OVER dinner, Moa remarked on his mood. “Goodness, Mr. Roscoe. You sure is fit this evening. What’s got you so excited?”
Marie looked at him with her eyebrows raised, her face saying, Yes, what exactly is this? Judgment was in her expression, prickly as cornstalks.
“I received some fine news today.”
Roscoe and Wilson each sat at one head of the table. Roscoe had Marie to one side and Gerald to the other, and Wilson’s family flanked him, too—Moa and Charles to the left, Henry and Jenny to the right. They sat exactly that way for their weekly meals, their two families always coming together in the big house on Wednesdays.
“Well?” Moa pried.
“Alabama Power wants to electrify some rural properties, and we’re one of the first on their list.”
Curiosity seemed to be edging out the disappointment on Marie’s face. “We’ll get power here on the farm?”
“That’s right, and they asked me to run the lines in—contract work.”
“Does that mean we’ll get lights, Pa?” Gerald asked.
“That’s exactly what it means, Son, and what’s more—we can get that old thresher running.”
“You know we don’t have the money for that,” Marie said. “Let alone the fuel it’d take to make it run.”
“That’s it, though,” Roscoe said. “I can convert it to run off electricity.”
“Wouldn’t the electricity be expensive, too?”
“Electricity won’t run anywhere close to fuel prices.”
Roscoe saw Marie wanting to smile, but she fought it, keeping her face in its rigid calm. “I thought farmwork was beneath you.”
“It’s just not mine. This is.”
Roscoe followed Marie’s eyes around the table. They stopped on Wilson, who sat still and quiet. “What do you think of this, Wilson?”
Wilson’s face was as unreadable as his silence. “Well, Ms. Marie, Roscoe’s discussed it plenty with me, and I think it’s just what the farm needs.”
Wilson’s belief—genuine or feigned—was enough to make Marie believe, and Roscoe watched the faintest smile cross her face. “You’ll do this work?”
Roscoe nodded, and the gesture set them apart. They were alone for a moment, as they had been before Gerald’s birth, alone and young and hopeful, walking the banks of the Coosa River, watching the water make its way to the dam where it would build electricity. They were mesmerized by their future—all the light and power and change—filled with it, their own excitement rushing and flowing. Roscoe realized he missed those sensations. He missed his wife.
CHAPTER 2 / ROSCOE
The wall around Kilby Prison is twenty feet high, with four strands of barbed wire along the top. Every other strand is charged with sixty-six hundred volts of electricity. The other two are grounded, and so far as I know, the live ones have never been cut.
From the front Kilby looks like a redbrick school, a place for teachers like my wife. Shrubs line the front walk to the double doors, with globe lights on either side of the entrance. An eagle spreads its wings in a circle over the tall letters spelling out the prison’s name.
The year is 1926, which seems as if it should mean something, more than a quarter of this century gone. I’ve been in this place for three years, and that, too, seems as if it should mean something. I just passed my thirty-third birthday, and my life has become only years before Kilby and years during. I hope for years after, but not too frequently. Hope makes disappointment that much harsher when it arrives.
Fall has come again, thin winded and tawny, and I’ve just finished my work tarring up the cracks between the thirty-foot sections of the wall that open up with the cold shift. The warden pieces together a crew to paint the gaps with tar, and I’ve been part of it since I came. I’m pulled from other work, and it’s a good job to get for those few weeks. Out of the shirt factory and the cotton mill, out of the dairy. There’s air to breathe along the wall, wafting in through the openings. Across Wetumpka–Montgomery Highway is the oak grove. Grazing pasture is to the east and fields of corn and beans and mustard, cotton to the north. Even the dirt and gravel in the pit to the west is something sweeter than the scent inside the wall. Stick your eye to those cracks and it’s the world out there, a world we paint over with tar. The air gets sticky and black, and then we’re closed back into Kilby. There’d never be the time nor the tools to make one of those cracks fit a man through, but we dream about it, think about excuses to get out to the yard alone. We may sneak a fork or two out of the mess hall. We may chip at those cracks with the rocks we find. We don’t talk about it. We don’t work together. Escape is solitary as confinement, or should be.
