Taylor wraps my hands with rope. “Come on then, Martin. We’ll lead you in now. Hup!” he says to the dogs. “Maggie! Dagger! Hup!” I walk past the cowering pup and trudge into the creek. I’m no longer thirsty, and the mud-brown current puts me off. Taylor’s mare splashes heavily into the creek behind me, and the dogs plunge in alongside the horse’s strong-pillared legs.
“Get,” Taylor says.
On the far side, I look back. The chastised pup stands belly deep in the water, whining. The tips of his ears flutter in the current.
“Hup,” Taylor shouts.
The pup whines, and Taylor reins his mare to turn. The other dogs are milling on our side, their noses down, confusion in their snouts. They are losing interest in my capture.
“What do you think’s wrong with that dog, Martin?”
“Fear.”
“Hup,” Taylor shouts at the dog, and slaps his wide thigh.
The pup whines more and dips his head lower, ears half-submerged.
Taylor drums the saddle horn as he did his belly and lets loose a great, painful sigh. “Goddamn it.” He pulls a leather lead from one of his rear saddlebags. “Shake off your cuffs, Martin. You’re gonna have to go get him.”
“Sir.”
I’m tired of this creek, its muddy water and stubborn wet.
“Hey, pup,” I say as I approach the dog, the current sucking at my knees.
The pup turns his head in shame and cowardice. The last time he came toward me, Taylor whipped him. Now, I’m calling him in. Hartley wouldn’t approve of any of this.
“Come here.” I reach for his collar. A small growl is in his throat. “Think you can bite me?”
He answers by stopping his noise, and I clip the lead to the rusty ring in his collar. The other end holds a clip, too. “Fasten it to your belt loop,” Taylor says to me. “It’s strong enough to hold for now.”
Taylor’s dangling that scrap of my cuff from the side of his horse for the other dogs. They sniff it for a second, then run back and forth along the creek bank, whining and yipping, trying to find my old scent. When I climb from the water again, they are ginger in their approach, confused. The big one is Maggie, and she sticks her snout to the toe of one of my boots, lets out a yip, then turns her eyes to the pup, who stands proud and alert at my side. Maggie sticks her nose back to the ground, and the unleashed pup, Dagger, snaps suddenly to a point, singling out the creek for her attention, as though the hunt ends there, drowned in the water.
I can see that this hasn’t been a successful training venture. The hunting of men aside, we’ve violated any number of Hartley’s rules.
Taylor reluctantly slides from his horse and pulls a couple more leads from his bag to hook up the others. “Might as well strap them up with that junk dog. See if they’ll fall in behind the horse.”
I look away as he climbs into the saddle.
He digs his heels into his horse’s flanks and clicks it forward. The mare starts into a quick walk, then a trot, then a gallop, and the dogs follow, pulling taut their leads. My wet clothes hang on me, leaden and demanding, and my lungs heave up coughs as soon as I start running. The pointed pain in my stomach returns, and the creek boils up in my mouth, silty and sharp. Again, the brush and branches swat at my face and arms, pricks that bead with blood. The dogs heave my hips forward, and my body follows of its own accord.
“Marie?” I say, my voice a lost thing amid the winded dogs and horse, the leads and chains.
“What’re you saying back there, Martin?” Taylor turns his head over his shoulder.
“Talking to the dogs.”
He chuckles. “I think you may just be cut out for this, now.”
I don’t know what it means if that is true.
THE day after the run to the possum oak, Taylor comes to the barn to announce that I am being reassigned to the dogs. “Martin’s one of the best workers I have in this place,” Bondurant says. “And he’s my main trainer on the new men. Find someone else to run your dogs.” Though I am a decent enough worker, I believe it’s personal dislike that’s fueling Bondurant’s fight.
“You don’t want to work the dogs, do you?” Bondurant asks once Taylor is gone.
“I have grown quite used to the barn, sir, but I don’t imagine it’s my choice.”
TAYLOR’S back the next day with the warden himself.
“You’ll keep Martin through the rest of the summer months,” the warden says, Taylor a bucket of gloat at his side. “And then he’ll move over to the dogs. He can do more good for the prison over there than in the barn.”
“Yes, sir,” Bondurant replies.
I continue with my milking and mucking, delivering jars of fresh milk to Rash every Friday, though I know he’d get me my reading requests without the favors now. I exchange other jars for cigarettes — a new supplier was not difficult to find after Jennings — which I smoke in the barn or the yard, the guards turning their heads. This is new, and I appreciate it. Some moments, in the barn especially, this feels like a real life — smoke in my lungs, a summer day outside, stalls to clean. I could be a farmer going about his daily work, Marie and Gerald waiting for me at home.
I think often of that young version of Marie I saw in the woods. I know she was from my imagination, running loose of its tethers, the strain on my body clouding rational thought, but still I want to see her again. Some days I pass over meals and take too many shifts in the sun in an attempt to bring her back, to get my brain to that same place. Though she refused to share it, I know she must have something to say to me, some message from the real Marie.
Ed is still missing. The warden had to know he’d never return, but we still hear him talking about the hope of Ed’s capture.
I assume that Wilson is still in a coal mine, though I prefer to see him back on Marie’s land. Maybe this is what the young version of Marie can tell me — that Wilson has escaped and come home. I see him with his family around the table in the big house, dining with Marie and Gerald, back where he belongs. I see him working the farm, as he should, that land more his than anyone else’s. He’d worked so hard for himself and his family — Marie and her parents included — and he’d allowed a space for me in his life on that land when he had no reason to provide it. In return, I’d led him to the coal mines, feeding him all those electrical dreams, firing that interest, getting him caught with a dead body. I want my young Marie to give me word of Wilson. More than the real Marie or Gerald, Wilson’s the person it would do me best to know is all right.
The young Marie doesn’t visit me in the barn, though, and fall comes too fast. I say good-bye to Bondurant and the other men, good-bye to the milk and the cows, the smells and sounds. The loss feels similar to my departure from Lock 12 and Alabama Power, the shedding of a favored job for one I don’t want.
I keep seeing Ed in his small boat on that big ocean. Some nights he’s coming this way, those waves crashing through the oak grove to Kilby’s front doors. Other nights, I see him rowing about the streets of London. Everyone knows him by name, though he’s been gone from that city seventeen years. “Mason,” they shout. “You building boats now?”
I see Wilson laying down his pick. I see him shaking off the coal dust, see the whites of his eyes. They’re white still, not sallow like those of the men around him. He’s walking home now. Moa is waiting for him. She’ll have cooked a large meal. “Papa,” his children will say, “where’ve you been?”
But then I tell myself to stop. I have already dreamed these dreams. Their futility is contemptible, loose and wicked as the roaches in the mess.
I report to the dogs in the morning.