Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Man by man he goes on retrieving the rope, picking the knots loose and coiling the rope over his elbow and through his cupped left hand. The darkness, filled with heat and a mucosal moistness, presses on him. From the dark a voice that comes from no one says: We will smother you. He goes on, slowly, retrieving the raw manila rope.

Bam! it went, bam! in his head like a pile driver sinking cypress logs into heavy Aufuskie bay mud for the new highway bridge, the actual driver and the other in his head almost the same but not quite — this other bam! that went on in his head some days until it seemed anchored not in memory but in his soul, bam! of doors closing and days ending and of time itself like a heavy hammer banging down hard on his head. He lay dreaming on his bunk in Acheron State Prison infirmary, bunk you could call it that was nothing but a few sticks of cypress wood bound together with grass rope and covered with a pile of cotton matting that he lay on, sick, the doctor said, with malaria — ague, cold plague — the red dog, they called it in the barracks — lying on his back with a headache like the sound of those pile drivers, the ones inside his head and the ones outside, lay thinking of the cold black waters of the river he had escaped into last winter and gotten maybe two chilled miles farther down before he was fished out with a mullet net by the sheriff of Alderson county, cast naked onto the raw bank and beaten across the back with a rope until he couldn’t get to his feet when ordered to. He lay dreaming of the white piano in the Emporium his mother used to nod off to in the big red parlor after a long night’s work, and slept for forty hours in the grassrope bunk, waking only to sip a little water from the tin cup Milo had placed beside his bed. Dreaming of the big snake that had lived with him and the mosquitoes that bit him and the deer flies stabbing his chest and tiny gnats settling into his ears and supping at the corners of his eyes, making themselves at home, but even in the dream he did not mind any of these creatures because he was dreaming of a white bed in a big house that opened along one side onto an airport where planes with big round propellors landed and took off and sailed away with him riding in the forward cockpit in a shiny leather helmet and a yellow silk scarf that trailed behind like a running streak engraved on the blue sky, flying to the sound of piano music.

“Well, what else can you call it,” Billy Gammon, young lawyer, says to his colleague, assistant and investigator Baco Bates, “what do you think of when you consider it, this prison —not theory now for these wandering boys, but fact? General erasure comes to mind, among other terms, bottomless pit, universal solvent, comprehensive alimentary chute, maw of hell. I know there are others. Barathrum . Into which everything they have is thrown — hopes, plans, memories of Mama mashing scuppernongs for the juice, of riding in a little square-nosed boat through the lily pads, of cutting the fool in church — you name it — memories of festiveness and of sobering up on well water and of usefulness and of that early unfortunate marriage to the sweetest girl you ever saw. . you name it. . everything’s got to go.”

He stops to look out the big picture window of the Shawl House restaurant across the square where the young men, known far and wide as the KO Boys, are just now passing hidden from view inside a big black panel van on their way the two blocks from the county jail to the courthouse. “Think of it,” Billy says, drunk at eight thirty in the morning, hardly ever undrunk these days and what of it, he would say, smiling at you as if you are his best friend once removed and the easiest person to believe in he has seen in a while, “think of the singular and well nigh mythological power of prison, Baco, of how no matter how strong or seemingly permanent that hard little flint representation, icy diamond of hopefulness or chagrin might be, that soul, I mean, you throw it through the doors of a prison and it is gone forever, dissolved into the dust and grease and sweat and the long black mordancy of that place. It makes me shudder just to think about it.”

The panel van, traveling as slowly as a hearse, rounds the corner at Cooper street, passing the Red Rooster café where several of the older men in the community sit at the back table having breakfast, the shadows of the sycamores passing soft hands over the top and sides of the van from which, if you are a small boy sneaked away from school to watch this, you would not have heard a single sound emanating, as if the truck carried not eight negro youths to what you could call their job , calling, life’s work really, or fate, over at the gray granite stone courthouse, but a load of silent ghosts.

“Jesus, Mohammed, old Confucius — you name it, Baco — truest of true loves, filial pieties of all kinds and duration, that time you stole granddaddy’s watch and sold it for passage to the Orient—”

“That wadn’t me,” Baco, a tall, bony man so skinny you thought he might crack in a big enough wind, fold in two, break apart and blow in sections away, says. “I stole a jewelry box, but I didn’t steal nary watch.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Billy says. “It could be a watch or a pair of patent leather dancing shoes or a celluloid collar you picked up off the street that had a bloodstain on it that was a clue to solving the crime of the century, or a crust of, I don’t know, of grease picked off the axle of the tumbrel carrying Marie Antoinette to the guillotine — it passes through that prison gate and disappears, gone to oblivion. Forever lost. Those boys’ lives and everything they got inside em, good or bad, is forever lost.”

As usual he has spoken too much. Baco looks with pity at him. He looks at Billy in the face, in his own face a mix of aggravation and fondness, and says, “You gon show up over there?”

“I suppose I might,” Billy says. “Sometimes I feel like I could stick my hand inside those gates and it would just disappear. I’d draw back a stump. Or I could walk right on in and I’d draw back. . nothing. It gives me a curious relief to let my mind circulate among such thoughts.”

These are the early days of the trial, and it is time to get moving. A big man with an untrained shock of hair the color of iron rust, he hoists himself up and begins to make his way to the courthouse.

He knew nothing about working on a farm but they said that’s all right boy we will teach you. They handed him a hoe and sent him into the fields. He learned the short clipped swing and chopped cotton for twelve hours a day and returned to the barracks so tired he hardly cared about eating. “I’ll sleep this one out,” he said to Marcus Millens, and Marcus just smiled a weary smile and turned to his rack. In dreams he wandered in a wide plain that he was sure one day he would get to the other side of but in the dream never did. In the morning when it was cool he felt like a man come to a new life not this one. He scribbled in his notebook sometimes but often he forgot to. He liked to stand up in the middle of the field and let the breeze play off him. Scatterings of birds passed over and he liked to send something of himself along with them, a word or a thought. It was a way to hook himself to the living world, the world that wasn’t chained down in a prison. I will be loose from here by and by, he said. He had a curious smile sometimes that the other convicts remarked on. One or two tried to beat it off of him but they weren’t successful. He didn’t know he had the smile until they made it clear. I guess I got some feeling even I don’t know about. And he believed this after a while. He would get caught up in the smells. The crotty smell of the dirt and the limber woody smell of the cotton plants, the sweet stink of bug poison, the smell of his own body and the smells that sailed over the fields, little pickets of smells, of turnips and spicy wild berries and once in a while the smell of some creature, blood even, as if down the way some ferret or quail had met its end. The prison world was one of elimination and spareness and he tried to press against this. Sometimes by holding his own wrist and just staring at the ground he thought he could get loose, or smelling his shit that he dropped behind a bush he could approach another world, but even his surging, side-stepping thoughts became thoughts of this world and his shit smelled of the field peas and sidemeat they fed him here. Still there were times, seconds like an ace in the hole, that stirred another existence in him, some ghost of times that had not been in this world but were familiar. He felt sometimes as if he was on the edge of something great. He liked to listen to the sound the wind made. Clouds like separate countries drifted from their absent worlds. He could smell Arabia or the Mongol steppes. He walked to the truck dragging his hoe to make signs in the dirt that might on their own mean something. He thought about the people he knew but this was hard on him and he tried not to do it. Cotton flowers were separately yellow or white as if there was a disagreement among them. The world was full of parts that barely fit and only fit for a little while. People turned aside, became memories or ghosts. In a split cotton boll the gray seeds lay twined in white fur. Everything would some day be far from here. He liked to taste the elements in the water he drank.