Cast the First Stone (31 page)

“You go back and tell him this is important,” Tom instructed the bellhop, tipping him a whole buck.

The warden reluctantly came down to the bar to see what Tom wanted. “What’s happening that’s so important it won’t wait, Tom?” he asked. “Don’t tell me it’s a break they’re cooking. I would have heard myself.”

“Listen, Tris,” Tom said. “You’ve been putting us off all summer. My boys are going along great now. We’ve beat the coal company and we’ve beat the band. It looks to me as if anybody’s entitled to a shot at the dining room it ought to be us now.”

They said that the warden fired Tom on the spot. But Tom came in the next morning and begged himself back. The warden warned him that if he ever mentioned softball to him again he’d fire him and make it stick. But we got to play the dining room one Sunday after all. The
Prison Times
scheduled it. The whole company came along. It was like a picnic. Everyone took along their Sunday-afternoon snack, and ate down on the diamond. We all had a swell time. At least everybody but Tom. We lost. Everybody said we won a moral victory but the score was five-to-three. If Johnny Brothers and myself, who were supposed to be the best players on the team, hadn’t made two errors each we might have beaten them. We won our bets, anyway, because we’d gotten four runs from everybody. Tom had even gotten six runs, so it wasn’t that he lost any money. He just hated to see us lose the game. He wanted to get us another game with them and spent all the rest of the week trying to persuade the editor of the
Prison Times
to schedule another game. But it was too late in the season.

All-star teams were picked from the school, idle, and working companies. The morning of Labor Day we had a play-off for the intra-wall championship. Johnny Brothers, Mose, Candy and I, were picked to play on the idle companies’ all-stars. We lost to the working companies’ all-stars and they lost to the school all-stars. Then the dining room played the school all-stars and beat them, winding up the season without a loss.

We had a fine dinner of roast chicken and watermelon, and that afternoon we went back to the diamond for the boxing bouts. A ring had been built in the center of the diamond and we stood back of a wooden railing and watched the stonewall glovers do their stuff. They were very lousy fights. A colored heavyweight was the best of the lot. He was fighting another colored convict with a fancy-Dan style and he caught up with him in the second round and knocked him clear out of the ring. It was a very hot day and the heat had beaten most of the fighters before they entered the ring. We wished they had given us a picture show instead. But it was nice to be out all day.

All in all it was a big, wonderful summer. We had lemonade three or four times every week and on those especially hot nights they brought us ice cream that a big firm out in the city had donated. The big provision concerns were always giving us something that summer—lettuce and lemons and watermelons and tomatoes and hams and milk. There was a fellow named Angelo Lonardo who used to send us in whole boxcars of overripe bananas, until some of the people connected with the United States Treasury Department sent him down to Atlanta for not paying taxes on the income from his numbers’ racket, and then he needed somebody to send him some bananas.

Oh, it was an excellent summer. You should have seen all those desperate gunmen and murderers playing Softball and slopping ice cream that summer. Sid Bippus and Smiling Joe Raskowski and Nigger Newman. It was some summer.

But it got over.

21

T
HE DAY GOT
off to a lousy start in the first place. It was a gray October day with a cold, fine drizzle. We were clad in our coats and vests, with our caps pulled down over our eyes. The grass was gone and the walks were wet. It was winter again.

We had oatmeal and chalk for breakfast. We hadn’t had that in a long time. I had been expecting doughnuts and ham gravy. I was disappointed. It was a little thing but in the stuffy, stinky dormitory with the wet gray drizzle looking in from the outside, it grew.

Switz came over and said, “Let me look at your paper, Monroe.”

I nodded. He picked it up and read the headlines. “‘Killed a sheriff,’” he said. “I bet that son of a bitch needed killing.” He felt he had to say something because I had let him read the paper. I walked away without replying.

Johnny Brothers and Black Boy and another colored convict were trying to get a fourth player for a game of cards. “Sit down and pick up the cards, Jimmy,” Brothers said, dipping his head and grinning as was his habit. Every time he did that I remembered I had heard that he had cut another colored man thirty-six times and I always wondered if he had dipped his head and grinned before he started chiving on him.

