Where is Beau?
“Marie, I’m scared.”
Her face is sad, and our woods are full of noise. Sounds arrive from the way we came, pounding feet and shouting voices, horse hooves, more dogs. My own start whining.
The warden himself makes our spot of land first, high up on his chestnut gelding, the handsomest of the prison herd. “Christ. Jesus Christ. What’s this, Martin?”
Tell him it was you, Marie whispers.
“Martin!” the warden shouts.
Marie disappears, but I hear her words still, granting me guilt, handing me the burden of Stevens’s body on the ground. If I take it, I sever my ties with the warden and Taylor, Chaplain and Rash. I become worse than Reed and his knife, than Hicks and Boyd and Vincent, worse than Beau even. If I claim this, I walk myself to a single cell outside Yellow Mama’s room, and I wait to meet her.
Is that where I should go, Marie?
“Martin!” the warden shouts again. “Who the hell did this?”
Me. I did. Though everyone would know I’m lying, know I have no gun, no motive, but still — it was me. Bind my wrists and walk me back to prison. Strap me to Ed’s chair. Bring me my electricity.
I will the words to my mouth. Me. I did this. I’m working with Hughes. We had it planned. And then I say, “Hughes. He was hiding inside. The dogs led us here. Beau had Stevens go to the door.”
Just as I say it, Beau rises from the brush, leaves clinging to the arms of his uniform. “Man turned his gun on me next, sir. It was all I could do to dive out of its range.”
The dogs whine.
“Hush your goddamned dogs,” the warden says to me, and I do.
Beau has become a coward before us, shamed and disgraced.
The warden kneels at Stevens’s white face. The man’s lips still move, but his body has grown quiet.
“You’re not going to make this one,” the warden says. “Take your shirt off, Martin. Cover the man’s insides, at least.”
I pull off my shirt and lay it flat over the shiny mess of Stevens’s stomach. The fabric soaks up the blood, and mosquitoes make quick for my exposed skin. The dog belt digs deeper into its rut in my back. My ribs show too much, my stomach a caved thing under its puckered scar. It feels disrespectful to be standing so naked in front of a dying man.
Guards arrive, and Michaels, winded behind his leads. They stare at Stevens and the warden. They’re as lost as my dogs. Beau still stands half in his bushes.
Taylor finally comes.
“Lucky your horse tripped, old man,” the warden says. “Seeing as you like to deliver the knock, would’ve been you lying here.”
Taylor must know the truth in this; Beau, too.
“Let him lie here until he’s gone,” the warden says to the guards. “Then put him on a horse. It was Hughes that did this. Big fellow. You guys know him. Start that chase again, fellows. Martin, you and this other one”—the warden points to Michaels—“get those dogs back on the scent. I’ll be behind you.” He signals out a young guard. “Head on back to the grounds and let them know what’s going on. And fetch the chaplain, and a crew to take care of that horse.”
“Sir,” the man says.
My shirt has gone red.
Beau comes closer. “I’ll go with the dogs, sir.”
“You’ll stay with this man,” the warden booms. “And you’ll escort his body back to the prison, and then you’ll take a seat on one of those benches outside my office and wait as long as you have to until I’m done with this.”
“Yes, sir.”
Michaels and I step inside the shack to get the dogs’ noses on the smell again — there on that rag, here on the floor. They catch and bray, yipping and pulling.
How is it I am running again? Stevens is dying or dead behind me, and Beau has been publicly shamed, but everything else is as it was. Men leave trails behind them. They run from dogs that only want a chase. Branches bend to our weight, sticks break under our boots. My legs ache and my back, yet I am still harnessed to these beasts, my own and Stevens’s, all five of them. I have lost my stomach and leg to scars, my arm to ruin, my collarbone to a permanent cave.
No matter the changes in me, they will keep me running. Taylor will keep me searching through books for him. Rash will keep me shelving. Chaplain will keep me reading to his flock before their suppers. This place will take pieces of me, chunks and bites, until I am Stevens, filling someone else’s shirt with blood.
IT’S dark by the time the dogs stop. They’ve led us to a weather-beaten house on the Alabama River, right near its start — the state’s river flowing out of the marriage of the Coosa and the Tallapoosa. The house can’t hold more than a room or two. Lamplight glows from its square windows. The warden climbs down from his horse and guards stake out their positions in the surrounding brush. Michaels and I are told to keep our dogs quiet and out of the way. We separate to keep them calmer, and I find myself alone in the trees.
The people inside must know we’re there, but they’re making no sign of it.
The warden steps up on the tilting, craggy porch to deliver that great Alabama Department of Corrections knock on the door, followed by the boom of his great voice. “We know Henry Hughes is in there. You just send him out without a fuss.”
Scuffling and shouts come from inside, then the door opens to a man even larger than Hughes. The warden has his rifle aimed, along with three or four other barrels out there in the dark. The large man has hold of Hughes’s arm, and he shoves him forward. Hughes trips on the threshold and goes down to his knees at the warden’s feet.
“Oh, Henry,” a woman sobs, coming to stand next to the huge man. “You told us you was out.”
“That’s not the case, ma’am,” the warden says.
“Goddamned bastard,” the man in the door shouts. “Goddamn you for bringing this down on your mama. You folks take his sorry ass back to that prison and you lock him up tight, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.” I’ve never before heard the warden call anyone sir.
Hughes’s mama leans over him, tugging on his thick shoulders. “Why, Henry? Why’d you do this to us? You was s’pposed to do your time and come back home for good.”
Hughes keeps his head low. “I was just so tired of it, Mama.”
“You do your time and you come back home. To stay.”
The warden doesn’t tell her he’s a murderer now, that this run will cost him the whole rest of his life. Hughes’s original sentence was for liquor and larceny, and his max time would’ve been ten years. He told me once about the money he’d made, the corn he’d stolen. His still is back there with Stevens, the remains of a shack in the dark.
The warden lets him hug his mother before putting on the cuffs. The large man — Hughes’s father, I assume — has already gone back inside. I want to tell Hughes that I’ve been renounced in the same way, and that the only way to live with it is to hate the man who hates you, to believe you hated him first.
There is a hand on my shoulder. Marie. You could’ve saved him.
“Marie.”
He’ll die now. You could’ve stopped that.
I don’t know that I could have.
Marie’s hand moves to my face, cupping my jaw. She’s so beautiful.
“Why did you make me move?”
She brings her young lips to my old ones, roughened and coarse. Why did you come? Her lovely head nods toward Hughes, the cuffs on his wrists, the tears on his mother’s face, the absence of his father. Own this. It’s yours.