“Well, better save a bit of that water. It’ll have to last you a spell. Bloomin’ guards sometimes skip a day, you know. How long you in?”
“Twenty years.”
“Oh, my word!” Gardner whispered. “That’s a bad ’un!”
“What about you?”
“Me? Oh, I’ll be gettin’ out in a year. Done me four already. So about Christmas next year, I’ll be gettin’ back to the world.” A silence followed; then Gardner asked, “What you in for, mate?”
“Armed robbery.”
“Now, that’s a hard ’un. But you just keep your spirits up, boy, and you’ll come through it. The Good Lord won’t forget you.”
At the mention of God, anger and fear boiled over, and Barney slammed his fist against the stone wall. “God? Where is He in all this? Twenty years in this rat hole for something I didn’t even do? Don’t talk to me about God!”
“Just listen, boy—don’t be talkin’ so wild!”
“I’ll talk as I please!”
“Not in this place,” Gardner advised. “You’ll be havin’ your head in an iron collar, and besides, you’ll find out that you need God here like never before.”
Barney clamped his lips, then forced himself to speak softly. “Your name is ‘Awful’?”
“That’s not me proper name. Orville, that’s it. Orville Gardner.”
“Why do they call you ‘Awful’?”
“Because, old chap, that’s exactly what I was—just awful!” A breathy laugh punctuated Gardner’s speech. “Nothin’ too low for me—a fighter, a thief, a drunk, a whoremonger! But no more, thanks to the Good Lord! I come to this place the chief of sinners, but the Lord Jesus found me, and He saved me by His blood!”
“I don’t want no preaching, Gardner. You can keep your God to yourself!”
“As you please. Watch your step in here, you understand? When we go to chow, keep your head down and don’t say a word. The guards watch the new blokes real close, so don’t give ’em no excuse, Barney.”
Gardner ceased talking and Barney lay down on the cot. He was still thirsty, but took Awful’s advice. The minutes drained away slowly. Without a watch, there was no way to judge time anyway. Besides, the dim murky twilight made it impossible to see anything. I’ll lie here week after week, year after year, no sun through those slits on the walls. The warmth won’t even penetrate this gloomy, damp hole! The thought sent a cold chill down his spine.
More than once Barney almost moved to put his head to the bars—just to hear a whisper again. The silence and gloom terrified him, though he knew it would pass in time. He forced himself to lie still on the cot, fighting off the wild desire to scream and beat his fists against the stones.
The only diversion that first day was a guard walking down the narrow way outside the cell, sometimes bringing an inmate back to his cell. Even that became an event to be anticipated, something to look at, to hear.
Finally there was a clanging sound, and he leaped to his feet and pressed his face to the bars.
“Chow time,” Awful whispered. “Remember—keep it down!”
The guards unlocked the cells and marched the men down the narrow way. Gardner, Barney noted as they fell into line, gave him a wink, but said nothing. He was six feet tall and had a full head of hair and a beard to match. The men lined up a few inches apart in front of a door. Barney flinched when a pair of hands touched his shoulders, but saw down the line that each man had put his hands on the shoulders of the one in front of him. He did the same, and when the line moved, it was a lock step—a shuffle. As they entered the massive mess hall, the serpentine line reminded Barney of a centipede—a human centipede.
A warder, armed with a club, watched every move. No smiles, no winks, no glances, Imboden had said, so Barney kept his face a frozen mask. When his section of the line turned, Barney sat down at a table. Awful Gardner was on Barney’s left, he knew, but kept his eyes fixed in front of him. He waited with the rest, eyeing the tin cup and single bowl with a tin plate on top. A rough chunk of bread lay on one side of the bowl, a spoon fork on the other. Each table had a large pitcher.
