Cast the First Stone (9 page)

There was the school, too. It consisted of eight rooms underneath the Catholic chapel. There were regular schoolroom desks arranged to face blackboards across the front of each room. There were six grades. Two rooms each were given over to the first and second grades. The latrines were in the end rooms on either side.

Each grade was divided into A and B classes. I was assigned to teach 5A. At the time they were studying predicate adjectives. I had not ever learned, or else by then had forgotten, just what a predicate adjective was. I got fired the same day I began. Guerda, the big simple-minded Dutchman whose place I had taken, was reassigned to the job. He was blowing his top over arithmetic. Most convicts have obsessions. That was his. He started right off, as in the past, and for which he had been fired, teaching his version of mathematics. It was indeed a weird and grotesque version. But he was happy. I was “seated,” which meant I was demoted to the status of a 5A pupil. And I was happy, too.

A pupil’s life was a happy life, if one didn’t mind the sitting. We read newspapers and magazines and sneaked smokes, and shot spitballs, and drew funny pictures on the blackboards when the guards were absent. And when the guard was present we baited the teachers. When the superintendent, who was also a guard with a longer title but the same pay, came into the room, we looked intent and occupied. But if he stayed too long we would stump him with some trick question we had thought up for just such an occasion. After that we wouldn’t see him again all that day.

In the mornings, for twenty minutes before we went in to wash up for dinner, we marched around the yard for exercise, and again for twenty minutes in the afternoons. But since neither we nor the guards relished walking in the snow and slush and bad weather we compromised on fifteen minutes, or even ten or five, if the deputy was not about.

That was school, more or less, if you include the books which were donated by boards of education throughout the state, and the four other companies besides ours which celled in the 1&2 block, and the programs every Friday where there was speaking and reciting and some singing by the colored convicts.

There were two things about the dormitory which could bring back the whole living, pulsing scene so vividly that I could see it and live all through it again and feel that hurt I felt then, being away from all those things that I liked. I was young and hot-blooded and passionate and liked the living, tangible things. Women and going to bed with them, drinking whiskey and gambling, sports to watch and play, a car to own and drive, the moving picture shows, and nights in a park, and the sunset on the Lake from the pier at Vigo park, and clouds after a rain, and spring—which was always as tangible to me as a woman’s kiss. And being conscious of all those endless years that I could not afford to think about and that I tried so hard not to think about that pretty soon I lost all thought of anything that went below the senses of sight and hearing and smelling and feeling. But still I thought of them, those years, even with my eyes and ears and nose and skin. I thought of them with the coldness of being out in the weather with not enough clothes to keep me warm, and with the sight of guards clubbing convicts over the heads with loaded sticks, and with the smell of unwashed bodies and dirty latrines, and with the sounds of sticks banging for bedtime, and the sight of the lights winking.

The first of those two things was Giuseppe playing “In My Solitude” on his electric guitar every morning, just ‘before breakfast, with the loud bell-clear note carrying all over the dormitory.

I never understood why that should have affected me so then that always afterward upon hearing it I could see again that goddamn dormitory and those gray convicts and those gray winter mornings with the fog and the walls and the deserted morning look of the prison yard, and feel again that utter sense of being lost in a gray eternity.

The second was Chump’s console radio which Nick one of the deputy’s runners who was his old man, they said had bought for him, and which Captain Charlie let him play at nights after the lights were out if the other convicts did not object.

For years I could not hear a radio without remembering Chump, seeing him lying there so proud with his Indian blood darkening his skin, and the important way he felt about owning a console radio; as if the seed of Nick had spawned the radio with him and he had birthed it.

6

T
HE GUARD WHO
was on duty at the visiting hall looked at my pass and gave it back to me. “Give that back to your mother,” he said. “She’ll need it to get out.”

He took me into the hall at the end of the 1&2 cell block and he and the hall guard searched me. They made me leave my cap and gloves on the hall guard’s table. I was afraid they might take the cap so I kept it turned down so they couldn’t see the lining.

