

  “That would be a strange way to live, not knowing each other’s families. My oldest daughter, Connie, lives in Canada. She’s thinking about colleges and I tried to interest her in Ole Miss. She wants to be closer to her mother.”

  She heard a sadness in his voice. “If she still lived in Mississippi, would you have wanted her to go to Ole Miss?”

  “I’d never have considered it.”

  There was such a distance in the room between them. To sit down at the table opposite him seemed too formal, but to go around it and sit next to him seemed too forward. She stayed by the bookcases. “Have you ever used your major?”

  “Never even remembered a damn thing about it. What was the use? No matter what I did in life, I was always coming home to farm Matagorda. That had long been laid out.”

  “I wonder if my father was ever there?” In explaining how he dynamited ditches and trees on farmland, she wondered if her father would only have been a workman at Matagorda.

  “I don’t remember that name. I’ll ask Daddy. I used to blow stumps on the place myself, with Negro help.”

  “You used dynamite. Hal!” She heard herself squeal in a ridiculous way, like a cheerleader, and was embarrassed.

  He flicked open his cigarette lighter with a thumb, in a masculine manner she admired. Then he sat as he periodically had, in a subdued, silent slump as if waiting for directions. She thought prison would have wrecked his sense of being a man: achiever, doer, director of things around him.

  She stood there watching him smoke and could not rid herself of a desire to steal the Welty edition. In this place, she felt she had a right to take it. She wanted to get back at an authority that had put her in a room with bars on the windows. Suppose Hal saw her and was moved to ask, Just who is it you are? Who are your people?

  She could not pass off lightly the information that her paternal grandparents had come from a place no one ever heard of in Tennessee, and that her maternal relatives were right up the road in the clay hills. Remember? Once, she had cheated on an algebra exam in high school and passed for the whole year because she made a hundred on that test, sparing herself summer school and a re-exam. How, she had always wondered since then, did you evaluate right and wrong when she had bettered her life by cheating?

  “Hal, this room is suffocating. There’s no air-conditioning. I can’t open any of these windows. Hal?”

  He leaped up alertly as if used to being commanded by some female figure of authority—wife, mother, teacher? Hadn’t he spoken of his mother as Mama? Laurel thought about playing with dolls, Betsey-Wetsey, in hers and Hal’s common childhood days. He would have played with trains, soldiers, guns. Guns! she thought sharply. She remembered some public figure speaking about Lyndon Johnson, saying it was hard to get used to a President who referred to his father as Daddy. She had trained herself in the East not to refer to her daddy; she had been laughed at. My father, she had learned to say, with the elegance of aristocracy. Mrs. Perry, while being honored at a White House reception, ran into Johnson in an elevator. “Laurel,” she had said. “He took out a comb and ran it through his hair. ‘Got to spruce up for the ladies,’ he said.” Mrs. Perry had laugh
ed loudly. She could always see the humor of a situation. But there had been something uncouth to Mrs. Perry in the incident, that a man carried a pocket comb at all. Laurel had laughed, saying, “Well, shades of Andrew Jackson.”

  Hal tapped expertly at the windows and they shot upward. When she complimented him, he said he had learned to do almost everything living on a plantation, particularly carpentry. Then he told her that his first wife, Carla, would not live out in the country. They had had a little bungalow in town. “I can’t imagine her not wanting to live on your plantation,” she said. Perhaps that was the beginning of differences between them, the reason he left her for Sallie. That, she momentarily thought, was not exactly in his favor. Still, there was appeal to a man who let sexuality overrule his good sense. A stage he would have gone past, since he had matured in prison, according to Buddy. “Oh,” she said at a window. “There’s that garbage man again. Why does he have on those clothes?”

  Beside her, Hal said, “That old man’s been pulling time here most of his life. They changed the uniforms, but he wouldn’t give up his old ringarounds. He could be paroled, but he won’t go before the board. Says he wouldn’t know how to live in the free world; So they told him he can just stay on here till he dies.”

  She would not have expected a prison to be compassionate. But she was not surprised Hal knew the old man’s story. Would any of the other prisoners take that time? Would William? “His hat’s like the one the Philip Morris callboy used to wear. Remember him?”

  “Of course.”

  Simultaneously, they raised cupped hands to their mouths and said, “Call for Phi-lip Morr-is,” after the old radio program. Then, laughing, they rounded the table and sat down side by side. Only first, Hal angled his chair so that his back was to the wall. Something you learned in prison, he said, never to leave your back unprotected. Laurel looked at him again with a sense of admiration about the danger he lived in.