Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

But the well. That is legend. He tried to swim his way out through tunnels Bennie Combers swore were there. A great underground river Bennie said that would take him quickly to the big river. Plenty of room to draw breath. But there was no river, no room for breath. He got turned around and nearly lost his life, swimming downward in the dark. They hauled him out with a scrap of net he was barely able to crawl into.

No, well, no, not today, he thinks, the sunlight like warm cream on his bare arms. Not today a swim into the dark.

He wore himself out on those early escapades, wore out the craziness. He got a reputation, and cognomen, as a willful, uncooperative prisoner, UNC in capital letters on the yellow manila folder that goes with him as he makes his way around the state prison system. The sun is sticky on his face. He could wipe it off like sap from his arms and hands and clean it from his face but he doesn’t want to. The light and heat soak into his body. He unbuttons his shirt, pulls it away from his chest. The spray of scanty corkscrewed hair soaked in sunlight. You can take your shirt off if you want to, but nobody with any sense takes his shirt off under a sun like this. A black man burns just like a white one. He pulls the blue-and-gray-striped cloth away from his chest. He smells his body odor, sour as oakwood and comforting. Just working a button through a buttonhole gives him a sense of freedom. So does walking across the yard with nowhere the white man told him to go, returning by his own will to the barracks.

He steps along to the well. Milo lets go his arm, grabs one of the long galvanized buckets and lowers it. Delvin listens to the bucket clank hollowly against the sides. He feels a generation older than the boy who jumped into that other well. He leans over the parapet far enough to dip his face into the column of cool air the bucket stirs up. Leaning slightly to the side he can see the sky reflected in the black water. He jumped not toward that pinned-down blue but toward the stars. When you bring the water up it is neither blue or black, it is clear as crystal. They say it tastes of sulfur, but the taste is more like the mold on a old piece of hoop cheese.

Milo pulls steadily on the rope. The bucket, spilling water as it comes, reaches the top.

Delvin presses his hand and then his face against the chilly wet galvanized metal. The feel of it sends him back into his dreams. Celia speaking to him from the rainwet front steps of her friend’s house. She is telling him to read — who was it? Douglas? No. Freeman. This goes by in a zip. He hasn’t thought of Freeman for years, has forgotten him. A writer first mentioned by the professor. Well, these books, these volumes written to prove the black man deserves his freedom, are all right. They make you, while you read them, free. Books come in packed in sacks of rice, sacks of salt. They are directed to particular inmates but the included instructions are ignored. Once in a while the inmates get visitors, wives and mamas and shamed weeping daddies gathered in the fenced-off portion of the yard under a big live oak. You can socialize. In gunny sacks they bring pies and apples and kumquats and pieces of molasses candy wrapped in a wax paper twist. These bits of food are all that is allowed in. No books, no hardware, no toiletries, not even soap. There are no chairs, people sit on the ground or squat on their heels, men who will be back to work Monday morning in sharecropped cotton fields, women who will be cooking for a dozen or stooping with the men in the fields hoeing cotton or picking it or in summer cropping tobacco. They bring fresh-squeezed cane juice in glass jars, blue jars children hold to the light to see the colors in.

He dips both hands in the bucket — forbidden, but he’s forgotten this rule, for now — and splashes water on his face. He holds his face up to the sunlight and feels the cool burning as the sun takes the water back.

With Milo’s help he tips the bucket and pours the well water over himself. He wears the sulfurous shirt and pants and coarse heavily washed canvas underwear issued to all those who survive a stay in the breakdown ward. The water will leave its residue of sulfur stink but sweat will soon enough wash that out. The old yearning flares again, a piece of it, the edging of the spirit toward freedom that in prison you have to nub off short, most men have to. It roots in him like a sweet potato raised in a glass jar. He feels himself listing. His joints ache and he has a headache, but the crushing chills are gone. They piled gunny sacks on him. He begged them to lie on top of him, but they wouldn’t. In his mind a big bearskin black and stinking of bear lay on him, but later when he asked after it nobody knew what he was talking about.

From the well a spokeway of paths radiates. In some past now lost prisoners were required to walk a certain line to the well. Now these paths each barely a foot wide are sunk in the clay; everybody naturally follows them. “A lesson for you and me,” he says to Milo, pointing this out to him.

“You don tol me,” Milo says, grinning.

“That’s okay,” he says. “I forget what the lesson was.”

Milo places the empty bucket back in its little wooden slot at the foot of the well and they proceed on their way. They take the slightly curving path he named Lope. He named all the paths. Chicago, New York, Bright Leaf Trail, Dixie Highway, Salvation; he keeps the names to himself. Shielding his eyes, he looks at the nearest tin-sheathed tower. One of the guards, Hammersmith, idly watches him. He is the one brought his last letter, one of the four he has received in the last six years (since he left from Uniball), from his old train riding friend Frank. The letter was stamped Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Patches, long rectangular strips, were cut out of the pages. The religious fervor of our time is , then blank, a hole letting the air in. Must have been some fiery words. Then the sentence : Apples are America’s most loved fruit , then more air. Then: but what can we know of another’s anguish? then air, then the words: anyone whose suffering is one grain worse than our own is one we can’t, then more air. The words the heat of them , and then Frank’s fervor and cool distancing sliced away. Five other pages were similarly rejigged. The pages looked like paper cutouts. Here and there a partial sentence (in our own selves we have to find. .; confused and broke we embrace. .; cancer for. .; a tenderness most. .) scraps of words, a litter really, somebody’s fresh trash. He had memorized every bit, even the odd words (reddish, conservationist, river’s, unoffered) they were like gates, buckles, fasteners, letting life in, or out; there were dozens of them. He dug a hole in the clay under his bunk and hid the letter there, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth. It would be all right if it wasn’t there the next time he looked. Frank was trying to tell him something important; the guards saw that. There was no return address: that too was turned into an air hole, escape vent.

He leans heavily on Milo’s thin strong arm. They roll as they walk, pals airing it out. Milo chatters about breakouts, about the new man, a gingercake named Arthur Fowler who, so Milo says, has tattooed a portrait of his superior court judge on his chest in an attempt to get a mistrial.

“I love the way courtrooms smell,” Milo says.

Two years ago Milo was thrown by a guard into a pyracantha bush and one of the thorns pierced his left eyeball. He can see light and shadow with that eye — enough in this world, he says, to tell what’s what. An escape attempt carried him to the bush. “Got to get me some wings,” he says now when asked about it.