Nettie Williams, our next-door neighbor, came within minutes.
“Oh, Lord! The baby’s come!” she shouted. “Let me see the little thing.”
I was happy to settle him into her arms.
“Why he’s not even cleaned up yet. Has something gone wrong?”
“No.” The thought hadn’t occurred to me at all.
But Nettie Williams gave the baby back quickly. “The babe’s ruddy and loud, sure enough healthy. I’ll go inside and see about that bride of yours.”
In that moment, I wasn’t concerned for Marie, only for this wailing thing in my arms, this sloppy infant in need. I settled into the one rocker we had, its joints squeaking under my weight, and I bent the pointer finger on my left hand so that his small mouth could close round the knuckle, far less dirty than the fingertip. As soon as my knuckle met his mouth, he stopped his fit and sucked away contentedly at my empty skin.
Marie was far from us then. And we were far from her.
And now Maggie is here in this shed with her seven pups, all of them in need of nothing from me.
“ONE of the females is missing,” Taylor says to me on the pups’ eighth day. He sets me to searching, and eventually I find it along the east side of the run where the grasses grow tall, winding their way through the wire, creeping along the edge of the dirt, hearty enough to thrive in this dog-heavy ground. Midway down, the dog’s small head rises barely higher than the dirt, slightly covered by grass tufts. It’s in a hole Maggie must have dug.
The warmth of the pup’s body tells me it’s not yet dead, and when I bring its head to my ear, I can make out its breath, weak and ratty. It is too light, and its head cocks to the side, something wrong in its jaw that I hadn’t noticed before. It needs to die, so I press my palm against its snout, the shortest fight left, a tiny reach of the legs, a shake in the neck — not enough to constitute a struggle.
I return it to its hole and shout for Taylor.
“Maggie must’ve known,” he says.
I dig the pup’s grave right where Maggie started it, deep enough to keep out the scavengers.
Maggie walks outside into the sun, off to a corner to relieve herself. Her spine ridges out of her back in a notched line, her ribs tracing down her sides between deep furrows. Her tail is tucked between her legs, her ears dragging on the ground. Those long ears are dusty, all that silk gone gummy like horsehide under a saddle. Whelping doesn’t suit her, and I wish I could free her from it. She should be tracking someone down. She should be tied to my waist, straining and braying, those ears scooping a convict’s scent toward her nose. Ears like that have a job to do, and it has nothing to do with nursing pups.
Taylor tells me to spend the remainder of my day in the library. “Go on over to your books, Martin. Get your mind someplace else. That dirt’ll be dry come tomorrow.”
“I haven’t worked the other dogs yet.”
“Get.” His hand finds its way to my good shoulder. “Go on. I’ll expect you early tomorrow.”
I leave the barn with its smells of bone and leather, and I walk that red dirt back to the wall, where I’m let through with little notice. The yard is quiet, every man off to his job, and I’m taken by the loneliness of the place. I pass the chapel on my way to the library, and Chaplain is out front. He’s watering the flowers he’s planted. I suppose we need flowers.
“Roscoe, what brings you here?” He is crouching down, the silliest watering can in his hand, a miniature thing, fit for a child.
“On my way to the library.”
“Taylor gave you a day off?”
“We lost one of Maggie’s pups.”
Chaplain sighs, a deep, heavy breath that shakes his frame, then he holds the watering can out toward me, and like a fool, I take it. He goes inside his church without saying anything. He has disappeared before I realize he’s going, and I’m alone with that dog in a hole behind me and this watering can in my hands and these unnamed flowers at my feet.
This is Kilby Prison. We exercise in a dusty yard. Around it, a high wall is strung with wire, and in that wire is electricity, enough electricity to kill me and George Haskin and anyone, more than they run through Yellow Mama. Listen. Electricity so strong, you can hear it. A chapel is here, and our chaplain has planted flowers. They are red and blue, and because I do not know their names, I feel that they are foreign. They are not Alabama’s flowers. But they are ours.
CHAPTER 19
Nothing precipitated Wilson’s arrival — no letter from the state that had sold him or the mining company that had leased him. Wilson was gone, and then one day he was standing on the front porch.
Marie and Gerald were returning from their lessons in Rockford.
“Who’s that?” Gerald asked.
Marie squinted her eyes. “Charles?”
Gerald shook his head. “Too tall.”
They kept walking, pecan shells under their feet. Marie’s mind filled up with the crunching and cracking, the sharper moments when a shell caught the sole of her shoe in a way that nearly pierced the leather. She could almost feel the pain it would cause. A great hope was in her, something growing like a child in her stomach. She knew that frame and height, familiar as the land around her, familiar as her father’s house. She wouldn’t let herself look at the porch again, though, wouldn’t allow herself another glance until her sight would be clear and solid.
Gerald started hollering when they were about ten yards from the house, his now-long legs sprinting him forward and up those peeling porch steps. Marie tried not to hear the name her son was shouting until she was there, right next to him.
“Wilson.”
Gerald stepped away.
Marie saw Wilson’s arm, but she brought herself forward first, letting herself ignore it for the moment of his holding her, brief and chaste. Marie had put her arms around Wilson on so few occasions — the birth of Charles, her own father’s death — that they kept them light and quick. Maybe it was history pressing on them, the deep color-divided lines of their state, but maybe it was just their nature, neither of them in need of lengthy contact. Marie liked to assume the latter.
She stepped back to see Wilson fully. She closed her eyes, the picture sharp in her mind, projected against the backs of her eyelids. There was Wilson — tall and broad, a denim shirt tight across his shoulders, one sleeve of it flowing down to his right hand, the other sleeve cut short at the elbow. His left forearm was gone, the wrist and hand. Those fingers that he’d always had, capable of such work, gripping and turning and lifting — they no longer existed.
“It’s all right.” Wilson placed his one hand on Marie’s shoulder. “I’ve made my peace with it.”
“How?”
“It got me out of the mines.”
“You shouldn’t have been in the mines in the first place.”
Wilson smiled. “That’s a matter of opinion, Miss Marie.”
Marie heard Moa’s voice: “Wilson?” His name was a question, not that of a person standing there on the porch. His name was of a ghost, something as dead as his arm, something looking for its place. Moa didn’t move from behind the screen, and Marie watched her eyes rove over her husband, taking in the hair cropped close to the scalp, the new scar lines on his neck and cheek and remaining hand, the same wide-open face, and then the sleeve rolled and pinned where his left arm used to hinge.
“Oh.” Moa rushed from the house. She grabbed Wilson by the neck and covered his face with her lips, every centimeter, every ridge and dip — eyes, brows, nose, cheeks, lips, temples, forehead, lips again. And again. “Oh, Wilson.” She gasped his name like air. Then, Moa moved her attention to the remains of his arm. She gripped the biceps under its cotton, and Marie watched her fingers exploring whatever muscle and bone must be left there. Moa felt down to the pinned roll, and Marie found herself curious about what the flesh must feel like, puckered and swollen and scarred.