Cast the First Stone (5 page)

“Jimmy, you certainly are good-looking,” he said. “You are one more good-looking boy.”

“Yeah?” I felt a blush coming up.

“Let’s say we’re cousins,” he said.

“I don’t care. But everybody will know we’re not.” I liked him.

“No they won’t. They haven’t got any way of telling. Let’s tell them we’re cousins on our mothers’ side. Our mothers were sisters.”

“It’s okay with me.”

“Cousin Jimmy. How does that sound?”

“Cousin Mal.” I grinned.

He was delighted. “We’re cousins. I wish you were my cousin for real. I feel like I’m your cousin for real.”

“Aw, hell.” But I liked him.

“Everybody has seen us together ever since you came into the company yesterday,” he said. “They’ll think I knew you before. I told the General that I knew you before, anyway. I told him that you were my cousin when he called me last night.”

“We’re just a couple of old cousins in the big house,” I said.

He was excited. You could see it in his face and eyes. His eyes were real bright blue and now they were brilliant with excitement. “We ought to cut our arms and mix our blood and then we would be real blood cousins.”

“Aw, hell, we don’t have to do that.”

“Oh, all right.”

Then he said, “Your eyes are the same color as mine.”

He was good company and very pleasant. That night after the lights had been turned off he brought me a tailor-made cigarette and said, “Good night, cousin.” We were buddies.

3

T
HE NEXT MORNING
was gray like the morning before. It had stopped snowing but the ground was covered. The snow had softened and was slushy and the wheelbarrows churned it into heavy muck. Rolling those “Georgia buggies” was a killing job.

It wasn’t long before there was some excitement. Old man Warren, who usually sat inside and warmed his chair, had taken the shift outside. Captain Roe, the younger guard, had a sprained ankle and had come inside.

About nine-thirty I saw Captain Warren come running into the dormitory. He went into the office and got Captain Roe and ran back outside with Roe hobbling along behind him. There was a cut over his left eye and his glasses were gone and blood was running down the left side of his face. He had his pistol out and as Roe went outside he drew his also.

All of us porters ran out to see what the excitement was about. Everybody had stopped working and was standing about in groups, talking and gesticulating. Mal saw me and came over. “Johnson knocked old Fuss-face on his can.”

“Yeah? What Johnson?”

“You know, that new fellow that was over there on 5-11 with you. He was transferred over here the same day you were. He’s got a cut down the side of his face. He said he was a paratrooper.”

“Yeah? Yeah? He hit him?” I got excited, too.

“Knocked him on his can.”

“What did old man Warren do?”

“He didn’t do nothing. He had on his overalls over his uniform and he couldn’t get out his pistol. He got up and started unbuttoning his overalls to get out his pistol, and Johnson hit him again. Hit him in the mouth. Hit him up beside the eye the first time and knocked off his glasses. Busted them all to hell. Even if old Fuss-face had got his pistol he couldn’t have seen him to shoot at him.”

“Yeah? What did he do then?”

Mal smacked his lips like it tasted good. “Johnson ran down by the dining room. I think he’s gone to the deputy’s office. Somebody told him to beat it over to old Jumpy Stone and he wouldn’t let ‘em kill him.”

“That’s when the old man came inside,” I said. “I saw him when he came running inside. He took Roe out with him.”

“I wish Roe had been here to get knocked on his can too,” Mal said.

“Come on, I’ll show you where it happened,” I followed him down the tracks and saw where Warren had sat down in the snow.

“Knocked him right on his can, didn’t he?”

Everybody was talking and laughing and excited, as if they were at a ball game and had seen one of their home team hit a home run. It was fun seeing a guard get smacked. It was something to talk about.

“Man, you oughta seen old Fuss-face scratching for his heat,” one of them said, jubilantly.

“That old chump carries two guns, man, and he couldn’t get either one of them.”

“You oughta seen his face. Looked like a bowl of chow mein.”

“Looked like the ass of a bear if you ask me.”

“What will they do with Johnson?” I asked Mal.

“They’ll probably get him over in the hole and sap up on him.”

“Will they shoot him?”

“I don’t know, but he’ll probably wish they would before they get through with him. If Jumpy Stone’s there he’ll stop them, though.”