“Eat!” The sudden command by a warder was followed by a clatter of plates pulled into place. Barney removed his tin plate, looked into the bowl, and almost threw up. It was a stew of some sort, but he’d have to shove it down. He poured the conglomeration into the tin plate and began to eat. It was thick and grimy, with soggy vegetables and bits of rancid meat, from what, he could not tell. The meat was very salty, and he knew he’d be thirsty later on, but he ate slowly, not knowing when they’d be fed again. The bread was old and wormy; still, it was better than the stew.
The lack of talk was eerie. He had not known how much talking and eating were joined. It seemed natural to converse with the man eating beside him, but one glance at the dark-skinned prisoner across from him and the others all over the mess hall wearing collars, who were forced to shove their food between strips of steel, stopped him.
The meal finished quickly, and the men were marched back to their places of confinement. As the door to his cell clanged shut, Barney remained where he was, watching as the other prisoners were herded into their stalls. Finally it grew quiet, and he dropped to the cot and held his head in his hands. How long he sat there, he didn’t know; then he heard Gardner whisper, “Cheer up, lad! Never fear!”
That was all, but it helped. He lay down on the hard cot, pulled the single blanket over him, and closed his eyes. The time dragged on. Finally he drifted off to a fitful sleep, awaking abruptly when a warder hit his nightstick against the bars as he walked down the hall. The night passed somehow, and when the first murky ray of light came to his cell from the slotted window, he sat up. The stench of the place was just as bad, he knew, but his sense of smell was already becoming immune. Soon I won’t even know the place stinks, he thought grimly. After I’ve been here a few days.
Breakfast was like supper. The lock-step march to the mess hall, the silent meal, then dumping the plates and flatware into a small barrel as they passed out of the place. Barney was called out by one of the warders and told, “You’ve been assigned to clean-up detail.”
This meant, he discovered, sweeping and mopping the offices and the guards’ quarters. It was hard work, but that night in his cell, Awful commented, “Clean-up detail? Coo! Now you see, lad, how the Good Lord is looking after you—just like I said!”
“What’s so great about that?” Barney whispered.
“Why, a chap gets to move about, don’t you see? Just be glad you didn’t get in the carpet-weaving shop! My word! Sitting there ten hours a day with a warder breathing down your bloomin’ neck, and usually with a hard hand, too! No, dear boy, cleanup is the best there is. They don’t usually let a new man have it, so it must be that God is favoring you.”
Barney did not respond, for he was still confused by the enormity of his personal tragedy. He slept little that night, or the nights following. He was like a man in a coma, or suffering from shell shock. The dreadful physical conditions of the prison—the food and the confinement in the coffin-like cell—could be adjusted to. But the loss of all freedom and the stripping away of his human dignity could not be accepted by Barney.
As the days passed, then weeks, he learned to shut things and people out as he lay for hours in his cell. At other times, he lived in the past, for, like his mother, he had the same gift of remembering the past vividly. These memories dwelt on his childhood days—fresh and sharp images. He remembered the days at the ocean with his father and mother when he was the only child. At times he could almost feel the sting of the cold brine and hear the roar of the breakers.
One scene came to him over and over—a day he and his father had walked along the beach looking for shells. It had been hot that summer day, and they had strolled for miles on the wet dunes. Finally his father had said, “Let’s rest here.” Sitting in the elbow of the trunk of a large tree, his father told him of the building of the railroad. Barney could still remember th
e weight of his father’s arm across his small shoulders and the look of his blue eyes in the bright sunshine. Then they had gone back down the beach, and Barney remembered finding the shell, the biggest and best he’d ever found. It was a chambered nautilus, beautifully wrought. His father had said, “God sure knows how to make things, doesn’t He, Barney?” Barney had kept that as his prized possession. It was still where he had left it—at his old home, in his room.
Barney became numb to the prison routine—rising at dawn, eating breakfast, going to work, having the evening meal, returning to his cell. He performed his duties mechanically and was shoved along like stock herders prodding cattle, with no particular interest in any one animal.
The one break in the routine was Sunday. That day prisoners were given a choice of going back to their cells from the dining hall with their food and being locked in until the next morning—or attending church. Like most of the inmates, Barney stubbornly refused to attend church, in spite of Gardner’s repeated invitations.
