Just by trying hard enough I could keep from thinking about my mother and father and that wild, reckless year I’d lived after their divorce. I could keep from thinking about the guys who hung around the gambling joints and were my friends that year. Although it didn’t hurt to think about them because most of that gang were just lucky they weren’t in there with me. Only thinking about them made me think about Chicago, and thinking about Chicago made me want to vomit. It made me want them never to know what an utter fool I’d been, what a simple-minded schmo, a square, as to try to pawn that ring in that shop, of all places.
There were many things about that dormitory, things that happened there and things that happened elsewhere while I was bunking there, which afterward I could remember without remembering the dormitory at all. By that I do not mean the dimensional or visual aspect of the dormitory, its breadth and length and height, its bunks and tables and such. That was like a color one will remember long after sight has left the scene. I mean the living, pulsing, vulgar, vicious, treacherous, humorous, piteous, tawdry heart of it; the living men, the living actions, the living speech, the constant sense of power just above, the ever-present breath of sudden death, that kept those two hundred and fifty-three convicts, with their total sentences numbering more years than the history of Christianity, within the confines of that eggshell wood; or, for that matter, kept them within those high stone walls to live on, day after day, under the prescribed routine and harsh discipline and grinding monotony which comes to all after a time.
And there were convicts, too, whom I could remember without remembering the dormitory, as if, telescoping back into retrospect, I could pick them out; where they stood, what they said, how they looked at some given moment—without seeing beyond the circumference of the vision of the telescope, like sighting a buck at three hundred yards.
There was Mal at the peephole, telling everyone who came near enough to hear his voice to tell his cousin, Jimmy Monroe, that he wanted to speak to him; until everyone within both dormitories had heard it said that I was his blood cousin and had remarked that we did look something alike, sure enough.
“Hello, cousin,” he would say.
All I could see would be his eye and I would begin to laugh. “All I can see is your eye. It looks funny.”
“I can see all of you.”
“I saw an ad in the paper,” I would say. “Hammon’s has a shoe sale on. Florsheims for $15.75. Two pairs for $30. Do you want a pair?”
“You’re not kidding, Jimmy?”
“Naw, I’m going to get a pair for myself.”
“I need a pair, but I don’t know. You won’t be straining yourself?”
“Fifteen dollars? What the hell!”
“Fifteen seventy-five.”
“Fifteen, if I get two pairs. I’ll get you a pair. I don’t care what you say.”
“I’ll make it up to you, Jimmy,” he would promise.
And I would say, “Aw, hell.”
“I hear you’re a big shot now. I hear you’re running a poker game,” he would say.
“Old Nick the Greek himself, that’s me.”
By that time we’d have to get away and let some other cousins talk. He’d send for me again when they got through, or maybe he’d wait an hour or so until the lights went out. If I was busy dealing and couldn’t get down for that or some other reason he’d send for me the next day to come over to the window where the furnace was located. I’d stand at the window and talk outside to him while he stood inside of the furnace room, or in the doorway of the sand room where the sand was kept for the molds. That way he was hidden from the tin-shop guard who liked to stand in the window of his second-story office and spy out on the yard, so he could know every time some convict carried a kid to some hiding place so that afterward he could get the kid and have him for himself. He was that kind of a guard. It was also against the rules to talk through the windows of the dormitory.
And there was Lippy Mike the head porter, a big wide-shouldered, athletic-looking, black Irishman, who held his shoulders high and square and walked with a swagger. Everybody seemed to be afraid of him because he had a reputation with a knife, and a scar up over his deep-set insane-looking eyes to prove it. And he also had a knife with a blade six inches long.
He assumed more authority in the dormitory than the guards, one of whom was Captain Bull, big and beer-bloated and slovenly, with tobacco ashes down his vest and a stubble of gray beard, and the heart disease which finally killed him. The other guard was Captain Clem who had a narrow, nasty, greasy face and a sloppy mouth and narrow shoulders and a pot belly and skinny legs, looking young in the face and old in the body, with prematurely gray hair.
Lippy Mike was the most overbearing, arrogant convict I’ve ever seen, “After this when you’re transferred, Monroe, bring your sheet and pillowcase,” he had said to me the very first thing with his damned insufferable arrogance. “Thursday’s laundry day. Be sure to have your sheet and pillowcase on top of your bunk. And take everything off the floor in the mornings.” He had assigned me to my bunk. The guards left the dormitory to him; he ran it.
“Anything else, captain?” I asked.
He had pinned those fanatical blue eyes on me with his shoulders high and square and the butt of the knife sticking out of his left breast pocket. “I’m not your goddamned captain, punk. I’m Mike.” And then after a full moment in which he just stared at me he had lifted his gaze to call, “Papa Henry, give this boy a sheet and pillowcase.” And with that he had walked down the aisle, high-shouldered and swaggering and when I had said, Go to hell, he had been too far away to hear it.
I never liked that boy.
