Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  “Four days ago,” I said.

  “Well, you won’t have any now for six weeks,” he said. “That’s how long this cast stays on. So four days won’t make a hell of a lot of difference, will it, now?”

  That made me angry in the first place. He stood me naked in the center of the floor, straightened my spine by sight, padded my body with cotton, then dipped the plaster of Paris gauze into water and wrapped me up from my hips to my chest. That was all he had to do except send in his bill to the Industrial Commission. I stood there for an hour waiting for the stuff to set, then the nurse took me into C ward and put me in a cot. The springs sank down in the middle and the cast cut me across the thighs.

  “This cot gives too much,” I told the nurse.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  “I want you to stop it from giving, goddammit!” I said. “That’s what you’re here for, that’s what you get special grub and special privileges for.”

  “To hell with you,” he said.

  I tried to get out of the cot but couldn’t get my legs up far enough, so I wiggled over to the side and tried to drop down to the floor. The nurse came over and shoved me back into the center of the cot and I hit at him. “Get your goddamn hands off of me, you bastard!” I said. He drew back and started to hit me but the guard walked in and he stopped.

  “What’s the trouble here?” the guard asked.

  “This goddamn bed gives and this bastard won’t fix it,” I said.

  “You want to watch out how you talk to people around here, boy,” the guard said.

  “They want to watch out how they talk to me, too,” I said.

  “This punk’s too fresh,” the nurse said.

  “What’s the matter with this cot?” the guard asked.

  “There isn’t anything the matter with it,” the nurse said.

  “You’re a damned liar,” I said. “It gives in the middle and makes my cast cut me. You can see for yourself,” I said, throwing back the covers.

  “The cast is too long.” the guard said, looking at it.

  The nurse didn’t say anything.

  “Isn’t there some way to cut off some of this cast?” the guard asked.

  “I don’t know r ,” the nurse said. “I’ll get the supervisor.”

  Jake In galls was the supervisor then. He was a swell convict. “Hello. Jimmy,” he said, coming in.

  “What say, Jake?”

  “What’s the trouble, kid?”

  “This bed gives.” I said. “It makes the cast cut into my thighs.” The covers were still at the foot of the cot where I had thrown them, and I pointed to where the edge of the cast dug into my legs.

  “Get Monroe’s chart.” Jake said to the nurse. When the nurse came back with the chart Jake looked at it and said, “The doctor ordered slats for this bed. Why didn’t you put some slats under the springs?”

  “I didn’t notice it.” the nurse said.

  Jake looked at him. “Put some slats under it.” he said. Then he turned to me. “That’ll fix you up, Jimmy. How are you getting along otherwise?”

  “Fine.”

  “Getting plenty to eat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you, Jimmy.”

  “Okay, and thanks, Jake.”

  “You’ll be all right now. Monroe,” the guard said, taking a different attitude now.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  But the next week an influenza epidemic hit the prison and the hospital became overcrowded overnight. All of us who were not on the danger list were moved downstairs into the basement, underneath the north wing, to make room for the flu cases which were coming in at the rate of two dozen a day. There were no hospital cots in the basement, only the double-decked bunks that had been used when it was a cripple-company dormitory years before. It was damp and dirty and stinking. The epidemic had struck so suddenly there had been no time to prepare for it. They assigned us guards but the nurses were too busy upstairs with the flu cases to give us any attention. The only time we saw a nurse was when they brought down our meals. if the orderlies were all busy.

  I was assigned to a bottom bunk. It sagged in the middle and no one had the time nor inclination to stiffen it with slats. My cast cut into my thighs until they ached and it was very difficult for me to get up to use the bathroom. Each time the nurses came around with our meals I called it to their attention but none of them did anything about it. I sent word to the doctor and to the convict doctor and to Jake Ingalls, but received no reply. I stood it for three days.

