Lit Riffs (27 page)

“Why should we move?” they said. “This is our home.”

Maybe you think it strange that people would want to cling to such a life. But I don’t think I’ve conveyed to you properly what it was like, back in the day when the prison was thriving. How lovely it was, how sweet and sad to hear the harmonica music pouring over the prison walls at twilight, to see the men like overgrown children playing their listless games of baseball on the other side of the fence. And on our side people were content, they had a reason for being, a purpose in life. Who would want to give that up? If you’d had it, wouldn’t you cling as long as possible to any hope of getting it back?

Those were dark times, I suppose. I confess I was not as attentive as I should have been. Because by that time I was no longer a child and I was busy falling in love. When you fall in love yourself, you’ll see that it is a full-time occupation. Even when you are supposedly doing other things—working, sleeping, brushing your teeth—secretly you know you are just pretending to do them while your inner truer self has not stopped thinking about the loved one for so much as a second.

He was Bobby Bane, son of the prison warden, and he was the finest-looking man I’d ever seen, then or since. I can show you pictures but they do not do him justice. He had pointy eyebrows like a movie-star villain, sunken cheeks that looked like they’d been scooped out with a melon baller, long white teeth that a beaver would envy. Long hair that my father couldn’t wait to get his hands on.

I was a fair enough specimen myself in those days. If you look at all my sisters, you can see my parents mixed in an astonishing variety of combinations and permutations: here my father’s nose jutting out like a rainspout, there my mother’s softly receding chin, here my mother’s cheekbones merging oddly with my father’s jowls. I think I got the best bit of both: my father’s soulful spaniel eyes, my mother’s tart and prissy mouth.

We went walking, we wrote each other letters though we lived half a mile apart. I suppose it sounds old-fashioned, but at the time it was considered romantic. I can show you the letters—read them to you someday. His penmanship was not so good but the emotion shines through, you’ll see.

Meanwhile, the prison population was dwindling, dwindling. The numbers slipped from the thousands to the hundreds, and then to less than a hundred. More and more employees were let go. A shantytown sprang up on the playing field behind the school, tents and trailers and sheds of tin siding and plastic sheeting. More and more families with no income and no prospects, waiting and praying for the tide to turn, waiting to present themselves when the prison started hiring again.

But maybe it wasn’t going to turn. Maybe the world really had become a better place and people were living in peace and harmony, like in songs. But what do I know. I was in love, seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses, as they say.

The prisoners continued to trickle away. Their time was up; they were given new suits and bus tickets. All the way from the prison gates to the bus station they had to endure the reproachful stares of men, women, ragged children.
This is all your fault
, their eyes seemed to say.
Why couldn’t you stay put?
Some of the former inmates were so overwhelmed by accusatory stares that they ran sobbing back to the prison gates begging for entry. But the guards kept the gates closed, calling through the bars, “I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry, sir. You’re free to go now,” giving them helpful proddings with pointed sticks. So they trudged wearily back to the station and awaited their buses with their eyes shut tight, fingers in their ears.

Soon there was only a skeleton staff left at the prison, pacing the empty, echoing halls, idle and anxious, pestering the remaining three inmates with offerings every few minutes. “Need some laundry done?” “Need a massage?” “Need some coffee?” “Need to talk to someone?” Even these three would not be around much longer, their release dates were coming up. Something had to be done. Men like my father, including my father, began meeting in homes, in restaurants, in the town’s one bar.

“What will we do,” they said, “when there are none left?”

“The funding will stop, the prison will close, and then what will we do?”

“As long as there is one prisoner, the prison will have to remain open and we will keep our jobs,” someone reasoned.

“But what if there are no more criminals in need of punishment? Not even one?”

“Then perhaps we should provide one,” someone said softly.

“You mean, one of … us?” the others said, shocked.

“For the good of everyone. Wouldn’t it be worth it?”

