Driving the King by Ravi Howard Page B

good lawyers working. Doing all we can.”
    That smile she gave me then. Something pieced back together.
    â€œTell them I said thank you,” I said.
    â€œYou don’t have to thank anybody. You saved a man.”
    The trembling in her fingertips had been calm for a while, and Mattie’s hands were like every other woman’s in that place, fingers pressed hard against the wire trying to squeeze what they could through. The families were too practiced in coming to Kilby on a Sunday morning, and they knew that place as well as they knew their front rooms and church pews, where they should have been come Sunday.
    â€œThey can’t do this.”
    â€œThey already did, baby. I love you for fighting for me, but you need to get ready for them saying no. When they give a man ten years, they don’t go back on it.”
    I hated to watch her drop her head then, because I knew our time was short. Her fingers rolled against mine, and some of the ink remained from her fingerprinting, treating her like she was locked up, too.
    â€œCouple days before the show. You were talking about going to Oakland and spending a little time with your sister after she had the baby.”
    She was silent for a moment, looking away. A few months had passed since that talk, but it seemed like so much time and California so far away. The prison walls and a fence line made it only that much farther.
    â€œWhat’d they name the baby?”
    â€œJoshua. Just made a month old.”
    â€œHe’s got a big head on him like his pop?”
    â€œHe’ll grow into his head, I’m sure.”
    â€œHis pop’s twenty-five, and he still hasn’t grown into his yet.”
    She had easiness in her face, and I wanted to remember it. I had nothing but dead years between right then and 1955.
    â€œYou just need to go and see your people. Get your mind off this for a while at least. Get on a train and see that baby. It does me good to know you’re out in the world with your folks.”
    â€œI can’t get my mind off this. Not with you in here.”
    â€œYou still need to go see your people. Go back to work. Otherwise Kilby might take your years, too. You don’t owe the state of Alabama any time. They got me for that.”
    â€œPart of me wishes you’d killed him. We could have gotten you in a car and taken you somewhere.”
    â€œNever been the type to run. You neither.” It was hard to talk to her without seeing things as they should have been. My mind went back and forth between that and what was around me.
    â€œGo out there and hold that baby. Your sister could use a little rest.”
    â€œThey do as they please,” she said, rocking.
    â€œAlways have. But you—Go see your people and send my love. We’ll talk when you get home.”
    The fellow in the stall next to me wore one of those sadlittle wedding rings the men made. Some dried piece of weed twisted around his finger. He couldn’t have anything real, because the guards might take it, say it was a weapon. Some men had married the women sitting across from them in ceremonies at the little jailhouse church in the pine grove. That kind of marriage turned them all into widows. It was no kind of life. Mattie might as well be sitting by my headstone at Lincoln Cemetery. And what could I give her but empty years, a marriage on some old stools in the jailhouse visiting room. It could not be.
    Mattie and I had been married once.
    On a leave weekend from Camp Gruber, I met her at a boardinghouse in Muskogee. The sign on the front desk said they rented only to married folks, but all the soldiers knew they didn’t ask for papers. It was wartime, and our uniforms were license enough. The man at the front desk turned the book around and read the name like he was Saint Peter.
    â€œMr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Weary. Welcome to Muskogee,” he said, and hearing it out loud made it sound closer to being true.
    When we made