The Prison Book Club (18 page)

Then Phoebe invited us to pile in with our favourite moment of Rex Walls at his lowest.

“Pimping his daughter out in the bar was pretty bad,” said Earl.

“I don't think that was the worst,” said Mitchell, as he poured himself a coffee from the coffee machine, claiming that Rex's worst moment was
after
pimping her out—when he denied that she'd been molested and claimed that the guy had probably only pawed her.

For Byrne it was the time when Rex came home drunk and smeared the mouth of the clay Shakespeare bust that Walls's older sister, Lori, had made for her Cooper Union art school application portfolio. “That was a very, very evil thing to do,” said Byrne.

“His whole life was framed with excuses,” said Richard. “He couldn't hold a job because the Mafia was mixed up in the unions and they wouldn't let him work.” Almost everyone around the table broke into laughter, the laughter of recognition that Richard was bang on.

But for Graham, the father's greatest offence was risking the sexual abuse of the kids by his own relatives back in his hometown of Welch,West Virginia. “They'd lived in cars, they'd lived in pretty well every shithole you could think of, eating out of Dumpsters, but he leads the kids into a situation where they're likely to be molested,” said Graham. He leaned forward on the table and thumped it. He had warned Frank and me before the meeting that he might not be able to check his emotions in the meeting when it came to Rex exposing his children to that danger. “You're gonna get me going and I'm just gonna go right off,” he had said. “I can see it coming.” Again I was seeing that strong moral code he had when it came to family.

It reminded me about something else we'd talked about, the three of us, before the meeting. We'd reflected on our own parents and whether we had any experiences comparable to those of the Walls kids. Frank said it wasn't unusual for kids to fall out of moving cars in the 1950s, especially if they were “old junkers.” I said that before seat belts, many kids had scars on their chins from sitting on their parents' laps in the front seat and banging their mouths on the dashboard. I pointed to the scar beneath my lower lip.

“I smashed my head on the dashboard,” agreed Frank.

“That explains a lot,” said Graham.

I told the two of them that the way Rex taught his kids about geology reminded me of my father, who used to take us on rock hunts—sometimes on abandoned mine sites. “We were usually cold and wet, but we learned a lot,” I said. But that was just the charming side of Rex, not the negligent side.

“Was
I
abused?” mused Frank. “My parents used to work, so they were never home. I'd be in the house all by myself. I was only eight or nine years old and I'd go to school myself, come back and have to let myself in. Sometimes I'd be walking to school and walk into a park and forget about school.”

“I never lived in a place more than a year, I don't think,” said Graham. I couldn't imagine living with that much uncertainty. I recalled asking my parents to promise that they wouldn't move until I finished high school.

“How many places did you live?” I asked.

“By the time I finished high school I probably lived in seventeen or eighteen different places,” he said. He listed two remote Northern Ontario towns and two Southern Ontario cities. “And I lived in Winnipeg; Calgary; Regina; Blue Ridge, Georgia. Blue Ridge was horrendous, full of hillbillies. I was originally born in Montreal. We lived in Quebec City.” Five provinces, and one town on the Georgia-Tennessee border. And in one city they moved five times. Sure sounded like life Rex Walls–style.

“But why?” I asked.

“'Cause my parents were always up to stuff. We were always on the move. My father drank lots, but in all fairness to my mother, she would step up and make sure that we had everything we needed.”

Graham's family's nomadic lifestyle helped explain his questions to the book club members about the Walls parents. He asked the group whether they would describe the Walls parents' conduct as neglect or abuse.

For some reason, everyone looked to Doc for the answer. Maybe they were seeking the clinical definition. “To me, neglect is the absence of doing something,” he said. “And abuse is the act of doing something that would be harmful. Neglect accumulates over time and becomes abuse.”

“Which raises the question,” said Richard, “can you be a negligent irresponsible parent, and still be a loving parent?”

“Yes, yes. I think you can love somebody but neglect them, deprive them of the basic necessities of life,” said Graham.