And over a series of days and discussions, the idea began to take hold. If the rest of the state could not provide, we would have to do it ourselves. One of us would have to shoulder the responsibility, provide employment and purpose to the rest of us. And the discussions turned from
how
to
who
. Surprisingly for a town where everyone prided themselves on helping each other out, there were no volunteers.

“I have to run the damn prison, otherwise I’d do it myself,” Warden Bane said.

“What about your worthless son?” someone called.

The discussion moved on to other options, but the idea that Bobby Bane was the man for the job somehow fixed itself in people’s minds. Don’t ask me why. Something about him made people think he’d be able to play the role of a criminal. I said myself he looks like a villain, but I meant the seductive, storybook sort. Not the real kind. If he seemed blundering and worthless in those days, it was only because he was so dizzily, blitheringly in love he could barely walk in a straight line.

Or maybe people wanted to get back at Warden Bane. They were tired of his bossy ways, though he
was
the boss. They thought if he had been smarter, acted sooner, he could have averted the present situation. Also his job would be the last to go; they resented that.

And then, well, poor Bobby. Assaulted from all sides. “Think of the kids out there, Bobby, the kids!” “Do you want to see your father lose his job?” “The whole town’s depending on you, son. Step up to the plate!” “Who’s going to support your grandparents now?
All
the grandparents out there?” Even his fourth-grade teacher called up to say, “Think of someone else for once.” And his brother, slapping his back and saying, “I know you’ll do the right thing. You’ve got it in you, I know it.” At first he resisted, but then he began to listen. I could see him start to cave.

Whenever he stepped outside—an endless ocean of imploring, accusing faces. You never saw so many people, just waiting around, watching his every move, peering in the windows of his house, whispering through the heating vents while he slept.

I saw it happening. “Don’t do it,” I told him. “Don’t listen to them! It’s ridiculous! You don’t owe anybody anything!” But already he was shining all over like a man who’d found his mission. “Let’s go away,” I said hopelessly. “Let’s elope and go to Beet City.” But already he was too far gone.

“They need me,” he said dreamily. “
You
need me,” he said suddenly. “Both your folks will get to keep their jobs.”

“I need you out here, not in there,” I said.

“Now don’t be selfish,” he said, taking my hand.

After that things happened quickly. He took credit for some damage to public property, a streetlight I think, and managed to compound it with some unruliness with the police and some courtroom insolence. Soon he was returned to us in the blue van that brought in the newcomers. And just in time, too—the last of the inmates was just walking reluctantly out the gates as he was brought in.

He settled right in to his cell and spent his time chatting with the grateful, reinstated guards. My father, desperate for something to do, trimmed him once and sometimes twice a day, and my mother cooked him feasts but stuck to regulations with the plastic utensils and metal trays.

The warden managed to rehire a number of old employees by citing the special needs of the one inmate. I was allowed to see him in the visitors’ hall after going through the formalities of having my coat groped and my purse searched.

“You should see the amount of mail I get,” he told me excitedly. “I’ve got fans!”

“What about my letters?” I said.

“I got those, too,” he said. “They were sort of boring, though.”

Now that we had no choice but to write letters, the romance had gone out of them for me. But my sisters thought it was thrilling that I was dating a man in prison. “It’s so romantic,” they kept saying. “But isn’t it dangerous?” they asked, as if they’d forgotten that they’d known Bobby since he was in diapers. “Isn’t he just
bursting
with pent-up desire?”

Everyone thought I was being very brave and noble, and when Bobby asked me to marry him, what could I say but yes when it meant his father could rehire the prison chaplain and a few more custodians to sweep out the chapel? And afterward we were allowed conjugal visits, which meant a bit more laundry to do and a few more names on the payroll.

Bobby began to really enjoy his role after that, I think. As his sentence neared its end, his father gave him extra time for bad behavior, he had the power to do that. Bobby gave himself some tattoos and started working out and meditating. He even made tally marks on his cell wall until I told him to quit it, he wasn’t fooling anybody.

