Gresham had one further unexpected association with a member of the Inklings: When Charles Williams’s novels were being published for the first time in the United States, Gresham contributed the introduction to The Greater Trumps (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1950).
* * *
I don’t know if you ever tried to crawl through a drainpipe sixteen inches square but if you never did, don’t try it. Unless you’re built slim like me. I had to take the chance because that pipe was the only way out of Coulterville Pen, and you see I had to get out or beat my brains against the bars like a bluejay I caught when I was a kid.
I started a tunnel under the floor of the paint shack and it took me six months before I got down twelve feet to the main pipe of the old prison building. I broke into it with a piece of iron sawed from a cot. Then I waited for a rainy day. If you’re thinking about a crush-out, you want to wait for fog but rain will do. After the noon mess I started. With luck they wouldn’t miss me before the count at quitting time.
There was some two hundred feet of pipe between me and Ross Creek and I wasn’t sure there wouldn’t be a grating over the pipe mouth. I had to take that chance.
In the dark I inched my way along, rapping the metal bar against the clammy sides of the pipe to scare any water snakes that might have holed up in there. Once something wriggled out from under my hand and I started to laugh and the laughter came booming and shrieking back at me in a sort of echo.
Then I got to something I didn’t know about—an elbow in the pipe. I stopped dragging myself along and began to cry. You see, there was no way back and if I got stuck I didn’t think Warden Duffy would rip up half the prison yard just to keep me from starving to death in there. I figured he would just fill in the tunnel, when he found it, and fix up the books somehow to account for another inmate being dead.
Lying there, half inside the elbow, I could feel the muck squash under my chest. My eyes were burning with the slime, and the tears washed them clean and that was one on my side. You get to be grateful for little things like that.
I began to cuss my old man and think about my mother. He was my stepfather and I guess he meant all right but he had a high temper. It came back to me like a picture on a movie screen—Ma was in bed with a headache. She always had to have the blinds pulled down because the light hurt her. I was sitting in the kitchen reading. I was a big kid, going on seventeen. I’d done my chores so the old man hadn’t no real kick coming; he just come in feeling mean.
The book I was reading was one of Ma’s, called Phantastes, by a fellow named MacDonald. It was an old book with a green cover and the name in gold letters with a lot of curlicues. The back was pretty near off it, Ma and me had read it so much.
First thing I knew the book was snatched away from me and I saw the old man standing there. He was breathing hard through his nose. He didn’t say a word, just took the book and with his other hand grabbed for the stove plate lifter.
I got burned some, reaching into the stove before he yanked me out and began giving me the open hand, first one side of my face and then the other. I was built light and I couldn’t budge him. He cut my lip. It didn’t amount to nothing but I knew right then and there what I was going to do.
That night late Ma came into my room, not making any noise. I made believe I was asleep. She bent down and kissed me and then she smoothed back my hair and I wanted to jump up and grab a hold of her but I didn’t. I was planning to cut out of there, you see, and I knew if she talked to me I would never make it.
I waited until both of them were asleep and then I didn’t leave no note or anything. I had a valentine some girl from school had stuck in our mailbox and I left it under my pillow where Ma would find it in the morning and then I was off. The sky had never seemed so full of stars and them so far away.
I heard a freight whistle up the line and I headed for it, cutting across fields in the dark and snagging my pants on barbed wire plenty but I didn’t care. I had been on the go ever since—until I landed in Coulterville Pen.
When I stopped dreaming and had got some of my wind back I reached ahead of me in the dark and felt around as far as I could and then I found a ridge where the elbow fitted on to the pipe. I grabbed that little rim with my fingers and somehow, by digging with my toes to push from behind, I managed to worm my way through the elbow. And there, ahead of me, was a little gray spot of light.
I had to hurry because I knew one of the screws or a fink would find that tunnel under the paint shack and they’d have the prison siren blowing its brains out in no time. I inched along, the spot of light getting bigger all the time and my ears stopped ringing because the air was getting better, the closer I got to the pipe mouth.
Finally I reached out and grabbed the edges and pulled myself right out into the creek. It was muddy and roaring with the spring rains. I lay there in the shallows for a minute, letting the icy water wash the muck off me. Then somebody spoke from the bank over my head.
“Don’t try to swim for it. We’ve got a launch out there waiting to pick you up.” It was Warden Duffy’s voice. “Wash that slime off you and then turn and face me. Drop that iron bar.”
And that was that. I was so tired I hardly cared. There had been an old blueprint kicking around the prison population of that stir for years. It had been stolen from the record room probably before I was born. Nobody had ever tried a crush-out through that drain, though, and now nobody would ever get another chance. That was all I thought about while they were taking me back.
I was marched down into the “hole” under the old prison and thrown into a cell. For a long time nobody showed up at all. No food and no water. The floor was studded with rivets and I couldn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time.
When they finally came for me it was Duffy and a couple of big screws who worked in the solitary block. Duffy started trying to find out where I had learned the layout of the drains and I had kind of a hard time not telling him. In the end they locked me up again and went away.
