Work Like Any Other

by Virginia Reeves

  It is a disgusting mark.

  The doctor pulls the sheet back up. I wonder if he’s the same doctor who missed the ball in Jennings’s kidney.

  “We’ll leave you up like this for a bit and get some real food into you. If it all holds, we’ll send you back to your cell day after tomorrow.” He turns to Hannah. “Easy foods.”

  “I’ll bring some broth.”

  It has been so long since I’ve eaten, even plain broth sounds delicious.

  There are no voices in the room while she’s gone, the ticks and stutters of the building resounding loud and dogged, a great gray presence. Minutes pass, then my nurse returns with a steaming mug. I could weep at the sight of it, and still again at the warmth when I take it into my cupped hands.

  Nurse Hannah smiles and leaves me to this joy.

  I take a sip, and it is every bit as good as I want it to be. The second sip is, too, but halfway through the cup, pain starts in, red and barbed. It takes my breath, a great inward gust that must sound as though I’m drowning or suffocating. The broth wobbles in my hands, and try as I can to settle the mug, the hot liquid spills down my chest and wound. I am shouting and twisting, and I’ve pulled the needle from my arm in my panic.

  “Nurse Hannah!” I scream with the last of my breath, the pain reaching its hands into my lungs. I can hear her running footsteps, and here she is—my girl. Hello, sweet thing. I see her, but everything is going gray round the edges, like the persistent sounds in the room. Her hair is gray and the skin of her face and hands; even her white uniform has dulled.

  The doctor has returned, his voice mixing in. “To surgery. Get at the foot of the bed.”

  There is movement and breeze, the swinging of doors.

  “Prepping left arm, Doctor,” the nurse says. Something cool is at the inside of my elbow. “A poke,” she says, and I feel a new needle enter my arm, and that is all I’m left with. The voice, the cold, the needle, the gray.

  CHAPTER 13

  The lawyer Marie hired to represent Wilson was able to trace him to the intake facility at Kilby, but from there, he disappeared.

  “Leased, you can be sure,” the lawyer said, “but to where, we just don’t know, ma’am.”

  “How can they have no record of a man they convicted?”

  “It’s not uncommon. I’m sorry.”

  Marie believed he truly was.

  Roscoe’s letters continued to arrive, as they had since he’d first left with Sheriff Eddings that evening in the midst of supper. Marie could taste the meal. She could hear the easy conversation. She could feel the closeness of him—his hand on her leg, an intimacy she’d allowed him to regain.

  At first, Marie refused to read the letters, focusing instead on Wilson’s trial. But after Wilson’s conviction, she went back to the small stack in the top left drawer of her dresser, finding herself hungry for a man’s words.

  She knew Roscoe had been convicted, too.

  Dear Marie, he wrote. Where are you?

  Even that was too much—too entitled, too expectant. She was wherever she wanted to be.

  Do you know what’s happened to Wilson?

  Yes. She knew.

  These questions only angered her, only forced Roscoe further away. Even the voice she heard through the writing sounded whiny and pitiful and indulgent. That voice didn’t care what had happened to Wilson. It cared only about its own discomfort.

  But then Roscoe described the small cell that held him in the Montgomery jail, and for possibly the first time Marie imagined him there. She saw him, Roscoe T Martin, sitting on a thin cot, the beard he’d grown in his time there, the rough shagginess of his hair. She knew he didn’t belong in this foreign place, no matter how much he deserved the punishment.

  In the next letter, he described his trial. He talked about the State lawyer who’d represented him. He did a good job, Roscoe wrote, and Marie knew instinctively that the man hadn’t. He couldn’t have. He wasn’t equipped to do a good job. I’ve been convicted of manslaughter and larceny. They’re giving me twenty years, Marie. I’ll be gone a long time. Please let me hear from you.

  It had already been months since he’d written those words, half a year almost.

