“Now, I want you to stay calm, Ross. I got one more thing I’ve got to tell you. Set those hands down, son. You just sit there, calmlike.”
Roscoe set his hands back in the gully of his legs. His shoulders were starting to ache.
“Wilson’s already been taken in. He was right there when it happened.”
Roscoe raised his hands again.
“Put those hands down, son.”
He put them down. “Mind if I have a cigarette, Sheriff?”
“Not if you hand me one, too.”
The cuffs made it difficult for Roscoe to fish his cigarettes from the chest pocket of his shirt, and more difficult still to handle the box. He ended up dumping its whole contents into his lap. Only six cigarettes were left, and he handed one to Eddings, tucked another in his mouth, then struck a match on the floorboards. He passed the flame to Eddings and cracked the vent window on his side.
“Wilson was just checking the fence line,” Roscoe said. “He wasn’t involved with the electricity.”
“He was up on the ladder, Ross, getting the juice flowing again.”
Then Wilson had been there to flip those levers back to on. That was why they hadn’t noticed the short back at the house—the lights off during the day, and the thresher not in use. It wasn’t Wilson’s job to check the lines, not his job to clean up anything, but he did those jobs all the same. Roscoe breathed in his smoke, both his hands coming to retrieve the cigarette to knock its ashes outside, the left hand dragging along like something paralyzed.
“Wilson’s a farmer,” Roscoe said. “He’s been working that land since Marie was a girl. He doesn’t know a damn thing about electricity.”
“But you do, son. And you likely needed someone’s help with a project that big. The way I see it, it was either Wilson or Marie. You want me to turn around? Go get your wife?”
Roscoe turned his head to watch the woods blur by, the dogwoods standing out yellow against the bark of the tall loblollies. He thought the brown-leafed hardwoods were black oak, but they could’ve been chestnut oak, too. Those two were hard to tell apart in the fall. All the woods’ undergrowth thinned out in these months—the beautyberry’s leafless branches decorated with clumps of purple, the red buckeye left to twigs. In his time walking Marie’s land, he’d found himself noticing the various sorts of shrubs and trees. An identification guide was in the library at the house, and Roscoe had started cutting clippings during his walks, bringing them back to match against the illustrations in the book. He’d been surprised at how many different species grew on Marie’s land. Their memorization came easy to him, and he’d started telling Marie their names and habits the way she told him about birds.
Since the power had gone in, they’d started walking together in the evenings like Moa and Wilson.
“Summersweet clethra,” he’d tell her. “See its spiky flowers? They’ll all be gone in another week.”
“Dwarf fothergilla. Those little white flowers will only last through the end of the month. It’ll turn bright red in the fall.”
Marie, Roscoe thought, there in Sheriff Eddings’s car. I did this for you.
CHAPTER 6 / ROSCOE
Our librarian is a twig of a man named Ryan Rash. With a note of great accomplishment in his voice, he tells me that he’s gotten me a standing Friday shift in the library. “Your foreman at the dairy isn’t willing to let you go for more than a day a week, but it’s something. And don’t go thinking I’m doing you a favor, now. I need some kind of literary talk on occasion, and you’re one of the only damn men who reads in this whole place, so it makes sense. The boys I have in here the rest of the week can barely keep the numbers straight.”
Because compliments are so hard to get, I take Rash’s words as one.
The Fridays are welcome, the library always dark and cool, something deep and musty about the place. The collection is small, but it takes time to sort and shelve. I enjoy wheeling Rash’s creaky cart down the narrow aisles, stopping here and then there, slipping a book into its slot. The organization is comforting, a great structure that can catalog and number everything.
I prefer the numbers in Dewey’s system to Rash’s alphabetical sorting in the fiction. Dewey put literature in the 800s, but library folks like to give it a spot of its own, let the customers find their favorites by name. As though convicts have favorites. Taking the fiction away from the numbers breaks the rules of classification, and it bothers me like misplaced pails and caps in the barn. Any misplacement throws off the whole system, and the 800s are too small without their novels.
The use of electricity is in the 600s, applied science. Religion is in the 200s. If there were any books on the death penalty, they’d be in the 300s—social sciences—but we don’t have any of those. Rash has a copy of the Manual for Institutional Libraries that warns prison librarians to ensure that their collections are “censored carefully. Nothing should be accepted which represents vice attractively, contains sensual suggestions, or deals with crime and punishment.”
Rash finds the manual humorous and gave me that specific section to read. “Doesn’t leave us with much, does it?”
“You have Crime and Punishment on the shelf.”
Rash nodded. “I’d hoped the title might compel some of our men to actually read it.” He showed me its card—checked out four times, returned a day later every time. “You’ve read it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“My wife’s father had a large library in his home. The title caught my attention.”
