The Final Adversary (6 page)

“You heard the rule, Mackey,” Wallen said. “No talking.”

“I—I’m sorry!”

“Not as sorry as you
will
be!” Wallen snapped. “McCoy, fetch me a collar!”

A guard emerged from a side room, holding a peculiar item in his hands. Wallen held it up for all to see. Then he grinned. “This is the iron collar, men. Let me show you how it works.”

The collar looked like a barrel-shaped bird cage with an open top and bottom. Two iron bands about an inch and a half wide held each end together. Six narrower iron bands ran like staves from the top to the bottom.

The boy flinched as Wallen unlocked the bottom ring and opened the collar on its hinges. The guard approached him, saying, “Just hold still, Mackey. This won’t hurt as bad as the thrashings your pa give you!”

Wallen slipped the contraption over Mackey’s head, closed the collar so that it fit snugly around the boy’s neck, and turned a key, locking it securely. Then he stepped back. “Now, that’s a right pretty bonnet, ain’t it?”

The sight of the pale-faced youth with his eyes staring out from the steel affair sickened Barney. It was not painful, but it was denigrating, an insult to a man. In days to come Barney would become so accustomed to the iron collars that he would pay no attention.

“You’ll wear that for a couple of days,” Wallen told Mackey. “Makes sleeping a little hard, and it ain’t so easy to get your grub between them bars, but it’ll teach you to keep your mouth shut.” He glanced around at the others, adding, “We got a plentiful supply of these little gems. Any time you want one, just open your mouth and I’ll accommodate you! Now, come on.”

Ten minutes later, after climbing several flights of stairs, Barney stood before a steel door and was shoved inside. When the door clanged shut, Barney surveyed the cell.
Just like a coffin,
he thought—no more than three and a half feet wide, about seven feet high, and seven feet long. A coffin of stone, separated from other coffins by walls a foot thick.

A cot and a bucket stood in the stark coffin. With no
plumbing, the bucket accounted for the overwhelming stench in the prison—a thousand buckets that filled and stank.

Sing Sing was built directly on the ground a few inches above the water’s edge, so the flagstones were always wet. It was cold and damp now.
What will it be like in the grip of an icy New York winter?
Barney wondered. He turned and looked at the cell, trying to find something to distract his mind from the terror crowding in on him.

There was a ventilator about three inches in diameter, which, he discovered later, led to a small duct between the walls. This, he also learned, helped spread the odors and the dampness. It was a haven for vermin, for each prisoner simply swept the dust out so that it filtered down on the man below him. And no power on earth could rid the fleas and lice and bedbugs from the ventilators.

Barney’s eyes moved from the ventilator to a shelf on the wall with a pitcher resting on it. Water! He grabbed it and began gulping the contents down to quench his burning thirst. It was tepid and had a putrid iron taste, but he didn’t care.

“Mate! Say, mate!”

The whisper came from his left. He put the pitcher back and leaned his head against the bars. “Yes? Who are you?”

“Keep it quiet, mate! Real nice and quiet!” the voice whispered hoarsely. “Me name’s Gardner. Awful Gardner, they calls me. What’s yours?”

“Barney Winslow.”

“Just come in, eh? First time in the place?”

“Yes.”

“Well, better save a bit of that water. It’ll have to last you a spell. Bloomin’ guards sometimes skip a day, you know. How long you in?”

“Twenty years.”

“Oh, my word!” Gardner whispered. “That’s a bad ’un!”

“What about you?”

“Me? Oh, I’ll be gettin’ out in a year. Done me four already. So about Christmas next year, I’ll be gettin’ back to
the world.” A silence followed; then Gardner asked, “What you in for, mate?”

“Armed robbery.”

“Now, that’s a hard ’un. But you just keep your spirits up, boy, and you’ll come through it. The Good Lord won’t forget you.”

At the mention of God, anger and fear boiled over, and Barney slammed his fist against the stone wall. “God? Where is
He
in all this? Twenty years in this rat hole for something I didn’t even do? Don’t talk to me about God!”

“Just listen, boy—don’t be talkin’ so wild!”

“I’ll talk as I please!”

