All my energy burned on living. How to eat better. How to keep myself strong. How to lay by warm clothes for the winter. When I dug, or baled hay, or humped potato sacks, I did it with the intensity of prayer, and my prayer said: keep my body young, let me outlast this place, let me not die here in the stink of these men.
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Many times I thought of escape. We had the chances. But the guards’ best weapon in keeping order was the prisoners themselves. We lived so on top of one another that you could never have got hold of even the minimum of the things you’d need to survive outside the base without someone turning you in. There was a whole group of snitch prisoners who told tales to the guards to try to get in friendly with them. They would be paid for their tattle, but most of them would have done it for free. An oddity of our prison was that, once in a while, someone you’d got used to seeing in the bunkhouse, or working beside you, would disappear for a week or two, and then turn up again, but this time holding a gun, perhaps on horseback, having been made a guard.
It was cunning on Boathwaite’s part for many reasons. Men need hope. They need something to dream on. For the prisoners, this was better than heaven: they could come back, in this life, with all the rights and pleasures of a guard! That’s one reason why there were so many eager snitches. It also meant that Boathwaite had men under him who knew the mood in the prison so well that any troublemaker could be rooted out and dealt with before he had time to organize. There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the process. The prisoners who got the break weren’t especially anything. But they never made into a guard a man who was too keen on prayer — and there were some of them — and they never chose a muslim.
I’d be lying if I said I was miserable every minute. If it were true I couldn’t have lived. I had unfinished business outside there. I hadn’t dreamed that plane.
And, the plane aside, it was still possible to find some joy in each day. I always liked farming, its colours and smells, and the miracle of the soil. We die for ever, but a plant dies back to his root. That was also a kind of comfort to me. Nature favours the small and simple when times are hard.
I never got over the power of that land. We grew so much that each fall we didn’t need to harvest it all. We left some fields to rot, and others we ploughed back under. In August and September we had tomatoes coming out of our ears. Pumpkins, squash, corn, milk, butter. And that was with slaves working it, griping, hating it, gold-bricking on principle, every chance we got — imagine what free men would have made of the place.
None of the prisoners would say such a thing, of course. We had unwritten dos and don’ts that were stricter than the ten commandments. Only the greenest newcomer would let on that he was impressed by the food. The style was to kvetch and complain, to fight your corner fiercely if someone was encroaching on you — maybe even if they weren’t, so long as you could cut a good figure — never to express surprise, or doubt, and never to be curious.
*
There was a pigsty at the base where they raised pork for the guards. One time Shamsudin and I were sent to lay shingles on part of its roof. It was filthy hot on the roof in midsummer, and as new prisoners we got stuck with the worst jobs. Also, it was the guards’ idea of a joke to have a woman and a muslim working on the pigsty together.
After about fifteen minutes, the fellows who were supposed to be watching us sloped off somewhere, leaving us alone. The sun was bright overhead, and the smell of tar and shingles took me away from the place and made me think of home.
Shamsudin was working on a patch away to my left. I glanced over at him. He didn’t look up. He was crouched down on the slope of the roof, studying something. I wondered why he was so quiet. It crossed my mind for some reason that he felt guilty about throwing me over as a friend. Then I noticed how slowly he was going. I moved over to him and asked if he was all right. His face was grey and his hammer was shaking.
I was certain he was going to pass out. It was the height that was making him ill. We were twenty feet up. I wasn’t strong enough to hold him if he slipped so I cupped my palms to yell for the guards. Shamsudin laid his hand on my arm and pleaded with his eyes for me not to do it.
Even at ground level, he would have struggled with the job. There was something in Shamsudin of my father. He was out of place in the rough and tumble of the Far North. His hands were more like a woman’s than mine were.
In a decent world, there’s no shame in weakness, but there was nothing decent about life at the base. Failing at his task would mean at the least a week in the punishment cells. At the worst, it would be the kind of small wound to his reputation that would encourage others to tear at him, perhaps fatally. That’s how it was at the base.
I helped him up higher where he could hold on to the peak of the roof and gave him the nails to hold. He felt rigid and unsteady and I knew he was trying not to look down. I said we should talk to keep his mind off the height.
‘What should we talk about?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Tell me how we got into this fix.’ I meant how we got stuck up on the roof, but Shamsudin had a cast of mind that always leaned towards speculation, and he shared the interest of many of the other prisoners who liked nothing more than to talk about the disasters that had befallen us and why they’d come about.
It always seemed to me that nothing revealed the prisoners’ ignorance as much as when they talked of these things. You came across as many explanations as people you asked, and most of them told fairy tales that would shame children: a piece of the moon had fallen into the sea and made a tidal wave; tiny atom machines had eaten up all the sunlight; and so forth.
Of course, I knew what I’d seen: desperate people pitching into and overwhelming our tiny city; and I could guess the things they were running from — failed crops, cities with no light or water, gangs of lawless men — but what lay behind those troubles I couldn’t say.
So as he clung to the shingles with one hand, trying not to look down, and reached me nails from his apron with the other, Shamsudin told me his own idea.
He said the earth was close to five milliard years old. He spoke of seeing it from space, surrounded by a blur of clouds, turning from blue to white and back again as the centuries pass. They were long summers in which the oceans teemed and winters when even sea water froze hard. He said five times in that span of years all life had been wiped from the planet when it grew too dark or too hot. It was one of those times — a big moon that whacked into Mexico from space — that did for the dinosaurs.
It sounded like fairy tales to me, and I asked him if it was written in his Holy Book — he said, and that it was science that said so.
After the fifth time, it was our turn. We crept out of the mud. We peopled the planet, living in every corner, never mind wet or ice or desert, steadily growing wiser and more resourceful.
Around four and half milliard years after it began, the earth started to alter. Looking at it from space, you’d have seen rocket ships and satellites burst out of it like corn from a popper. The earth was in one of its warm times, had been since before we mastered farming — we’d grown accustomed to predictable seasons and good growing weather. But now there were so many of us, all wanting so much, and all armed with the inventions of previous centuries. Once, we’d been so many naked apes, scratching for life on the foreshore of an African ocean. Now we were a vast army, a termite mound of giants, who could shake the planet if we stamped together, who could warm the air just by breathing.