Cast the First Stone (3 page)

For a time the guard walked up and down the center aisle. When the convicts had become settled for the night he returned to his padded chair on the guardstand and began reading his magazine again.

I turned over and looked at the ceiling. It was about three feet above my eyes. I felt as if I was someone else. It couldn’t be me, Jim Monroe, lying there on an upper bunk in a prison dormitory. It just wasn’t so.

“Jim.”

I spun over.

Mal was standing by my bunk. “I brought you some matches,” he said.

I took them. “Thanks.” They felt like splinters and I tried to see them in the dim light.

“They’re split,” he said.

“Oh.”

“I couldn’t get back. That guy got to singing the blues and I couldn’t get away.”

“That was all right.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

After Mal left it seemed that something had changed. I looked around and listened. Then I realized it was the silence; it had become silent. Now the whispering started again. A high, falsetto voice piped, “Good night.” From another part of the dormitory a similar voice replied, “Good night.” Somebody snickered. I slid ‘way down beneath the covers and ignored them.

A half-hour later, when I thought everybody had gone to sleep, I climbed down from my bunk and went over to the latrine. Those of us who had upper bunks had wooden stools to step on. I felt very conspicuous going across the floor under the center aisle lights in my large floppy drawers. I hoped everybody was asleep. But as soon as I stepped into the light a great hissing and whistling began. The guard rapped his stick for silence. I gritted my teeth. To hell with ‘em! I told myself.

While I was standing at the urinal Jeep came out and joined me. He just stood there. “What’d that guy say about me?” he asked.

“He didn’t say any more about you than you said about him,” I grunted.

“What you want to do is wait and find out for yourself,” he said. He was wearing nylon shorts, which showed his round hairless legs. Practically everybody I’d seen slept in their long drawers. His bare flesh looked obscene.

I felt embarrassed standing so close to him. “Look, let me alone,” I said. I went back and climbed into my bunk. I tried to go to sleep but I couldn’t. All that stuff that happened in Chicago kept coming back. I could see myself asking that sonofabitching pawnbroker for five hundred dollars for the ring, and him saying just a minute and slipping out in the back room. I’d known he was calling the police. Even if he did have that one ring I had a lot of other stuff. But I couldn’t run. I never could run.

I could feel the cops hitting me in the mouth, hanging me by my handcuffed feet upside down over a door, beating my ribs with their gun butts. I could feel the blood running down my legs from where the handcuffs pinched them on the anklebone.

I had stood it as long as I could, I thought, looking at the ceiling. I might have stood it longer if I’d lost consciousness. But there had been too much pain and not enough hurt to lose consciousness. I had confessed.

I had never confessed anything in my life before. Since I was old enough to remember, the beatings I’d gotten from mother and father had taught me one lesson: Never confess. No matter what you ever did, always say you didn’t do it. Let ‘em prove it. But still deny it. That had been the one rigid rule in my code of existence. Never confess. Then there would always be a doubt, if not a chance.

But I had confessed. Now it was too new to stand thinking about. I felt like vomiting whenever I thought about it. I felt ruptured and nutted.

I tried to think of my mother. But I’d almost gotten to the place where I couldn’t think of her. I tried to think of the boys out at the club. But I’d almost gotten past them, too.

It was thinking of Chicago that I couldn’t get past. It came and went and when it went I tried to get some sleep. But it never went far enough so I could get much sleep. I’d sleep a little and then I’d wake up thinking about it. It seemed as if no sooner than I’d gotten to sleep I’d see myself lying huddled on the concrete floor in the Loop detective bureau, confessing.

I turned my head and looked out the window that was just a little above the level of my eyes. I saw the moon in a deep blue sky and a guard-turret with spotlights down the walls. I saw the guard silhouetted against the sky, a rifle cradled in his arm, the intermittent glow of the cigarette in his mouth. I saw the long black sweep of the walls beneath the deep blue distance. When you looked at the walls your vision stopped. Everything stopped at the walls. The walls were about fifty feet from the dormitory building. Just fifty feet away was freedom, I thought. Fifty feet—and twenty years.

2

W
HEN THE LIGHTS
came on next morning I put on my shoes and socks sitting cross-legged on my bunk, then lay down and stuck my legs in the air and pulled on my pants. I jumped down and got my towel and soap out of the coffee bucket and went over to the trough to wash.