  The rest of his letters came from Kilby Prison. The same intake process that had lost Wilson had held Roscoe tight. Her anger rose again. Why did Roscoe deserve to stay? She’d read the newspaper articles about the facility when it opened—a new penitentiary designed for true rehabilitation with its own livestock and farms, shirt factory and mill. We have a library. The librarian is an interesting fellow named Ryan Rash. I’m glad for the books, but there are less than in your father’s library, and Rash doesn’t stock any Faraday.

  How dare he mention Faraday, the father of all this electrical madness. She stopped reading. There were more letters, but she’d wait. She couldn’t hear any more in one sitting.

  “Are those from Pa?” Her son stood at the door, not little any longer.

  “Yes.”

  “What do they say?” He took a step into the room.

  Their conversations about Roscoe had been quick and simple since Eddings’s last visit.

  “Have you heard from Pa?”

  “No, love.”

  “Do you know if he can get visitors?”

  “No, love.”

  Now Gerald was here, a step inside her room, asking about his father’s letters.

  “He’s in Kilby Prison, working in the dairy. He spends time in the library, too.”

  “There’s a library?”

  “Apparently.”

  “That’s nice.” Gerald lingered. “Will we ever go see him?”

  “No. We won’t.”

  Gerald nodded. He’d suddenly become so old. He was helping with the farm, working with Wilson’s oldest son, Charlie, to keep things going.

  “Moa wanted me to tell you that supper’s served. That’s why I came up.”

  “Tell her I’ll be right down.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She wanted him to come to her as he had as a boy, to bury his face in her skirts and cry or laugh or simply breathe out his warm little boy’s breath. She wanted to twirl the curls of his hair round her finger and whisper stories to him. She wanted to teach him his letters and watch, again, the delight of figuring out words and then sentences and then books. She wanted him to invite her to share a book together after supper, to go for a walk, to do anything.

  Gerald was already gone, down the stairs, across the sitting room to the dining table, then into the kitchen, offering to help Moa and Jenny bring out the plates.

  Marie didn’t know how to bring him back.

  CHAPTER 14 / ROSCOE

  It’s growing dark when a guard escorts me from the hospital. Nearly a month has passed, though it could’ve been a year. My time away feels long. Boyd, Hicks, and Vincent keep their eyes away from me as I come through the cell door. Reed’s bunk is empty, and a new fellow is in Ed’s spot. He looks up briefly—long enough for me to see the great swells and bruises on his face—and then he returns to the children’s book in his hands.

  “Boy’s a trustee, now,” the guard says to my cellmates. “Hands off.”

  This is the first I’ve heard of my new rank, but I’m not interested in challenging it.

  I sit down on my bunk.

  “Hey, Books,” Hicks says. “You hear that the warden sent Reed to a turpentine camp in the north? Worst camp you can get.”

  I don’t respond.

  “Listen, figure we might use this whole ordeal to all our gain.”

  Boyd is looking at me, and Vincent, too. The new boy has raised his head, but he lowers it quick when Hicks shouts, “This don’t concern you, Fresh.”

  “Tried crawling into Hicks’s bed his first night here,” Boyd explains.

  He won’t last long
, then.

  “What sort of gain?” I ask.

  Hicks smiles. “The simple sort. Just a little share of your trustee favors.”

  “Such as?”

  “Cigarettes and liquor.”

  I smile this time. “Those aren’t part of the package.”

  “But they turn their heads when it’s a trustee doing the business.”

  “No.” I know that I’m above their reach now—wounded, healing, a trustee of the prison.

  “Roscoe,” Hicks is saying, “you best—”

  “No.” My new scars are itchy against my uniform. “We know you can’t touch me, which means there’s nothing I owe you. Only gain I see for us in this cell is keeping clear of each other.”

  “Can’t promise you safe passage through the yard,” Hicks warns. “Or sound sleep.”

  “Yes, you can.” I have been wounded and brought back—a ­reprieve, but not an escape. I will force these bastards to step around me.

  Vincent is the first to lie down, turning his back on us. He has always been the easiest to pacify. Boyd abandons the fight next, and I am left with Hicks above me, feet dangling, our short-term cellmate a guarded witness to my right, his eyes pretending to read the words in his silly book.