When the visiting-room guard ushered me around the corner of the 3&4 block into the long gloomy cavernous visiting hall, with the cagelike cells rearing overhead like the caves of cliff dwellers, and the cell house ceiling so high it was lost, I was still worrying about the cap.

I walked down behind the benches, behind the eating convicts. When I saw my mother I stopped and stood there for a moment, very still, looking at her and seeing her and seeing her look at me, and seeing her love for me, and feeling her eyes on mine and loving her, right then, more than I had ever loved her, or myself, or anyone, in all my life. My love for her overwhelmed me. I was choked with it.

And then I hurried forward and she stood up and we leaned across the table and kissed each other and I lost sight of her. I could feel her hands holding very tightly to my arms and after she had released me and I had sat down I could still feel them very tightly on my arms. Neither of us had spoken.

“I brought you some lunch, James,” she said, moving her hands around in the basket of lunch. “I brought you some scalloped oysters. You always liked scalloped oysters.”

Her voice sounded very thin and hollow as if it came out of the front part of her mouth instead of her throat. I thought of when the judge had sentenced me and I had tried to say, that’s all right, that’s all right, only to find that my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and my throat was solid and inflexible and that only my lips, in all my face and mouth and throat and chest, would move and they could not make any sound at all.

“Did you, Mother? Let me help you, Mother,” I said, but I did not look at her again.

She had been looking at me, now she looked at the basket in which all the while her hands had been moving without accomplishing anything.

“Here is the tablecloth, and here are the napkins, and here are the plates,” she recited, taking them out of the basket.

We spread the tablecloth very carefully. She smoothed out the wrinkles and then began to take out the silver and the food. But it did not seem real, neither our actions nor our being there in that prison—in that grimy, gloomy cell house, sitting across from each other—nor our funny, ridiculous efforts to make it real and easy and natural.

There was a dish of scalloped oysters and some potato salad and some bread and butter and a jar of jelly and some cakes. “I didn’t bring you anything to drink,” she said in that light, weightless voice. “I couldn’t find anything to put anything in.”

All along, since I first looked at her, I had not looked at her again. I had been watching her hands and looking at the tablecloth and the food and beyond her, through the open bars into a cell where the two bunks to the left of the door had been chained up for the day; at the commode and the shelf where there were pictures and jars and bottles and two combs and one brush and a homemade broom and, hanging on a line of string across the right of the cell, a wine-colored lounging robe—deep-colored against the yellow calcimined walls.

“That’s all right, Mother, I don’t want anything to drink.” My voice sounded muffled and I cursed under my breath. “We get plenty to drink, all we want to drink.” I was trying to sound natural and cheerful so that she would think I felt that way, but my voice cracked at the very top.

“You look well, James.”

My fork touched an oyster and moved it on my plate. “I feel fine, too, Mother.”

She was wearing the old rusty black Persian lamb coat I had bought from a guy who had claimed to be a fence, and it had turned out to be a fake. And underneath she wore a brown woolen dress.

“Do they feed you enough, James?”

Oh, God, she’s trying so hard not to cry, I thought.

“They feed us pretty good.”

In trying to smile I only succeeded in spreading my lips. It made me feel sick all up in the face, under and around my eyes. The muscles and the skin and all felt sick, as if they were afflicted with leprosy, and my eyes felt sick, as my stomach feels when I want to vomit, and I knew my mother wanted me to look at her but my eyes felt too raw and open and sick for me to look at her, or at anyone. I sat there with my lips spread, toying with the oysters.

“Do…do they hurt you any, James?”

“No, Mother. It’s not all that bad.” I told her about the routine and the schedule. “I was a porter in the coal company at first but now I have a job teaching school.”

“I should think that would be nice,” she said.

“It’s all right,” I said, still not looking at her. “You’re not eating anything James,” she said. I stole a glance at her and quickly looked away. “I’m not hungry, Mother. You see, we just finished dinner.”