It was very cold in the dormitory in the morning. The air was cold, the iron bunk frames were cold, the concrete floor was cold, anything you touched was cold. The water that spilled in thin streams from a half-inch sprinkling pipe was icy cold. It was so cold that even the strong lye soap wouldn’t lather. I caught some water in my cupped hands and dashed it in my face. Then I wiped at my face with the towel. The homespun cloth felt greasy. Until it had been washed several times it wouldn’t absorb any water. I said to hell with it, it was my dirt. I went back to my bunk and put on my hickory-striped shirt, gray vest, gray coat and gray cap. None of the garments fitted. They weren’t made to fit. They weren’t made up as suits. Over in the commissary, where I’d been outfitted, there were stacks of coats, vests and pants of different sizes, some new and some used. The commissary clerks gave out the used clothes first. They were the uniforms left by the convicts who’d gone out. All of my things were used except my Sunday shirt. My coat was patched at both elbows. It was much too small. My vest was too big and my pants were too short. I had used-shoes also; the heels were run-over and the soles were thin. But I was dressed as well as anybody, better than most.

The breakfast bell rang. The guard knocked his stick. We lined up down the wide center aisle in two lines, two-by-two in each line. The tall men stood at the front, graduating down to the short men at the rear. Two medium-sized men marched at the very front of each line to pace us. I was stationed by the guard, according to height, somewhere about the middle of the line. The guard knocked his stick again and we marched out of the dormitory, down a narrow alleyway between the dining room and a three-storied red-brick building, and turned into a side entrance.

The dining room was a flat, one-storied building with two wings separated by the kitchen. Our company was the first to enter. We marched down the wide center aisle and filed in between the narrow slate-topped counters and stood with our arms folded. Each of us stood behind a stool. There were ten to a counter. We filled twenty-and-a-fraction counters. When everyone had found a place we stood for a moment until the guard was satisfied and knocked his stick. We took off our caps, put them underneath the stools, and sat down. We looked at our breakfast. It was the same breakfast I’d had since arriving.

Aluminum bowls were half-filled with soupy oatmeal. Milk, made by adding water to powdered milk, had been poured over it. But it had been standing for so long that the body of the milk had settled to the bottom in a white scum which covered the oatmeal. The water had come to the top. To one side of the cereal were aluminum plates, holding one link of fried sausage which had cold-welded to the aluminum by congealed grease. It was very cold in the dining room. The food was stone cold. Empty cups were lined against the front ledges of the counters. The knives and forks and spoons were made of some metal that had turned black.

For a moment or so the convicts in our company were silent. We were permitted to talk after we were seated, but no one said anything. I discovered that it was like that every morning when the men sat down to breakfast. Across the aisle another company was coming in, filling the counters. Then the companies began entering from all three doors. Soon the dining room was filled.

The men began to eat. I stirred the oatmeal and the water whitened again. I ate it rapidly. I had noticed before that everyone ate very rapidly. In that way you did not taste the food so much. The oatmeal was slightly sweet.

“Slop,” a dull voice said.

The convict waiters stood by the service tables alongside the walls. A convict at my counter called to the waiter: “Get me some bread down here, Mac.”

The waiter brought a pan of whole-wheat bread.

“I don’t want no goddamn black bread,” the convict said. He called to the guard, “Hey, Cap, what about some white bread? I work like a nigger out in that stinking coal pile all day and I want some white bread. It’s bad enough to have to eat the rest of this goddamned crap.”

“Watch your language,” the guard called back.

“Screw my language,” the convict muttered.

The guard came up to the end of the counter. “What did you say?”

“I said I want some white bread. I can’t eat black bread. I got stomach trouble.”

The guard snickered. “Heh-heh, you oughta thought about your stomach ‘fore you come in here.” He sounded as if he was senile, but I didn’t pay him much attention at the time.

“Aw, come on, Cap,” the convict wheedled. “You know I can’t eat this black bread. I got the piles so bad now I can’t hardly lift a wheelbarrow.”

“Oh, you can roll a wheelbarrow all right,” the guard said. He turned to the waiter, “Give ‘em some white bread, first thing you know they’ll be saying they don’t get enough to eat.”