And there was Hunky Hank who had been in the Lincoln County jail with me when I’d been arrested for forgery. He had helped me run the dice game in the county jail and had helped me fight the time I tried to take on all the colored prisoners on the floor. Here, he and another fellow called Book-me had been running a peewee poker game. He had started me off to gambling in prison because he knew I could. I would spell him on the deal and sell chips the rest of the time. It gave me something to do besides he on my bunk and brood, which I did a lot of, too. Also I could talk to him, which I couldn’t to most of the men.
Hunky was a porter in school at first. Then he got a porter’s job in the woolen mill because he thought he could make some money out of it. One of the woolen-mill companies bunked in the dormitory with us across the aisle, and he was just transferred from one side of the dormitory to the other. Then one day he took my Sunday shirt over to the woolen mill to wash and iron it. The guard caught him washing the shirt. It was against the rules. My number was on the shirt tail so they caught me, too. The courtroom guard came around that morning before breakfast and added the two of us to the long line of convicts going to court. We were all sullen because we’d miss our breakfast, even if the deputy found us innocent, and scared because most of us were guilty and were going in the hole. The deputy transferred Hunky to the coal company. He gave me a lecture and sent me back to school. That was how I took over Hunky’s half of the poker game to run for him.
There was the school, too. It consisted of eight rooms underneath the Catholic chapel. There were regular schoolroom desks arranged to face blackboards across the front of each room. There were six grades. Two rooms each were given over to the first and second grades. The latrines were in the end rooms on either side.
Each grade was divided into A and B classes. I was assigned to teach 5A. At the time they were studying predicate adjectives. I had not ever learned, or else by then had forgotten, just what a predicate adjective was. I got fired the same day I began. Guerda, the big simple-minded Dutchman whose place I had taken, was reassigned to the job. He was blowing his top over arithmetic. Most convicts have obsessions. That was his. He started right off, as in the past, and for which he had been fired, teaching his version of mathematics. It was indeed a weird and grotesque version. But he was happy. I was “seated,” which meant I was
demoted to the status of a 5A pupil. And I was happy, too.
A pupil’s life was a happy life, if one didn’t mind the sitting. We read newspapers and magazines and sneaked smokes, and shot spitballs, and drew funny pictures on the blackboards when the guards were absent. And when the guard was present we baited the teachers. When the superintendent, who was also a guard with a longer title but the same pay, came into the room, we looked intent and occupied. But if he stayed too long we would stump him with some trick question we had thought up for just such an occasion. After that we wouldn’t see him again all that day.
In the mornings, for twenty minutes before we went in to wash up for dinner, we marched around the yard for exercise, and again for twenty minutes in the afternoons. But since neither we nor the guards relished walking in the snow and slush and bad weather we compromised on fifteen minutes, or even ten or five, if the deputy was not about.
That was school, more or less, if you include the books which were donated by boards of education throughout the state, and the four other companies besides ours which celled in the 1&2 block, and the programs every Friday where there was speaking and reciting and some singing by the colored convicts.
There were two things about the dormitory which could bring back the whole living, pulsing scene so vividly that I could see it and live all through it again and feel that hurt I felt then, being away from all those things that I liked. I was young and hot-blooded and passionate and liked the living, tangible things. Women and going to bed with them, drinking whiskey and gambling, sports to watch and play, a car to own and drive, the moving picture shows, and nights in a park, and the sunset on the Lake from the pier at Vigo park, and clouds after a rain, and spring—which was always as tangible to me as a woman’s kiss. And being conscious of all those endless years that I could not afford to think about and that I tried so hard not to think about that pretty soon I lost all thought of anything that went below the senses of sight and hearing and smelling and feeling. But still I thought of them, those years, even with my eyes and ears and nose and skin. I thought of them with the coldness of being out in the weather with not enough clothes to keep me warm, and with the sight of guards clubbing convicts over the heads with loaded sticks, and with the smell of unwashed bodies and dirty latrines, and with the sounds of sticks banging for bedtime, and the sight of the lights winking.
The first of those two things was Giuseppe playing “In My Solitude” on his electric guitar every morning, just ‘before breakfast, with the loud bell-clear note carrying all over the dormitory.
I never understood why that should have affected me so then that always afterward upon hearing it I could see again that goddamn dormitory and those gray convicts and those gray winter mornings with the fog and the walls and the deserted morning look of the prison yard, and feel again that utter sense of being lost in a gray eternity.
The second was Chump’s console radio which Nick one of the deputy’s runners who was his old man, they said had bought for him, and which Captain Charlie let him play at nights after the lights were out if the other convicts did not object.
For years I could not hear a radio without remembering Chump, seeing him lying there so proud with his Indian blood darkening his skin, and the important way he felt about owning a console radio; as if the seed of Nick had spawned the radio with him and he had birthed it.
6
THE GUARD WHO was on duty at the visiting hall looked at my pass and gave it back to me. “Give that back to your mother,” he said. “She’ll need it to get out.”
