“Plenty of time for that. There’s a meal cooking at home. Best get you back.”
Maggie jumped in the truck bed with little prompting, and I tied her rope to one of the slats to keep her from diving out. I’d never ridden in a vehicle with Wilson. I’d never seen him drive, but he performed it with ease, his left limb propped against the wheel when his right needed to shift.
“Did Marie send you?”
Wilson eyed me, an old look I knew well. “When’s the last time you heard from Marie, Ross?”
“Nine years ago.”
“There’s time for that, too. Kilby hand out pets to everyone they let go?”
“I worked the dogs.”
“You a dog boy, then? Chasing down escapees?”
I nodded.
“That was a wanted job at the mine. Kept you aboveground, got you out in the woods. What’d it keep you out of?”
“The dairy.”
“Dairy sounds good to me.”
There are days the dairy sounds good to me, too. Days I picture myself back there even though I know it’s nowhere I belong.
The truck rattled down the dirt lane to the highway, and there were the oaks. Kilby sat behind us, watching our dust through its many eyes.
“Where’s Marie?”
“Mobile.”
I didn’t know how that could be true. I had always — only — seen her on her father’s land. Marie moving us to that place set me to building those transformers and stringing those lines along the cornfield and electrifying that thresher. George Haskin wouldn’t have had anything to explore if we hadn’t been there. The time I’d served in Kilby grew from my time on that land, and there would have been no time on that land without Marie’s insistence that we move there.
Electrical work could be come by in Mobile. Why not take us there directly?
“Mobile?”
“Moa’s making you a fine meal, Ross. All the trimmings.”
“Why is Marie in Mobile?”
Wilson had the stump of his arm up on the door now, alongside the open window. His right hand was scarred, raised strips thatching the skin, some pink, some black. “You were expecting her here? Thought she’d be waiting?”
I don’t know if I thought that. “I didn’t expect her to be in Mobile.”
“There’s plenty you didn’t expect, Ross.”
I thought he was referencing George Haskin and our sentences, but I know now he was talking about our new lives, the lives that were starting there in that truck.
The highway went on before us. Spring had come, the oaks bright with their new leaves. Hollies dotted green in the lower brush, some sprouting high enough to rival the trees. The road was smooth and newly painted, and it made me think of Ed’s chair. We passed into a stand of shortleaf pine, with its bunchy needles and clustered cones. The cones grow opposite one another on the branch, a reflection — that’s how you can tell the tree apart from other pines.
Maggie held her head in the air, nose tipped high, ears flapping.
“What’s Marie doing in Mobile?”
“Teaching.”
“And Gerald? Where’s he?”
“Tuscaloosa.”
“Going to the university?”
“That’s right.”
Gerald made sense there, but Marie was a mystery I couldn’t solve — not the young version of her or the grown one that might have come to see me in the infirmary. Nurse Hannah had never confirmed or denied that shifty presence.
“Did Marie visit the prison?”
“We got notice of you being laid up. Course Moa got no word about this.” Wilson lifted the stump of his left arm. “They didn’t even tell her where they sent me, probably had no record of it themselves. Just a list of numbers, you see, taking our shifts. You know their favorite saying about leased men? ‘One dies, get another.’ ” Wilson thumped his damaged arm against the door. “See, I’m told I’m lucky, Ross. Would’ve been dead if they hadn’t chopped this off and cauterized what was left. You ever smell flesh burning?”
“Not up close.”
“From a distance, then.”
“There’s a smell when they use the chair at Kilby.”
“The chair!” Wilson laughed. “They give you dogs when you get out. Infirmaries when you’re hurt. Books to read. Even your executions get special treatment. At Sloss, it’s either the mine or a guard that delivers that sentence.” He shook his head and smiled as if it were the funniest thing he’d heard. “A chair! You get to consult on that, Ross? Lend your electrical expertise?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame.”
I didn’t tell him how close I’d been to its builder.
We eventually left the highway for a county road, the packed clay spinning into red dust behind us. The trees on the right had yielded to long stretches of peanuts just starting to spread. Small plots of spring crops were amongst them — lettuces and onions. It sent me back to the mess hall, some fellow from the fields talking about onion bulbs, yellow and red and white. “We’ve got two onion seasons,” I heard him say. “You got to put the bulbs in the ground early February, pull that crop early June, then you’re in with your winter bulbs late September.”
The poles alongside us held the line I had tapped. They turned about two miles up to run along that far edge of the field.
In a quarter mile, we pulled onto the rutted drive that led to the house and the barn. The same pecans lined the way, their leaves full and green. The fields stretched out behind them. Everything I saw made me terrified to see the next. The pole fence still ran to the west end of the sling-backed barn, one new rail bright against the weathered others. There was the chicken coop, the chickens. Every piece was there, not much different from how I’d imagined it at Kilby. I’d seen myself walking up that drive, Maggie next to me. “We’ve been hunting rabbits,” I’d heard myself say. I am just a hunter with my dog.
Maggie whined in the back loud enough for us to hear.
“Nice of her to do the speaking for you both,” Wilson said.
Then the house emerged from the oaks. There was the white clapboard and the double porches — top and bottom, as Marie’s father had insisted. The chimneys rose from their opposite sides, the brick seated in place with signs of fresh mortaring. The porches had not sunk with time like so many we’d driven past — an eastern corner sagging toward the ground, a post rotted through, the eave collapsing. The paint was fresh. The same two rockers sat on the lower porch, but they’d been sanded and varnished to look new. They must have been made of strong wood, and I wished Ed were there to tell me the grain.
When I first saw Kilby, I thought it looked like a school with a lighthouse out front, strange things to me both, but that clean farmhouse was unfamiliar, too. We’d never polished the grounds quite that shiny. Even when the money was coming in, we’d left the creepers on the chimneys. Marie had liked them.
Her horse was nowhere to be seen, long dead, I supposed.
Wilson pulled up to the shop and reached across his body to open his door with his only hand. “You sit here a minute if you need to. Supper will be ready soon, and I know Moa’s anxious to set eyes on you, but you get your bearings out here first.” He stepped free of the cab. “You want me to let your dog out? She won’t go after the chickens, will she?”
“No.”
He slammed his door, and I watched him lift one of the wooden rails out to give Maggie leave of the truck bed. She was reluctant to jump down, and Wilson slid that stump of his arm under her waist, his right arm round her neck, lifting her to the ground gentle as a baby.
Wilson had been my friend. We had strung lines and seen crops turn to money and eaten dinners and watched our kids grow. Marie’s father had always hired his help. Marie’s grandfather hadn’t had slaves. Wilson had been a free man his whole life until our arrest.