“Ain’t got none,” the waiter grumbled.

“Go get some,” the guard snapped. “My boys are working boys. They work hard in the coal piles. You go get ‘em some white bread—and be quick about it.”

The waiter went off, muttering to himself.

“Attaboy, Cap,” one of the convicts said.

“Tell ‘im ‘bout it, Cap.”

“I’m going to look out for my boys,” the guard said.

The waiter returned with the mess sergeant.

“Who sent this boy after white bread?” the mess sergeant asked.

“I did,” the guard said. “My boys want white bread. They’re working boys, they need white bread.”

“You run your goddamned coal company,” the mess sergeant said, “and let me run this goddamned dining room.”

Our guard walked up to the front of the dining room and looked out of the door. The mess sergeant went back to the kitchen. Finally a convict who hadn’t touched his breakfast said, “Who wants to swap some meat for some oatmeal?”

No one paid him any attention.

Twenty minutes after we’d entered, the mess sergeant rang the bell. The companies that had entered last had only been in there about five minutes. But at the ringing of the bell everyone reached for his cap. They held their caps in their right hands, with their arms folded across their chests. Our guard knocked his stick. We stood up and put on our caps and marched out. Our line formed in the center aisle and we went out into the yard. It had begun snowing again. The ground was already covered with dirty black slush. The fresh snow was sprinkling it with white.

Most of the convicts in the company kept straight ahead to the coal piles. A spur of railroad track came up from the powerhouse which was down in back of our dormitory. Piles of soft coal stood waist-high alongside the track. The convicts took their stations. Some went down to the coal shed in the powerhouse building and got wheelbarrows. Others got shovels and lined themselves along the piles. The wheelbarrow gang formed in a long line. As they rolled by the piles, the shovel men dumped coal into their wheelbarrows—one shovelful to a wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow reached the end of the pile it was filled to overflowing. The men rolled the coal up on a platform and dumped it into a machine that crushed it into slack coal. Another wheelbarrow line rolled the slack coal over to the coal shed. The wheels of the wheelbarrows had cut deep muddy ruts in the ground. The ruts were filled with black slush. Some of the men tried to straddle the rut as they pushed their wheelbarrows. Others just walked in the slush.

I hadn’t been assigned to a job. None of the men who had been transferred into the company had. All of us followed the porters back into the dormitory. After awhile the head guard, Captain Warren, came in to get us. He was the guard I’d noticed in the mess hall. He was a stoop-shouldered old man with gray hair the color of dirty dishwater and a flabby, weather-red face. His washed-out blue eyes peering from behind old-fashioned gold spectacles held an expression of extreme contempt. He was chewing tobacco and spittle drooled from the corners of his mouth. He didn’t seem able to control the muscles of his mouth.

He called us into his office down at the front, near the door, and propped his feet on the desk. “It ain’t no picnic,” he said. “It ain’t no picnic. You got to roll coal. They got to have coal to run the powerhouse. Got to have electricity for the electric chair. Oh, it’s a tough life. You can’t stop just ‘cause it rains or snows. You got to roll all the time. You got to roll to keep warm. If you get too hot you get chilled and catch pneumonia. Brrr, it’s cold out there this morning.” He looked at us as if he thought we were the lowest form of animal life. “I’m going to put you boys to rolling coal. Heh-heh,” he laughed at our expressions. “I bet you won’t do it no more.”

He sent us back to the head porter, B&O, to get some gloves. B&O opened a box and gave each of us a pair of cloth gloves. The gloves were made out of old uniforms. The imprint of a mammoth hand had been cut out of the cloth. Two pieces of the cloth had been sewed together. That was a glove.

I started outside with the others but Captain Warren stopped me. “Go back and report to B&O,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir,” I said. B&O was an emaciated, big-framed, slovenly man with a disfigured face, unkempt, grayish hair, and a blue cast in one of his watery brown eyes. They called him B&O because he’d been caught on a B&O freight. He had the most evil disposition of any man I’ve ever met. It was impossible for him to speak a civil word. He was so mad because Captain Warren had assigned me to a porter’s job he didn’t speak to me for an hour. I reported to him and he walked away. I wandered about the dormitory trying to find something to do. Captain Warren came in and asked me why I wasn’t working. I told him B&O hadn’t given me anything to do.