But I already own so much — our lost children and Wilson’s death in a coal mine and George Haskin and all the anger I’ve dealt. I can’t own this, too.
“Martin!” the warden shouts. “Michaels! Keep your dogs on him.”
We nudge them toward Hughes, and they pull their leads tight to get at his scent. I will him an escape, a tunnel the likes of which I willed for Jennings, something deep that leads to the sea. Ed will meet him there on the beach, and they’ll row back to London, banding together in their thievery. I was wrong to want him captured.
If I could, I would apologize.
A wagon arrives at dawn, and guards shepherd us into its bed. They encircle Hughes, and leave Michaels and me to settle our dogs. The eastern sky is a dusty pink, nearly orange, and the faint remains of a few stars are toward the west. I unhitch my belt, tell my dogs to lie down, then lie down myself.
They can’t rouse me when we get back to Kilby, and I’m told that it only takes one tall guard to heave me over his shoulder and drop me on the cot in my cell.
I sleep through the day and most of the night, waking to half dreams in the dark. The walls come in waves, like Ed’s ocean, and I can almost make him out on the other side of the bars.
“What are you doing up so late, Ross?”
“Hughes will get your chair for killing that boy.”
“That’s not our concern.” He starts humming the ballad that the men have made up as a prayer to Yellow Mama. “ ‘I know I done wrong. I know I must pay. I sat in this jail one thousand days. The appeals run out. I will not win. I done did my time, and I’ve had my last feast. Yellow Mama have mercy on me.’ She’ll have mercy on Hughes, don’t you worry.”
I hear Marie again, telling me to take Hughes’s place. “It’s such a quiet way to go,” she whispers. “All at once. They can’t take any more pieces out of you.”
Now, every man in Kilby is singing to Yellow Mama, a great ocean choir, and there’s an organ, and Chaplain is up at the pulpit with his hands tented under his chin, and he’s praying to Yellow Mama right along with us, and angels are singing with the men in the fields, and Ed’s ocean crashes against Kilby’s shore.
I don’t feel rested come morning, and Taylor says I look like hell when I arrive at the pens with the dog pail.
“Shame,” he says. “The whole damn thing. Loss of a good man, and now Hughes is a damn murderer. At least we lost Beau, huh?”
“Sir?”
“Warden let him go as soon as he got back from the chase. Man’ll have a tough time working in corrections ever again, that’s for damn sure.” Taylor is breaking ranks to tell me this and he passes over it quick. “We’re going to do some close-in training on the pups today. Go easy on you, all right? Head over to their pen when you’re done with the feeding.”
“Yes, sir.”
I wish for my young Marie.
You best quit your ghosts, I hear my father saying. Focus on what’s here rather than what’s in your head. Do your damn work, Roscoe.
“All right, Pa.”
I respect his words just now, a truth in them I couldn’t catch before. Here in this barn with my hands bloodied by meat scraps and dusted with bonemeal, my nose stuffed up with the stink of it — here I can see why he took such comfort in those veins of coal. They were tangible, as were the coal cars and the mules and the men. They could be touched and moved, nothing like the slippery currents running through the wires I so admire. His coal was like the corn in the fields or the cows in the barn or the dogs in their pens — solid things we can feel with our hands and see with our eyes, smell and hear and taste. There’s relief in that sort of integrity.
I’d like to tell him I understand.
PART II
I still see Kilby, all of it spread before me — the yard, the mess hall, the infirmary, the chapel, the toolshed, the dairy barn, the gates and wide stretches of wall, my own tar-black fingers. Then I see that truck in the dirt lot the day I walked free, its body a deep green like the leaves of the hackberry, wooden slats round its bed. It was a farm truck, a work truck, and I wanted Marie to be inside.
Hughes was on his way to meet Yellow Mama, and I had finally gotten parole. Hughes gave it to me, too, that run of his. While I was sitting on that same bench outside the parole room, waiting on the board’s decision, the warden told me the news. “Hell of a run you did, carrying on after Hughes pulled that shotgun. We note that sort of thing in your file.” The warden offered me a cigarette. “You’ll be pleased with their call this time.”
So I wasn’t surprised when the large man, who’d taken the bald man’s place, told me I was going free.
Chaplain sought me out to lay his hand on my shoulder. He read to me from Isaiah, a passage about trees clapping their hands at my return, and he gave me a Bible.
Rash gave me a dictionary and Hartley’s book about dogs. “Damn it, I’m glad you’ve gotten paroled, but I hate that you’re leaving.”
I found Dean in the mess. “Keep going to the library. Even though I won’t be there.”
“Hell, Books. It won’t be as good, but I’ll give it a shot.”
That was as close as I came to saying good-bye to a friend within those walls.
I sent one letter home, telling Marie the date of my release. Please collect me from the prison on April 10. I’ll be coming out the front doors around 3:00 p.m. If that letter went unanswered like all the others and no one came, I was sure I would never go back to the land. I would go to the ocean, and I would find myself a lighthouse.
But a farm truck was in the parking lot, and I knew it was there for me. A rifle and fishing rod hung in the rear window, and they kept me from seeing the head of the driver.
“Martin!” I heard from behind me, Taylor’s rough voice. “I got a send-off for you.”
Maggie was at his side, her great nose to the sky, trying to find what she should sniff out.
“She’s tired, and I don’t think she’s got another litter in her. Makes her no good to me. Figure you could take her to pasture.” Taylor put a ratty length of rope in my hand, its other end tied to Maggie’s collar. He’d never part with one of his leather leads.
“Thank you, sir.” We shook hands.
“Best not see you back here.”
“Yes, sir.”
He tugged on one of Maggie’s ears, then gave her a swat on the butt. “Go on, old mutt.”
She looked back only once at her old master. “Come on, girl.” I was grateful for the distraction, for something I could focus on rather than the hope of my real wife, there in the dirt lot of Kilby.
When we were a few yards away, the driver’s door opened, and Marie did not step out.
I stopped, and Maggie tensed at my side. Is this who I’m looking for? her body asked. Do you need me to point?
“Wilson.” His hair was short, and a few more lines were round his eyes, but his face didn’t look much older than it had the last time I’d seen him. He walked toward me, coming round the back of the truck, and I saw his left arm then — gone from the elbow down.
My right arm hung tucked in its bend against my body, but my hand was there, my forearm, and I made good use of them. I still do.
Maggie growled.
“No. Sit.”
“Got yourself a dog, Ross?” Wilson held out his right hand, and I shook it just as I had Taylor’s a moment before. “Problem with your arm, there?”
“Shoulder injury. I don’t have full use of it anymore.”
Wilson raised the stump of his left arm. “Full use of what I have left.”
“What happened?”