I didn’t quite believe either of them. Spud was infatuated with a barmaid in Walsenburg. As for Cotton, I couldn’t forget his implied threat about putting six feet of dirt in the faces of the Vickers team. I also couldn’t forget his story about wiping out a nest of SS deep in the Roman catacombs.
The bunkhouse was a long building, clean and well lighted, with a cubicle for the foreman, not unlike an army barracks. But when it was empty, it could be a very lonely place, and on this particular evening I felt memories of the past trying to catch up with me, like a specter trying to serve a summons or a figure dressed in leather honing a knife on a whetstone. I was also bothered by every aspect of my conversation with Wade Benbow. Why had Mr. Lowry been so certain that Benbow’s negligence was responsible for the death of the grandchild? Benbow was not a weak man. He was looking death in the face and seemingly without fear. Why would he spend his remaining time on earth chasing a serial killer who didn’t exist?
Last, Benbow’s mention of monsters in our midst would not go away. All my life I’d had the same feelings. I was raised to believe that redemption could occur as quickly as looking up suddenly at a burst of sunlight inside a raincloud and realizing you had just been set free from all the dark days that had beset you. If that were true, and I believed it was, how could some be born with the lights of pity and mercy already robbed from their eyes?
Even though I had witnessed the electrocution of a man in a southern prison, and seen individual acts of cruelty perpetrated on people of color for no reason other than to humiliate and degrade them, I did not understand that real evil was collective in nature until I heard the lyrics of two black convicts recorded in Angola by an academic named Harry Oster. That might seem strange, but as a southerner, I had listened too long to chivalric tales and the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux rather than the leathery whistle of the razor strop called the Black Betty.
One of the singers, Robert “Guitar” Welch, sang a couplet I couldn’t get out of my head: “Wonder why they electrocute a man twelve o’clock at night / The current much stronger, the people turn out all the light.”
Another convict, Matthew “Hogman” Maxey, sang about the desperation of an inmate assigned to the Red Hat gang, a group who wore black-and-white stripes and straw hats painted red and were forced to run their wheelbarrows double-time up and down the levee from sunrise to sunset. Those who fell out were stretched on
anthills or shot. Over one hundred bodies were buried in the levee, anonymous and forgotten, in summer their resting place a fairyland of green grass and buttercups, as though the earth wished to console them at least partially for their misfortune.
The lyric he sang? “I axed my captain, ‘Captain, tell what’s right.’ / He whupped my left, then say, ‘Boy, now you know what’s right.’?”
I sat down on the bed in my cubicle and made an E chord on my Gibson and ran my plectrum across the strings. The resonance of the old-time Gibson acoustic guitars had no peer. The bass strings rumbled like distant thunder; the treble strings tinkled like crystal. When you curved your fingers into the neck, the chord seemed to make itself, as though an angel were guiding your hand. I began to sing my favorite Jimmie Rodgers song, “Blue Yodel No. 1.”
T for Texas, T for Tennessee,
T for Texas, T for Tennessee,
T for Thelma, the gal who made a fool out of me.
I felt a shadow move across my body and then my hands and guitar, and looked up into Cotton’s face.
“Hey, what’s happenin’?” I said.
“Thought you’d like to play some checkers.”
“Sure,” I said.
He unfolded the board on my bed, then opened a box of checkers and began placing them on the squares.
“What happened to your thumb?” I said.
“Hit it with a hammer.”
“You want a soda?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
I went to the machine at the end of the bunkhouse and came back with two cans. “That’s a lot of tape.”
“Looks like an M1 thumb,” he said. “Know what that is?”
“You press the clip in the magazine with your thumb, then roll it out before the bolt snaps on it and fixes you up proper.”
“You told me you weren’t in the service.”
“I read about it in a book.”
His good eye lingered on me. I started to pop both soda cans, but he picked his up before I could, covering the top with his palm. “You go first,” he said.
When I talked with Cotton, I always felt I was looking at half a face. “Are you planning on doing some payback?”
“On the Vickerses?”
“Who else would I be talking about?”