  “Get out of your bunk,” I tell Hicks, pushing against his mattress from below. “I want this whole thing to myself.”

  Hicks’s been sleeping over me since I arrived. I’m asking him to move above Fresh.

  “Go to hell, Books.”

  “I know how to make my injuries look new again,” I warn him. “All kinds of insults I could see you causing. Get me another stint in the hospital with my pretty nurse. Get you a stint in the doghouse. Maybe something else.” Ed is here with me, his voice in my throat, his hands clenched at my sides. “Get,” we say together, and Hicks jumps from his bunk, grabbing his linens, stomping like a fussy child the few steps it takes him to cross to his new bed. He uses Fresh’s knees like a ladder, crushing the book, digging heels into the flesh above the man’s kneecaps, deep enough to make him shout.

  “Shut your fairy mouth,” Hicks says, bringing the toe of one of his boots into Fresh’s face, opening the cracks on his lips. A few drops of blood land on the pages of his book, and I think of those stains there forever, making their way into every new set of hands that checks out the book from the library. Fresh coughs and whimpers. I know that Hicks will deliver to Fresh the violence and anger he wants to deliver to me, that Fresh has become my surrogate, my dummy, my double, that I have chosen this for him, that it is as unfair as George Haskin’s singed body.

  I am not ashamed.

  Contrary to Hicks’s prediction, I sleep soundly that first night back in my cell, a new comfort lapping at me that I haven’t known in Kilby before.

  I’M given easy tasks in the dairy for the first few days, but Bondurant doesn’t care for exceptions, and he has me back in regular rotation quick. On Friday, I return to the library.

  “Good to see you, Martin,” Rash says.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He taps a book on his desk. It’s called Hunting Dogs, and it’s written by a fellow named Oliver Hartley. “Taylor’s getting impatient. You wouldn’t believe how angry he was to hear the news. Injury or not, he’s tired of waiting.”

  I roll my shelving cart away, Hartley’s words open on top of the sorted books. There are chapters on hunting coon, opossum, skunk, mink, coyote, fox, squirrel, rabbit, and deer, but none on the hunting of men.

  I learn that once a dog knows how to tree squirrels, I should take him to woodchuck country, and that once he can tree woodchuck, I “may rest assured that he will tree a ’coon if he finds a trail.” If it’s summertime, I should take my dog “where ’coons abide and turn him loose.”

  I shelve the dictionaries. I shelve the host of Bibles we store in the 200s and a few books about psychology in the 300s. Hartley tells me that a successful trainer in Minnesota feels strongly that pups should not start their training until they are twelve to fifteen months old. Here is one of Ed’s books on sailing ships, filed in with the 300s—the ocean reaches far across Dewey’s system—and I swear the book is water-warped at its edges. He has been gone about two months, but his books continue to surface throughout the prison. Rash said Chaplain brought in this last one. “He found it under a stack of Bibles. Isn’t Mason back now?”

  “No. No one can find him.”

  I can see him back in London, Yellow Mama shaking him as he slips the diamond bracelet from a noblewoman’s wrist, there on his English street. The current is touching the soles of his feet, skittering up his legs, through his guts and his heart, out his arms, down into his hands. It flicks his fingers.

  “Oh!” the woman yells. “Help! I’m being robbed!”

  But Ed is gone. He’s too quick to be caught in the streets. “Damn,” he’s saying, steadying his walk around some narrow corner.

  I keep expecting his return. I see him rowing in on a wave that he’s trained on the oak grove. He’ll coast up to the front doors, pulling the oars into the small boat he fashioned himself, a wooden craft, shiny hulled, clear-lacquered to show the grain. “I was about halfway across that ocean when I decided I better turn around,” he’ll say. The guard in the tower will lean his head out the window and say, “Row on over the wall, Ed. They’ll be happy to see you.”

