Playing With Matches

by Carolyn Wall

  For a long time, Thomas has been gone from me. But I had no idea how physical it was. And I know the girl—a sulky navel-studded student named Sunny with bee-stung lips and weighted eyelids. What an embarrassment for Thomas, who’s been making a fool of himself in front of his friends—our friends. I am probably the last to know.

  I’m guessing Sunny is not his first affair. Back when we were signing papers that would make Harry ours, I’ll bet Thomas was screwing around.

  33

  Next morning, fog rolls in, spreads its wings, and holds fast in spite of wind gusts that should have driven it away.

  Wheezer comes downstairs, helps himself to bacon, and pecks Auntie on the cheek. “You ready?” he asks me.

  “Don’t worry about the children,” Auntie says. “There’s plenty to keep them busy here.”

  I have been shaking since dawn. Hell’s Farm is the last place I want to go. What if, while I’m there, they look up my name and call the sheriff? What if my family never sees me again?

  I leave the table, thinking I’m sick to my stomach. I kneel over the toilet in Auntie’s bathroom, but nothing comes up. I’ve had only coffee. My legs cramp, and my heart vibrates in my chest.

  In my growing-up years, I watched loads of convicts go past this house, being trucked to the pig farms or the far cotton fields. They stood braced between the high backboards, holding their hoes. One guard drove while two others, with heavy clubs in their belts, rode in back. Or the prisoners were marched across the field, feet chained together, hoes in the air, hands shackled at the waist.

  I’ve seen, and I know. And last night, from the attic window, I snuck a long peek.

  Hell’s Farm is a big brick building that used to be a plantation manor. The only thing left to tell its history are the four white columns and a broken concrete porch. Behind are the outbuildings and the long, low barracks they call cages. When the river rises, that land is first to flood.

  On the far side, I recall, is the steep-sided creek. When the river’s running, like it is now, the creek swirls with tree limbs and sewage. There’s a rickety bridge across the trench, although I’ve never crossed it, and on the other side is Potter’s Field, the county cemetery.

  I remember too what the prison looks like close-up because, as a child, I walked its fence and clung to the chain-link. I always wanted Claudie to go down there with me, do a proper job of spying, at least until they ran us off.

  Wheezer is on his cell phone with someone—the warden, I think, still setting things up—and it’s nearly eleven before we step out into the oddly green morning. He looks at the stacked and rolling sky, says this storm is going to be a big one.

  While I’ve waited, I’ve removed as much dust from the attic as I could, and washed and dried the sheets and towels. Folding gave my hands something to do. Auntie had the radio on. Greta is now predicted to increase as it crashes onto the Mississippi coast tomorrow morning.

  We set out for the Farm.

  By the time we arrive at the gate, I am sweating and drawing on my last reserves of breath. There’s a bronze plaque that reads: STUART P. HAVELLION STATE PENITENTIARY, ESTABLISHED 1922.

  Although I’m sure they recognize Wheezer’s face and his name, it’s his clipped-on ID badge that seems to be gold. The gate whines open, and we step in. It closes behind us, and the second one rolls.

  “Sally port,” Wheezer says in explanation. “For deliveries and visitors. A security thing. One door has to close before another one opens.”

  In a tiled entryway, there are a counter and bored-looking guards, and an office behind. A telephone, an umbrella stand, and a long concrete hall. I sign my name once as a visitor and again for something else, surrender my driver’s license, my wristwatch, and the belt to my pants. I keep my wedding ring on. Maybe it will go better with these guys if I look married. I step out of my shoes and through an electronic arch. Even then, I am waved with a metal detector and my shoes inspected, my pockets turned out. I’m required to open my mouth while two different people shine a light down my throat and look under my tongue. And all the time, their faces are impassive.

  Wheezer, who holds a briefcase into which nobody’s even looked, leads me down the hall, through more steel doors. Men with dim faces sit behind high dark glass and push buttons that get us through.

  They rattle and clank behind us, and I clench my fists to ease the shaking.

