“Yes. With the extent of his consumption, we feel that Mr. Martin could easily have acquired double that figure, if not more.”
“Are you aware of the average household income in this country?”
“Yes, sir.”
Roscoe’s lawyer objected to this question as irrelevant, but was quickly overruled. In the whole trial, the judge only sustained two of the man’s objections.
“Could you please tell the court the average household income in this country?” the prosecutor asked.
“One thousand two hundred and thirty-six dollars, sir.”
The prosecutor stood motionless and quiet at this number, letting it bore down into the hearts of the modest jury members. After a long minute, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, an innocent man paid his life for this greed.” The paper quoted that, too.
ROSCOE’S lawyer called few witnesses. Edgar J. Bean was one of them. “He’s a good character witness,” the lawyer told Roscoe. “He’ll show your integrity, how you make good on your promises.”
Bean told the judge and the jury how Roscoe had paid his debt in full, with interest. “I didn’t require no interest, but Roscoe included a good five percent.” Bean looked over at him. “I’d do business with Roscoe any day.”
Roscoe nodded in thanks.
In cross-examination, Bean fumbled some, and the prosecution made Roscoe out to be a dishonest crook who’d taken advantage of a small-town businessman. Still, Roscoe appreciated Bean’s attempt.
MARIE and Gerald didn’t attend the trial, and they didn’t visit Roscoe in his Montgomery jail cell. Rationally, Roscoe told himself it was a significant trip for them, but in his gut, he knew they were making a choice, and he didn’t understand why. How could Marie not be deeply embedded in everything? Roscoe could see her taking to his defense the way she took to teaching. She was impervious, and she would work until an answer came. He knew she’d do a better job representing him than the State lawyer. And there was that, as well—why the State lawyer? Why not hire an attorney who could actually make something come of this time in the courtroom? They had the money now.
But Marie wasn’t there.
Roscoe felt the haunting of abandonment, as he had after Gerald’s birth. Marie had left him then, in every way but appearance. They had shared a home, yes, but not a bed. They were parents of the same son, but they didn’t raise him together.
In his jail cell, Roscoe thought about their courtship, how quickly they’d become inseparable, intertwined, rooted. They’d courted longer than people thought they should, neither of them in any hurry to change what they’d discovered. They would spend their time in the village dining hall talking over village food, or they would stroll together along the Coosa River, Marie pointing out birds. Roscoe visited Marie’s schoolhouse, and Marie walked out over the dam with Roscoe as her guide. They married two years after they’d met, and they took their vows at a small ceremony on Marie’s father’s land with few in attendance—Marie’s father, Wilson and Moa and their first two children, Roscoe’s foreman, Marie’s closest friend from college. A child didn’t come for two years, though they tried regularly to create one, and Roscoe could see plainly now that those two years before Gerald were their best. They had been given a house in the village, a tiny home just down from the dam, but an immense step up from the single-employee apartments where they’d both been living before. They were able to share a bed, to sleep together every night, and to rise together every morning. They drank coffee and ate eggs and bread and ham before Roscoe walked Marie to school. She always finished work first, so she lingered near the powerhouse at the end of Roscoe’s shift, waiting for his appearance.
They were better in isolation—the two of them away from Marie’s family and the ghosts of Roscoe’s family, no child between them.
In his jail cell with its high, barred windows and stone walls, Roscoe played back his son’s birth, the place where his marriage to Marie shifted like a tree uprooted in a storm, tipped so that its roots spread out over air, rather than ground. Roscoe knew it was not the boy’s fault, that he hadn’t meant to loosen those roots in his flooding and swelling—storms don’t know their cruelty—but still, Roscoe had assigned him blame. The tree that had been his marriage remained, made up of the same components, but it stood at odd angles, its parts misaligned, its growth stalled.
Maybe Roscoe was better with everyone in isolation, one person at a time. Maybe it was always going to be factions of two, one person on the outside circling round, waiting for a chance to break in. Possibly the mistake was simply one of numbers—they should’ve known three wouldn’t work. If there’d been the potential for four or six or eight even—they had dreamed of so many children—then maybe they could’ve managed the odd-numbered days, their investment in the future enough to keep them connected.
Roscoe tried to see a life with his son. The two of them becoming the inseparable ones, intertwined, rooted, Marie looking for a way in.
And he’d had a piece of it—a small intimacy with Gerald. But he was after Marie, ultimately. He’d wanted most to disturb Gerald and Marie’s knitted comfort and steal back his wife. And he had! He’d gone to Marie’s land, and he’d installed the transformers, and he’d run the lines, and he’d electrified the thresher, and he’d fixed the damn farm. He’d righted the damn tree, shoved its roots back in the ground, pushed its branches toward the sky. His marriage had returned, and if it’d put Gerald slightly on the outside, what was the harm? The boy would be grown soon enough anyway, and searching for someone else to complete his pair.
It was Roscoe who was alone in a jail cell, though, far from the land he’d electrified and the wife he’d regained. Gerald was back in his place by his mother’s side. Roscoe knew it.