“Whatcha playing?” I asked, sitting down.

“Pinochle.”

“Okay, Black Boy, you and I got ‘em,” I said.

We played until dinnertime. After dinner I sat around and looked out the dingy windows at the gray day and waited for my mother’s visit. But she didn’t come. I felt a dead letdown and began slowly filling with a vague, general annoyance at everything and everybody. Supper was also sad. I forced down some of it because I knew that I ought to eat something. On the way back the day seemed colder and the rain wetter. The prison seemed bleaker and uglier. Freedom had never seemed so far away. When the mail was called I received a letter from my mother.

Dear Son:

Your letter came Wednesday. I had written to you before receiving it but if I had known that you were going to write I would have waited to write to you, but I thought perhaps you were going to write to your father.

I planned coming down there today, as I told you, but it was raining this morning and I didn’t want to risk it. [I looked at the postmark and saw that it had been mailed that morning.]

I think I told you that I am not very steady on my feet any more and can’t get around so well. My arthritis troubles me when I go out in wet weather and I try to avoid it as much as possible. Your mother is getting to be an old woman. I will be sixty-one years old next month. [I could feel the muscles knotting and pulling down my face.] My arms get so weak at times I can’t raise them. I had to go to a specialist. He told me I am overworking myself and that I just need a rest.

Now, James, I know that prison must be a very trying place and that you are getting tired of being there—[Oh, goddamn, why did I have to say anything about that? I thought with a groan.]—but you must remember that you brought it all on yourself. I am doing all I can to get you out, but there are some things that you must do for yourself. You have not been a very good boy and the warden told me that you have given the officials considerable trouble since you have been there.

Your father might be able to help you get out of there. But the thing for you to understand is that he isn’t trying, and neither are any of all those people with whom you associated and on whom you spent time and money when you were free. You cannot control the rest of the world, but you can and must control yourself. Remember that. If you are a good boy you will come up for parole in two more years. All you need to do is behave yourself. And you will not need to ask the help of anyone. It is all left with you. [Who in the hell’s help was I ever asking? I thought. I had the impulse to ball up the letter and throw it away. But I read on from a sense of duty.]

I want you to understand, James, that I am trying to help you, but I am only one person. You make things hard for yourself. You are so hardheaded that you will never listen to me, you think I don’t know anything.

I am almost down and out. Same days I can make it, and some days I can’t. Some days my legs will not carry me up to the store. Pretty soon, I hope, it will all be over and I can rest…

I folded the letter across several times and tore it into very small pieces and took the pieces out into the aisle and carefully dropped them into a cuspidor. I wonder what I said to start all this, I thought. And then, suddenly, and very queerly, I wanted to do something for my mother to make her happy. Right then I would have died for her, lied, killed, stolen; anything for her. I stood there for a moment, blind with desperation, wanting to make the greatest sacrifice that anyone has ever made for the love they hold their mother. I wanted to die a thousand, tortured deaths for her in my momentary ardor of self-immolation.

I went down to the poker game and took out ten dollars’ worth of chips. I lost that and bought another ten dollars’ worth. In an hour they had me. I looked at the table and then looked at Candy. He had been losing, too, and only had a few chips left. He split them and shoved one half my way. But they weren’t worth the trouble. I shook my head…Losing, losing, losing, I thought. Losing all the time. That thing is really on me, I thought; solid on me.

Signifier had three nickle chips left. He said, “You can have half of these if the dealer will lend me his knife to divide them.” I didn’t look at him…Every single time I lose, I thought. My eyes slid across the table…All that goddamn stuff about me begging her for help. When in the hell did I ever beg her for help? I just said I was tired. Well goddamit I am tired, I thought. Tired!

I let smoke dribble from my mouth and nostrils, trying to control myself; watched it eddy upward toward the cardboard sign that hung from the light by a string—
SPITTING ON THE FLOOR AND WALL FORBIDDEN
. I didn’t see but one word:
FORBIDDEN
, and my gaze felt bruised against it.

The deal began again and stopped at me, tentatively. Starrett said, “Going or gonna get left?”

