Cast the First Stone (40 page)

“You must have had it tough in all those joints,” I said. “With your sensitive mouth and the way your eyes look sometimes.”

“The year in Florida was the toughest,” he said. “Those wolves down there would try to rape you right in front of the hacks. The hacks wouldn’t give you any protection if you weren’t from the South. I used to carry a big chiv and they knew I would use it. Even then some of them still tried. But in the reformatory it was different. I took everything and never gave anything. That was a fine way to do, wasn’t it?”

My feelings for him after that were never steady and, from day to day, never the same. But he was in my blood by then. I wanted to erase his past and have him start from scratch with me. I didn’t want to admit that he had ever existed before he met me.

One day he was shuffling through some old letters and dropped one. He reached for it but I had already stooped and reached it first. My gesture hadn’t been intentional. I wasn’t trying to see it. I glanced at the address, involuntarily. It had been addressed to Dido in the insane asylum. A moment had passed before I realized just what it meant. I was thoroughly shocked.

“When were you in the insane asylum?” I asked.

For an instant he looked as if he would deny it. Then he changed his mind and told me all about it. The last time he had been arrested he had pretended to be insane. “It wasn’t hard to do,” he said. “My crime had been so damn hysterical they thought I really was insane. They kept me down there under observation for six months and then sent me here.”

“Were you insane?” I asked.

“I might have been,” he said. “I had lost my perspective. They were catching me too fast.”

“I know how that is,” I said, thinking of the time I’d tried to kill myself. “I’ve lost mine too.”

“If we hadn’t made up again I’d be back there now,” he said.

I felt very tender toward the Dido I knew. I was scared for him. I wanted to protect him and change him all over from that Dido whom I didn’t know, the one whom I found as repellent as a snake. I could not bear to think of him in connection with anyone except his mother and myself. I must have thought him capable of doing anything, I was so scared for him. It must have been that I was afraid he would turn back into that other Dido, the one whom I hated so.

26

E
VERYTHING TOUCHED ME
that spring. I was very emotional. I had never been so emotional. Everything was soft inside of me and at the slightest thing it would bubble out, like foam. A single note on Dido’s uke touched me. A bar of melody. Thoughts of my mother. A bird flying in the window and flying out again. That touched me plenty. And clouds in the sky. Or a convict with a flop. And those golden spring twilights without any shadows, soft and diffused with a golden glow, tinting everything with vividness.

Death row was in the 12 block. On those afternoons when they took the condemned men across the yard to the death house we stood in the windows and watched them pass. That always touched me. I would wonder what they were thinking. Long into the night I would wonder. What could they be thinking? You couldn’t tell from looking at them. Some walked with shoulders back, swaggering, contemptuous. I’d think of Dido and wonder how he would walk that bitter half mile; wonder if in the end his sneer, and high and mighty contempt for everyone, would fail him. Others walked erect and soberly, as if they were silently praying. Some slouched along, indifferently, with their hands in their pockets. The priest walked with some and they looked penitent, but who knows how they felt or what they thought? Most appeared perfectly natural from where we looked down on them. They talked and laughed with the guards much the same as any convict going anywhere.

But all the time I wondered what they were Thinking. I’d never had a chance to ask anyone who made the stroll and didn’t burn, although there were two of them in prison. Dido said he talked to one of them, named Gardner. He said that Gardner told him that he was thinking about fishing the day he made the stroll because it was a hell of a good day to fish.

Thoughts of death touched me constantly. I would lie in bed at night and think of those burnt-up convicts lying on the prison yard. I’d think of those men walking to the death house. I’d think of all those convicts dead and dying in the hospital, and those mattresses out beside the hospital steps on mornings. I’d think of myself dead and rotting in the oblivion of prison, never having been a goddamned thing in life but just a number on a board; having in the end lived and died for nothing and left nothing, and was nothing and never to be nothing but some goddamned worms in the sonofabitching ground.

I’d fill with a raw sense of protest against something which I could not identify or define. It was all wrong, I protested. There was more to any man than just a number on a board. There was something inside of a man you couldn’t put in black-painted numerals in a fingerprint card and Bertillon measurements. There was warmth and romance and hot-blooded passion. There were yearnings and desires and charity, too. There was that unaccountable gladness in a perfect day.