Rash laughs at this. “Ah! You see? That’s why I need you around here.” Rash is the only member of the prison staff who offers appreciation, and I believe it comes from his work. He’s a trained librarian, and though he could’ve worked in any other library, he’s told me he chose to work at Kilby. He believes in the prison’s promise of rehabilitation, and he wants to be a part of it. At times I feel compelled to ask what the milk I occasionally steal for him is doing to rehabilitate me, but Rash is so good a man compared to his peers.
Our library has seven books on dairy farming—600s. Cotton is in there, too. All the agriculture. It’s strange to me that electricity gets filed under the same number. Dewey must’ve seen the running of power through wires as the same as running shoots out of the ground, seeing them all as applications of science. If Rash can stand for electricity and agriculture to be lumped together under one number, there’s no reason he can’t let the fiction lie alongside the poetry.
I still miss the library in Marie’s house, dark with its wood and heavy curtains. “Light breaks down the paper and the bindings,” Marie told me the first time I came. “We keep the curtains drawn during the hours of high sun.”
Marie’s father was a farmer—yes, always—but he was also a reader. These were his two occupations, he told me.
“Are you a reader, son?” he asked early.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s good. A heap of books is the only foundation a man needs.”
Had my father lived to meet the man or chosen to meet the man given the chance, he would not have been impressed. “A solid occupation is the only foundation a man needs,” I hear him saying. “It’s those damn books that did you in.”
Marie’s father would be pleased with the section on fiction in Rash’s manual, though. The last paragraph reads, “Let the prison library not only meet the recognized needs of the men, but inspire them in further efforts. The reading habit once firmly fixed is among the best safeguards for any man.”
Rash appreciates this passage in the manual, too, and he uses it with the board to bolster his collection of fiction. To me, the passage isn’t about fiction, though, but rather any book, regardless of its type. I want books full of information as well as stories, and I see this in the men around me, too. Roberts wants art books. Powers wants biographies on Alabama governors. The illite
rate fellows want books full of etchings and photos. Somehow, there’s a book in here about Yellowstone National Park. It’s popular, all those hot bogs and steam vents. Maybe we just want to know the real pieces of the world now that we’re so far from them.
Ed is always looking for books about ships. Rash has built up the maritime section solely for him.
“Why won’t he read Moby-Dick?” Rash asks me. “He rotates through the same seven books, and every eighth request, I slide it in there. Comes back in a day, just like Crime and Punishment.”
I don’t offer Rash a reason. He must already know that Ed isn’t interested in literature. Hearing that truth aloud won’t make Rash stop trying.
I hear footsteps, boots on the hard floor. It’s Dean. He’s in on the murder of his daughter’s suitor, though some say it was more than that—a business dealing gone sour. Chaplain’s teaching him to read.
“You got this?” he asks, setting a paper on top of the books on the cart. “Chaplain says the library’s got it.”
I recognize Chaplain’s handwriting. It’s dainty, neat as a lady’s, and it reminds me a bit of Marie’s. They make their M’s the same, and their T’s. He’s written The Old Tobacco Shop, by William Bowen. It’s a children’s book, and I remember snatches of it, Marie reading it aloud to Gerald when it first came out. I can hear her voice.
“You got it?” Dean’s asking.
“Yes.” I lead him to the 800s. Rash stocks quite a few books for children, and he allows them to stay in among the few volumes of poetry we have.
I pull The Old Tobacco Shop from the shelf. Its cover is green, the corners rubbed tan. Dean flips a few pages. He stops at the first illustration. “What’s this say, Roscoe?”
“ ‘Lord bless us!’ cried the hunchback. ‘Look at that!’ ”
“There’s a hunchback in it?”
“Yes.”
He nods and tucks it under his arm as though a hunchback were all he needed. Dean appreciates the Bible stories that deal with peculiarities and deformities. He’s come up to me after services, his Bible in front of him: “Read me that bit, Roscoe, about those creatures with the four faces each.”
And so I read the passage for him.
“How can they not turn when they go?” Dean asked.
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Chaplain.”
That story was all Chaplain needed to convince Dean to start studying his letters, and now Dean is reading The Old Tobacco Shop. A copy of it is sitting in the farmhouse, on one of the many bookshelves in that dark library. I can see Gerald asking Marie to read it again. He has not outgrown it, because—in my mind—he has not grown.
I fear we don’t grow, either, here in these walls. Instead, we go backward. So many of the men around me are boys, taken again with legends. All of us imagine new creatures in the dark of our cells. Four-headed beasts with calf hooves from our own new Guernseys, down in their fields.
I often wonder what Marie would say about this library, this glimmer of knowledge and learning tucked away in the walls of a prison, what she’d say of the things we still share—children’s books, dictionaries, Bibles.
Dean is setting The Old Tobacco Shop down on Rash’s desk, a green metal beast covered with papers and cards. “Let’s see, let’s see,” Rash says. “Mr. Thomas. Did you return your last book?”
“Yes, sir.”
I like the sound of the date stamp on the card, and again on the envelope inside the book’s cover, heavy and permanent.
