They keep me out in the hall for at least ten minutes, but when I return to that unfortunate chair, their decision is the same.
“The board feels that you would benefit from more rehabilitation,” the bald man says. “We are denying your parole. Your next hearing will be held in two years.”
“Thank you.” I go with my guards back through the corridors and gates and doors, back to the yard, where they will turn me loose.
CHAPTER 17
The prosecution hadn’t been able to prove exactly when the transformers and the lines went in and finally settled for $1,000 in reparation. The farm carried the debt, and Marie had wanted it gone as soon as possible. Without the men and the thresher, the farm wasn’t making enough money to cover its own expenses, let alone any additional payments, and so she’d sought out a teaching position in Rockford the following fall. Roscoe had been away nearly a year, and Wilson’s sons were doing good work keeping the farm in order. Marie felt she could take herself away. She trusted her father’s land in the hands of Wilson’s family. Gerald came with her to the schoolhouse, though he kept his distance, his nose in his books and his thoughts on his father. Marie saw Roscoe there in the boy’s eyes and his cheekbones and hair. She saw Roscoe in his desire to leave — a son wanting to run from his home. “Gerald!” she would call in class. “What is the answer?”
Only when she directly confronted him would he speak: “Columbus. The capital of Ohio is Columbus.” He always knew.
Marie’s salary was meager, but she was able to put most all of it toward the power debt, and by the spring she’d paid it in full.
Marie wasn’t expecting the man from Alabama Power who arrived on her doorstep a little over a year later in mid-June, summer vacation stretching long and difficult for her and her son. Because the man’s appearance was a surprise, it reminded her of when the sheriff came for Roscoe. She was bristly when she opened the door, stiff and curt.
She spoke through the screen, keeping the latch held tight. “May I help you?”
“Marie Martin?”
“Yes.”
He explained his position with the power company, as well as his intent. “Do you have a moment?”
She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone with his hands or mind in electricity. The whole enterprise was slippery, dishonest, alternating. Here and then gone. She thought of Roscoe’s explanations, all those passionate lectures he’d given her about forces and impulse — circulation, laps, and runs. All of it was ugly, now, a deeply channeled ugliness that was burned like the body of George Haskin. She saw the prosecutor’s description — the blackened fingers and darkened veins. A book—Parnassus on Wheels—would join this image, and Marie would watch it fly over her head to hit one of her mother’s ceramic plates that hung on the wall, the porcelain falling slowly to the floor, where it shattered against the wood her father had laid, board by board. Gerald came next, his arms bruised purple and blue, yellow tinged at the edge, marks the shapes of his father’s fingers. There was so much to see.
“I have a moment,” Marie told the man from Alabama Power.
The day was already warm, the night’s chill burned away. The mockingbirds were loud in the pecan trees, and a solitary crow called out from the roof of the barn.
Marie sat down in one of the porch rockers.
“Is this a bad time, ma’am?”
“No worse than any other.” She motioned to the chair across from her. “Please sit.”
Marie knew that the girl who’d made her dead mother’s bed had grown into the cold woman she was now. She hadn’t meant to turn out this way, but once the push started, she’d been incapable of reversing it. She was not a welcoming woman, not kind. She was strong and reasonable and disciplined.
“Ma’am?”
She recognized the man’s youth, a child really. What was he doing on this errand? So innocent-faced, rough-cheeked, haphazardly shaved, a bit of stubble near his ear and again under his nose. Marie couldn’t tell whether he was handsome. “You want to bring power back in?”
“Yes, ma’am. The company’s started a rural electrification program, and your property is high on the list.”
Marie nodded.
“There’s very little that needs to be done, really. We’ll have a crew examine your existing lines, and then they’ll put in a meter. From what I heard, your place was fully wired. Imagine it’d be nice to get back to that.”
“I don’t much care for electricity.”
The young man looked perplexed. She could tell that he knew their story, knew her husband was a convict, far away in a prison somewhere, charged with the death of a man who’d held a job like his own. The young man clearly knew that they’d turned a nice profit in their time of electricity — the newspapers had reported as much — and that, were it not for the illegality of it, their experiment would’ve been lauded as revolutionary, the next great frontier of modern agriculture. His face asked her why she wouldn’t want to return there. Why not retrace those steps?
“Ma’am? You don’t care for electricity?”
“No. But it would probably do the farm good to have it back.” Marie looked toward the stand of trees that stood between the main house and the Grices’ quarters. Moa was still over there, tending to her family, crippled as it was without its father.
Marie had asked them to move into the big house — there was room enough — but Moa refused: “No, Miss Marie. No, no.”
Marie wanted one of the boys to appear — Charles or Henry — so that she could tell the young man from Alabama Power that they were her land managers. She wanted to say that the decision was theirs. Whatever they decide is fine.
She was tired of decisions. There’d been so many in the past two years. “All right. Install your meter.”
Relief pushed its way through the man’s features. His ears were uneven on his head, and a slim, white scar ran its way across his chin. Marie noticed these pieces of him, letting herself stare. She was losing herself, she knew, sinking into something untenable, a deep well with madness at its bottom. The feel of it — slippery, cool, damp — hung on her like the wash she no longer helped Moa hang on the line, wrung to wrinkles and still dripping. Any previous version of herself would not stare so long at this young man’s face, taking in the enlarged pores on his nose, the clump of hairs between his brows, the near absence of lower eyelashes, the irises like clay, muddy red.
She watched his lips say, “That’s wonderful news, ma’am.” The lips were chapped in places, dried to white. “We’ll have a crew out within the week, and we’ll send you rate details in the mail.”
She recognized the words the man was saying, but she heard them for their sounds, not their meaning. Like birdcalls, she thought, a detectable pattern. She heard notes rise, pitches and drops. The combination equaled pleasure, contentment. She was sure she’d be able to identify this young man by his call alone, pin him as a company man, reaching completion on a difficult task. Hear that lilt? she would say. That’s self-satisfaction.
The man stood. Marie could tell he wanted to go, get on with his other visits (were there other visits?). He wanted to be done with this strange woman who didn’t care for electricity. “Do you have any questions?”
“No.”
MARIE set to work in the kitchen. Peaches were ready for canning. Moa and Jenny would be over to help, and they would spend their day in orange-red flesh, steam, and heat. Though Jenny complained righteously, Marie didn’t mind the discomfort — the dampness of her skin, sweat-beaded forehead, sticking cotton, heavy hair. She had always enjoyed physical work, and she could well have forgone the university and stayed home and tended the farm. She could’ve married one of the sweet boys from Rockford, raised on neighboring land, and they could’ve run their joined properties with ease and simplicity. Electricity would’ve been something far off and foreign until the day a young man knocked on the door to ask if they’d like to run some poles in. Lovely, she would say. Let’s try it.