2
I began trying to dope out another way of beating the stir but I couldn’t put my mind to it. My mouth was dry and I kept slipping into all kinds of crazy dreams for a while. It felt like they had turned on the heat down there and then suddenly it was ice-cold and I was shivering so I could hear my teeth rattle. Every now and then I would get a flash of memory—things that had happened to me long ago—and one kept coming back and back as if it was trying to tell me something.
It was the picture of a little valley I had discovered when I was a kid, a couple of ridges beyond our farm. I called it Happy Valley because when I first found it, it was the spring of the year with the trees all slow green and the crocuses coming up golden under them where there had once been a garden. It seemed like nobody could ever be anything but happy there.
It was a great place to run off to when things got kind of steamed up at home. I went back to it year after year. In winter you would think the whole world had been shut out, like as if a big cold frame had been dropped over the valley, when the sky was pressing down gray and close with more snow coming and it was so still you could hear your own heart working. Once I flushed a partridge there and the boom it made, shooting up out of the snow, sounded as loud as a cannon.
Well, a picture of this valley began coming back to me and I tried to hold on to it. After a while I didn’t feel the rivets any more. “This is pretty good,” I said to myself. “I’ll just camp here for a while in the valley.” And it worked fine for what I judged was a night and part of the next day.
Sometimes it was winter in the valley and sometimes it was summer. Then I let the year roll over it, quiet and slow, and watched the leaves come out and the grass get high and then the sky got a deeper blue and the leaves turned and the valley was all gold and red with the fall of the year.
As I watched it, the first snow came and then more until it was all soft white and nothing breathing or moving except maybe an owl, out hunting when the night was settling down.
The next time they came for me and started asking questions about that drainpipe layout I was ready for them. I was determined to hang on to the valley as long as I could. They started to work me over and I hung on tight to the valley. I got so I could crawl right out of my skin and slide into one grass blade, standing there in the early summer light. I don’t know how to tell it any better than that, what I did.
I could feel the strap fetch me a lick across my shoulders and I could feel something go off in the back of my head like a firecracker but there I was, safe and sound, inside the grass blade. It always had to be something little.
Once I slipped out of the grass and then it was tough for a while; I lost the valley and had nothing but the table top. When I lifted my head I saw that my lip had been bleeding in a little puddle. I had bit it without knowing.
I hoped they’d get tired soon and put me back into the cell because I didn’t want to rat on the fellow who had given me that blueprint.
When they did get tired and I was safe back in the cell I just curled up and fell asleep. After that I got so I could shift in my sleep and give the rivets a fresh place to work on without waking up much.
The warden threatened to keep me down in the hole for the rest of my life but I stayed clammed up and in the end they took me out and gave me a hot shower and a shave and issued me clothes and I was taken over to Cell Block 9 which is the solitary block where they keep all the hard cases—the guys that get caught with shivs in their shoes and the guys that start fights. This was all right with me because I wasn’t in any shape to work then any how and I didn’t mind not having mail privileges—Ma was dead a few years back; nobody ever wrote to me except a couple of girls I had met in lunchrooms and that kind always get married and quit writing anyhow.
3
The valley kept me busy a long time. But at last it sort of wore out and I began to get scared again until I thought of a pet bluejay I used to have. Not the one that beat his brains out but another one. This fellow I caught when he was young and had fallen out of his nest. I kept him out in the barn and used to feed him scraps. He tamed up nice and would ride around on my shoulder and I called him Smarty because he was an awful sassy customer and used to talk back to me a lot while I petted him. In the end a cat caught him. She come bringing him into the house, proud as could be. But Ma took Smarty away from her and the two of us buried him out under an apple tree. Ma said, “He’ll always be here, son. He’s part of the tree, now. When the blossoms come out next spring you come out here and listen and I’ll bet you’ll hear him scolding away as the wind goes by.” And that’s the way it was, too.
So now I began to think about Smarty and it was just like the cat hadn’t got him at all. I could sit on my bunk and make believe I had him with me, perched on my shoulder, and then I would send the make-believe down into my fingers until I could feel the soft feathers of his back. I recalled the way he’d stretch out one wing and fix his feathers with his beak and then hop down and look at me, first with one eye and then with the other. The way I saw him now his feathers were brighter blue than they had been for real. He would hop all around the cell and flutter between the bars and I could lean against them and see him flying back and forth and roosting on the bars of the windows across the cell block. Then I’d whistle real soft and he’d come back to me.
About that time Dreamy O’Donnell, an old trusty, was given a job helping out in the office where they keep the records of fellows that go stir-simple. One day the doctor sent for me and the screws took me to the office and the doc asked me a lot of questions. I wasn’t sassy or anything but I kept thinking about the bluejay and smiling to myself because I could see him sitting on my shoulder, giving little soft pecks at my ear, and they couldn’t.
Once when the doc was called to the phone the old man whispered to me, “Nice going, kid. You rode out the storm in fine shape. You’re regular.”