“Not in this place,” Gardner advised. “You’ll be havin’ your head in an iron collar, and besides, you’ll find out that you need God here like never before.”

Barney clamped his lips, then forced himself to speak softly. “Your name is ‘Awful’?”

“That’s not me proper name. Orville, that’s it. Orville Gardner.”

“Why do they call you ‘Awful’?”

“Because, old chap, that’s exactly what I was—just
awful!
” A breathy laugh punctuated Gardner’s speech. “Nothin’ too low for me—a fighter, a thief, a drunk, a whoremonger! But no more, thanks to the Good Lord! I come to this place the chief of sinners, but the Lord Jesus found me, and He saved me by His blood!”

“I don’t want no preaching, Gardner. You can keep your God to yourself!”

“As you please. Watch your step in here, you understand? When we go to chow, keep your head down and don’t say a word. The guards watch the new blokes real close, so don’t give ’em no excuse, Barney.”

Gardner ceased talking and Barney lay down on the cot. He was still thirsty, but took Awful’s advice. The minutes drained away slowly. Without a watch, there was no way to judge time anyway. Besides, the dim murky twilight made
it impossible to see anything.
I’ll lie here week after week, year after year, no sun through those slits on the walls. The warmth won’t even penetrate this gloomy, damp hole!
The thought sent a cold chill down his spine.

More than once Barney almost moved to put his head to the bars—just to hear a whisper again. The silence and gloom terrified him, though he knew it would pass in time. He forced himself to lie still on the cot, fighting off the wild desire to scream and beat his fists against the stones.

The only diversion that first day was a guard walking down the narrow way outside the cell, sometimes bringing an inmate back to his cell. Even that became an event to be anticipated, something to look at, to hear.

Finally there was a clanging sound, and he leaped to his feet and pressed his face to the bars.

“Chow time,” Awful whispered. “Remember—keep it down!”

The guards unlocked the cells and marched the men down the narrow way. Gardner, Barney noted as they fell into line, gave him a wink, but said nothing. He was six feet tall and had a full head of hair and a beard to match. The men lined up a few inches apart in front of a door. Barney flinched when a pair of hands touched his shoulders, but saw down the line that each man had put his hands on the shoulders of the one in front of him. He did the same, and when the line moved, it was a lock step—a shuffle. As they entered the massive mess hall, the serpentine line reminded Barney of a centipede—a human centipede.

A warder, armed with a club, watched every move. No smiles, no winks, no glances, Imboden had said, so Barney kept his face a frozen mask. When his section of the line turned, Barney sat down at a table. Awful Gardner was on Barney’s left, he knew, but kept his eyes fixed in front of him. He waited with the rest, eyeing the tin cup and single bowl with a tin plate on top. A rough chunk of bread lay on one
side of the bowl, a spoon fork on the other. Each table had a large pitcher.

“Eat!” The sudden command by a warder was followed by a clatter of plates pulled into place. Barney removed his tin plate, looked into the bowl, and almost threw up. It was a stew of some sort, but he’d have to shove it down. He poured the conglomeration into the tin plate and began to eat. It was thick and grimy, with soggy vegetables and bits of rancid meat, from what, he could not tell. The meat was very salty, and he knew he’d be thirsty later on, but he ate slowly, not knowing when they’d be fed again. The bread was old and wormy; still, it was better than the stew.

The lack of talk was eerie. He had not known how much talking and eating were joined. It seemed natural to converse with the man eating beside him, but one glance at the dark-skinned prisoner across from him and the others all over the mess hall wearing collars, who were forced to shove their food between strips of steel, stopped him.

The meal finished quickly, and the men were marched back to their places of confinement. As the door to his cell clanged shut, Barney remained where he was, watching as the other prisoners were herded into their stalls. Finally it grew quiet, and he dropped to the cot and held his head in his hands. How long he sat there, he didn’t know; then he heard Gardner whisper, “Cheer up, lad! Never fear!”

That was all, but it helped. He lay down on the hard cot, pulled the single blanket over him, and closed his eyes. The time dragged on. Finally he drifted off to a fitful sleep, awaking abruptly when a warder hit his nightstick against the bars as he walked down the hall. The night passed somehow, and when the first murky ray of light came to his cell from the slotted window, he sat up. The stench of the place was just as bad, he knew, but his sense of smell was already becoming immune.
Soon I won’t even know the place stinks,
he thought grimly.
After I’ve been here a few days.