THE trial continued, and the prosecution focused on George Haskin. Photos of him from before the accident showed a nose that hadn’t formed right at birth, giving where it should’ve held. The ridge above his eyes stood out like a cliff, his eyebrows hugging it tight. He wore a troubled face, which made his death somehow worse in Roscoe’s mind.
While the jury looked at his photos, the prosecution described him as a kind and decent boy, churchgoing and community minded. He’d lived in the single-worker apartments in the Lock 12 village, moving in about seven years after Roscoe and Marie had moved out. He owned a hound dog, and he was an avid duck hunter. Both George and Roscoe had made their livings off electricity. Like Roscoe, he’d worked as a topper on ridge-pin crews before being assigned to other work. George Haskin was said to have a good singing voice. Though he had no evidence to contradict the claim, Roscoe found this hard to believe. Maybe it was just the photos—a man with that sort of nose couldn’t be a good singer.
Roscoe also believed that George must have been stupid, and that didn’t mix well with singing either. All the beautiful-voiced people Roscoe had known were intelligent, and that made sense to him. Singing seemed like a physical puzzle, a challenge to the mind’s ability to coach and command the body. George Haskin couldn’t have been strong in those areas if he was stupid enough to get himself killed by his own livelihood.
The prosecutor described George Haskin’s body after his death—hands burned beyond recognition, nubs of blackened fingers. His hair had caught fire and burned his whole face and head. The current had made a mess of his veins, great branching lines of red that spread across his skin like roots. The prosecutor hadn’t made that comparison, but it was all Roscoe could see.
Roscoe’s lawyer focused his argument around the farm’s failings and Roscoe’s heroic effort to alter that course. Marie and Gerald’s absence was a crippling liability, though. “I’ve reached out innumerable times,” the lawyer told Roscoe. “I can’t subpoena her because she’s your spouse—and I don’t know that her testimony would help us that much anyway—but she refuses to attend. Is there something I can pass along? Some way I could convince her to sit behind you in the
courtroom? It’d make a world of difference with the jury. They need to see your family, Roscoe.”
Roscoe shook his head. He’d tried, too.
“My client was trying to save his farm,” his lawyer said in his closing comments. “He was trying to save his family. He took so little electricity—truly a drop from a lake—and the last thing he wanted or expected was for a man to die. Mr. Haskin’s death is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy for everyone involved. But I ask you to see my client as he is—a deeply burdened man who wanted nothing more than to provide for his wife and son.”
That wife and son were nowhere to be seen, however, and Roscoe was convicted of larceny and manslaughter. He was sentenced to twenty years’ incarceration in a state penitentiary. He would leave for Kilby Prison the following day.
Even in that moment, Marie did not come.
CHAPTER 8 / ROSCOE
I’m up for my first parole hearing today, which means it’s been four years since I came here. There isn’t sense in this number. Four is the age Gerald was when he started reading. It’s a number on a chart in Marie’s old classroom. It’s bars on my cell window and scratches in the dust in the yard and attempted escapes this year. I can picture those fours. But as years made up of weeks and days, I can’t fit that number to my time in this place. It is both too much, and not nearly enough. I have always been here, but I have also just come.
Ed has had one hearing already, and the chair assignment and furlough happened soon after. I know his chair still hasn’t been wired, and I’m hopeful it will be the job that grants my own furlough. I’ve told myself they didn’t come to me with the wiring because they weren’t ready, so I’m prepared to go to them now. I will trade those lives cut short by electrocution for my freedom. If Ed hadn’t built the chair, someone else would’ve. If I don’t wire it, they’ll give it to someone else. The State will have their chair. We can’t stop that.
The parole board meets in the administration building, and two guards lead me through a covered walkway that connects it to the main cell house. Other guards open and close gates and mesh doors for us as we pass.
“Another hopeful, huh?”
“What? No packed bags?”
The ones that know me call me by name.
“I bet the board’ll let you go today, Martin!”
“No good-byes for me, Martin? We’ll probably never see you again.”
My escorts join in the laughter, but don’t add their own comments.
We enter a diamond-shaped lobby, the front doors directly across from us. I know the lighthouse is just past them, and the oak grove past that.
The parole board meets in a room at the southwest corner of the diamond, its presence clearly announced by an etched placard on the wall. Frosted-glass doors close off the east end, and I can hear voices behind them amid the snap and click of typewriters. It’s peculiar to be around such foreign noise, given off by secretaries in offices or clerks at a bank.
“This way,” one of my guards says, nudging me forward.
He knocks on the door, and a mild voice tells us to enter. One of my guards stays outside, and the other accompanies me in.
The room is sparse, but the windows are tall, and they are not barred or screened. I can see the front guard tower, there in its nautical moorings. If these three men behind their long oak table grant me parole today or give me a furlough, I will go to the ocean. I am sure of it. I’ll find a lighthouse like this one and become its occupant, lighting my lantern in the dark to keep ships from danger.
Or, if Marie would allow it, I’d go home.
“Sit down, please,” one of the men says.
A single wooden chair faces them, vulnerable and open. I feel like a child as I sit, unsure of what to do with my hands. I start with them flat on my thighs and then shift to crossing them over my body.
“Roscoe T Martin,” the man in the middle says. He is balding at his temples, and the hair he still has is a mustard yellow, thin and stringy. As though to compensate, his eyebrows run out from his brow in two great hedgerows. His suit is dark blue. The men on his sides are dressed in the same color. His voice is the same mild one that called us in. It sounds either patient or drained, but not both. “You are here for your first parole hearing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You understand that we are not here to determine your innocence or guilt, and that we accept as fact the guilty verdict imposed on you by the State of Alabama?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The purpose of this parole hearing is to determine whether you can return to society without endangering public safety.” He pauses as though he’s asked another question, and I am readying to say, Yes, sir, when he continues, “We take several factors into consideration when making this decision, Mr. Martin, including your intake evaluations, behavior while incarcerated, vocational and educational accomplishments during incarceration, and plans you have were you to be released. Does this make sense to you, Mr. Martin?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well.” He opens a folder that’s in front of him, and I think of everything it must say about me, all of the history they took when I came. “We will start with a review of your crime.”
Ed told me this was where they would start. I have reviewed my crime many times. I review my crime every day.
“Mr. Martin, you were convicted on two separate counts—larceny and manslaughter. For larceny, you were given a sentence of ten years.”
“Yes, sir.”
“For the count of manslaughter, you were sentenced to twenty years. I see you were given concurrent sentences, which puts you at a combined sentence of ten to twenty years.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Gentlemen,” the balding man says to the other two men, “anything else you’d like to add?”
They shake their heads.
“I’ll start with my questions about the central file, then. Please contribute as you like.”
The men nod, and I put my hands back on my legs, my back impossibly straight against the rungs of the chair.
The balding man says, “I see that you were assigned to the dairy. How is that?”
“Very good, sir.”
“Do you feel well suited to the work?”
“Yes, sir.”
The man on the left says, “Do you think you could carry on this work outside the prison?”
“I do, sir. My family has a farm, and I could increase its productivity by adding a small herd of dairy cows to the existing crops and livestock.”
The man on the right says, “You wouldn’t want to return to electrical work?”
I wait too long to answer, and the man in the middle marks something down in my folder.
“I’m trained as an electrician. If there was electrical work, I’d—”
“That’s quite all right, Mr. Martin,” the balding man says. “I see you’re also doing some work in the library. Do you find that rewarding?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?” asks the left.
“I enjoy reading, sir, and I like to be around the books.”
“Can you see yourself carrying any of the skills you’ve acquired in the library to your civilian life?”
“Yes, sir. My father-in-law left us a large library, and I would like to organize it using the same system we use here.”
“Yes, but can you see yourself gainfully employed in this field?” asks the right.
“If there was a position close by, sir.”
Balding makes another note in my file. “Any other questions, gentlemen?”
The two others shake their heads again, no.
“If you were paroled now, Mr. Martin, what would your plans be for reentering society?”
“I would return to my family, sir, and help them work the farm.”
“You wouldn’t seek ele
ctrical work?”
“No, sir.”
“Just a moment ago, you said you would return to electrical work if there was something available.”
I think of those streetlamps, the dam, the turbines. Poles and crossarms, insulators and wires. And those are only the wrappings and containers. Inside them is that great electrical force I’ve spent so much of my life studying. I know that here in Kilby I have lost it, but how could I not at least try to return to that work once I escape these walls?
“Mr. Martin?”
I see Wilson standing on the ground below me while I connect our own wires to the binder on Alabama Power’s lines. I think of what he said.
“It’s what I do, sir—electrical work.”
The balding man pinches his nose and closes my file. “Mr. Martin”—I hear that it is not patience in his voice, but a deep exhaustion—“let me be clear. With your history, you will never again be employed by an electrical company within the state of Alabama. Likely, you’ll never be employed in the country. What we are trying to glean is whether you’re willing to start anew as a productive member of society in a different line of work. Does this make sense?”
Of course it does, just like his explanation of the proceedings. Unlike the four years I’ve spent in Kilby, everything said in this room does nothing if not make sense.
“Mr. Martin, am I clear?”
I nod.
The guard who followed me in shouts, “Answer the man’s question!”
“Yes, sir.” I turn my attention to the rest of the board. “There’s electrical work I could do here though, to assist the prison.”
“Shut up, Martin,” the guard says. “You’re done.”
But the man in the center says, “What work is that, Mr. Martin?”
“The wiring on the chair. The chair that Ed Mason’s built. I’ve heard the parameters—twenty-two hundred volts, two or three points of contact. I can wire that easily.”
The balding man looks at me questioningly. “Mr. Martin, I would not recommend that you lend your electrical expertise to any part of this prison, let alone a part as significant as the one you’ve just mentioned. You have succeeded in electrocuting a man, but you did so by accident. I’d hate to see what would become of the poor fellow you intentionally tried to kill.”
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