“You’re a fake, a decoy,” I told him. “You’re the little wooden duck, they’re hoping you’ll bring in the real thing.”

If that was the plan, it wasn’t working. Bobby kept on rattling around alone like a flea in a birdcage, while the giant clothes dryer in the basement flung his two little sheets around and the secretaries composed long reams of notes about him to give themselves something to file. My father groomed Bobby’s poor head until not a single harassed hair dared show itself above the surface.

Then the nagging voices descended on Bobby again. “If you’d read a few books, we could rehire Librarian Birdie,” they said. “There are still hundreds of people outside wanting their jobs back, why aren’t you doing anything for
them?
” “What about poor Mr. Crouch? He’s got a daughter in the hospital, six granddaughters to support. If you don’t give him something to do, those girls will
die
, you hear me? Do you want
that
on your conscience?”

My mother, though she tried not to mention it, was itching to do another Last Meal. “There’s a quail recipe, with truffle stuffing, that I’m dying to try,” she’d hint. “If you could just mention it to him …”

“But he doesn’t need a Last Meal,” I said.

“Not yet,” she said. “One can always hope.”

Then the rumors started. People said that if one family member “checked themselves in,” other family members would be guaranteed their jobs back. Warden Bane would neither confirm nor deny. But soon there were rumors that Bobby had company. People began to lift their heads and admire the weather and talk optimistically about the future. It was not uncommon to see families in heated discussion, pointing fingers at one male or another, sometimes drawing straws, sometimes playing the clapping, rhyming games that children use to decide who will be “it” in a game of keep-away. More than once I was assailed by people in the street, they’d grab my arm and say, “Do us a favor and choose one of us. Why? No reason. Just point.” And then to the others: “What the lady says, goes.”

That was when I left my hometown. It was all so wearying to watch. Bobby cared only about his pen pals and his muscles. And I was pregnant with you, you see. I wanted you to grow up in a different sort of environment.

The changes didn’t happen all at once, of course. It was a gradual shift, a slow reversion. Over time the shantytown was dismantled, the gray miserable hordes abandoned the streets, resumed their jobs and homes, and became recognizable again. Some families had arranged a system of rotation, taking turns spending time behind bars. The prison was filling up, though there was plenty of confusion—people had trouble remembering whether they were working or serving time. It did not seem to matter, much, anymore, as long as the daily routines continued, the floors were swept, the food cooked, the lights extinguished, the paychecks issued, and the bells rung at the proper hours for all the town to hear.

And then, to their great relief, fresh inmates from the outside started showing up again, delivered to the gates in a blue van. The world was not perfect after all.

I heard there was talk about holding another prison rodeo. I would never go back to see it, but I find it oddly satisfying to think that the spectators in the stands will no longer sit apart, since the families of workers and inmates are one and the same.

author inspiration

This was the first Tom Waits song I ever heard. And after repeated listenings over many years, its peculiar magic still hasn’t worn off. This song always makes me feel wistful, nostalgic, but nostalgic for places I’ve never been to, nostalgic for a past not my own. Maybe it’s because of the wound-down-music-box haunted-fairground feel of the music, or maybe it’s the lyrics, which always strike me as ominous and yet strangely comforting.

david ebershoff

I. SPRING

On a cold spring day in 1912, Mrs. Trevor Harrington, née Olive Darwin, decided to kill her first husband. She was seventeen, a bride of two weeks, with small brown eyes and a thin, eager face. There was always something underdeveloped about Olive, her fist as tiny and white as a chick. Her strongest muscle was upon her ankle, sinewy and tough from years of pressing the piano pedal. Many people agreed that Olive wasn’t pretty; gifted in music and in the garden, but not pretty.