I just smiled at him. It seemed a long time ago—that business with the pipe and me getting the shellacking. It was O’Donnell that gave me the blueprint, you see—he was too old and worn out to use it himself. But I hadn’t ratted on him.
The old man was still whispering out of the side of his mouth, “…says you’re over the line. But I told him any kid that could go through that pipe was a long way from being stir bugs.”
“I’ve got a bluejay,” I told him, out of the side of my mouth. “He rides on my shoulder. Nobody can see him excepting me.”
O’Donnell’s face lit up. “No kidding! Say, kid, you’ve found it all by yourself—the only real way out of this stir. I gave up the crush-out ideas years ago. What you’ve been working is what cons call the Dream Dust Factory. Ain’t nothing you can’t have in stir, son, if you want it bad enough. You build it out of Dream Dust, inside your head. Only there’s one thing you mustn’t never make out of it…”
The doc came hustling back right then and I didn’t learn what the old man was going to tell me only I didn’t care much. I wanted to get back to my cell.
Outside of the windows across the cell block the summer days were getting shorter. The light on the wall across the courtyard looked different and the cell block smelled like autumn—fresh-painted steampipes.
In Cell Block 9 they didn’t allow us magazines or papers but I didn’t need any. I could see all the pictures I wanted right inside my head—built out of Dream Dust, like the old guy said.
After a while I got tired of the bluejay; he was always around and always pestering me to pet him. He would wake me up in the morning, pecking gently at the blanket over my face, and I would push him away and he would fly up to the cell bars and scold me for not getting up. I decided to fade him out but it took a long time until he was really gone.
4
Before I knew it the winter was over and the air coming through the windows across the block smelled like spring. That’s the toughest time in stir—when you can smell the spring. I began remembering girls I’d met on the road; not real road sisters, because they are pretty tough, but girls on farms where I had dinged the back door for a meal, and girls in hash joints. There was one girl I’d been so stuck on I got a job washing dishes for a couple of weeks but she started going out with a fellow who had a car.
But remembering her was what really started me working the Dream Dust Factory for fair. I wondered then why I had never thought of this one before. Maybe it was because I was scared of it—scared it wouldn’t work and then I would be up the creek with nothing to hang on to.
I began building out of Dream Dust, over and over, shaping it up inside my head and trying to see what I had made. It got clearer and brighter and I could see it fine with my eyes shut but when I opened them it faded away. I didn’t really think it could happen to me and to work the Dream Dust Factory you’ve got to believe it can’t fail.
Nights were the noisiest time in Cell Block 9 because that part of the prison population are restless sleepers, always having dreams and cussing or waking up yelling and bringing the night shift screw down to tell them to shut up.
But one night I was lying there in the dark, listening to the fellow in the next cell coughing. I was just dropping off when I heard a voice, clear as could be. It was a girl’s voice, right down close to me, speaking low. I couldn’t make out the words very clear, just part of one sentence: “…come to you. Don’t worry.” And with that I waited to see if there was any more. There wasn’t but I turned over and went to sleep happy.
The first time I saw her was at night. There’s something about night that makes it easier. She was just a shadow—that first time—between me and the bars of the cell front. I saw her first with my eyes shut and then when I opened them, real, real slow, I could see her shadow. She seemed to be wearing a pair of old denim pants, just like prison pants, but she had them rolled up above her knees and she had on a man’s shirt that was too big for her, with the sleeves rolled up, and there in the dark I could only see her shadow but I thought her bare arms, as she stood with her hands in h
er pockets, were about the sweetest sight I ever saw in my life. Her hair was long; it hung to her shoulders, and even though I couldn’t make out her face I knew she wasn’t smiling. The tears started slipping out and down my face. She had come to me at last.
The next time I opened my eyes she was fading; I could see the bars through her. I knew that the Dream Dust takes a lot of time, but time was something I had. I had all the time in the world.
It’s funny, in stir, how the days crawl by so slow and yet the months seem to go sailing over your head if you don’t count them. I gave up thinking about the seasons outside. Where I was now it was mostly summer and out of Dream Dust I made trees—big ones, growing close, with their leaves meeting overhead; and in the dim light there was a little creek flowing over stones and in the willows were blackbirds nesting—there and in the rushes.
Sitting beside the stream on a smooth flat rock, I brought her back. I could hear the water over the stones, chuckling to itself. The wind came through, stirring the willows, and there, with my eyes wide open, I found the one I waited for. She parted the branches and stepped out on the rock and I saw her face, just as clear as could be.
She had a wide mouth that was red without having a lot of paint on it and her eyes were brown, under the golden hair. She looked at me, smiling to herself, waiting for me to speak to her. I reached up and took her by the hand and drew her down on the rock beside me; her hand was warm and sweet and I held it in mine. Then I leaned over and her lips were firm and real. She had a modest way of kissing that went through me so I wanted to cry, and yet she didn’t draw away from me, either.
“What’s your name?” I whispered to her and she put her lips close to my ear and whispered back, “Vida.”
Tales Before Narnia Page 38