“What the hell did it all start about?”

“It was hard rolling and the shovel men put too much on his buggy. He dumped some of it off a couple of times and then old Fuss-face saw him and ran over and told him to get a shovel and put it back on. He kept on going and old Fuss-face ran up and grabbed him and slapped him. And what did he do that for?”

I went back inside. Everybody had quit working and after awhile they all came dribbling in. But they were still excited and kept talking about it and wondering what they’d do to Johnson.

After awhile old man Warren and Roe returned. Warren had the side of his forehead bandaged and painted with iodine. He was all worked up and looking for trouble and he’d strapped his holster on the outside of his coat, where you could see the pearl butt of the pistol sticking out.

“I got another one, too. I got another one, too,” he said, when he saw us looking at it.

A convict in the back of the dormitory yelled, “You had ‘em out there, too.”

Warren turned a splotched red. “Yes, yes, and you’ll be the first one I shoot.” He had a high, irritating voice and it was harsh and nasty now. “Come on, come on, everybody get outside and go to work.” He wanted to abuse them. “You’re all laughing, you’re all laughing. You should see what I did to him. You should see him before you laugh.”

The men were getting sullen. He ran out and shoved a couple of them around and slapped two he found sitting on their bunks. And then he went up by the door, and hit at their legs with the leather strap of his stick as they passed. Roe stood in the background and looked watchful. I got mad just looking.

The guards wore blue uniforms with brass buttons and regulation caps. Old man Warren was something to see, standing there with his shabby blue suit over his flabby old muscles, with gray hair sticking out from underneath his cap and his face red with iodine and a big patch over his eye, abusing the men. Young men. Strong men. Men who could break him in two. There was something filthy about it. Something that outraged the senses.

A couple of sergeants came down and stood around for a time. A big tall one, called Fletcher, and a fat one with red jowls and flat feet. They called the fat one Donald Duck because of his flat feet. When he walked he put down his feet cautiously. He never made a careless step if he could help it.

When we went in to dinner that day Sergeant Cody was in the dining room. They said that Fletcher was treacherous. They said he stood outside a locked cell once and shot a convict to death. His eyes blinked and his whole face jerked and jumped from some kind of nervous disorder. But it was Cody they were scared of. Cody was a quiet man. He hardly ever said anything and he hardly ever hurried. He never repeated an order. And whenever you saw him running, some convict was going to die, they said. He was the most feared man in prison. A big rawboned man with a clay-colored complexion and a rock-hard face, and lips so thin you could hardly see them.

We were subdued in the dining room with Cody standing by the door. He stood relaxed and unmoving. He wore a long black slicker thrown over his shoulders like a cape, and his hands were out of sight. He had his cap pulled low over his tricky eyes. Above him hung one of the signs that were all over the dining room: Eat Slowly. Chew Your Food. He looked somber and leashed.

It wasn’t until that afternoon when we went to the barbershop, two long gray lines of convicts marching through the gray day, underneath the sagging sky, that we learned the actual truth of what had happened to Johnson. The barbershop was upstairs over the hole. It was a long box of a room with the prison-made, straight-backed wooden chairs circling the outer walls. Down the center were the benches where we sat back-to-back, waiting our turns for the two-minute shaves and five-minute haircuts. Before we could get a haircut we had to have a signed slip from the guard. Nobody got a haircut that day.

We had marched down between the dining room and the tin shop and turned west at the front of the dining room and south by the hospital, gabled and antique, and down past the deputy’s office and the hole next door. Then we had to stand outside in the cold to wait for a company to leave the barbershop, to make room for us. Our faces got chilled and tight in the cold so that when the hot strong lather was slapped on them the skin cracked open like a scalded tomato.

Kish, the big Greek runner for the hole, came out and told us that Warren and two other guards had broken one of Johnson’s arms, cracked his skull, and put him in the hole. Kish said he would be there for a time. He seemed very pleased.

Standing in the cold in the close-packed line, I could see the big new red-brick chapel building across the yard, and part of the west cell house where I had celled on 5-11. I could see the front cell house with its four rows of barred windows, and five-foot strip of polished stone underneath the eaves so the convicts couldn’t scale it; and the slanting slate roof. And in the middle the main gates of the prison, where beyond was freedom; and through which more men entered than ever left.