On Easter Sunday Dido and I went to Mass, although we were Protestants and weren’t supposed to go. But he wanted to go with me to watch the candles burning. I had told him how I was affected by burning candles.

“If anything ever makes me truly religious it’ll be candles burning on an altar,” I said.

“Why?” he asked curiously.

“Oh, I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it,” I said. “I guess because they’re so soft and insistent and eternal, like a good woman’s love.” A moment later I caught his eyes on me.

Everything touched me that spring, but Dido touched me more than anything. Dido with his morbid, brilliant, unsteady mind and kaleidoscopic moods, his weaknesses and his broodings and his gayety; sparkling one moment and surly the next—one moment so close I could feel him beside me in my heart, and then next as remote and distant as the answer to a prayer. Whose anger inspired anguish and whose pitiful bravado was like a whistling in the dark and made me want to stand between him and everything. Poor little kid, I thought, too bad he wasn’t a woman. He had a woman’s fascinating temperament, with a man’s anatomy.

Ever since I had discovered he had been in the asylum I had thought of him as a little crazy. I couldn’t keep from thinking it. He was so unstable and theatrical that everything he did seemed posed. But in that place of abnormality of body and mind there was something about his love for me that seemed to transcend degeneracy and even attained, perhaps, a touch of sacredness. Because whatever else he might have felt, he never felt that his love for me was wrong. And if the gods he worshipped were heathen gods, I thought, who could tell him better? No one in there.

And he was so unpredictable, unlike all other convicts whom I had ever known; and so inconsistent. Every moment with him had something all its own. He would challenge the best poker player in the dormitory to some head-and-head stud, or want to fight the biggest, toughest guy. I thought always that he was a little crazy. Perhaps he was. When he would go out to the poker game with one dollar, after solemnly promising to lose that and quit, and then come back an hour later seventeen dollars in debt, which I would have to pay, I would think he was a little crazy. And at nights when he wanted to talk and would come down and stand beside my bunk until dawn. He was extremely, abnormally affectionate, but he was never monotonous. He always touched me.

The fresh green sprouts of grass touched me and the buds on the trees and the robins, when they came. We saw several robins in the yard. The convicts marching down the sidewalks which split the new green grass, and the rainbows after the showers, touched me. And the words which came back to me from somewhere in the past: “And God made hope to spring eternal from the human heart.”

There was a newness in the spring which touched me, and an oldness in the prison which touched me. There were the walls and the horizon and, in the distance, the roof tops of the city; an etched skyscraper and the scattered church spires. There were people there beyond the walls whom I couldn’t see who touched me; ardent young lovers and flowers beginning to bloom. And there was laughter all out there which I could not hear, which touched me.

The director assembled a yard crew and had them plant grass seed in the barren spots and transplant the flowers and landscape the prison yard. We took our gloves and balls out of winter storage and the softball fever had us again and Captain Tom had it worse than ever. We began going out to our practice diamond, behind the old wooden dormitory, to get our team in shape. We wanted to beat everyone that year.

I shifted the players around and tried them out for every position. I had to teach Dido everything but he learned very quickly. “I could learn to do anything for you, Jimmy,” he said. We found another convict who could catch and I went to second base.

Dido played softball as he did everything else. He was very good when I was there to see him. He rapidly developed into all-star material. I bought some elastic braces for his knees, and every night we had the team masseur work on them.

Tom was elated and Dido was in solid. As long as he played ball he was Caesar’s wife, he could do no wrong. I was pleased and proud of him and he knew it. He was very enthusiastic and played with all his heart. During the games he kept up so much noise out in center field he could be heard all over the diamond. He kept all of us on our toes.

“Do you like it?” I asked him once.

“I like to do everything you like to do, or even like for me to do,” he said.