He took me into the hall at the end of the 1&2 cell block and he and the hall guard searched me. They made me leave my cap and gloves on the hall guard’s table. I was afraid they might take the cap so I kept it turned down so they couldn’t see the lining.
When the visiting-room guard ushered me around the corner of the 3&4 block into the long gloomy cavernous visiting hall, with the cagelike cells rearing overhead like the caves of cliff dwellers, and the cell house ceiling so high it was lost, I was still worrying about the cap.
I walked down behind the benches, behind the eating convicts. When I saw my mother I stopped and stood there for a moment, very still, looking at her and seeing her and seeing her look at me, and seeing her love for me, and feeling her eyes on mine and loving her, right then, more than I had ever loved her, or myself, or anyone, in all my life. My love for her overwhelmed me. I was choked with it.
And then I hurried forward and she stood up and we leaned across the table and kissed each other and I lost sight of her. I could feel her hands holding very tightly to my arms and after she had released me and I had sat down I could still feel them very tightly on my arms. Neither of us had spoken.
“I brought you some lunch, James,” she said, moving her hands around in the basket of lunch. “I brought you some scalloped oysters. You always liked scalloped oysters.”
Her voice sounded very thin and hollow as if it came out of the front part of her mouth instead of her throat. I thought of when the judge had sentenced me and I had tried to say, that’s all right, that’s all right, only to find that my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and my throat was solid and inflexible and that only my lips, in all my face and mouth and throat and chest, would move and they could not make any sound at all.
“Did you, Mother? Let me help you, Mother,” I said, but I did not look at her again.
She had been looking at me, now she looked at the basket in which all the while her hands had been moving without accomplishing anything.
“Here is the tablecloth, and here are the napkins, and here are the plates,” she recited, taking them out of the basket.
We spread the tablecloth very carefully. She smoothed out the wrinkles and then began to take out the silver and the food. But it did not seem real, neither our actions nor our being there in that prison—in that grimy, gloomy cell house, sitting across from each other—nor our funny, ridiculous efforts to make it real and easy and natural.
There was a dish of scalloped oysters and some potato salad and some bread and butter and a jar of jelly and some cakes. “I didn’t bring you anything to drink,” she said in that light, weightless voice. “I couldn’t find anything to put anything in.”
All along, since I first looked at her, I had not looked at her again. I had been watching her hands and looking at the tablecloth and the food and beyond her, through the open bars into a cell where the two bunks to the left of the door had been chained up for the day; at the commode and the shelf where there were pictures and jars and bottles and two combs and one brush and a homemade broom and, hanging on a line of string across the right of the cell, a wine-colored lounging robe—deep-colored against the yellow calcimined walls.
“That’s all right, Mother, I don’t want anything to drink.” My voice sounded muffled and I cursed under my breath. “We get plenty to drink, all we want to drink.” I was trying to sound natural and cheerful so that she would think I felt that way, but my voice cracked at the very top.
“You look well, James.”
My fork touched an oyster and moved it on my plate. “I feel fine, too, Mother.”
She was wearing the old rusty black Persian lamb coat I had bought from a guy who had claimed to be a fence, and it had turned out to be a fake. And underneath she wore a brown woolen dress.
“Do they feed you enough, James?”
Oh, God, she’s trying so hard not to cry, I thought.
“They feed us pretty good.”
In trying to smile I only succeeded in spreading my lips. It made me feel sick all up in the face, under and around my eyes. The muscles and the skin and all felt sick, as if they were afflicted with leprosy, and my eyes felt sick, as my stomach feels when I want to vomit, and I knew my mother wanted me to look at her but my eyes felt too raw and open and sick for me to look at her, or at anyone. I sat there with my lips spread, toying with the oysters.
“Do…do they hurt you any, James?”
“No,
Mother. It’s not all that bad.” I told her about the routine and the schedule. “I was a porter in the coal company at first but now I have a job teaching school.”
“I should think that would be nice,” she said.
“It’s all right,” I said, still not looking at her. “You’re not eating anything James,” she said. I stole a glance at her and quickly looked away. “I’m not hungry, Mother. You see, we just finished dinner.”
Her eyes were red where she had been crying and all around them the flesh of her eyelids was swollen and her face seemed loose; the skin seemed slack as if some inner support which had held it into shape for all those years had broken loose in her grief. Her hair, showing beneath the brim of the made-over felt hat, seemed grayer but it could have been my imagination, I told myself, but I could not look at her again to tell.
And suddenly I knew that I could not look at her, not only because I did not want her to see the sickness and the guilt and the remorse that I did not want to feel in my own eyes, but because I did not want to see the grief and the sudden age showing in her face. As if not seeing it would keep it from being there or at least keep me from having the knowledge of it by seeing it, although I knew it was there, all along, even before I had seen her. And also I did not want her to see my eyes for her own sake.
Cast the First Stone Page 7