The yard was criss-crossed with brick walks down which the gray men marched through the gray days; to the dining room, to the bathhouse, to the barbershop, to the hole, to the hospital, to the mills, to the Protestant and Catholic and Jewish and Christian Science chapels, to the electric chair. In front of the Protestant chapel was a small, empty pool. They said the band stood there and played marches on clear days, while the convicts marched to their meals. They said alligators were kept in the pool in the summer, but I didn’t believe that.

A little beyond where we stood, across the areaway, was a square, gray-stone building which housed the school on the first floor, and the Catholic chapel above. And beyond, a brick walk leading out of sight around the corner, down by the front cell house to the death house.

There was a pile of lumber and iron and wheelbarrows and junk over in front of the west cell house, left over from the building of the new 7&8 cell block.

As we went up the outside stairway into the barbershop I saw one end of the long, flat, one-storied frame building behind the school. It was a dormitory. There were four thousand convicts in that prison which had been built for eighteen hundred.

My whiskers weren’t very thick and I’d decided to shave only once a week. But when my turn came I didn’t want to say anything to Captain Warren. I went over and got into the chair. The shave left my face raw and burning. When Mal got out of his chair he came over and squeezed in beside me on the bench. He gave me some after-shave lotion, but it burned worse than the shave and smelled like menthol and alcohol.

“What was that barber saying to you?” he asked.

“Oh, he was just kidding.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I had baseball whiskers,” I said, blushing.

“Nine on each side.” It was a stale joke.

When we returned to the dormitory the convicts were sullen and hostile. Old man Warren was pleased. He kept on abusing the men. “You saw what Johnson got. You see what you get for fighting a guard.”

He saw two men wrestling playfully. He ran up and jerked them apart and slapped one, and hit the other one across the arm with his stick. The men were very sullen. Warren stopped all the card games. Until he left, after supper, we couldn’t do anything but sit around and look sullen.

But that night after the shift had changed, the games were good. The tobacco orders had come in that day at noon and had been delivered to us after we’d signed the yellow bills of sale. I struck a bargain with one of the gamekeepers, a Swede called Ole, and got some matches, two bars of soap, and a carton of cigarettes for a monthly order of the daily
Gazette
and some western-story magazines. I could have gambled with it. There was very little cash in the dormitory and merchandise was taken at the commissary price. But I thought I’d better not, since Mal had warned me against it.

Mal got a checkerboard and we played pool checkers until bedtime. I won fifty-two out of eighty-one games, but I think he was just letting me win. He made some good moves there, once or twice, to lose fifty-two games to me.

The next day was Sunday. We dressed up in our blue denim shirts and our white string ties. My shirt was so large the collar sagged down to my chest. After a breakfast of coffee cake, peanut butter and coffee we lined up for church.

The Catholics and Christian Scientists went first. There were about twenty Catholics and two Christian Scientists in our company. We didn’t have any Jews. After they’d gone the Protestants lined up and marched to the Protestant chapel. Everybody who didn’t have one of the three other faiths was a Protestant. Church was compulsory.

I didn’t have to go. The porters were exempted. But I went to get out of sweeping. In the regular line Mal marched several men ahead of me. But Sunday he fell back in line and marched just ahead, so we could sit together in the chapel.

The yard was filled with long gray lines of convicts. Every walk was filled. All the men were out. It didn’t seem possible that the prison could house all those men. Even the honor men came in from the honor dormitory, in their neat blue suits and white shirts, looking like civilians, and filled up the front seats reserved for them. The honor men were big shots. It was something to be an honor man and wear a blue serge suit and a white shirt and look important.

We entered the chapel from the back. It was made like a theater, with the seats graduating up to the roof at the rear. There was a large stage with wings and curtains, as in the legitimate theater. The deputy warden sat in a chair at the extreme left of the stage. His head was bald as an egg, with big dark freckles and he had a flat-nosed pug’s face. He was a big man. His body shook from some sort of nervous disorder. They called him Jumpy Stone because on his bad days he was a sight to see. His blue eyes, shaded by tufted brows and enlarged by polished spectacles, looked bright and sharp. He sat there watching us as we entered, with a sardonic expression.