  There was a vacant room off from the dormitory that had once been used for a storeroom. On the way to the latrine I’d noticed it contained a few old barrels and a couple of tables and benches. I managed to hobble over there in search of some boards to use as slats but I didn’t find anything I could use. All I found was an old rusty tenpenny nail. I took it back to my bunk and began cutting off my cast with it. It was very tedious work, with the point of a dull nail, and it took all that night. But by morning I had scraped a hole from the top to the bottom of the cast deep enough so I could tear the cast apart. I tore it off and threw it into the wastepaper container. That was the fourth day we had been down there.

  That morning, just before dinner, the doctor and the convict doctor and the supervisor and two nurses came through on a tour of inspection. All the bunks were occupied by that time, for as soon as a patient upstairs passed the danger point he was hustled downstairs to make room for the next case. The doctor stopped briefly and asked everyone how they felt. When he stopped at my bunk I told him that I was feeling fine. I was lying down with the covers pulled over me and he couldn’t tell that I didn’t still have my cast.

  “Having any trouble with your cast?” he asked.

  “I was but I’m not any more,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said and started away, grinning his big horse-toothed grin and appearing very amused about something. But after he’d gone a few steps he stopped and turned around, frowning. He came back and said, “Let’s see your cast,” and reached down to draw back the covers.

  “I took it off,” I said.

  For a moment he hung there with his hand still extended toward the bed and his mouth half open with unspoken words. Then he turned a dull, splotched red. “Took it off?” He sounded incredulous.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Took it off.”

  He straightened up slowly, controlling himself with great difficulty. “What did you do with it?” he managed to ask, squeezing out the words.

  “I threw it in the trash can,” I said.

  And then he blew. He went off like a V-Two Rocket. His hands flew up in a wild frustrated gesture and his body swerved in my direction as if he was going to jump into the bunk and strangle me. Then he caught himself and kept turning until he had made a complete circle, and his hands jerked at his hair. “What in the hell did you do that for?” he screamed in a high, shrill, completely uncontrolled voice.

  “It was hurting me—” I began, but he rushed away without listening. He walked furiously, straight ahead into the empty storeroom, then he turned around and came storming back.

  “Now what will I tell Dr. Castle? What will I tell the industrial commission? What will I do, what will I do?” He tore at his hair. “You—you dolt! You feather-brained idiot! You—you—” He wheeled away and stormed out of the door, roughing over the half dozen patients collected there to request various prescriptions. I felt half scared and half rebellious and tight with nervousness. Goddammit, they ought to have come down and fixed my bunk in the first place, I kept telling myself, trying to justify my action and keep from feeling scared.

  Right after dinner the doctor sent the hospital runner downstairs after me. I got dressed and followed him upstairs. I was wooden with scare and nervousness and rebellion. The doctor and Dr. Castle and the deputy and the director were waiting for me in the doctor’s office.

  “Why did you take your cast off, Monroe?” the director asked. />
  “It was hurting me,” I began. “I sent word up to the doctor and he wouldn’t—”

  “My God, you were just down there three days!” the doctor exploded.

  “Three days is a long time when you’re in pain,” I said.

  “My God, you’re not the only patient in this hospital,” the doctor raved. “You act as if you were the only patient in the whole damn prison. This hospital is filled with men with temperatures of over a hundred. Who do you think you—?”

  “Let’s hear what the boy has to say,” Dr. Castle cut in. The doctor controlled himself. Dr. Castle was one of several very famous specialists who gave their services to the institution free of charge. It provided a source of study and research and practical experience for various internes studying under them.

  “The bunk sagged in the middle,” I said. “It’s one of the regulation dormitory bunks with the springs at the ends and when I lay down it gave in the middle and the cast cut me across the thighs. I sent word up to the doctor and the nurses and everybody, telling them about it, but no one came down to do anything.”

