Candlemoth by R. J. Ellory

up for a negro in this time is a man of spirit and backbone.'
        She
laughed, a tumbling infectious sound.
        'But
then you pair were always in a heap of trouble all by yourselves, weren't you?'
        Nathan
smiled, the first time since the street. 'Wouldn't have been a pair, and
wouldn't have been anywhere near as much trouble on my own,' he said, and I
laughed with him, and for just a little while what had happened didn't matter.
        Seemed
to me we were laughing at the world from the gateway to Hell, and that was the
funniest thing of all.
        
        
        Later,
after we left, left with an open invitation to return, Nathan walked with me
towards the Lake. We always went this way, side by side, step for step, and
then where the path separated fifty yards from the water's edge we would go our
respective ways.
        'We'll
see this thing through together, Nathan,' I said.
        He
didn't reply. He knew what I meant.
        He
paused at the end of the path and turned towards me.
        He
held out his hand.
        I
took his hand, and for an eternity we stood there without a word.
        'Your
choice, Danny Ford,' he eventually said.
        'No
choice, Nathan Verney,' I remember saying.
        And
then we went our different ways, back to our own homes, and later I sat at the
window of my room and watched that slow Carolina blue skyline melt soundlessly
into Lake Marion.
        At
sixteen years old it was not my job to understand why.
        That's
what I believed.
        The
reason I ran with Nathan was because I was scared, because I had been unable to
defend myself, because he had stepped in to protect me and I owed him the same.
        Eleven
years since the day we'd shared a sandwich by the Lake.
        A
little more than half of that again and Nathan Verney would be dead.
        But
that was the future, an unknown, and just as JFK would fall within the year, we
had no idea of what was coming.
        We
lived for the present, a little for the past, but most of all it seemed we
lived for one another.
        And
that, out of everything that was to come, was possibly the hardest thing of
all.
    ----
        

Chapter Four
        
        Back
in Sumter, the year or so I spent there before being transferred to Death Row,
I met a man called Robert Schembri. It was August of 1972, and by the time our
paths coincided Robert was nearly seventy, and he walked with a stoop and a
limp and the air of someone beaten. Beaten, however, he was not, for Robert
Schembri possessed a spirit of unparalleled indomitability. Apparently he
served thirteen years straight in solitary, a narrow cell, eight feet by eight,
a metal-framed bed, a hole in the ground, fifty minutes of daylight every
seventy-two hours. He went down there because of his stories, and his stories
were wild and impossible and strangely fascinating. Folks were upset by his
stories, the claims he made, the theories he presented, and though anyone in
their right mind would have considered him far from the brightest light in the harbor,
my experience of Robert Schembri remains lucid and clear. Schembri was a
dangerously intelligent man.
        I was
the only person he ever told the reason for his imprisonment. Why I was chosen
I never knew, for Schembri died of a heart attack, one of those special Federal
Penitentiary kind of seizures, a month before I was transferred out of General
Populace. And he was the one who gave me some kind of understanding of what had
happened to me and, more importantly, why. It was he who'd warned me of a man
called West, a man who walked the walk and talked the talk, and ran D-Block as
if he was the last American God. I had not known at that time that Mr. West
would figure so prominently in the latter years of my life, and had I known I
would have paid a great deal more attention to what Robert Schembri told me of
him. But I did not, and at the time it seemed unimportant, and