Trevor Harrington was sixty-six, and his new bride’s first impression of him was his hair: white, wiry hair everywhere—in his ears and upon his knuckles and on the big ball of his belly and, like a polar bear rug, spread across his back. The last thing Olive’s father had done before dying was arrange the marriage. It was his gift to his daughter, who, as anyone in Washington County could tell you, would never have children, not after the accident with the bull.

Harrington and Olive lived on a small hay farm on Fly Summit Road where they tended fifty-four acres of timothy, a dozen head of cattle, a pair of asses named George and Martha, and a lame thousand-pound pig. In the shed next to the barn Harrington tinkered with the combustion engines he salvaged from the river yards down in Troy and Albany. He would come in for supper slimed with castor oil, and Olive, who had lived a quiet but musical life with her father until only a month ago, would beg him to wash his hands.

Years before, Harrington’s first wife died in childbirth, taking with her Little Sue, a baby as tiny as a kitten. He spent the following thirty years more or less alone. Most days he spoke to no one, not even to Mrs. Napp, who at noon would come to the kitchen door with a honey ham warm in the basket. Mrs. Napp would sweep up after Harrington and tackle his pile of wash, her lean but strong arms wringing the crumby sheets and the stiffening long Johns until her knuckles turned white. She made such efficient work of the dishes in the sink and the mud tracks on the runner that she was gone within the hour. Mrs. Napp, who lived a hearty life until giving up at eighty-three, died about the same time Olive’s father found the tender lump in his groin. His need to secure his daughter’s future and Harrington’s need for help with the housework coincided. Later, looking back on it, Olive would think of that moment when the tails of George and Martha swung and touched at the gray, mangy tips.

Olive’s dowry consisted of the upright piano with its stiff pedal, several books of sheet music, a piano stool needle-pointed with goldenrod, and half a dozen lace napkins. Her domestic skills were capable but not exemplary. Her sewing was sturdy if not elegant. She could boil a mutton joint to a fine ashen gray while keeping the meat on the bone. She was a prize-winning gardener; her corn relish had taken second place in the cannings competition two years back. But Olive’s greatest talent, everyone knew, was musical. She was blessed with a keen ear and a good memory and a small but silvery alto. Her tiny fingers moved fast and mouselike upon the upright’s ivory. When she sang, the tendons leapt from her throat and the hair at the nape of her neck grew damp. In the evenings she used to sing ballads to her father—“Early Buttercup” and “Fawns in the Snow” and his favorite, “The Mohawk Girl.” During the day, she would dash through her housework and the tasks in the kitchen garden in order to find time at the piano. Not long before her father’s death she composed her first song, a little ditty called “Springtime Forever.”

On the first day of spring in 1912, the justice of the peace married Olive and Harrington in the Easton town hall. They returned home to the farmhouse through the fields patched with old snow and early crocus. They celebrated at the kitchen table with a pigeon pie. Olive said to her new husband, “I have a gift for you.” She went to the piano in the next room and began to sing “Fare thee Well.” After a few stanzas, a displeased caw came from Harrington. At first she thought it was gas from the pigeon. She ignored the unpleasant noise and continued to sing. Her back was to him and she didn’t see Harrington’s beaky gray lips snapping in the nest of his beard. She didn’t know he was rising from his chair and moving toward his new wife in a slow, angry lurch. He came to her side and Olive looked into her husband’s milky eyes, and in midnote, he slammed the upright’s lid upon her right hand. “It seems no one told you,” he said, “that I hate music.” His tongue was wet and full on his bottom lip. “Another thing. I hate pigeon pie. Honey ham every night, that’s what I like.”

Then he went to his shed where he spent several hours tinkering with the engines under the kerosene lamp. Through the window she could see him bent over his workbench: he was oiling a piston and fingering a ball bearing as if it were a black pearl. His expression was lost in his hair.

Olive’s hand was red and swollen and throbbing. She wrapped it in a tea towel. Upstairs in the bedroom, with her good hand she maneuvered the buttons of her nightdress and brushed out the sheets. Then she climbed in, pulling the blankets tight to her chin, her injured hand resting in a bowl of ice on the nightstand.

