For a moment or so the convicts in our company were silent. We were permitted to talk after we were seated, but no one said anything. I discovered that it was like that every morning when the men sat down to breakfast. Across the aisle another company was coming in, filling the counters. Then the companies began entering from all three doors. Soon the dining room was filled.
The men began to eat. I stirred the oatmeal and the water whitened again. I ate it rapidly. I had noticed before that everyone ate very rapidly. In that way you did not taste the food so much. The oatmeal was slightly sweet.
“Slop,” a dull voice said.
The convict waiters stood by the service tables alongside the walls. A convict at my counter called to the waiter: “Get me some bread down here, Mac.”
The waiter brought a pan of whole-wheat bread.
“I don’t want no goddamn black bread,” the convict said. He called to the guard, “Hey, Cap, what about some white bread? I work like a nigger out in that stinking coal pile all day and I want some white bread. It’s bad enough to have to eat the rest of this goddamned crap.”
“Watch your language,” the guard called back.
“Screw my language,” the convict muttered.
The guard came up to the end of the counter. “What did you say?”
“I said I want some white bread. I can’t eat black bread. I got stomach trouble.”
The guard snickered. “Heh-heh, you oughta thought about your stomach ‘fore you come in here.” He sounded as if he was senile, but I didn’t pay him much attention at the time.
“Aw, come on, Cap,” the convict wheedled. “You know I can’t eat this black bread. I got the piles so bad now I can’t hardly lift a wheelbarrow.”
“Oh, you can roll a wheelbarrow all right,” the guard said. He turned to the waiter, “Give ‘em some white bread, first thing you know they’ll be saying they don’t get enough to eat.”
“Ain’t got none,” the waiter grumbled.
“Go get some,” the guard snapped. “My boys are working boys. They work hard in the coal piles. You go get ‘em some white bread—and be quick about it.”
The waiter went off, muttering to himself.
“Attaboy, Cap,” one of the convicts said.
“Tell ‘im ‘bout it, Cap.”
“I’m going to look out for my boys,” the guard said.
The waiter returned with the mess sergeant.
“Who sent this boy after white bread?” the mess sergeant asked.
“I did,” the guard said. “My boys want white bread. They’re working boys, they need white bread.”
“You run your goddamned coal company,” the mess sergeant said, “and let me run this goddamned dining room.”
Our guard walked up to the front of the dining room and looked out of the door. The mess sergeant went back to the kitchen. Finally a convict who hadn’t touched his breakfast said, “Who wants to swap some meat for some oatmeal?”
No one paid him any attention.
Twenty minutes after we’d entered, the mess sergeant rang the bell. The companies that had entered last had only been in there about five minutes. But at the ringing of the bell everyone reached for his cap. They held their caps in their right hands, with their arms folded across their chests. Our guard knocked his stick. We stood up and put on our caps and marched out. Our line formed in the center aisle and we went out into the yard. It had begun snowing again. The ground was already covered with dirty black slush. The fresh snow was sprinkling it with white.
Most of the convicts in the company kept straight ahead to the coal piles. A spur of railroad track came up from the powerhouse which was down in back of our dormitory. Piles of soft coal stood waist-high alongside the track. The convicts took their stations. Some went down to the coal shed in the powerhouse building and got wheelbarrows. Others got shovels and lined themselves along the piles. The wheelbarrow gang formed in a long line. As they rolled by the piles, the shovel men dumped coal into their wheelbarrows—one shovelful to a wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow reached the end of the pile it was filled to overflowing. The men rolled the coal up on a platform and dumped it into a machine that crushed it into slack coal. Another wheelbarrow line rolled the slack coal over to the coal shed. The wheels of the wheelbarrows had cut deep muddy ruts in the ground. The ruts were filled with black slush. Some of the men tried to straddle the rut as they pushed their wheelbarrows. Others just walked in the slush.
I hadn’t been assigned to a job. None of the men who had been transferred into the company had. All of us followed the porters back into the dormitory. After awhile the head guard, Captain Warren, came in to get us. He was the guard I’d noticed in the mess hall. He was a stoop-shouldered old man with gray hair the color of dirty dishwater and a flabby, weather-red face. His washed-out blue eyes peering from behind old-fashioned gold spectacles held an expression of extreme contempt. He was chewing tobacco and spittle drooled from the corners of his mouth. He didn’t seem able to control the muscles of his mouth.
He called us into his office down at the front, near the door, and propped his feet on the desk. “It ain’t no picnic,” he said. “It ain’t no picnic. You got to roll coal. They got to have coal to run the powerhouse. Got to have electricity for the electric chair. Oh, it’s a tough life. You can’t stop just ‘cause it rains or snows. You got to roll all the time. You got to roll to keep warm. If you get too hot you get chilled and catch pneumonia. Brrr, it’s cold out there this morning.” He looked at us as if he thought we were the lowest form of animal life. “I’m going to put you boys to rolling coal. Heh-heh,” he laughed at our expressions. “I bet you won’t do it no more.”
He sent us back to the head porter, B&O, to get some gloves. B&O opened a box and gave each of us a pair of cloth gloves. The gloves were made out of old uniforms. The imprint of a mammoth hand had been cut out of the cloth. Two pieces of the cloth had been sewed together. That was a glove.