  Wheezer says, “I should have warned you, Clea—there are rules, strict rules, for while you’re on prison property. No skirts or panty hose, no makeup, no perfume. Next time you can bring pencils, a notebook, whatever. Carry them in an unzipped bag. Oh, and keep your voice modulated in the classroom and never say anything personal about yourself. If you’re answering a question, or giving directions, look the offender in the eye, quick, then away. Got that?”

  Offender. A hard word to get used to. But that’s why they’re here, isn’t it—because they’ve offended. Me too. I nod.

  To the right, I see the visitors’ room—rows of metal stools in front of thick glass, each window with its own black phone on the wall. We climb a set of stairs.

  Wheezer looks fit, like he’s run up and down these steps a thousand times. He says conversationally, “Farm covers sixteen hundred acres. Even with the barracks, this place was originally intended to take in four hundred. Now we’ve got eight portable barracks and over two thousand inmates. Highest the count’s ever been.”

  I wish he’d stop talking. In a few minutes I’ll be standing in front of convicted felons, and I have no idea what to say.

  “Most of ’em work out on the farm,” Wheezer says. “In the cotton fields, prison laundry, or the kitchen. We’ve got more men than jobs—but I told you that.”

  “Yes.” I also wish he wouldn’t walk so fast.

  “If they earn it, they get time in the yard.”

  “What do they do to earn it?”

  “No pullin’ shanks or throwing food, no beating the shit out of each other. Sorry,” he says.

  “You get a lot of that—fights and things?”

  “Enough. ’Specially when a man first comes in. Corrections Department used to make false teeth when they got ’em knocked out. We don’t bother anymore. Got a couple hundred in maximum security downstairs.”

  “Downstairs?”

  “Yup. In the cellar. Hell of a thing to dig in the delta, water seeping in. Guess they thought it was cheaper than adding on.”

  My heart beats double time.

  “We got restriction out in a concrete blockhouse—”

  “Restriction?”

  “Isolation. Guys who had to be cut out of the herd. They spend twenty-three hours out of twenty-four in their cells. Except for the guard that takes them to the showers, they never see another face. Well—their lawyers, but most of those have given up and gone back to divorces and jaywalking cases. Jeez, I’m overwhelming you.”

  “What does an offender have to do to be put in maximum security?”

  “The violent ones. Murderers, rapists. Sometimes they come in here, already bulled up on the bus, struttin’ their stuff, and we have to set the dogs on ’em—big honkin’ Rottweilers. Nobody gets eaten.” Apparently, he’s making a joke. “Don’t worry, you won’t come in contact with the worst.”

  We turn down a narrow hall, and I see that the rooms on the right are small, the lower walls solid, the top wire mesh—each with a table and two benches bolted to the floor. “Lawyers use those cages to meet with their clients,” Wheezer says.

  “No privacy anywhere.”

  “They get plenty in their cells.”

  To the left, through a window, I see an open room, each table accompanied by four permanent stools.

  “Third-floor dayroom,” Wheezer says. I guess he’s counting the cellar.

  Beyond the dayroom is a long row of steel doors—cells, I imagine, two men to a cell, each no more than six feet wide.

  Privacy.

  “Wheezer, my God, are all prisons like thi
s one?”

  Over our heads a guard sits, working buttons in a cage that looks to be reached by a catwalk.

  Wheezer lifts a hand, and the guy waves back. “Some are worse; none are better.”

  So says the chaplain.

  All those growing-up years, the rumors I had heard were true. I think of the men in the dark and the damp, two floors down—the ones who’ve become the worst of the worst. Maybe there are trustees down there, too, with rifles, playing cards and using bullets for poker chips, waiting for an inmate to break a house rule so they can chain him to the wall or gun him down.

  Wheezer ushers me into a windowed room. There’s a long table, behind which I must sit, and six bolted-down desks three across and two deep—the molded-plastic kind with an arm for writing on.

  “All yours,” Wheezer says, and opens his briefcase. “I got you some paper from the office and five pencils. Stay in your chair or behind the desk.”

  Christ.

  So I’m to have five. I wait a long time for them to come, for someone to bring them to me. Then here they are—single file, followed by a bull of a guard, who tells them, “Take a seat,” and hits my table with the flat of his hand. When my heart is beating again, he says to me, “They think they’re mean sonsabitches, teacher, but I’m right outside the door—” He laughs at his joke. There is no door. “And I can take ’em down with one hand behind my back.” He grins widely at the man up in the cage.

