The Pledge (37 page)

He finished as flatly as he had begun, turned, and left the room. The three men sat in silence for a long moment, and then O'Brien said, “I'll be damned.”

“What do we do now?”

“Wait here, I suppose,” Bruce said.

They only had to wait a few minutes, and then a guard came into the room and told them to follow him. He led them down a slight hill into the grounds of the prison proper. Bruce noticed some houses on the hillside, away from the prison grounds, and guessed correctly that those were the homes of the warden and the guards. From the hill, where the Administration Building of the prison stood, the offices and admission section, Bruce saw the prison grounds as an opening in the forest, twenty-two cleared acres surrounded by a wall of trees. At the far end of the opening, there was a large frame building, the dining room and kitchen. There were four one-story barracks, army style, and two smaller buildings, one the library and meeting hall, and the other a hospital. At the edge of the cleared land, a big garage shed with trucks and tractors. All of this was subsequent information; at the moment, the three men were led to the hospital building, which contained eight unused beds. There, the guard turned them over to a convict who held the job of hospital orderly. The guard disappeared, and the orderly regarded them without pleasure. “My name's Mac Olsen,” he said. “I'm in charge of this place, and here's where you sleep tonight and make work for me.” He pointed to a door. “That's the crapper. Use it if you need it. Dinner's in ten minutes, so pick a bed and stretch out if you want to.”

“Which bed?”

“Any bed. I don't give a damn. You're here for one night.” Olsen was a tall, skinny man with a twitch in one eye, bald, and in his middle years. He was depressed and unfriendly.

The dinner bell rang with a sound audible anywhere in the twenty-two acres. It was twilight as Olsen led the three men down to the mess hall. By now, Bruce had drawn out of Olsen the fact that Mill Bog, at capacity, housed one hundred and sixty men, roughly half of them black. The black men worked with the whites, but lived and ate separately. They had their own barracks, and the mess hall was divided. As one entered, it was whites to the left, blacks to the right.

The tables in the dining room were made of long ten-by-two-inch planks, as were the benches. Each of the three men was assigned to a separate table. Each table seated ten men, five on each side. The meal consisted of frankfurters, cabbage and potatoes, bread, thin coffee, and a small piece of cake for dessert. The meat was limited to two frankfurters per man, but there was ample cabbage and potatoes. Bruce, fiercely hungry after a long day with practically no food, ate everything in sight, and then walked out of the dining room and across to the hospital, where he sat on the steps and stared up at the starry sky. It was cold, the air clean and sweet. O'Brien and Alsta joined him and lit cigarettes. A loudspeaker, up at the Administration Building, came alive: “Irene, good night … good night, Irene, good night, Irene, I'll see you in my dreams.”

“Not like Leavenworth,” Alsta said.

O'Brien's cigarette glowed, but he said nothing. Bruce had already observed how little men in prison talked. It was an odd thought, but it occurred to him that if Molly were here with him, it wouldn't be bad at all. Now the prison camp was in darkness, the black walls of mountains all around it and on the edge of the mountains to the west, a faint and fading aura of blue-white light — a strange and very beautiful world. The song on the speaker system finished and faded. New York and Washington were without substance or meaning for the moment, and for the first time, actually, since the contempt process had begun, his indignation faded.

The lights were coming on in the barracks; muted sounds of speech; the tang of O'Brien's cigarette in the air; and from the direction of the barracks where the black men were quartered, ripples of laughter.

“I think I'll turn in,” he said to the others. For better or worse, they were his companions. All sorts of people would be his companions. He'd survive that and likely profit from it. He went inside, undressed, and crawled into bed. He was asleep in a matter of minutes, emotionally and physically exhausted.