I was on the wall when Deputy Warden Taylor sought me out. “You’ve made a name for yourself. Bondurant and Chaplain—they’re singing your praises. Best worker they’ve ever had and other such remarks. That true?”
“Can’t speak for anyone else, sir, but I do my best with the work that’s given me.”
“Seems you might be a good fit at the pens. Come on out first thing tomorrow. I’ve sent word to your other foreseers so they won’t be putting out the call.”
“Yes, sir.”
So today, I’m heading to the gate to meet him at the dog pens.
Beau’s guarding the east side, and he spits his tobacco juice right at my feet. “Taylor making you one of his little bitches?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Won’t win you any points with your cellmates—not that you’ve got many points as is.” He laughs. “Bet you’re thinking if you make dog boy, you’ll make trustee, ain’t ya? I’m sure Mason’s told you it’ll keep you safe, those trustee ranks, but I’ve seen plenty of trustees in the infirmary.”
“I’ve no interest in working the dogs, sir.”
“Shut your mouth.”
He pounds on the metal door before unlocking his side. Another guard unlocks the outside gate and waves me through with his shotgun.
“Take him to Taylor. And keep that gun on his back.” Beau’s been gunning for me since I arrived. “Think you’re better than all of us in here?” he asked me a couple months in. “All tidy mannered and educated. From what I’m told, you didn’t even get your hands dirty when you killed that boy. Probably sitting in your well-lit house eating some fancy meal with your wife. That looks a hell of a lot like cowardice to me.”
The guard on the other side of the gate settles the double barrels between my shoulder blades. “Walk.”
There are nerves in me as we approach the pens. Deputy Taylor is at the closest run, a dog himself, snouted and whiskered and thick in the neck. His jowls shake as he yells at my escort, “What you doing pointing that gun on him?”
I hear the guard shifting behind me. “Was told to watch this one, sir. Was told he might run.”
“You think I’d invite a runner out here? Jesus, boy, don’t know that you’re quick enough to be working this side of the wall.”
The guard comes level with me, his gun hanging down next to his legs. “Just following Beau’s orders, Deputy.”
Taylor laughs and pitches his head toward the gate. “Get on back to your post, and stop taking orders from Beau. Man’s a guard, same as you.”
“Yes, sir.”
When he’s a ways off, Taylor yells, “And you best not bring any boys out here at gunpoint again, you hear?”
“Yes, sir!”
I take comfort in seeing a guard reprimanded.
“All right, Martin, let’s see what these dogs think of you.”
Taylor tugs gently on a dog’s ears, then lets go and shouts, “Back!” His voice is hard and whiplike, and the dogs drop their paws off the top rails of their pens to the ground, expectant.
Two other men are farther in, mucking out the dogs’ waste and filling their water buckets and food bowls. The smell here is worse than at the dair
y, everything ripe and foul, and I want Taylor to see that I don’t fit, that it’s a mistake to assign me to these beasts.
“First thing we’ll do is get you handling them. They’ll learn you as a master when you’re here and as a scent when they’re chasing you. Dog boys is the practice, see. Got to get a belt on you and get you hooked up to one, see how they do at the end of that line.
“Jones!” he shouts to one of the other men. “Get me a belt and a lead.”
“Yes, sir.”
I watch Jones head toward a close-by barn. “Now, the belts we use are of my own making.” Everything about Taylor is large—his belly, his voice, his hands. “Made ’em so that you boys could hook yourself up to nine dogs if you wanted to.”
I do not want to.
He goes on about the leather leads, and in the middle of this talk the sirens start blaring, their whirl and pitch like some great bird descending from the sky. Every time I hear them, I think of Marie’s knowledge of birdcalls, naming all those feathered bodies by their noise alone.
