Page 43 of The Reformatory

Robert looked at Crutcher, startled. He couldn’t make out his face, so far off at the fence. “You know my daddy?” Robert said. “Sir?” Crutcher didn’t answer, so Robert asked again. “Mr. Crutcher, you know my—”

“Course I do—from the mill,” Crutcher said. “Nobody in three counties don’t know the name Robert Stephens.” Robert heard admiration in his voice. Crutcher’s orange cigarette ash flared to the ground. “You two choose which one goes first.”

Perspiration sprang out on Robert, everywhere at once. “I’ll go first,” Redbone said. “Waiting’s harder.”

Inside the shed, the floor creaked. A sharp whistle, then a lash. The teenager yelped, crying. His whipping had begun. Two lashes. Three. Four. Five. The higher the number, each as hard as, or worse than, the previous one, the more Robert’s own shoulders and knees whined with each one. The sound rocked through him. Would it never stop? He thought the twentieth lash would end it, but it didn’t. Or the thirtieth. But after thirty-five lashes, when tears dripped from Robert’s face, the whipping stopped. The sobbing was gone too, and the silence was worse. Robert was dizzy from not breathing. He sucked at the air. The chair’s seat beneath him was so damp, he couldn’t tell if he’d wet himself again.

Crutcher went to help bring the older boy out. Robert stared at the cornfield, wondering if there was a place to scale the fence or a hole someone might have left unrepaired in overgrown brush. He would have cut off his arm to know. He would have tried to outrun dogs.

“They give you a wood chip to bite on,” Redbone said. “Don’t spit it out. Better use it.”

Crutcher signaled from around the corner, and Redbone rose to go to him. Robert burned to say something to him, but he couldn’t make his mouth move. Redbone didn’t look toward him anyway. Robert couldn’t see the door from where he sat, or the waiting white boys, but he saw Boone and a white man drag the older boy out of the Funhouse by the shoulders.

Was he moving? Was he dead?

Robert’s chair rattled when he craned to see the two men lift the teenager back into the truck. He was relieved when the teenager bucked and cried out again. His legs and wrists were still chained. Boone clapped the truck’s panel shut and patted the door, and the white man drove the teenager away, toward a part of the campus Robert did not know. Maybe they were taking him to the infirmary.

Then Boone pulled Redbone’s arm, and Redbone vanished behind the clapboard wall.

The door slammed closed. Crutcher strolled back toward Robert, but this time he posted himself so he could see the white boys on one side and Robert on the other, a good fifteen yards away. Robert knew he could easily outrun Crutcher at this distance, if only he knew where to go.

Inside the shed, the warden’s voice sounded jovial, as if he were meeting an old friend. No delays. No scuffles. Redbone’s lashes began right away.

Liquid fire. That was the feeling of the strap. Robert felt it in Redbone’s scream, loud and anguished and somehow surprised. By the second lash, the surprise in his scream was gone. For his third lash, Redbone must have gritted down hard on his wood chip, so his scream sounded more muffled. But whether they were loud or soft, Redbone’s screams chafed Robert’s ears raw and wrung out tears that drowned his face. His chair legs clattered when he sobbed.

I can’t do this, he thought. He remembered the shower room and the pinging he’d heard from the wall, when he’d been so sure Mama was there. Was she still watching him? His fright in the shower room was long ago and silly now.

“Mama?” he whispered to the shadowed corn. “I need you. I can’t do this. I can’t.”

The breeze picked up and dry corn stalks whispered, and Robert remembered when such things used to feel like a sign from Mama. If he saw a red bird (Mama’s favorite). If he found the tiny silver cross Mama had given him on his floor in the exact same spot three days in a row. If he heard a creak on the floorboards when his eyes were closed. Even the shadow across his window. But whispering corn wasn’t enough to comfort him now.

“Please, Mama. I know maybe it’s hard to come, but I need you.”

The ping sounded just below his pinkie where he was resting his weight on his chair. He heard it both from the metal and between his ears, amplified, and this time he felt it too, a pulse.

“Why I gotta be here, Mama? I can’t do this. It ain’t fair.”

Another ping, and this time he cupped his hand over the vibration so it tickled his palm. In that touch, Robert felt how sorry Mama was to see him like this, how she wanted to help, but couldn’t. Ping. This time, he felt her arms wrap around him and sway with him.

This isn’t everything, he heard Mama’s voice say inside his ear. Mama’s here. There’s more ahead for you than this. This is only a moment.

LASH! Redbone must have dropped his wood chip. He howled.

“This isn’t everything. There’s more than this,” Robert said.

The ping tickled Robert’s palm, and his ears fogged, the howling far away.

13

True to its carnival name, the Funhouse looked twice as big on the inside, an endlessly long shed with the table at its center lighted from an overhead bulb as if it were a main stage. A transistor radio on the shelf by the door played a cheerful song like a county fair: a fiddle and a guitar and a singer who sounded like a cowboy. Laughter snapped Robert’s head around; two shirtless, sweating white men were dealing cards over wooden crates in the corner, their bare bellies jiggling when they laughed. Everyone else was busy: Crutcher was wiping down the table beneath the lights, Boone was locking the door behind him, and Warden Haddock was rinsing his leather strap in a small sink. Robert tried not to notice how the water washed down pink.

Methodically, Warden Haddock wiped the thick strap with a towel.

This isn’t everything. There is more than this.

“Didn’t ’spect I’d be seeing you tonight,” Warden Haddock said. His low voice rumbled the pit of Robert’s stomach.

“S-sir?”