  I wonder, who are the real assholes here?

  Each of the five slides down in his seat, knees apart and hands on the desk, their orange suits making them all alike. But they aren’t.

  We are a class.

  How am I to hand out paper and pencils if I can’t move? I think, Screw that rule, and pass things around.

  The guard misses nothing, and he swings back in, this time his palm hitting the glass so hard, I think it will break. Nobody looks up.

  “I see one pencil lift offa the paper, your ass is mine!” he yodels out like he’s calling hogs. “Say, ‘Yes, boss!’ ”

  Five mechanical voices: “Yes, boss!” They take up their pencils, hands cramping, heads down, grinning wickedly at one another.

  I can’t sit in this chair. I want to push both it and the table against the wall, but they’re anchored to the floor. I choose a point to the right, farthest from the “boss.”

  “I’m Miz Ryder.” That’s what Wheezer has told me to say. And so, with the shuffling of big feet and murmured jibes and counter-jibes, we begin.

  I hold out two separately cupped hands. “On the day I taught myself to read, this is what I knew: In one hand I held the solid letters of the alphabet. B, D, F, G, and so on. I thought of them as islands.

  “In my other hand were the soft ones, the vowels. They were bridges from one solid place to another. Together they were like—the Florida Keys. Land and water. With that map, I could read—and write—any word, any phrase.

  “I love that you want to write. There’s a profoundness in thinking on paper, maybe remembering the past. You can explore who you are now … predict the future. Or,” I say with a smile, “in this class, you can make it all up.”

  They look at their desks, their boots, the linoleum floor. They think I’m a lunatic. Who can blame them? Through a six-inch strip of window, I can just make out the gunmetal sky, a ragged flight of blackbirds.

  “I once witnessed some crows,” I say, “gathered in a circle in the grass. In the middle there was this one ruffled misfit. Then suddenly all these circled-up crows stopped chattering to each other, and they attacked the one in the middle. They pecked him to death.”

  One guy has MONDALE stitched to his pocket. He’s an older guy, heavy, shiny black with almost no hair. According to my list, his first name is Wesley.

  “Mr. Mondale, why do you think they did that?”

  He says, “I got an idea, but—you want us to make up shit? Pull sumpin’ out our asses?”

  They all snicker at this, so I smile too.

  “Tell me what you really think.”

  “Bird was already dyin’. Poor guy was sick with some disease. Bastards couldn’t be bothered carryin’ him no more.”

  Wesley, it appears, has an aching heart. “That may be.”

  Closest to me is Raoul. He’s dark—South American, maybe, with a nose that covers half his face. Although he’s three feet from the back wall, he keeps glancing over his shoulder. “One in the middle stole a piece of bread.” His voice is high-pitched. “He broke a rule. He breaks them all the damn time, always getting a case, called up before the man. Really, it’s a wonder he lasted this long.”

  Everybody laughs.

  Wesley shakes his head, runs an enormous hand over his eyes.

  There’s also this little white guy, Frank. He has big teeth and an oft-broken nose. “Fuck that. Damn crow ain’t acceptable here.”

  “Here being Mississippi.”

  He thinks that over. “In the South. Wherever.”

  Is he talking racial? I don’t think so. Gangs form in prisons. They’ve all seen this played out—join or die.

  Wesley says, “Bird had shit for brains. Didn’t call the man ‘boss.’ ”

  This time they almost fall out of their chairs laughing.

  The guard bangs into the room, his jaw tight and his chest barreled out.

  “Hold on!” I say, and I step up and press my palm to his shirt buttons, the first I’ve felt the gray twill of those uniforms. I think about how I used to fear them, and of the night I spied on Bitsy in the field. That guard’s pants were around his knees and his backside was shining. “Sir. You’re disrupting my class. If I need you, I’ll call.”

  There’s dead silence in the room, but he goes, the guard goes, and I tell my students, “Okay. I want to begin to know who you are. I want you to write about an hour or a day, in your life, that shows where you came from.”