He woke early in the morning, before sunrise. His watch told him that it was five minutes before six o'clock. He dressed, shaved, and then went out to sit on the steps and watch the morning light glow behind the mountains. At half-past six, the silence exploded in a crash of the bells, and over the next half hour the convicts poured out of their barracks toward the mess hall. Bruce and his two fellow newcomers joined them. Bruce was ravenously hungry, as if making up for all the days without appetite, and he did away in short order with the bowl of oatmeal and the bread and milk that came with it. Now, in daylight, he was able to look at the prison population more or less objectively, young men, most of them, no single type, no specific type. No one addressed questions to him, no one asked him his name, who he was, what he had done. Apparently, that would come in its own good time.

Through with breakfast, he walked back to the hospital, to find his bed stripped and new linen folded and waiting. So with O'Brien and Alsta. They were told to make up the beds and wait outside, and after some ten minutes, a guard came over and told them to follow him. Alsta went to one of the barracks, Bruce and O'Brien to the other. Each was directed to an empty cot, the two cots ten beds apart, each with a pillow and folded single sheet and two army blankets. The barracks was empty, except for Bruce and O'Brien, and when they had finished making up their beds, the guard told Bruce to wait there while he went off with O'Brien.

Alone, Bruce wandered around the barracks, the long rows of beds and the lavatory stretching through the back, like the post of the letter T, a row of twenty pots without wooden seats, reminding him for all the world of the hotels in North Africa after the landing, where everything not nailed down had been stolen, including the toilet seats. He went back to his bed. A small wooden locker at the foot of the bed proved to be empty when he opened the lid, but it was an admission that people in prison might possess things. Then he sat on his bed, mildly puzzled that he had been left alone there, yet content to sit quietly and think about all the many things that needed thinking about. In England and France and India, he had seen prisons that might well be models for a small corner of hell, and here was a prison designed with common sense that did not squeeze its prisoners to death with either punishment or boredom, but put them to work; and it was a prison designed by the same society that lay silent and afraid under the threats and ravings of a handful of semidemented men. Only here he was an anomaly, a freak of sorts, a political prisoner, which was something neither the prison system nor the country had ever thought through or even contemplated.

His musing was confirmed when the guard who had taken O'Brien away appeared and informed Bruce that the warden desired to see him. “Just go up to the offices,” the guard said. “Main building.” He pointed the way.

Left alone, Bruce walked up the slope to the building that had greeted him the night before. There were no walls. This was a strange prison, indeed; he could just go on walking.

He walked into the Administration Building, and the guard, sitting behind his desk at the door, asked him his name.

“Bruce Bacon.”

“Yes, the warden's expecting you. Down the corridor at your right.”

The door he opened was marked
Warden Demming
, and a middle-aged woman, sitting at a desk and typing busily, stopped to assess him. Evidently he was singular enough to define himself, and she simply pointed to a door that led to the inner office. The office was simple — government issue, a standing flag, a big portrait of Lincoln, another of Roosevelt, and a map of West Virginia. The warden, seated behind his desk, told Bruce to sit down and then surveyed him thoughtfully. After a moment or two of this silent study, he asked Bruce what he thought of prison.

“The District jail gave me the impression that nothing has changed very much in the past two thousand years, but this place —” He shook his head.

“Yes, this is an interesting place. About twelve years ago, Mr. Bennett, the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, sat down with a group of penologists to try to make something civilized out of the prison system. They came to some conclusions. If there are no locks or cells, a prisoner can't break out, and if there are no walls to go over, he can't escape, and if you give him work and treat him decently, he won't escape. It works. In twelve years, there have been only eight escapes, homesick mountain people mostly, and we just phone the local police, who pick them up. But we keep a pretty low profile. We don't want newspapers writing about us, and we don't want to be analyzed out of existence.

“Now let me tell you why I'm telling you all this. To begin, I read you every day in the
New York Tribune.
I had a subscription then to the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, and the
Tribune
, and I read every dispatch you wrote right through the war. I had a son in the service, a rifleman who was killed on the fourth day after the Normandy landings, and during that time, there were sixty Quakers in this jail, religious pacifists, and I had to make my peace with that. I think you helped me. What you wrote was different from what the others wrote. I don't know exactly how, but it was different.