I picked up the card which he had dealt to me and sailed it down the aisle. I didn’t feel any anger. It was just an answer to his question.

And then suddenly, the accumulation of all my feelings and sensations and emotions and thoughts; all my hates and fears and humiliations and irritations and stagnations, all the rotten filth, not only of that day but of all those years, began to boil up inside of me. It spewed up from those years of being half scared of everything and trying not to show it; half scared of someone thinking I was a girl-boy, half scared of someone running over me or taking advantage of me, half scared that I might feel remorseful for my crime, or sorry for my mother, or sorry for anything I had ever done—so that I wasted all my sorrow on those indifferent convicts. And those years of being so damned scared to think about the past or the future, and all the while all the actual brutalities and cruelties and hardness and abomination of the living, rotten, degenerate prison touching me; and all the while never letting on that it had, or that anything had ever touched me, or could touch me—as if it was a game of life and death being played within me in which I would be the horrible loser if I ever let on. All those goddamned years trying to make out I wasn’t ever scared. Those years of trying to be tough and trying to be smart and trying to prove I wasn’t weak, as if there was a dreadful penalty on tears; and trying to know so damned much more than a nineteen-year-old boy has any business knowing. Those years of trying so awful goddamn hard to make them recognize me as a convict, as if it was a special honor, like a doctor’s degree, when all the while I was even afraid to admit to myself how utterly different was everything inside of me when I let it be; trying all the while to push whatever there was in me that was good down the drain, and forget it, and become someone else whom I never really was until I tried to make myself so.

And all those people rising like a row of slimy spectres to leer at me; those convicts on whom I had leaned so heavily in my need for companionship—a need which I had never known I had until after Blocker left, having convinced myself all along that they leaned on me—Mal and all the chiselers and punks and sycophants in between. Whispering to me, in their soundless voices, that I had never been anything by myself, that I had always needed the feeling of having a mob of followers in order to make it at all.

And now it was oozing up and out of me, through my mouth and eyes and ears and nose; coming out of the days filled with dullness and sameness and violence and death—the brooding days with the slow change of shadows, the slow change of seasons, with the everlasting scene, eternal and the same; the mocking days and the deliberate days and the indifferent days with their pieces of sunset wedged between two buildings, with their distances horizoned by a wall, with their bar-checked square of stars and their three-foot parade of moons from the window casement to window casement. Coming from the sickening fear of violence, the scare of being scared, and the scare of being humiliated and of feeling cheap; of telling myself that all I had left was my feelings and I didn’t want them hurt.

Now I was tired of it. Tired of pretending I wasn’t scared when I was, tired of pretending I was tough when I wasn’t, tired of having to pretend. Tired of everything about the prison that made it necessary.

I put my hands, palms downward, on the gray blanket and stood up, straddling the bench. I spit the butt from my lips. It broke up and scattered tobacco shreds over the back of the playing cards. Candy, Johnson, Starrett, Polack Paul, Coky Joe, Tony, and Dutch all looked up at me. I swung out from the bench and walked down the aisle. I felt a sticky heat in my eyes, blood in my face. My lips felt thin and stiff as paper, my muscles jerked. I noticed that the convicts walking up and down the aisles for exercise got out of my way.

At the front, the night guard, Captain Charlie, threw up his hand. “‘Lo, Monroe.” I wheeled and strode back down the aisle, without replying. My shirt felt moldy and my pants chafed me. And then, the dormitory began seeping into my consciousness; a steady hum of noise, air thick with the odor of tobacco fumes and unwashed bodies, the drift of faces stamped with the full stupidity common to convicts, rows of bunks in ugly pattern, steel bars cutting across the raining night. Five years! I had lived in it for almost five sonofabitching years!

God Almighty Knows stopped me, touching my arm. “Wanna buy some cracklin’, Jimmy? Great big brown ‘uns ri’ frum de frigid zone.” Cracklings were pork scraps from which the lard has been rendered. Barrels of them were shipped into the prison to be made into soap. The convicts cooked them into mulligan stews. They tasted fine.