Breakfast was like supper. The lock-step march to the mess
hall, the silent meal, then dumping the plates and flatware into a small barrel as they passed out of the place. Barney was called out by one of the warders and told, “You’ve been assigned to clean-up detail.”

This meant, he discovered, sweeping and mopping the offices and the guards’ quarters. It was hard work, but that night in his cell, Awful commented, “Clean-up detail? Coo! Now you see, lad, how the Good Lord is looking after you—just like I said!”

“What’s so great about
that?
” Barney whispered.

“Why, a chap gets to move about, don’t you see? Just be glad you didn’t get in the carpet-weaving shop! My word! Sitting there ten hours a day with a warder breathing down your bloomin’ neck, and usually with a hard hand, too! No, dear boy, cleanup is the best there is. They don’t usually let a new man have it, so it must be that God is favoring you.”

Barney did not respond, for he was still confused by the enormity of his personal tragedy. He slept little that night, or the nights following. He was like a man in a coma, or suffering from shell shock. The dreadful physical conditions of the prison—the food and the confinement in the coffin-like cell—could be adjusted to. But the loss of all freedom and the stripping away of his human dignity could not be accepted by Barney.

As the days passed, then weeks, he learned to shut things and people out as he lay for hours in his cell. At other times, he lived in the past, for, like his mother, he had the same gift of remembering the past vividly. These memories dwelt on his childhood days—fresh and sharp images. He remembered the days at the ocean with his father and mother when he was the only child. At times he could almost feel the sting of the cold brine and hear the roar of the breakers.

One scene came to him over and over—a day he and his father had walked along the beach looking for shells. It had been hot that summer day, and they had strolled for miles on the wet dunes. Finally his father had said, “Let’s rest here.”
Sitting in the elbow of the trunk of a large tree, his father told him of the building of the railroad. Barney could still remember the weight of his father’s arm across his small shoulders and the look of his blue eyes in the bright sunshine. Then they had gone back down the beach, and Barney remembered finding the shell, the biggest and best he’d ever found. It was a chambered nautilus, beautifully wrought. His father had said, “God sure knows how to make things, doesn’t He, Barney?” Barney had kept that as his prized possession. It was still where he had left it—at his old home, in his room.

Barney became numb to the prison routine—rising at dawn, eating breakfast, going to work, having the evening meal, returning to his cell. He performed his duties mechanically and was shoved along like stock herders prodding cattle, with no particular interest in any one animal.

The one break in the routine was Sunday. That day prisoners were given a choice of going back to their cells from the dining hall with their food and being locked in until the next morning—or attending church. Like most of the inmates, Barney stubbornly refused to attend church, in spite of Gardner’s repeated invitations.

These were the long dismal hours when the whispers, sighs, and groans of a thousand men echoed against the blank walls, and the smell of a thousand bodies and a thousand buckets saturated the damp and gloomy air. Barney usually filled the day with dog-eared novels that he could read by holding the book up to the dim light filtering down through the slit from above.

After two months, Barney couldn’t face another long day. As they were lining up for the walk to the dining room, he whispered, “Awful, I’m going to church.”

“Good-O! It’ll be a good ’un, Barney.”

The service was held in a long, narrow room with rough benches. At the front of the room was a low platform with a crude pine pulpit and a table holding a pitcher of water.
Awful sat beside Barney and handed him a tattered songbook. “Let’s ’ere you sing out, lad!”

Two men were seated on the platform, and one of them stood up and began singing. He was not a particularly good singer, and for the most part the inmates were either unskillful or indifferent. Yet as the singing went on, something began to happen to Barney. It was the songs, for many of them were the ones he had sung in the church he had attended all his life with his parents. He could almost hear his mother’s clear voice as she sang “Rock of Ages” with great joy. Another, “Alas, and Did My Saviour Bleed,” was his father’s favorite. As the song filled the room, Barney remembered standing beside his father as a child, holding his hand, and his father had cried as he sang: