Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other

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 .

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.

Idon’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.

Istill 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.”