  That wave will spill out around the tower. It’ll slosh against the brick of the administration building and then against the cement of the wall. It’ll loosen the tar, rattle those cracks, inch them wider. The fire in those wires will short, and Ed will come slipping over the top, poured out in a gush that dampens the dirt yard.

  Because I’ve never seen it, the ocean I know is capable of these things.

  “They still using my chair?” Ed will ask, stepping clear of his boat.

  “Yes,” we’ll tell him. “All the time.”

  “I can’t even feel it anymore.” He’ll hold his steady hands out for evidence.

  Ed will go back to the woodshop. He’ll start making those cradles again. We’ll mount his boat from the rafters in the mess.

  He has sent one letter. It was waiting for me when I left the hospital: No one home. Left the letters on the porch. Nice place. Your friend.

  I picture that bundle of letters coming untied. The first envelope waves a bit. It opens and its pages shuffle loose. Then the next. And the next. The paper is like smoke. It curls and loops and makes for the sky, where it breaks apart and disappears. When Marie comes home from her day at the school (for she is teaching, again—I see her there), a boy version of Gerald at her side, only the twine is left, a loose, ratty cord. She’ll tie it in a circle and slide it on the boy’s wrist because he asks her to. Later, it will hold up her hair.

  These are all imaginings. Marie has made her choice. Ed, too, and Gerald. They are all gone from me, and I have a report to conjure from this hunting book. There are no wires, no conduits, no dam. There aren’t even cows, whose nature I have grown to know and predict. Here in my book, there are only the hunted and the pursuing, and I must plug men into one and prison dogs into the other.

  Here is another ocean book, filed in the sciences of the 500s, a few poems for the 800s, a world atlas and a history of the state in the 900s.

  “I don’t know what to take from this book,” I tell Rash at the end of the day. “It’s all about hunting other animals.”

  “Just put a man in for the animals.”

  “All due respect, sir, but men don’t act like coons and squirrels.”

  Rash laughs. “You want my advice, Roscoe? Just give Taylor a story. There’s nothing in these books that’s going to help him train his dogs any better. Tell the man about treeing coons, and he’ll either think it’s groundbreaking or a pile of rubbish, and he’ll either commend you for the information or curse you for your ignorance. It’ll depend only on
his understanding of the information. There’s no sure route on this one.”

  I can imagine Taylor’s disgust when I tell him to set his dogs loose on a man’s summer scent. Strapping men to dogs is different from everything Hartley’s talking about. His dogs are off lead, the hunters well behind.

  Rash gives me the book to study in my cell. “Taylor will be back next Friday,” he tells me as I’m leaving. “You’d best have something ready for him.”

  TAYLOR is already at the desk when I arrive in the library the following week.

  “Deputy Taylor’s ready for his report,” Rash tells me.

  “Come on, boy,” Taylor says. “I got work to do at the pens.”

  I look to Rash, but he just nods. “You’re free from your shelving as long as Deputy Taylor needs you.”

  I resent Rash’s easy disposal of me. Maybe he knows Taylor will soon be over this want of knowledge, that I’ll be dismissed before I’ve said much of anything.

  Taylor is walking away. “I’m listening, boy!” he shouts over his shoulder. “What’s it you got for me?”

  Rash waves me on.

  I follow Taylor out into the yard, drawing up level with him. He is quick-paced for such a large man, and it’s a challenge to match his stride.

  “That the book?” He pitches his head toward the book in my hands.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  I hesitate. “Due respect, but I don’t know that I’m turning up much, sir. Hartley’s methods are all about treeing coons.”

  “Men have been known to climb trees, Martin.”

  “His dogs are off lead, sir.” I turn to the page I’ve marked and read, “ ‘We will go into the woods and walk slowly, giving the dog plenty of time to hunt and if we don’t see him pretty soon, we will sit down on a log and wait a while.’

  “That’s the sort of advice I’m getting, sir, and I just don’t know that it’s much help to you.”

  I don’t recognize the guard on the east gate, who asks, “New dog boy?”

  “Not sure,” Taylor replies, and we pass on through.