It was funny how sensitive I was to his playing. I could make a dozen errors and they wouldn’t faze me because I was good and knew it. But if he made one I was sick with dread. As with all other things he did, he kept me continually apprehensive. I knew how unstable and hysterical he could become and every moment I looked for him to go haywire. I hated to see the pressure get on a game because I felt he couldn’t take it.

And then I broke my arm. We were playing our rookies a practice game out in back that day. Mose was pitching for the rookies, so we could get some batting practice. Johnny Brothers said to Candy and me, “Let’s knock old Mose out the box and make him mad.”

Johnny Brothers got up and hit one over the death house. It was a ground-rule double. I followed and hit a sharp liner toward Polack Paul, who was playing second for the rookies. He opened his hands and the ball went through and hit him in the mouth. Rounding first, I saw that he couldn’t find the handle to the ball so I kept on into second. Candy yelled, “Slide!” and I went down in a fadeaway, bracing my fall with my left arm. It was the one that had been broken before. It snapped like a twig. I scrambled up and looked at it and said, “Goddamn son of a bitch,” and then grabbed it with my right hand and started running around the end of the dormitory toward the hospital. Soldier Boy, who had been catching Mose, ran over and grabbed me under the arm to help me and Johnny Brothers yelled, “Wait a minute and I’ll get the stretchers.” Johnny Brothers had a fetish for carrying convicts to the hospital on stretchers.

I said, “Screw the stretchers, I can walk.” I was still running.

Then Brothers ran up and grabbed me under the other arm, and Candy and Signifier and some of the others followed. Tom brought up the rear, puffing and blowing like an overloaded switch engine. When we came to the railing which surrounded the hospital lawn we jumped over it and ran across the grass, and jumped over the railing at the front and ran up the stairs into the hospital.

“‘Mergency!” Brothers yelled. “Make way, ‘mergency!” He was ducking his head and grinning, as I always imagined he had done when he had cut that man he knifed thirty-six times with his chiv.

The guard ran out and said, “What’s the matter here?”

And I said, “I broke my arm.”

And he said, “What about it? Sit down over there, the doctor’s eating lunch.”

Tom came in then, looking like the beginning of a heart attack, and went on back to get the doctor. I was one of his star players, and the manager of his softball team, and he didn’t give a damn if the doctor was in bed with the warden’s wife.

Doctor Blaine, one of the visiting surgeons who was head of the medical college at the university and also of the city’s biggest hospital, happened to come in at the time, with a couple of internes. “What’s the matter here?” he asked.

And Tom said, “This man’s got a broken arm.”

“Let’s see, boy,” he said. Someone cut off the sleeve of my shirt and the doctor felt the break. “Come here,” he said to the internes. “Simple fracture of the ulna. Feel it.” They felt my arm. Then he grabbed me by the wrist and the elbow and pulled the sections of the bone apart and let them back into place. “Now feel it,” he said to the internes. They felt it again and looked amazed. Jake Ingalls and the convict doctor, Tino, came up and Doctor Blaine instructed them, “Put it in splints.”

They put it in simple wooden splints and then took me back to the X-ray room and fluoroscoped it. The break was set perfectly, so that only a tiny jagged line in the bone showed where it had been broken. Just below it I could see where the bone overlapped from where it had been broken before. None of it had hurt, neither when I broke it nor when he set it. Jake Ingalls said they’d keep me in the hospital for a couple of weeks, anyway. Then Tom and the gang left. Candy said he’d send me over whatever I needed. It wasn’t until then I thought of Dido. I hadn’t seen him at all.

That night when the runner brought over my pajamas, bathrobe, toothbrush and things, he had a six-page letter from Dido. I smiled, thinking that he must have been writing on it ever since I got hurt.

“Dear Jimmy,” it began. “I wish it had been my arm instead of yours. I would break both my arms for you. Love you so. Wonder why somebody won’t let me break my arm for you. I want to so badly. I want to do everything for you. Got to stand and see you hurt. I could hurt somebody for that. It’s hard to say everything that I mean when you mean so much more to me than I’ll ever be able to ever say.” And then he went on and said six pages of it. It was a wonderfully passionate and crazy letter and it cheered me tremendously. It was odd how unimportant a broken arm could become in view of all that worship.