This was difficult ground to map, but several of the men wanted to talk about the parents' love. A fellow named Jones said that even though he thought of Rex as a “deadbeat and a waste type of a man,” Rex was redeemed somewhat by his Christmas present to the children one year when he had no money for gifts. He took each child outside one desert night to look up at the stars and gave them each a star for Christmas. Jeannette had expressed some skepticism and then decided on a planet: Venus, which shone brighter than anything else in the western sky that night. “I thought that was pretty decent of him,” he said.

Bookman and Byrne both pointed to parental love in the form of education: how the mother, Rose Mary, and Rex brought home bags of books from the library and often home-schooled their kids at a level that was higher than that offered by the local schools.

“How much care they took in making sure that the kids were educated but they didn't give them a pair of shoes, you know what I mean?” countered Graham. “Or something to eat.”

We plumbed the topic of the parents' selfishness: how the mother squandered food money on paint, and wouldn't sell the diamond ring that the kids found in order to buy groceries.

Graham said that he thought the author blamed her mother more, for not having the strength to leave Rex. He then asked the others whether they thought Walls had embellished her story in places. I was reminded of his skepticism at Collins Bay when we discussed
Three Cups of Tea
. The question prompted Tom to restate the moral question he had alluded to earlier: whether the author should have profited from her family's misery. He and others focused on the writer's shame, and pointed out that she seemed relatively content growing up and only appeared to develop shame when she achieved success.

Graham had handled the session masterfully. Over and over again, he spotted when guys wanted to talk, and he created space in the conversation to invite them in. If they'd forgotten their point, he had an admirable ability to remember what they'd been starting to say. Frank had recruited strong analytical readers. And Phoebe established herself as an agile facilitator. The details of the text were as fresh in her mind as if she'd reread the entire book the night before. I could see that the Beaver Creek Book Club was going to be just fine, even without Carol.

When the meeting broke up, I was without a guide to get back to reception. I would have to find my way alone past the men's living units. I hesitated for a moment before leaving the programs building, but Frank materialized beside me, perhaps sensing my discomfort. “I'll escort you back,” he said. I knew I was safe with Frank. I remembered asking Graham once if he was ever afraid of his former gang members in prison and he replied jokingly that he was only ever afraid of Frankie.

Frank and I walked along in silence for a moment. Then he asked me if I would pass on a message to Vince when I saw him. I seemed to recall something in the volunteer training about not doing favours for inmates. They'd feel obliged to do favours for you.

“If I can,” I said.

“Tell him, ‘The Beggar-master says hi,'” he said.

“The Beggar-master says hi,” I repeated, my throat suddenly dry like Frank's. Was this some kind of code? I wondered.

We parted at the reception building.

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

I drove home that evening thinking about Frank's message, wondering what it meant and knowing that I was scheduled to see Vince two days later. At Carol's urging, I would be meeting Vince for coffee for the first time since he left prison. He had robbed banks to feed an addiction but she believed that with lots of support he could stay out of trouble. Moreover she was proud of him. Even though he was a graduate of the Collins Bay Book Club, she was giving him the books that they were reading and he was reading along with them on the outside.

I turned on the windshield wipers. There was a light rain. What were the chances that any of the men could overcome, like Jeanette Walls, their difficult circumstances and would our book discussions really help counter the experiences they'd suffered in their own young lives? It was hard to imagine. That night at home I looked up two more of the men. I learned that Hal was only a teenager when he killed his parents and siblings and that a man with the same name as Byrne had killed his wife.

I had no difficulty spotting Vince in the Arbor Room at the university when I met him two days later on Remembrance Day. He hadn't shaved off the long goatee and moustache that many men grow in prison to look tough. Perhaps it was still necessary to look tough in his halfway house. We stood outside under a ginkgo tree and listened to the bugle and the sad tribute to the fallen soldiers: “They will not grow old as we grow old.” After the service, we got coffees and sat down. He was gentle, with large dark eyes that rarely blinked and that communicated deep emotional pain. He told me his story, which included a traumatic childhood experience. I told him about my daughter's illness. We commiserated with each other.

