Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other

Yellow Mama is the new subject of myths swapped in the mess hall, the storytellers saying that something in the oak and maple Ed used, something about that wood, feeds off the electric current, breathing and swelling until those yellow legs grow strong enough to break from their metal stands and lumber away. The storytellers mimic the stomp of her wood-soled shoes in the open cell corridors at night. “She can climb stairs,” they say. “She can slip keys from the belts of the guards. She can open cell doors without making a sound.”

They say she speaks to you before she takes you away, and that her voice has a foreign accent like Ed’s. I imagine he’d enjoy these stories.

The four other men left in my cell skirt by me in brooding silence. They resent Ed’s freedom, and they turn their looks of anger and betrayal toward me now that he’s gone. Ed was a trustee, which granted him the warden’s protection. He knew the only thing keeping our cellmates from killing him in his sleep was the punishment they’d face come morning. Now, it’s just me they have to despise, and my faults are too ridiculous for these men to act upon — the letters I write, the readings I give for Chaplain, the books I keep stacked near my bunk, the Fridays I spend in the library. They call me Books.

“All that reading didn’t do you much good, now did it, Books?”

“Got you stuck right in here with us folks. Hell, I even got a shorter sentence.”

“Hey, Books, go on and read us something.”

“Yeah, Books — what new stories you got?”

Even when they ask me to read, derision is in their voices.

I don’t think of myself as above these men. That’s a hierarchy they’ve imposed.

Ed enjoyed his books, too, all those descriptions of ships read again and again.

It’s hot in the cell house this evening, and I rise from my bunk to go to the window. It’s impossible to see outside through the screen and bars, so it’s only my reflection I take in. My face in the glass is abbreviated, shorn of its chin and mouth in one pane, my forehead gone in the next. This is a place of fragments.

I think about Marie out there, and Gerald. They may be sitting on the front porch, staving off the heat with a bit of breeze. They may have just finished dinner. Gerald is thirteen now, a year younger than I was when I went to work in my father’s mines, but I see him as that seven-year-old he was when we first moved to the farm, a quiet boy in the corner with a book from his grandfather’s library.

I see the other fights we had before the one that sent me to fields, fights between him and Marie and me, always the same — my explosive anger and their quiet victimhood.

I stayed away until morning, that night I dreamed up the transformers.

“What the hell you doing over there, Books? You’re giving me the goddamned creeps.” This is Fred Hicks talking.

Gil Boyd adds, “You pining for your husband, Books? Missing his arms round you in the warm night?”

The others laugh and Reed pats his bunk. “You want to crawl in here with me, pretty?”

This gets them going all the more. Our fourth cellmate, Vincent, lost his hearing in a mine explosion the same day he stabbed his overseer in the side. He loves to join in, but tonight he’s facing the wall in his upper bunk, oblivious of the talk.

Ed was better at defending himself than I am.

“I’m missing my wife and boy,” I tell these men, looking over my shoulder, “like you’re missing your whores and bastards.”

Reed is up on his feet. “What’s that, Books? Your husband ain’t here to protect you no more. Best not start trouble.”

I know full well that Reed is married. I know he left his wife with four children to raise on her own. He’s in on assault and sex crimes, and the words that go round this place say his children took the brunt of it.

Hicks and Boyd aren’t moving, but the grins on their faces show their thirst for my injury.

I am tired of this place, so I say to Reed, “You’re right. I have no business insulting your wife, being smart and strong enough to marry the likes of you. Brilliant woman I’m sure.” I know that he will attack me, and I want him to be unmerciful, so I say, “Those kids though — they couldn’t possibly be yours, so I stand by the bastard comment, if you take my meaning.”

Hicks and Boyd both laugh — they find Reed as disgusting as I do and Ed did — but that doesn’t forgive me my place inside this prison. They will always side against me.

Reed turns his back, and I think for just a moment that I’ve won this conflict, but he turns back fast, a knife in his hand, something homemade and ragged up to its point. There is no handle, just this great triangle of metal, and I don’t even have the time to yell or turn or block before he drives it deep into my thigh.

The pain is a shard the same thickness as the blade, just as ragged and grubby. It doubles in width when he pulls the metal free.

Boyd is shouting and so is Hicks, and I see them clambering from their bunks, but before either of them gets to Reed, he’s buried the metal in my stomach, and I am vaguely aware of the popping sound the point makes as it goes through my skin. Other sounds come from every direction — more yelling, running footsteps, the ever-present jangle of keys, clubs on bars, the demands of guards, and I’m on the floor of my cell, the cool concrete under me — how is it cool in this heat?

Aman is leaning over me, and I hear the words he’s saying, but part of my mind sticks in dreams, peculiar scenes that feel tilted and waffly.

I am in a pasture fighting with a man who’s killed my grandchildren. He shot them in the chest, and I’m showing Marie their bodies. She looks at them indifferently before saying, “They never meant much to me.” The man jumps between us. We both have rifles, but we fight with them as though they are swords. He pushes me away and fires in Marie’s direction.

“Mr. Martin?”

Marie is gone, and the man is surrounded by small beasts with smashed, toothy muzzles and the ears of hounds. He points at me. “Put him back to sleep.”

CONSCIOUSNESSbreaks in briefly, coinciding most often with visits from Chaplain. I see him in patches of fog, a wavering crow there by my bed, flapping his black wings. He reads to me from Job. “We’re all tested in different ways, Roscoe,” but I am not Job. I may even deserve the infection that’s taken over the bandaged wounds on my leg and stomach, pitching me into a fever this warm and prickly. I don’t know whether this is Chaplain sitting at my side or, indeed, a big crow, set to devour me. His voice is a raspy caw, his mouth peaked and pointed.

He pecks at my sheets and then my arm, nipping at my clammy skin, then he opens a book with his black wings and reads, “ ‘And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband.’ Where is your wife, Roscoe?”

I don’t know which of us is asking this question.

“Listen, Roscoe.” The crow reads more from his book. He reads, and the words eddy and swirl like the Coosa. They break and pitch like Ed’s ocean. They are birdsong and wind, a field of corn, a bricked powerhouse. They are lines and insulators and poles. They are the branching veins of George Haskin.

“Is there a storm?”

“No.”

“The wind,” I say. “It’s so loud, and the rain.”

“It’s a beautiful, sunny day.”

“You brought the ocean, didn’t you, Ed? Brought it right into Kilby like I thought you would. How’d the warden take it?”

“Nurse,” the crow says. “Nurse.”

And there is my nurse. Here she is.