  “So you tore it off?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know that cast cost the industrial commission one hundred and seventy-five dollars?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Here we’re fortunate enough to have a specialist come in here and do the job for half price as a favor to you and you rip it off without a moment’s thought, without—” the doctor began but Dr. Castle cut him off. “Couldn’t you have waited for a few days, boy? You realized, of course, how busy the doctor must have been.”

  “No sir, I didn’t realize it,” I said.

  Dr. Castle began getting red. “But you could have waited a day or two longer, couldn’t you? It wouldn’t have killed you to have waited just a couple of days longer, would it?”

  I didn’t answer. I stood there, straight and stubborn, cloaked in a mute rebellion. They’re all against me, I thought. They don’t want to hear my side. They want me to admit that I was wrong. To hell with them, I thought. To hell with them, sitting there like fat pompous gods caring less than a damn about a convict’s personal feelings. Screw ‘em!

  “I don’t know what the officials think about this, but I feel that you should be punished,” Dr. Castle said, red and angry. He stood up and put on his hat and walked out.

  The deputy didn’t say anything. The director looked at the doctor. The doctor waited a moment for them to upbraid me and when they didn’t he said, “Have you a back-brace?” He wouldn’t say my name.

  “Yes.” It was just a wide belt I wore sometimes.

  He waited for me to go on. I didn’t elaborate.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “Over in the dormitory.”

  “I’ll send Tim over to get it.” The hospital runner was named Tim. “You’ll have to wear it You can’t have another cast.”

  “I’ll go over and get it myself,” I said. “He doesn’t know where to find it.”

  “Well, go over and get it!” the doctor shouted. “Go over and stay over! Go to hell! Get out of my sight!”

  I turned and started outside.

  “Wait a minute,” the director called. “I’ll send Tim with you.” The deputy hadn’t said anything.

  It had begun to rain, so we ran across the yard. I was out of breath when I got to the dormitory. Chump Charlie saw me first and asked, “What you doing out the hospital so soon? I thought you were going to be in for six weeks.”

  “Got to get my brace!” I gasped. I went over to my bunk and began fishing in my bag for the belt. Chump rushed down to the game and told them I was in trouble. Blocker and Candy and Signifier came running up the aisle.

  “What’s the trouble, kid?” Blocker asked. He looked at Tim.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “They gave me a raw deal over there and I cut off my cast.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I threw it in the trash can.”

  Candy said, “I bet that big pot-bellied bastard over there pitched one for sure.”

  “It was his fault,” I said. “The son of a bitch had me put down in the basement.”

  “Come on, we got to get back,” Tim said.

  “Take it easy,” Signifier said. “You ain’t in the hospital now.”

  “They’re not thinking about putting you in the hole, are they?” Blocker asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Well, take it easy, kid,” he said.

  “Let us know if we can do anything for you,” Candy said.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I don’t need anything.”

  Tim and I ran back to the hospital. I still had on my house shoes and my feet got wet in the cold March rain. The doctor said the belt was too small to do any good. He sent me back to the basement. I undressed and went back to bed. They didn’t say what they wanted me to do and I didn’t ask them. That afternoon two new nurses were assigned to the basement. Neither of them had ever worked in the hospital before. One was from the barbershop and the other from the woolen mill. One had been convalescing from the flu himself. They didn’t say anything to me and I didn’t say anything to them. I was apprehensive until suppertime. I thought they would try to take me off of the hospital diet and put me back on the main-line grub. Only a few of us in the basement got the special diet. The others who were convalescing from the flu got the same as the convicts got in the dining room. But when the food came around I still got the hospital diet. After that I settled down to stay there for the remainder of my time, if necessary. If they can stand me I can stand them, I told myself. I sent back to the dormitory for my pajamas and bathrobe and some playing cards and magazines and my books.

  But I caught the flu and a couple of nights later I ran a high temperature and my throat became sore. I supposed it was from getting my feet wet. The doctor had begun visiting us every morning and when he came through the next morning I went out in the aisle and tried to stop him. “My throat’s sore, doctor, and I’ve been running a temperature all night.” He hadn’t spoken to me or even looked in my direction since the powwow in his office and I thought if I got directly in his path he’d have to answer me.

