if other heart-breaks—as if my wife, as if Briggs—hadn’t worn the first loss away years and years ago.
Twenty minutes later, the black brick turrets of the old penitentiary rose up at me, caught by big searchlights. The place sat there in miles of flat meadow and rows of broken tobacco stalks, like a backwater castle built by some paranoid, third-rate baron that the king never came to visit. In summer, you could watch convicts slouch through the yellow grass swinging their thick wooden scythes. Families picnicking in the public park across the highway would point at them, maybe hoping they’d be lucky enough to seeone of the blue-shirted reapers slice a guard in half, then race off without much hope toward wherever he figured freedom was. Or maybe the picnickers pointed to show their children what could happen to them if they didn’t stop talking back. In summer, the convicts played baseball in the meadow and grew tomatoes against the fence. In winter, unless herded off to fill some highway potholes, they stayed indoors like everybody else in the South. The sixty-three men on death row never went outside at all.
Now the prison looked wide-awake, so many lights on, you could tell that the coils of barbed wire on top of the turrets were shiny with ice. Out front, I saw some huddled cars and a dozen or so figures, most in plastic ponchos, crowded together under the house ledge. Inside his steamy cubicle a guard was eating doughnuts and reading a magazine. Four more people hunched beneath umbrellas around a forty-gallon drum where burning sticks hissed at the sleet. Nothing was going on and nobody looked injured, just miserable. Obviously the pickup truck hadn’t come back. There was a stretch limo, a black Lincoln, parked near the gate.
As I slowed, a Mustang behind me passed in a hurry, then cut left into the prison drive, skidding sideways next to the high iron gates. I pulled in fast, and jumped out the same time the driver did. We had both run, spraying slush, halfway across the wide lot toward the vigil group before I recognized Bubba Percy, reporter for the Hillston Star —star reporter according to him—a handsome good-ole-boy gone to pudge in his thirties, with a nose for news like a jackal's after maggoty meat. Clamping me on the shoulder, he yelled, “Mangum! That pickup come back? I miss anything?”
I snapped open the umbrella I keep in my raincoat pocket. “I bet you heard that on the scanner, didn’t you, Bubba? Breaks my heart you got nothing else to do on Friday nights. And lashes pretty as a girl's, except if this ice hardens on them, it's gonna freeze your weasel eyes shut.” I kept walking toward the foursome at the fire watching us.
“Oh shut up, Mangum.” He ran, zigzagging puddles. “You know a few years back, there was a W.Y. Tate arrested in Raleigh for tossing a stink bomb in that synagogue window on Yancy Street? You know that? Do you?” His hair snagged on one of my umbrellaspokes, and I hauled him under it with me.
“Bubba, you just hang on, one of these days The New York Times is bound to call.”
I didn’t recognize anybody in the crowd scrunched under the gate ledge—most were black, some were female, all were bedraggled as cats. Slush had blanked out half the letters on the big signs propped up beside them: FREE GEORGE HALL. STOP THE KILLING. JUSTICE FOR ALL. I did know the four people under umbrellas around the fire drum. The tallest, slender and long-muscled, wearing an old army jacket that had probably belonged to George, was Cooper Hall, the condemned man's younger brother who’d just started college when George went to prison and now worked for a civil rights organization that ran a legal-aid society, engineered legislative lobbies, and published a journal called With Liberty and Justice which Coop pretty much ran. He was better-looking thanGeorge, with a fine-boned arrogant face.
The woman in a yellow slicker beside him was his fiancée, Jordan West, a
Twenty minutes later, the black brick turrets of the old penitentiary rose up at me, caught by big searchlights. The place sat there in miles of flat meadow and rows of broken tobacco stalks, like a backwater castle built by some paranoid, third-rate baron that the king never came to visit. In summer, you could watch convicts slouch through the yellow grass swinging their thick wooden scythes. Families picnicking in the public park across the highway would point at them, maybe hoping they’d be lucky enough to seeone of the blue-shirted reapers slice a guard in half, then race off without much hope toward wherever he figured freedom was. Or maybe the picnickers pointed to show their children what could happen to them if they didn’t stop talking back. In summer, the convicts played baseball in the meadow and grew tomatoes against the fence. In winter, unless herded off to fill some highway potholes, they stayed indoors like everybody else in the South. The sixty-three men on death row never went outside at all.
Now the prison looked wide-awake, so many lights on, you could tell that the coils of barbed wire on top of the turrets were shiny with ice. Out front, I saw some huddled cars and a dozen or so figures, most in plastic ponchos, crowded together under the house ledge. Inside his steamy cubicle a guard was eating doughnuts and reading a magazine. Four more people hunched beneath umbrellas around a forty-gallon drum where burning sticks hissed at the sleet. Nothing was going on and nobody looked injured, just miserable. Obviously the pickup truck hadn’t come back. There was a stretch limo, a black Lincoln, parked near the gate.
As I slowed, a Mustang behind me passed in a hurry, then cut left into the prison drive, skidding sideways next to the high iron gates. I pulled in fast, and jumped out the same time the driver did. We had both run, spraying slush, halfway across the wide lot toward the vigil group before I recognized Bubba Percy, reporter for the Hillston Star —star reporter according to him—a handsome good-ole-boy gone to pudge in his thirties, with a nose for news like a jackal's after maggoty meat. Clamping me on the shoulder, he yelled, “Mangum! That pickup come back? I miss anything?”
I snapped open the umbrella I keep in my raincoat pocket. “I bet you heard that on the scanner, didn’t you, Bubba? Breaks my heart you got nothing else to do on Friday nights. And lashes pretty as a girl's, except if this ice hardens on them, it's gonna freeze your weasel eyes shut.” I kept walking toward the foursome at the fire watching us.
“Oh shut up, Mangum.” He ran, zigzagging puddles. “You know a few years back, there was a W.Y. Tate arrested in Raleigh for tossing a stink bomb in that synagogue window on Yancy Street? You know that? Do you?” His hair snagged on one of my umbrellaspokes, and I hauled him under it with me.
“Bubba, you just hang on, one of these days The New York Times is bound to call.”
I didn’t recognize anybody in the crowd scrunched under the gate ledge—most were black, some were female, all were bedraggled as cats. Slush had blanked out half the letters on the big signs propped up beside them: FREE GEORGE HALL. STOP THE KILLING. JUSTICE FOR ALL. I did know the four people under umbrellas around the fire drum. The tallest, slender and long-muscled, wearing an old army jacket that had probably belonged to George, was Cooper Hall, the condemned man's younger brother who’d just started college when George went to prison and now worked for a civil rights organization that ran a legal-aid society, engineered legislative lobbies, and published a journal called With Liberty and Justice which Coop pretty much ran. He was better-looking thanGeorge, with a fine-boned arrogant face.
The woman in a yellow slicker beside him was his fiancée, Jordan West, a
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