At first Olive couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes they snapped open again. In the wall behind the bed a mouse skittered along a beam. It didn’t scare her, its tiny, busy feet made her feel less alone: she imagined its bright black eyes. She wanted to stay up with it. Eventually the mouse went silent and Olive fell sleep.

A belt buckle falling to the floor woke Olive. For a moment she didn’t know where she was but then Harrington climbed into bed with a smelly gasp. His stale breath reached her only a fraction of a second before his greasy hand. He was covered in castor oil: it stained his shirt and was clumped in his beard and soon Olive was slick with it, too. He rolled on top of her and slipped off and rolled back on, holding himself in place. He made a joke about greased pigs. Only later, when she was cleaning herself in the bath, would Olive realize that the castor oil had probably been for the best.

The next day she went to the shed and found Harrington with his arm deep in a barrel of oil. It was amber and slow moving and glistened in his hair. He explained that he cold-pressed his own castor oil, a sideline that brought in enough extra income to feed the pig, Priscilla, who should have been slaughtered two seasons ago. Harrington’s eyes became damp as he spoke of her and her mother, Millicent, who had black spots like a cow.

“What do they use it for?” asked Olive.

“The first yield makes a fine purgative for when your pipes block up. The second makes a real nice engine lubricant.”

She followed Harrington to the kitchen yard where he held up a sickly root that could have been an old cucumber vine. “See this? It’s my castor plant. Come September I’ll have enough seeds for a few barrels.” Then he chuckled viciously. “Poisonous as hell. The stupider rabbits come round and nibble at it. At night sometimes you hear ’em screaming. Like ghosts in the field.”

Olive’s second evening as Harrington’s wife was much the same as her first. She asked if she could play the piano and he said, “Not in my house.” She reminded him that it was in fact her piano but he said, “Not anymore.” She asked if she could sleep on the davenport and he said, “Not as long as I’m alive.” She asked what she was supposed to do with herself and Harrington exploded with conjugal rage: it was like watching a rock hit the head of a snowman—white everywhere! “I’ll tell you what you’re supposed to do with yourself! You’re supposed to learn how to bake a goddamn honey ham. Make it sweet as honeycomb.” As if he hadn’t made his point, Harrington slugged Olive in the stomach. She spent the night cuddling with an ice pack. She hadn’t felt so awful down there since the accident with the bull when she was twelve.

Several days later when Harrington was in town buying scratch feed, Olive returned to the piano. The honey ham browning in the oven, she knew, would take care of her husband. Through the house she could smell the sweet, oily crust; its promise brought her a smile. Olive’s hand had healed by now and today she felt as well as she had since she’d married Harrington. She played “Come All Ye Songsters,” a song her mother had taught her when she was little. Her mother’s fingers were long and bony and they would dance on the keys. Now when Olive sang, she thought of her mother’s eyes. They were as green as a cat’s.

In the oven the ham spat and hissed. The heat weeping from the stove was so greasy it smudged the window in the door. Olive continued singing—“At the Cradle” and “Music for a While” and “Sweeter than Roses.” Her voice was light and her fingers fast and the music transported her to her previous life, a girl’s life of music and familial love. The bed in her old room had a pillow of velvet scraps. She would suck on it in her sleep, for years until it went bald. She kept a garden at the kitchen door, filled with peonies and pink, girlish cosmos and vegetables, from the second week of May through October. She was twelve when the bull attacked her mother; they said Olive was a fool to try to save her, running up behind the bull like that. Then a few years later her father died, the lump in his groin as big as an egg; now here she was, still at the beginning of her life.

As her singing rose, climbing the notes—
Music for a while shall all your cares beguile
—the door opened and Harrington’s footsteps were heavy in her ear. But Olive couldn’t stop playing—her fingers found the keys as if on their own!—and she continued to sing, under the music’s spell. For a long time Harrington stood at her side. She thought perhaps her singing had beguiled him, too, but then he punched her, a left hook to the cheek that threw her from the stool.