  But he brushed me aside and passed without replying. His stooge, the convict doctor, also passed me without speaking. I stopped Jake Ingalls and said, “What’s the matter with them?” nodding toward the doctor and his stooge.

  “Anything wrong, kid?” Jake asked, pleasantly.

  “I’ve got a sore throat and a hell of a head,” I said.

  He looked at my throat and took my temperature. When the doctor turned and came back he looked at Jake, but Jake kept on examining me without noticing. “You’ve got a touch of the flu, kid,” he said, making out a prescription. “I’ll get this filled and send it down to you. Take a dose of salts and lie down and take it easy.” He called to one of the nurses, “Hey, Elmer, give Monroe a dose of salts and put him to bed.”

  When I returned to the dormitory after five more weeks, things seemed duller and stranger than ever. I couldn’t work up even a passing interest in gambling any more. It seemed like a senseless pastime and I couldn’t see for the life of me how I had spent so much time and thought on it before. For a time I lay on my bunk and read novels and magazine stories, when I wasn’t studying. The only interesting things that happened any more were the things which happened in the stories I read. The life in them seemed to me the only real and true life which existed. The prison life came to be something of an unreality which surrounded me and in which I existed but did not live. It seemed as if it was all make-believe, like a scenario that had been written long years before, and we were only acting out our short parts on a stage, going through the actions which the script called for and uttering the written dialogue, and that in time the play would end for all of us and afterward, if we ever chanced to look back on it, it wouldn’t mean a thing.

  And by then I was getting tired of it, not all at once but ju
st a slow build-up of weariness, an unseen growth of distaste, a softly simmering exhaustion from doing time, an imperceptible accumulation of aversion for the prison and the prison life; for what it consisted of and existed for, and for the sight of it and the smells and the sounds and the repetitious, monotonous, theatrical voice of it; and for the deliberate, mocking, patently different, but everlastingly the same, continuity of actions which strung the years together like a haphazard sequence of situations written into a long, dull, rambling, dry, undramatic play. It came at first as a loss of interest in all the things that had formerly so intrigued me, as a sort of staleness that I thought was in the prison but which was really in me; in my mind and thoughts and reactions toward prison and prison life. The outside world was gradually building up in my thoughts. It was not the world in which I had lived for nineteen years, but one in which I had never lived and which had never existed anywhere but in my mind. My mind was building a world out of the stories I read and the thoughts I had in the silence of the night. It was an utterly fantastic and unreal and impossible-to-exist world. It was a Utopian creation which I was dreaming into existence.

  Somewhere near the end of May I got a typewriter and began teaching myself touch typing from the instructions which had come with the typewriter. I was progressing rapidly when one day, while wrestling with little George, I sprained my back. It was the first time I had really hurt my back since I had been in prison and I was frightened.

  At first I refused to be taken to the hospital. They weren’t going to get me over there and kill me, I told myself. I wore my back-brace every day and even slept in it, hoping that it would correct the ache, but instead it got worse. It got so bad I couldn’t keep up in line and had to leave the dormitory some time before the company in order to get to the dining room with them. I knew that, sooner of later, the deputy or director would notice it and they’d have me in the hospital, whether I liked it or not. Hobbling across the yard one day I passed the doctor and it seemed as if he got a look of gloating in his eyes.

  My mother was with her people in South Carolina at the time. I wired her a hundred dollars to come and see me immediately. She arrived three days later. I told her all my troubles; about the cast and my back and my fear of being killed if I went back to the hospital. I knew that no matter how much in the wrong I had been, or how much I deserved it, she wouldn’t want me to be hurt. And no matter what I might have thought before about her, or might think about her afterwards, that was the truth. I knew I could depend on that.