“OK. Now you're here. I don't know what the hell is happening outside, and I don't know whether you're a communist or not, and I'm not going to ask you. You're here, and this is a work camp, and I got to find a job for you. About sixty percent of our population here works in the woods, logging. We work with the rangers who mark the trees they cut to thin the forest. Then we cut them, drag them to the mill, saw them, and ship them to Federal prisons. We have our own sawmill, but it's dirty, dangerous work, and I don't see you there. The rest of the population works in the kitchen, the garage, and on the grounds. You're not a mechanic, are you?”

“I'm afraid not,” Bruce said.

“Well, I have another idea. Have you ever done any teaching?”

“No, again.”

“You'll work it out. Half the men in your barracks are Kentucky moonshiners. Decent, deeply religious folk, but they make whiskey because if they don't, they starve. No other way for them to earn a living. Also, they're illiterate. A few of the younger ones can read and write a little, but for the most part they're illiterate. Most of them are repeaters. The local circuit judge knows their case, and he puts them in here for six months or a year. It would be a damn good thing if you could teach them to read. How about it?”

“I could try,” Bruce answered slowly.

“It has to be an evening and weekend thing. They work in the woods during the day, and they're the best lumber people we have —”

“You know,” Bruce said, “I've never done anything like this before. I never taught. I suppose I could give it a try, but I'm not sure I'd be any good at it.”

“You can't make it worse.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“We still have the days. I'm trying to think of something that might be of some use to you. I think I'll put you in the motor pool, down at the garage. You'll learn what makes a car work. You won't go in as a mechanic but as an assistant. And by the way, evening work is optional. You can turn down the teaching if you want to.”

Bruce thought about it for a while, and then he shrugged. “Sure. I'd like to try the teaching. The other thing — yeah, I'd like that. I sat in a cell in Washington for eleven days. That's unbearable.”

“Good. We'll see how it goes. If you can't hack the teaching, let me know.”

Five days later, Bruce wrote to Molly: “A very strange prison, my dear one. No walls, just small signs that say
Stay Inside.
According to the warden, it's worked out as a psychological prison camp. Give the men a full day of interesting — within bounds — work, tire them, treat them like human beings, and you'll have a calm, orderly prison. It works. It seems that every prisoner spends the first couple of nights lying awake and planning his escape. Once he has it worked out, he puts it on hold. Why risk it unless he has to, and many of the men here are living better and eating better than they did outside. I compare it with that medieval chamber of horrors that they first put me into, and I muse a good deal over the contrary and many faces of this country of ours.

“The food is not great, but there's enough, and we each get a glass of milk each day and oranges or apples, plus the regular food.

“We sleep in an army barracks type of building, cots set side by side. The cot on my left sleeps Lemuel Ward, a huge, tough gentleman from South Carolina, doing the last two years of ten years for manslaughter. He must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds, and none of it is fat. His background, what I know of it, is complex, interesting, but nothing you'd want to share with kids at night. He is both respected and feared. He has taken a great liking to me, thank heavens. He named me ‘Professor,' and the name has stuck, and by now all the convicts call me that.

“The bed on my right provides an interesting counterpoint. It is occupied by a middle-aged man, name of Jackson Hill. He is a Kentucky mountain moonshiner. Half the men in the prison are moonshiners, Kentucky and West Virginia, and I'm told that if they didn't make whiskey, they'd starve, so it's a running battle between them and the revenue agents. They're very religious folk, and very often in the evening they'll do a little Bible reading — that is, one will read and the others will listen, since nine out of ten are illiterate, which I will tell you about later. But the other night, they were listening to some reading, all of them — that is, about seven or eight — gathered around Jackson Hill's bed. Lemuel Ward was listening respectfully. Ward doesn't say much, mostly just listens. He works in the woods all day with one of the lumber gangs, and after dinner, he sits cross-legged on his bed and makes ornaments out of the cellophane wrappings of cigarettes, a sort of prison art that I never saw anywhere else.