Lay Down My Sword and Shield (15 page)

The reception building was surrounded by trees and a green lawn. Three trusties were trimming the hedges, edging the sidewalks, and weeding the flower beds. They looked right through me as I walked past them to the entrance. I didn’t know why, but I always felt a sense of guilt when I was around prison inmates, as though I should apologize for something. I knew the sequence of absurdities that often put them there, and I knew, also, that the years of punishment and the debilitating ethic that went with it had almost nothing to do with correction; but if I thought too long on any of that I would have had to fold my law degree into a paper airplane and sail it out my office window. I looked directly at the Negro clipping the top of the hedge (he was so black that his white uniform looked like an insult on his skin), and he moved the clippers at a downward angle on the side of the hedge so that his face turned away from me.

In the distance I could see one of the crumbling gray blockhouses left over from the last century, and I wondered if that was the one where John Wesley Hardin spent years chained to the wall of a dark cell. They fed him gruel and water, and whipped him every day with a leather strap to break him, and when he was finally taken out to work in the fields they manacled an iron ball to one ankle, and two guards always stood over him with shotguns. He served his hard time like that, fourteen years in chains with the whip and horse quirt laid across the buttocks.

And I remembered the songs that Leadbelly had sung on the same farm: “The Midnight Special,” “There Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos,” and “Shorty George,” and the lines about the “black Betty,” a four-inch-wide razor strop, three feet long, nailed to a wooden handle.

I sat in the scrubbed reception room and waited for the guard to bring Art from the fields. The room was divided by a long, low-topped counter, and the inmates sat on one side and the visitors on the other, their heads bent toward one another in a futile attempt at privacy. There was a sign on the far wall that read:
DO NOT GIVE ANYTHING TO THE PRISONERS; CIGARETTES CAN BE LEFT WITH THE PERSONNEL
. At one end of the counter a huge guard, with rings of fat across his stomach, sat in a wooden chair that strained under his weight. There was a dead cigar in his mouth and a filthy spittoon by his feet. Most of his teeth were gone, and he licked his tongue across the strings of tobacco on his gums. His face was like a pie plate, and the washed-out eyes wouldn’t focus in a straight line. Occasionally, he looked at his watch and pointed one thick finger at an inmate to tell him that his visiting time was over, then he would suck on the flattened end of his cigar. I could almost hear the digestive juices boiling in his stomach.

Art came through a back door with a guard behind him. His black hair was dripping sweat, and the cobweb scar in the corner of his eye was white against his tan. His palms were grimed and his forearms filmed with dirt and cotton lint. There were black rings in the creases of his neck, and his clothes were rumpled and stained at the knees. He had lost more weight, and the veins in his hands stood out like knotted pieces of cord.

“How long we got, boss man?” he said, taking a package of Bugler tobacco from his shirt pocket.

“Fifteen minutes,” the guard said.

Art sat down and curled a cigarette paper between his fingers. He didn’t speak and his eyes remained downcast until the guard had walked back to the door.

“What do you say, cousin?” he said.

“I think we’ll get a new trial.”

“Half the guys in here live on new trials. They don’t talk about nothing else. They write letters like paper is going out of style.”

“The difference is that you’re not guilty of anything.”

“You know that don’t have nothing to do with serving time.”

“Listen, as soon as the appeal goes through I’m going to have you out on bond.”

“That ain’t good-guy jive, is it?”

“I don’t bullshit a client, Art.”

“All right, you don’t. But I’m hanging by my ass in here. This is a rough joint, man.”

“What’s happened?”

He rolled the cigarette and folded down the wet seam with his thumb, watching the guard at the end of the counter.

“A couple of the hacks are laying it on. They know I’m with the union, and they’re getting off their rocks while they got me in the field. Three days ago the hack said I was dogging it in the cotton and they gave me the apple-box treatment. They take you down to the hole without supper, and all night you have to stand on an upended apple crate, even though you piss your pants. If you fall off, the hole boss gives you a few knots to get your attention.”

He took a book of paper matches from his shirt, split one longways with his thumbnail, and lit his cigarette. He breathed the smoke out through the empty space in his teeth.

“The field boss already told me I’d have to wear out a hoe handle a week if I wanted to earn good time from him,” he said. “He stays so close on my ass that horse is shitting and pissing all over me. They’re going to make me build the whole five, man, and I’ll run before I do another month.”