I started outside with the others but Captain Warren stopped me. “Go back and report to B&O,” he ordered.
“Yes, sir,” I said. B&O was an emaciated, big-framed, slovenly man with a disfigured face, unkempt, grayish hair, and a blue cast in one of his watery brown eyes. They called him B&O because he’d been caught on a B&O freight. He had the most evil disposition of any man I’ve ever met. It was impossible for him to speak a civil word. He was so mad because Captain Warren had assigned me to a porter’s job he didn’t speak to me for an hour. I reported to him and he walked away. I wandered about the dormitory trying to find something to do. Captain Warren came in and asked me why I wasn’t working. I told him B&O hadn’t given me anything to do.
“You know what to do, you know what to do,” Captain Warren said. “Didn’t nobody tell you to rob those folks but you did that. You’ll do this, too.”
I went to look for a mop. Finally I found one in a pail of water. Another porter came up and said that was his. Then B&O hollered at me from across the dormitory.
“Get that barrel over there and go get some shavings,” he ordered.
I found the barrel in a corner. I rolled it out on the floor. “Where do I get the shavings?” I asked.
“At the planing mill. Where the hell you think?”
I didn’t know where the planing mill was. But I didn’t ask. I picked up the barrel and started outside. Captain Warren saw me when I came around by the coal pile. “Get a wheelbarrow, get a wheelbarrow,” he said. I looked around for a wheelbarrow.
“They’re down in the shed,” a convict volunteered. I went down to the coal shed and got a wheelbarrow and put the barrel in it and started off. I didn’t know where I was going. I went around the powerhouse and came out into an expanse of open yard that looked like a ball diamond. I kept on going.
Down at the end of the wooden laundry building a guard stopped me. “Where you going, boy?”
“To the planing mill to get some shavings.”
“You’re new, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
He showed me how to get to the planing mill. I went down some slush-covered alleys between brick buildings. I could hear the steady looms of the woolen mill, and a hundred other sounds of activity I couldn’t identify. Finally, after what seemed like a long distance, I came to a tin shed where convicts were cutting and planing lumber.
I went up to the guard and told him I’d come to get some shavings. He pointed to a pile. After filling the barrel I came back the other way, down to the crossroad and over by the sunken gardens next to the dining room, and back of the dining room by the long glass-enclosed greenhouse, back to the dormitory.
It was some prison. There were convicts just walking about everywhere you could see and the waiters hung out the dining-room doors and stared when I passed. They looked me over and asked if I wasn’t a new man and if I didn’t want them to get me a better job so I could move into their company. I didn’t answer any of them. I was fed up with it because I knew what it was all about.
When I got back with the shavings I put them in the corner and sat out at the table and played gin rummy with another porter until the company came in, about eleven o’clock, to wash up for dinner. After dinner they had an hour to smoke and rest and then went back to the coal pile until four-thirty. Then they came in and washed up again and went to supper. We had soupy beans, tea and bread for supper. By that time it was dark outside. When we returned to the dormitory we were through for the day. Until nine o’clock we could do whatever we pleased, as long as it wasn’t against the rules or the guard didn’t catch us. We could gamble, read, wrestle, dance, sing, write, study, talk, walk, cry or shout. We could yell as loud as we pleased. Couldn’t anybody hear us, anyway, and if anybody did there wasn’t anybody to give a damn. The only thing we weren’t allowed to do was whistle. I never knew why we weren’t allowed to whistle. But if we were caught just whistling softly we’d be sent to the hole.
Right after supper they called out mail. I got a letter from my mother and a note from my father with a hundred-dollar money order inside. The colored runner, Deacon Smith, brought the money order for me to sign. Later I learned that Deacon was the secretary of the Sunday School and assistant to the Protestant chaplain. When the chaplain was away he took charge of the Sunday services.
I wasn’t allowed to keep the money but it would be put to my credit in the front office. Deacon had no sooner left than everybody in the dormitory knew I had a hundred bucks to my credit. All of a sudden I had more friends than I knew what to do with. They wanted to walk around with me or give me some Bull Durham. Mostly they wanted to tell me what I could order the next day, which was ordering day.
With all that money I’d seen outside around gambling clubs during the past year, a hundred bucks didn’t seem like a lot of money to me. But those convicts in that dormitory were broke and they figured they had a sucker.
Everybody began calling me Jim. All of a sudden they knew all about me; all about my sentence, and my going to the state university and graduating, and being a doctor, one of them said, and another had it a lawyer, and one asked, “Weren’t you a fighter pilot?” They had a lot of things to sell me and a lot of things to give me. All I wanted was to gamble. I could have gotten credit in any of the poker games. But I didn’t know it.
When Mal came out and asked me to come back to his bunk I went because I didn’t have anything else to do. He looked very neat. He had washed and cleaned up after supper, so he must have had some private water because the washtrough was cut off. As he walked ahead of me I noticed that he was taller than I. He must have been about five feet, ten-and-a-half, or eleven. His hips were as wide as his shoulders. That looks odd in a man, especially if the man isn’t stout.