“Redtail,” she might say of the siren. “Thick feathered and dusty. It’s protecting its territory, warning off other birds.”
The dogs have brought their paws to the top rails of their pens again, their voices joining the sirens.
“Jones!” Taylor is shouting. “Jackson! Get those dogs belted up!”
Jones runs from the barn, strapping a belt round his waist. He drops another at my feet.
“Put it on, boy,” Taylor says. “Trial by fire on this one.” To Jones, he says, “Bring out Ruthie. She don’t care who she’s belted to so long as she has a scent to track.”
The belt is about two inches wide and thicker than any other I’ve ever worn. Two rings are on either side of the buckle, the base of them sewn over with extra patches. These must be what I could hook nine dogs to.
The guard who held his gun to my back comes running, a scrap of cloth in his hand.
I work to fasten the belt over my pants and shirt.
“Pick up that lead,” Taylor says to me. He turns to the guard. “Solid scent?”
“Straight off his back.”
I have the lead in my hand, and Jones is hauling a whining dog from the pen. “Strap one end to her collar, and the other to one of those rings on your belt.”
“What’s going on?”
“Taylor loves to throw new boys right in,” Jones says. “Just follow the dog. She knows what she’s doing.”
“The man’s still in sight,” Taylor shouts at us. “Right in the close cotton. Get your dogs over here.”
My dog pulls me to the piece of shirt in Taylor’s hand. She buries her snout in the fabric, huffing and snorting, then lifts her head to the air and lets out a great howling siren of her own. “Follow along, Martin,” Taylor says to me. The other two men are at the scrap now, too, their dogs digging into the smell, but I am going, my feet tripping me forward, this great beast hooked to my hips, tugging with a force I’ve not met before. She is a plow, an ox, an engine, cranking and turning and driving us on. I want reins attached to her muzzle, something to whoa her back.
The dog doesn’t slow as she puts her nose to the ground, all her movements connected. I hear the others behind me, and the pounding of horse hooves, and then Taylor draws up, high on the saddle of a tall bay. It looks like Marie’s horse once looked, back when they were both young. When I left for Kilby, that horse was nibbling the grasses around the farmhouse like a big, lazy dog, her back swaying deep between her withers and haunches, a great slump that could no longer support the weight of a person. I don’t know if she’s still alive.
The dog leads me into the cotton field, and we slow down. Cotton is a rough crop to move through. The plants let go of their moisture come harvest and turn their stems to twigs, hard and sharp. Taylor slips ahead. He has his Winchester across his lap. I still hear the yells of the other boys and dogs behind us.
“There!” Taylor shouts, and I see the escaping man, the great tear in his prison shirt that yielded the scrap for the dogs, such a fatal error in the running trade. He’s still in the cotton, his back bright against the plants.
A field guard is after him, then Taylor and his horse, then this dog and me and the others.
“Boy!” I hear Taylor shout. “You stop!”
The man doesn’t slow. He’ll reach the woods in a moment, and I don’t know what that means for me, whether I’ll be forced to follow. If this great machine of a dog continues at her same speed, my body will collapse, a tethered anchor dragged through the undergrowth, my skin and clothes tearing against the ground and the brush.
Taylor draws his horse up short in front of us and slides down from the saddle. “Stop that dog!” he shouts to me.
I dig my heels in and hunker back, lowering myself into the cotton, down to the ground. The dog’s head whips, and she lets loose the most mournful cry.
“Stop!” Taylor shouts to the escaping man.
The other men and dogs arrive on either side of me. Each holds a hand out to help me up.
“Sit,” Jones says to the dogs. “Wait.” All three of the beasts drop down, their snouts still turned toward Taylor.
Before us, Taylor aims his gun toward the sky. He pulls the trigger, and it fires a cannon’s worth of shot. “The warning shot’s enough to stop most runners,” Jones whispers. “Nine out of ten, I’d say.”