Her eyes were red where she had been crying and all around them the flesh of her eyelids was swollen and her face seemed loose; the skin seemed slack as if some inner support which had held it into shape for all those years had broken loose in her grief. Her hair, showing beneath the brim of the made-over felt hat, seemed grayer but it could have been my imagination, I told myself, but I could not look at her again to tell.

And suddenly I knew that I could not look at her, not only because I did not want her to see the sickness and the guilt and the remorse that I did not want to feel in my own eyes, but because I did not want to see the grief and the sudden age showing in her face. As if not seeing it would keep it from being there or at least keep me from having the knowledge of it by seeing it, although I knew it was there, all along, even before I had seen her. And also I did not want her to see my eyes for her own sake.

“I…I thought you liked the oysters that way, James. That’s why I fixed them,” she said, and I could hear each unshed tear on each word she said, so high and light and damp and filling up. She was trying very hard not to cry.

“I like them, Mother.” I moved an oyster, lifted it up toward my mouth, lowered it. If I had put it in my mouth I would have vomited.

“I didn’t write because I planned on coming down,” she said.

“That’s all right.”

“What do you think about, James?” she asked.

“Think about?” I was startled. “Nothing. I just keep my mind a blank. It’d be better if I didn’t have a mind—if I’d never had a mind.”

“You were so smart, James,” she said. “You might have become great and famous with your mind.” And suddenly she was crying. “Oh, my baby! My little baby! You were so brilliant!”

Oh, my God, and this, I thought, saying, “Don’t cry, Mother, please don’t cry. I’m all right! I’m all right, Mother!”

“Oh, my little baby! My poor little baby! My poor little baby!”

On top of all the rest…“Don’t cry, Mother. Please don’t cry…” All these tears, I was thinking. All these tears after all these years, now. All of this love for me, this pure and holy love, this mother’s love, and the pity. I don’t want the pity. And this son’s love for his mother. All this love, now, when it cannot help and does not matter…

“Don’t cry, Mother, please don’t cry.”

She got herself under control. Although I did not look at her I knew she was dabbing at her eyes, and when she took her hands down and held them, restrained and placid, on the table, the red work-coarsened hands with cracked nails, I could not look at them without crying so I looked away.

We were silent for a time.

“Do you still say your prayers, James?”

“Yes, Mother,” I lied.

“Things are not so hopeless as they seem, James,” she said. “The warden says that if you behave yourself and stay out of trouble you will receive time off.”

“Did you see the warden?”

“Yes. I was here before the visiting hour started and he came out of his office and talked to me. He said that you appeared to be a very nice boy.”

“He did?”

“He said they liked you very much.”

“He did? I haven’t seen him yet,” I said.

“He said in twelve or thirteen years you will receive a hearing by the parole board and if you behave yourself you will be paroled.”

“He said that too, eh?”

“Do try to be a good boy, James,” she said.

“I will, Mother, I’ll be a model…I’ll be a very good boy, Mother,” I said. So I won’t have to do but thirteen years, as the warden says, instead of twenty, I added under my breath.

She took a Bible from the bottom of the basket and gave it to me. “I want you to have this, James.”

“Thanks, Mother,” I said, taking it and thumbing the leaves. It was her own Bible. I’d seen it in her room since I could first remember. It was a very old book with a worn, soft-grained leather binding with the words
The Holy Bible
printed in gold leaf on the front, and written in ink on the flyleaf was my mother’s maiden name and the date,
June 13th, 1919
.

“I had that before I was married,” she said.

“I know.” The leaves were very fine and slightly yellowed from age.

“The time is up, madam,” the guard said, standing nearby. We had not seen him approach.

Her fingers, folded on the table top, and held so placidly, went rigid. Her whole body went rigid. Down the table I saw the others standing up, kissing, laughing, getting ready to leave.

I stood up quickly and she clambered to her feet and we kissed again. Her lips were trembling against mine and breaking up beneath mine and I thought, please don’t let her cry again. I loved her so, not looking at her. I loved her all in my chest and my throat and my head.