“Don’t do that.”

“I’ll run or I’ll ice one of those bastards. I’m through with that pacifist shit. When I was standing on that box with the hole boss looking down at me from the cage, it hit me what a dumb sonofabitch I’ve been for the last five years. The Anglos want us to be pacifists, just like they taught us that blessed are the poor crap in church. Man, we never knew how blessed we were. They want us to keep our hands in our pockets while they knock the piss out of us.”

“Forget about that running stuff, you hear?”

“It’s not something you plan. You start thinking about all that time and your clock gets wound up, and you’re ready to go through the wall with your fingernails.”

Art’s voice had risen, and the guard was looking at us with his crooked eyes. The fat tissue of his mouth was pressed in a small circle around his dead cigar.

“I spent a little time in a prison compound, too,” I said.

“Then you know what that patience shit sounds like.”

“Give it another couple of weeks and I’ll turn every handle I can to have you on the street.”

“I tell you, buddy, if I make the street they’ll never get me back in again. New trial or not, they better bring the whole goddamn army with them.”

“You’ll walk out of it clean, and I have a feeling that Cecil Wayne Posey’s ass is going to get barbecued, at least if I have anything to do with it. Also, the deputy at the jail is going to have a few interviews with the F.B.I.”

“Say, you cats really pulled a scene, didn’t you? I heard them bring you in that night. Something hit the cell floor like a sack of cement, and one of the blacks in the drunk tank told me it was a tall blond guy in ice-cream pants. You didn’t believe me when I told you to keep your head down.”

“I’m learning. I haven’t made a career of getting my head beat in.”

“So I have, huh? The greaseball who always gets his ass caught in the watermelon fence.”

“I met some of the people you have to deal with. I know it’s bad.”

“Man, you didn’t see nothing. You never got closer to a migrant camp than the highway.”

“I had a small taste of the local law enforcement.”

“I got two Purple Hearts in my trunk and you can have both of them.” He put out his cigarette, peeled the paper back carefully along the seam, and poured the unused tobacco in his Bugler pack.

“Do I get to be the dartboard again?” I said.

“The next time you’re in Pueblo Verde get Rie to give you a tour of the farmworker camps. Stick your head in a few of those stinking outdoor toilets, or talk with the kids sitting in doorways with flies swarming over their faces. Have dinner with a few of the families and see how the food sits on your stomach. Get a good breath of the dead rats under the houses and the garbage rotting in the ditches. Check the scene out, man. It really comes alive for you when you breathe it up both nostrils.”

“It looks like I have to stay white when I talk with you, doesn’t it?”

“You’re a good friend, Hack, but you’re a straight and your mind is white as Clorox.”

He got to me with that one.

“What should I be?” I said. “You want me to apologize because I was born me instead of you?”

“No, man. You still don’t see. It’s mind style, something you grew up with. Your people go through life like they’re looking down a long tunnel and they never see anything on the edges. You roar down the highway a hundred miles an hour and never remember anything later except a motel billboard because everything on the other side of the fence is somebody else’s scene. It don’t belong to you. It’s painted by some screw who lost his brushes and forgot what he was doing.”

“I don’t like to tell you that you’re full of shit.”

“Take the tour, buddy.”

“I’ve been on the tour. I grew up around it.”

“No point, cousin. You’re right in the middle of the pipe.”

“Another gringo, one of the oppressors? A dickhead with the liberal tattoo.”

The guard heard me, and he took the cigar out of his mouth between his fingers and leaned forward, with his stomach folding over his gun belt. The chair legs splayed slightly under his buttocks, and his crossed eyes were fixed in the smooth fat of his face.

“Look, Hack, if I make the street we’re going on a sweet drunk together. We’ll hit every Chicano joint in San Antonio. We won’t have to pay for nothing, either. We’ll slop down the booze and ball with brown-skin chicks till our eyes fall out. Yokohama on a three-day pass. A real wild one.”

“You’re cooking with butane now,” I said.

“I ain’t kidding you. I’m going to wash this jailhouse stink off me in the Guadalupe and buy my own beer truck. We’ll just tool around the roads drinking and slinging bottles at the highway signs. Then when I get back to Pueblo Verde they’re going to learn what real trouble is.”

“You want to go back for some more?”