These were the long dismal hours when the whispers, sighs, and groans of a thousand men echoed against the blank walls, and the smell of a thousand bodies and a thousand buckets saturated the damp and gloomy air. Barney usually filled the day with dog-eared novels that he could read by holding the book up to the dim light filtering down through the slit from above.
After two months, Barney couldn’t face another long day. As they were lining up for the walk to the dining room, he whispered, “Awful, I’m going to church.”
“Good-O! It’ll be a good ’un, Barney.”
The service was held in a long, narrow room with rough benches. At the front of the room was a low platform with a crude pine pulpit and a table holding a pitcher of water. Awful sat beside Barney and handed him a tattered songbook. “Let’s ’ere you sing out, lad!”
Two men were seated on the platform, and one of them stood up and began singing. He was not a particularly good singer, and for the most part the inmates were either unskillful or indifferent. Yet as the singing went on, something began to happen to Barney. It was the songs, for many of them were the ones he had sung in the church he had attended all his life with his parents. He could almost hear his mother’s clear voice as she sang “Rock of Ages” with great joy. Another, “Alas, and Did My Saviour Bleed,” was his father’s favorite. As the song filled the room, Barney remembered standing beside his father as a child, holding his hand, and his father had cried as he sang:
Alas, and did my Saviour bleed? And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?
Was it for sins that I had done He groaned upon the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown! And love beyond degree!
But drops of grief can ne’er repay the debt of love I owe:
Here, Lord, I give myself to Thee; ’Tis all that I can do.
And then the chorus:
At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away.
It was there by faith I received my sight—
And now I am happy all the day.
Tears gathered in Barney’s eyes, and he choked on the words. Barney heard little of the sermon, but the words of the song rolled over and over in his mind: It was there by faith I received my sight—and now I am happy all the day.
After the service he returned to his cell, and that afternoon he allowed Awful Gardner to speak of his love for the Lord Jesus Christ.
From that time on, Barney attended chapel every Sunday. He said little, but Awful was happy just to have him there. “You’ll find it, laddie, never fear!” he would whisper every night.
The months rolled by, and Barney was surprised to discover that he had been in prison for a year. “Time don’t work in here like it does on the outside,” Gardner said.
“You’ll be getting out pretty soon, Awful,” Barney said. They were sitting in the chapel where they could speak quietly, waiting for the service to begin.
“Right-O! Only a few more months. And I’m prayin’ that you’ll get time out for good behavior. I’ll be waitin’ for you out there, no fear!”
Fortunately, Barney didn’t let his mind think of release, for only a month later he got into deep trouble.
Winslow had always been a good self-taught artist. One day he found a tablet and began illustrating sketches of prison life. Most of the simple drawings were of the men in the prison—inmates and guards. He showed them to no one, and it was only by accident they were discovered when Barney and Awful Gardner were sitting side by side in chapel. As Barney was sketching the visiting minister, Awful caught a glimpse and nudged Barney.
“Lem’me see the rest!”
Gardner was delighted as he recognized various individuals. “Look at ’im!” he exclaimed. “It’s Captain Dollar down to ’is last hair! And ’ere’s Timmy Mackey—the spittin’ image!” He handed them back, saying, “Better not let any of the wardens see these. They don’t like it when a chap enjoys ’imself!”
Barney had no intention of any prison official seeing them. He continued to sketch, then in his second year he began to draw different aspects of Sing Sing—the grimmer side.
From the first day he was aware of the cruel punishments dealt by the guards. The iron collar was one of the more gentle ones Barney’d seen; but the cat-o’-nine tails, a whip with nine leather thongs embedded with bits of metal in each strap, was common. He had never seen it used, but he had been a witness of the result. Once while cleaning the primitive “hospital” floor, he had been shoved out of the way by two guards who brought an unconscious man through the door and dumped him on one of the cots. “Better give him a pill, Doc,” one of them laughed. “He’s got a backache. Got it from talking back to a guard.”