  Frank of the big teeth: “We all come from our mamas.”

  “Well, I jus’ come from yours,” Wesley says, and Raoul laughs in a high whinny-snicker that makes me want to laugh too.

  Raoul says, “I tell you right now, Miz Ryder, we come from ba-a-a-d times. You got a weak heart? The stomach trouble? ’Cause it ain’t pretty. I kilt a guy with a butcher knife.”

  “Goddamn liar,” says the fourth man. He’s been silent until now. His name, improbably, is Willie G. Willy. “You want everybody to think you’re bad, man. You ain’t shit. I heard you got busted stealing a roll of carpet off a truck.”

  “Matched my living room,” Raoul said, sulking.

  The fifth man, whom they call Horse, has said nothing.

  “He my cellie,” Willie says, introducing Horse. “He’s writing a vampire romance.”

  I can see Raoul and Wesley want to hoot and whistle, but I put a finger to my lips and nod toward the door. They keep it down. “Glad to have you in my class, Horse,” I say. “I look forward to reading your work. I’m—I’m glad to have all of you.”

  “We gonna meet again?” Raoul has taken a prissy-ass attitude. “Or you gonna ride off into the sunset like most teachers do?”

  “Other teachers come here?”

  “Oh, hell,” says Raoul. “We learnt to sew. I made an apron.”

  Wesley grins. “One come to help us get our GED. She didn’t last two days.”

  Willie G. says, “Her two eyes went in different directions. Black Monday, my man, you run her off.”

  Black Monday is apparently a nickname for Wesley. Willie G. is privy to it. I guess he’s earned the right.

  “I’m here for a while,” I tell them.

  “Okay, then,” Raoul says.

  Frank picks up his pencil. “You want somethin’ like—that time we got a riot going? Nightsticks, teargas, shanks poppin’ out. Some guys used fingernails, went for the throat.” He looks over at Raoul. “Fought like goddamn girls.”

  “I didn’t fight like no girl,” Raoul whines. “This Aryan dude broke off a piece of chain in the yard, that’s wh
at. Gutted two ol’ boys like fish, lined the rest of us up against the wall. Things turned sour quick.”

  Willie G. says, “My brother got ripped up pretty bad that night. They didn’t know we were brothers ’cause we got different last names. We went on awhile. Then one night he sent word down, he had all he could stand, workin’ in that laundry wit’ ‘Fold the towels, keep the edges sharp, stand up straight, take a dump.’ ”

  Incredible stories, and they hurt, and I love them. I hold up a hand, and Wesley and Raoul take up pencils.

  Beyond the window, in the far, far distance, I hear a train whistle by, and I am spellbound and saddened. I was born a quarter-mile from here.

  They write for twenty minutes. I ask them if anyone would like to read what they’ve written. No surprise, Willie G. has written about his brother. He calls him Joey. After the chain incident, Joey got himself transferred to a hoeing detail, and one day in the field when they were all watching freight cars go by, he jumped out on the track. He died for the next three thousand yards. Willie G. stood, watching, while his brother’s pieces were strung up and down the line.

  I tell Willie G. that I’ve never heard a tribute written with so much love. I wait for them to hoot or make faces. But they don’t.

  Big Wesley Mondale, who has almost no hair on top of his head, writes about his beard. It grows too fast and so thick that they make him shave twice a day. He says they oughta let him keep a razor in his cell, and not one of those pink girlie tricks, either. He pumps iron in the rec yard and does five hundred push-ups every day in his cell. Back home in Hattiesburg, he has a sister who’s eleven.

  The same age as Luz.

  He hasn’t seen her since she learned to walk.

  While I listen to these stories, my ignorance weighs a thousand pounds.

  I ask Horse if he’d like to read.

  Horse is a study. He looks like a killer. He wears a wedding ring. I can tell that he bites and tears at his nails. His arms and face are barked with ravines and scars in the shape of scimitars. His long body curves over his desk, and his singleness—his aloneness—is so palpable, I could scoop up a handful. I wonder what kind of woman ever wanted him, or if one will again. He says, “Ain’t nobody wants to hear this stuff.”