But the man is not stopping, even though the cotton keeps his movement slow. He presses on, ragged and halting, and then—he falls. I watch the crops swallow him.
“Want us to go on by you?” Jones asks.
“Wait,” Taylor says, as though Jones were just another of his dogs.
Taylor moves ahead, his face trained on the spot where the man went down. I picture that escaping man still going, working his way woodward under the cover of the cotton, elbow-crawling along a furrow line.
How Taylor can move so quickly, I don’t know. He’s already yards away. The field guard before him has moved out of the line. Other men are around, too, working the field, all in stripes. Taylor’s warning shot has brought them up tall, their hands paused in their picking, their eyes on the scene. They’re all pulling for the downed man. I can see it. They are granting him a tunnel, a secret passage there, exactly where he’s fallen, a corridor to the ocean where a ship waits. I want it for him, too.
But he returns to us, his body rising up through the cotton, pricked and ragged.
“Stop!” Taylor shouts once more. He levels his gun. I am close enough to hear him say, “All right, then. I’m gonna do this.”
How is it that a shot fired across land can sound so much fiercer than one fired toward the sky? I have never heard anything so loud.
The man falls, and Taylor looks around. Shock is on his face, a little fear. He’s sweating and pale, and he shouts at the men in the field, “Keep to your work!”
To me and the other two, he says, “Best bring those dogs on up here, just in case that didn’t land where I think it did.”
The other guard is there already, marking the spot, and Taylor’s mumbling to himself as he walks. My dog is quiet, but still pulling. We level up with Taylor, and I hear that he’s counting. “Nine,” I hear him say. “Ten, eleven.” He’s counting his steps.
Nineteen, it turns out. He fired from nineteen steps away.
My dog brays when she sees the downed man, and he covers his face. “Don’t put that dog on me. I’m not running. Please, just don’t put no dog on me.”
I pull the dog back, and Taylor tells her to sit.
The skin on the man’s side is torn up, and when he moves his hands from his face, I nearly don’t recognize him through the pain. His name is Jennings. We do a little business here and there—milk that I sneak from the dairy in exchange for cigarettes. It’s another act of theft, I know, and I have stolen enough, but smoking is one of the
only graces I have found here, one of the only familiar routines.
“We best get this boy to the hospital,” Taylor says to the other guard. “Get some men. They can make a sling of their sacks. Come on, now. Boy’s losing blood.”
The men materialize, sprouting up out of the last of the cotton as though they’d always been there. A tall man with only one tooth—a front one—slides his sack under Jennings’ head and shoulders. He takes one side and a short fellow takes the other. Two more are at Jennings’s waist, two more at his feet. They lift him, and the sounds that come from his mouth are gut-shot and black, like the blood wetting the midway sack, like the blood spotting the plants. It’s bright on the cotton, dark on the stems and ground. The crops are crushed down in a circle here, stamped out in a near-perfect ring.
“Put those dogs away,” Taylor says to us as he goes.
We watch the men heave Jennings away. They move toward one of the wider row lines so they can walk easier. The fields are still stunned into disorder, the guards caught up in whispering, the men in clumps. If ever a dog boy was to run, this would be the time. We could push our dogs off toward the woods on some trail we’d contrived, deep into thick cover before anyone would notice we’d gone the wrong way. We could part and run our own directions, me with this dog at my waist, crossing creeks, scaling Montgomery, swimming rivers and lakes until we reached Marie’s land. I could walk up the drive with this beast, both of us tired from our chase—“Rabbits,” I could tell my wife and son. “We’ve been hunting rabbits.”
“What the hell you still doing out here, boy?”
I don’t know the guard who’s turned his holler on me, but he’s approaching. He’s motioning with his gun. “Taylor told you to put that dog up,” he shouts. “Go on, now.”
“Sir,” I say, and tug my dog back toward the pens, the other two men off ahead of me. They’re quiet when I catch up.
“Lead that dog on into her run and then you can unhook,” Jones says.
Work Like Any Other Page 2