“I have a message from Frank, but I don't know if I should give it to you,” I said, warming my hands on the cup. “I don't know what it means and it might be an inappropriate communication.”

“What is it?” he said.

I hesitated, then decided that the message was probably innocuous. “The Beggar-master says hi.”

He laughed to the point of gripping his side to suppress a stitch.

“What does it mean?”

“The Beggar-master is a character in
A Fine Balance
, that novel by Rohinton Mistry. It's a really good book and I recommended it to Frank to read.”

I laughed with relief. How innocent the message had actually been. How indicative of the culture of books that Carol was creating in the prisons. I should have read
A Fine Balance
that summer after all.

“The setting is India,”Vince continued, “and the Beggar-master, he'd be like the pimp beggar for all the beggars. Frank always joked with me that he was the Beggar-master. So the message means that he's my master. Maybe when he gets out he'll find me some work.”

It was only later that I picked up my copy of
A Fine Balance
and discovered that the street beggars in Mistry's novel paid protection money to the Beggar-master. I wondered for a minute why Frank had given himself the name, then concluded it was just an innocent joke.

11

JUST DO THE DAY

T
HE GHOST OF TOM JOAD shadowed us that November. He clanked in the prison gates and grew restless in the tents of the Occupy movement. He agitated at the prison overcrowding and watched as two men in the prison were stabbed with shanks. Or at least that's how I saw it after a month of reading John Steinbeck's rhythmic, angry prose in
The Grapes of Wrath
, the Collins Bay Book Club's November book.

Even though I didn't warm to Tom Joad, the protagonist in Steinbeck's Depression-era novel, I saw aspects of his story all around me during those cold, grey weeks, particularly at Collins Bay. That's the gift of a timelessly relevant novel. When I remarked on this to one of the prison chaplains, she reminded me that Bruce Springsteen had written a ballad about Tom Joad, champion of the homeless and jobless. The song is called “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Perhaps Joad, the parolee in Steinbeck's dirge for America, haunted everyone.

The collision between art and life started the day before book group with an incident at the prison. Collins Bay went into lockdown and the book club meeting was cancelled. It would be at least two weeks before we could reconvene. I joked with Carol that maybe the men had orchestrated some mischief to buy extra time to finish the book. It was a long read at 455 pages, even though Steinbeck wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel in only one hundred days. At times I could only read it in short bursts because the story was so bleak: the Joad family is evicted from their tenant farm in drought-stricken Oklahoma and travels in a jalopy to California in search of work picking fruit, only to wind up in a migrant tent city facing more hunger and misery. Is prison better or worse than their predicament? Steinbeck asks. I guessed from speaking to the guys it was pretty much the same.

But the real reason for the delay at Collins Bay was more sobering. “A fellow was stabbed in the eye,” a staffer told us. “An inmate on 6 Block. New arrival. One of those things out of the blue. Can you imagine being blind in a prison?”

Defenceless, was what I imagined. My mind went immediately to the stabbing scene in
The Grapes of Wrath
. Tom Joad describes how he and another guy were drunk at a dance and how the feeling of the knife in his body sobered him up. When the guy with the knife came at him again, Tom grabbed a shovel and hit him on the head, killing the man and landing himself in prison.

According to a staffer, an inmate had recognized the new arrival and targeted him—something to do with a shooting on the outside. The stabbing happened during changeover and that meant the lockdown wouldn't be restricted to just one cellblock. Guards would have to search the whole prison for weapons.

Gaston wrote in his journal that it was the second stabbing in the past week and that it looked like the inmates would be locked down for a long stretch. He predicted that the lockdown would once again delay his attempt to book a conjugal visit. For weeks, he'd been trying to arrange a seventy-two-hour Private Family Visit with his wife in one of the prison's two-bedroom apartment units because she was crumbling under the stress.