“D,” Rash is saying, “E-A-N. That’s good, Mr. Thomas. Your writing is coming along. T-H-O-M-A-S. No, not like that. Like a snake. It curves top and bottom.”
The wheels on the library cart spin in circles instead of rolling forward. It’s a hard contraption to maneuver, and over its insistent squeaks and moans, I listen for Marie’s voice reading one of those books from her father’s library. I listen for Gerald’s breathy laugh at the funny parts.
They are silent though, both of them, not like that night I walked the fields, the night I thought of the transformers and the thresher.
They are so different now, Marie and Gerald, so formless and malleable.
I finish with the stacks and sit at one of the tables to help organize the cards. Rash has me looking for overdue books, and it takes hours to go through the small files. When I’m finished, I set a stack on Rash’s desk. “Nothing recent,” I tell him. “But these ones have been out at least a year. This one”—I tap the top card—“is going into its third.”
Rash picks up the pile, looks through the titles, then dumps the cards into the waste bin. “These are convicts, Roscoe. This is a prison library. We have no misconceptions about our customers.”
He waves his hand in the air, dismissing me. Even Rash isn’t above these gestures, the ones that turn us into flies or gnats.
CHAPTER 7
Roscoe got a State-appointed lawyer who refused to listen to any of his explanations about electricity and current and how little he’d actually taken from Alabama Power.
“None of that matters, son,” the man said. “We’ll do best just talking about the hardships on the family—your father-in-law’s death, the struggling farm.”
“It isn’t struggling now.”
“Best keep that to yourself, son. We need the farm to be struggling.”
“What about Wilson? How are you handling his case?”
“I’m not. He has his own representation. You’ll be having separate trials.”
Roscoe sent letters to Marie: Are you covering Wilson’s court fees? Why do we have separate lawyers? Please visit. Marie didn’t respond.
Roscoe’s lawyer had no information about anyone outside the courtroom—nothing about Marie or Gerald or Wilson. Roscoe assumed Wilson was in the same jail, but the colored section was in a separate wing, so their paths never crossed. Roscoe had no connection with the life he’d come from, and he spent most of his time recalling specifics he didn’t want to forget. He took tours of the house, walking slowly up the stairs. At the landing, he took a right and then entered the library. He walked its walls of books, shelves rising from floor to ceiling. He pulled a book out, flipped a few pages, read a passage, slid it back into place. He did this again and again. Sometimes Marie joined him, sometimes Gerald.
The trial came quickly, and the Birmingham News covered it. The guards at the jail passed Roscoe their newspapers when they were finished with them, teasing him about his prominence in the headlines. Roscoe read about himself like a stranger, his time in that city jail one of layered realities. There was his own memory and understanding of events, and then there was the prosecution’s skewed and daggered account, and then the paper’s version, slimmed down to the meatiest, most damning moments. At times Roscoe found himself nearly swayed by some of the information; at other times anger would grow in him as it had in those pre-electricity days on the farm.
In the courtroom, the prosecutor asked an expert from Alabama Power to explain how the company measured electricity: “In layman’s terms, please. So we can all follow you.”
“We measure electricity by kilowatt hours. A watt or kilowatt is a measure of voltage times current—one kilovolt at one amp of current dissipates one kilowatt of energy.”
“I said layman’s terms, please!” the prosecutor said, and the chamber filled with laughter.
The paper wrote, The prosecutor played to the jury with his humor.
The electrician on the stand smiled. “Just kilowatts, then.”
“And what can you estimate about Mr. Martin’s consumption?”
“Preliminary data tells us that the average urban household is using twenty kilowatts a day. Let us say that this farm with its fully electrified house and thresher used only fifty kilowatts a day.” The man had made a chart, and he pointed to it with a long stick. “Alabama Power charges its customers eight cents per kilowa
tt hour, which puts Mr. Martin’s consumption around four dollars a day.”
The man was exaggerating, Roscoe knew, exaggerating if not outright lying. Nearly 10 percent of a line’s voltage was lost every day in transmission, which made his consumption negligible. Anyone actually working the dam or the powerhouse knew that, but Roscoe could tell the company’s man wasn’t one to put his hands on the lines. Figures and theories were fine if physical evidence backed them up—Faraday always gave numerous demonstrations during every lecture—but the man on the stand had nothing to substantiate his claims.
“Four dollars a day!” the prosecutor was shouting. “Now, that sounds like a lot of money to me, sir, but I’m just a lowly attorney.” Again, the room chuckled. The News wrote, Again, the room murmured with joviality. Joviality?
Roscoe saw the jury growing convinced. He saw their anger rising. Four dollars a day.
“Now, we believe Mr. Martin has been unlawfully routing electricity to his home for two years.” The prosecutor paced in front of the jury. “According to your figures, how much is that voltage worth, sir?”
“Two thousand nine hundred twenty dollars.”
The News: There was a gasp from the jury and the audience.
There was. They glanced at Roscoe with disdain, as though he’d been robbing their own reserves.
“This is a conservative estimate?”
Work Like Any Other Page 6