“Where’s my supper?”

“Soon, dear.”

The table was set with bread and lima beans. In the oven the ham candied in its fat and honey coat. Harrington took his chair and fisted his knife and fork. Olive brought forth the ham on a platter and Harrington inspected it as if it were a newborn. “Now
that
is a honey ham.” Olive carved off a slab with a thick rind of honey.

He ate quickly and licked the honey crust from his plate and slurped the oil off his fingers. He chewed down a second slice and then picked off a large chunk of honey crust and took it with him to bed. From downstairs, Olive heard the belt buckle hitting the floor followed by the groans of an old man climbing into bed. It would be there, she knew, in the crumby sheets, in the still-cold night, with the mouse busy in the wall, that he would first realize something was wrong. She waited for it, perched on her piano stool. Trevor Harrington would reach for his wife and find her side of the bed cold and then he would hear the piano and her song. Harrington would stagger to the steps, everything about him heavy and slow, and he would try to call for Olive. But a man who has eaten a ham caked in castor oil will only walk so far, and before she could finish her last song, a lied on the variations of spring, there would be the doomed thump of her husband dropping to the floor, heavy as an old dog lying down.

II. SEPTEMBER

By the time Olive Harrington was thirty-five, she had acquired, neighbors commented, an artistic air. What people had once perceived as underdeveloped they now regarded as pixieish, and this was of the style in 1929, even in the North Country. Little about Olive Harrington had changed over the years. She wore widowhood well. On cold nights she tied about her throat a black cape with a grape felt lining. Her singing had flourished to the point that she gave a much anticipated annual autumn recital in Hubbard Hall. For several years the Methodist organist, Mr. Reed, served as her accompanist. He once played the picture show in Saratoga, experience that gave him a fine sense of drama and pleasing the crowd. Mr. Reed had a long, soft face and long, spidery fingers. He wore his hair in a Cuban cut, and several women, all of them married, noted his resemblance to an Italian opera singer who was in the newspaper for abandoning his wife. Mr. Reed’s eyes were black and nearly all pupil, and throughout their many months of rehearsal he kept them turned in the direction of Olive. Mr. Reed would say, “I’d do anything for her,” and this was true.

It was Mr. Reed who first alerted Olive to the stranger in the audience moments before her concertina. She was backstage, practicing her scales. “Who do you think he is?” she asked. Her costume was of burnt orange chiffon, suggesting a large autumn leaf. “They say he’s from New York City,” said Mr. Reed. “They say he’s looking to buy the dairy farm outside Shushun.” Both Olive and Mr. Reed knew that the farm had five hundred stalls and five thousand acres and the last man to own it had been a millionaire. A bachelor who preferred animals to people, he died without an heir; his estate, once the farm was sold, would go to a dog home in Albany.

“What would a man from New York want with a dairy farm?” It was a good question, but there was no time to answer for two hundred people from across Washington County and even a few from Vermont had gathered in Hubbard Hall for
Mrs. Harrington’s Fall Fantasy
.

After the concert, well-wishers arrived backstage. Each took Olive’s warm, wet hand and congratulated her. Her neighbors appreciated her musical temperament for they believed it added refinement to the village, if not the entire county. The village also boasted a female watercolorist who had won a prize in Schenectady and a sculptress whose latest work was the giant ceramic pig, grapefruit pink and with a slot down its back, that would remain at the steps of the bank until the first snow. If Olive was eccentric, she was also tolerated. Years ago, Olive buried Trevor Harrington without gossip; she put him to rest in St. Patrick’s next to his first wife and Little Sue. No one speculated; certainly no one thought to blame Olive. Maybe someone at the funeral said,
Not much of a tragedy, when you get right down to it
, but that was it.