Barney had turned to look, and one glance made him sick. Naked to the waist, the man’s upper back was a mass of bleeding pulp. He was unconscious, but his body was jerking, crawling like the skin of a horse trying to shake off flies. The flesh was laid back in such terrible furrows that the back of the rib cage was exposed, white bone laid bare in the bloody flesh.
One of the guards had seen Barney’s revulsion at the sight. “Better watch yourself, Con. You might get a bit of this yourself.”
Barney had been unable to forget the sight, and one of the victim’s descriptions had only intensified his vision of what it was like. The man from Tennessee, eyes stark with fear, stared at Winslow. “They chain you to the floor, all stretched out, and then one of them puts on a special white coat and a little flat hat. The rest of them gather around to watch. It’s bad at first, like fire! But then you pass out. Look at my back.”
His back had been so deeply scarred that it would never heal, and for months afterward Barney had nightmares about the event. He drew a sketch of it, not understanding why.
The other punishment was known as “The Shower.” It sounded innocent enough when Barney first heard of it. One of the inmates said that he’d been caught breaking the rules and was going to get “The Shower” that night. Barney had remarked, “Well, that’s not so bad, is it?”
“I’d rather have the cat!” he’d said bitterly.
Awful had been subjected to “The Shower” more than once. “They puts you in the regular shower, the one you know, Barney. Big wooden box with the shower head up high. Only they put a chair in there, and it’s got a sort of thing like a trough attached to the top, you see? It fits around a bloke’s neck, and it’s like havin’ your ’ead in a big basin. Your hands is strapped to the arms and you can’t move a finger, see?” Awful’s face contorted. “So when the guard starts the shower, the bowl fills up—and when it fills up to your mouth, you try to drink it to keep it out of your nose. But you can’t do it, so under goes your nose. What you do is drown. So they let you drown; then they takes you out and pumps you dry. And then—they do it again. Once they done me six times.” Gardner’s battered face was pale at the memory, and he shook his head. “Rather die than
go through it again, I would!”
Barney had drawn a graphic sketch of that scene, unconsciously using Gardner as the victim and Captain Nathaniel Dollar as the executioner. It had been Dollar who had applied the cat to the prisoner Barney had talked to, and the man had become a symbol to Barney of the many guards who were cruel and savage.
If he had thrown away the sketches, he would never have encountered the most harrowing experience of his life. Actually he forgot them, having tucked them in the back of the tablet, continuing to sketch the less terrible aspects of his surroundings. And it was on a Sunday morning that this oversight caught up with him in a burst of fury he had never dreamed could happen.
He had taken his tablet to chapel, and the service ran overtime. When the preacher closed, the guards came running down the aisles, hurrying the prisoners in order to keep to the rigid schedule. Barney had placed the tablet beside him, and in the pressure forgot it. He was outside the chapel before he remembered what he’d done, and stopped abruptly. The sudden movement jostled the man behind Barney, invoking the guard’s wrath. “Get on now!” he yelled.
“I left something in chapel—” Barney began, but the guard punched him with his stick, waving him on. Barney was heartsick, but when he told Awful what had happened the other was not worried.
“One of the preachers will probably find it. It’ll be there next Sunday.”
But an hour later Barney was aroused from a nap by the abrupt sound of his cell door opening. He opened his eyes, but not soon enough, for he was struck in the stomach with a club and dragged out of his cell, gasping in pain.
“What’s wrong?” he cried hoarsely when his breath returned.
The two burly guards silently dragged him down the narrow walkway. Fear coursed through him, and he tried to resist, but a sharp crack on the side of his head sent showers of bright lights before his eyes. The next thing he knew he was hauled through a door and shoved so violently that he fell sprawling on the stone floor. Rolling over on his side, he saw Captain Nathaniel Dollar standing rigidly in the center of the room beside the shower. Barney saw at once that a chair was fastened inside with a bowl affixed to it.
The Final Adversary Page 5