“The ball game’s just starting. We’re going to hit them with a strike in August. I don’t know if we can win, but a lot of cotton is going to burn in the rows if we don’t.”

“Our defense will work like piss in a punch bowl if you have a half-dozen new charges against you.”

“I can’t sweat that.”

“You’d damn well better, unless you want to end up here again with another five to do.”

“The only thing we got on our side is us. The cops, the legislature, the farm bureau, the whole fucking bunch—we got to bust them the only way we can, and that’s to shut down the harvest until they recognize our union and start to negotiate.”

“You can’t make a strike work in the fields. There’s ten people standing in line for the job you walk off of.”

“They’re going to win in California. We’ll win here, too, as long as they can’t scare us or turn us against each other. You see, man, that’s what their real bag is all about. We twist the screws because of the shacks they give us and the seventy-dollar rents, and they throw out twenty or thirty families and tell them they got to do it because the union’s forcing standards on them they can’t meet. But people ain’t buying that shit anymore.”

The guard looked at his watch and pointed a fat finger at us, then cleared his mouth of tobacco spittle and spat it into the spittoon.

“I left two cartons of cigarettes for you at the desk,” I said.

“Yeah, thanks, man. Look, you were straight when you said two weeks, weren’t you?” His dark eyes were concentrated into mine, and one hand opened and closed on his forearm.

“I can’t set it on the day.”

“I know that. I ain’t dumb about everything.”

“I’ll start on the bond as soon as the appeal goes through.”

“Okay,” he said, and smiled for a moment. “I just don’t want to go on the nutmeg and coffee kick and start flogging my rod in the shower like most of the stir freaks in here. Take care, cousin, and look around for that beer truck.”

I walked back outside into the hard light, and I was perspiring before I reached my automobile. The trusty gardeners were sweeping the cut grass from the sidewalk, their faces turned downward, and a crew of men from the fields were walking in file along the road, four abreast, their hoes over their shoulders in military fashion, with two mounted guards on each side of them. The sun had moved farther into the west, and the shadows from the cedar trees fell to the edge of the cotton field. The sunburned faces and necks of the men ran with sweat, and the guards had their hats slanted over their eyes against the sun.

I drove back down the dusty road and stopped at the gate while two guards looked through my car and in the trunk. As I rumbled over the cattleguard and turned onto the highway I felt a strange release from that confined world behind those high walls. The oaks along the road were greener, the sky a more dazzling blue, the hot wind heavier with the smell of the pinewoods, the murderous sun less of an enemy. The billboard signs advertising charcoaled steaks and frosted bottles of beer penetrated the eye with their color, and even the weathered farmhouses and barns with metal patent-medicine signs nailed on their sides looked like an agrarian romanticist’s finest dream. There’s a line of separation between the world of free people and the confined that you never realize exists until you discover yourself on the opposite side. Once there, behind the barbed wire or mesh screens or concrete walls, all objects and natural phenomena have a different color, shape, angle, and association from anything you had ever known previously. And no one who hasn’t been there can understand the light-headed opulent feeling of walking back into the free world.

Fifty miles up the road I stopped at a tavern and steak house built on stilts above the edge of a green river. The board walls were gray and peeling, and the open windows were covered with screens to keep out the clouds of mosquitoes in the shadows of the willow trees along the bank. A screened eating porch shaded by a tall cypress tree extended over the water, and I sat at one of the checker-cloth tables and ordered a steak and a pitcher of beer. The bottom of the river was soap rock, a type of smooth gray sandstone that the Indians had used to bathe with, and in the middle, where the current had eroded deeply into the rock over thousands of years, you could see the dark shapes of huge catfish and carp moving in and out of the light and shadow, then the surface would ripple with the wind and they would break apart and dissolve in the sun’s refraction. I cut into the steak and soaked up the hot grease with bread, and washed it down with beer. The pitcher and mug were crusted with ice, and the beer was so cold that it made my throat ache. Cowboys and oil-field roughnecks in hard hats were bent over the bar with dozens of empty bottles before them, and the barmaid, in shorts and a sun halter, was opening more bottles as fast as she could pull them from the beer case. Across the river a group of Negroes were cane fishing with worms in the shallows, their black faces shaded with flop straw hats, and the moss in the cypress tree straightened and fell like silk in the wind.