He was very pleasant and very friendly. He kept smiling all the time he talked as if he was pleased with something. When he smiled the hardness which his face had in repose was gone and he looked quite boyish.
I liked his bunk. There was an openness about it. Although it was over by the wall there was a light over it that gave it a certain cheerfulness. He didn’t have it curtained off as Jeep had his bunk, and there was none of that gloom and secrecy and suggestiveness like the bunks down in the corner where Jeep and Mike were: I liked it because it was open. I didn’t have any secrets.
Mal sat down beside me, crossing his legs and leaning his head back against the bunk frame so as to face me. I was sitting with my back to the aisle and my feet on his box, with my arms propped on the bunk.
“Do you draw disability compensation?” he asked. He was just fishing, he knew I hadn’t been in the army.
“Naw, state compensation from the industrial commission,” I said.
“You mean for an injury?”
“Yeah, I broke my back about three years ago—before I went to college.”
“Broke your back! Damn!” he exclaimed. “How do you get about?”
“Oh, it’s all healed up now. Just about, that is.”
“Damn! Nobody’d ever know it.”
“Nobody’d ever know you were in death row, either. Not just by looking at you.”
“Naw, guess you’re right. How’d you do it?”
“I was working in a steel mill in Gary. I’d just finished high school. I was riding an overhead crane and fell on a stack of plates.”
“Jesus Christ! Wonder it didn’t kill you.”
“It damn near did. I broke my arm, my jaw, and three vertebrae. I was in the hospital four months.” I showed him the scar where the bone had come through my arm.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “Does it ever hurt?”
“Not often. Mostly when I get cold. Of course I make out like it does to keep drawing compensation.”
“How much do you get?”
“Twenty-seven bucks a week. That’s for total disability. I can get it for five hundred weeks if I keep stiffing.” After a pause I said, “I haven’t told anybody but you. I don’t know what they might do when they find out I’m in prison. They might cut it off.”
“If you’d told the deputy warden you could of got an easy job,” he said. “You could of got in the cripple company.”
“I don’t mind it here,” I said. “I don’t want to take any chances.”
All of a sudden he leaned over and tousled my hair. “I believe you’re a slicker, Jim.”
I drew back. “What the hell!”
He laughed. “You wouldn’t get mad if a girl did that.”
I had to laugh, too. “I wonder what a girl looks like,” I said.
“Hell, you’ve only been in here ten days,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten so soon.”
“It already seems like a million years,” I said.
He smiled at me with his eyes half closed. He had two gold teeth in front in the very same places where I had mine.
“We look enough alike to be twins,” he said, “only you have dimples and your hair is a little darker than mine and your skin is smoother. Jesus, you’ve got pretty skin.”
“Hell,” I said, blushing.
“Mine was smooth, too, but this water and soap in here roughens it.” He picked up my cap where I’d laid it on the bunk. “You’d better get a cap like mine. The dye comes out of these things and makes you bald.”
“Yeah?”
He showed me his cap. It had a long visor and was lined with black coat-lining material and it was soft.
“What makes it keep its shape?” I asked.
“It’s got horsehair inside of the lining.”
“Do they let you have them?”
“No, they take ‘em if they notice ‘em. Some of the guards do. The others don’t care.”
“I better get me one. How much do they cost?”
“A dollar and fifty cents. But I’ll get you one.”
“I’ll give you the money.”
“Oh, that’s all right. It won’t cost me anything.”
“You’ve got some extra pants, too, haven’t you?”
“Yes. They
let you have them if you’re in some companies, but in some companies they take them.”
“Do they give them to you?”
“Oh no, you get them for yourself. They just let you keep them if you’re in a company like this, where the work’s dirty. We have them made up in the tailor shop.”
The runner came around with the papers. “You want to subscribe to the paper?” Mal asked.
“How do you do it?”
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
We went out into the aisle. “Hey, Mac! Mac!” he called. The short, owl-faced paper boy came over. He was about fifty years old and was doing life. He’d been in twenty-three years. “Jim here wants to subscribe to The News.”
“How long?”
“Oh, I don’t know. About a month. I want a Sunday paper and a morning paper, too.”
He wrote the names of the papers on a cashier’s slip, filled it out for $2.65, and gave it to me to sign.
I signed my name and number—James Monroe #109-130. “Do I get one now?”
“You got your receipt?” Mac asked.
“What receipt?”
“He means the cashier’s receipt for the money order you signed tonight,” Mal explained. He turned to Mac. “He hasn’t got his receipt yet but he’s got the money. He signed a money order for a hundred dollars. I’ll vouch for him.”
The paper boy looked at Mal. “You can ask the clerk then,” Mal said.
“To hell with it!” I said.
Mac jerked out a paper and shoved it at me. I took it and we went back to Mal’s bunk. We passed the poker game. It looked good and hot. That poker game sure looked good. But I wouldn’t stop to watch it.
“You have to give your history to get a lousy nickel paper,” I said.
“So many new men beat them.”
“Oh, is that it?” When we were seated again I said, “Man I sure would like to play some stud.”
Cast the First Stone Page 3