the county, at ever holiday parade. He almost always wore a suit with vest and tie now, even in the summer heat. He passed out little American flag pins to everybody he met. He’d never been one to take his family out in public, but now you’d see him at the moviehouse with his wife and three little girls. You’d see the whole family of them at a restaurant or eating a lunch together on a blanket under a tree after he’d give a speech at some holiday picnic. She was a quiet but gracious woman, his wife Annie, and his little girls were always perfectly well behaved. More and more the pictures you saw of him in the newspapers had his family in them too.
We didnt hear anymore such stories, neither, as we used to about what Bobby Baker had done to the Ashley whiskey camp lookouts. Some who used to believe them stories now said they always knew they was bullshit. Bobby Baker wasnt the kind of man to do such a thing, they said, they could see that now. That’s what a lot of folks said. But there was some of us always figured it took a special kind of man to handle himself with the Ashleys, and if Bobby Baker was that kind, well, then there
NINETEEN
July 1921—August 1923
HE WAS LOCKED INTO A SEVEN-BY-NINE CELL IN A SPECIAL BLOCK set apart from the rest of the prison and he did not come out again for one year and eleven months and four days. The door was of iron bars and faced a narrow dimly lighted corridor. If there were any other cells close by he could not see them nor did he raise response when he hallooed loudly from his door. The concrete floor was slightly concave and in its center was a shithole three inches wide and engirt with the umber wastestains of countless convicts over the decades. Once a week a guard flung a pail of water through the door to give the cell a rudimentary rinse. John Ashley quickly learned to anticipate these occasions and would sit naked near the door to receive the brunt of the water and thus wash himself somewhat.
In the rear wall was set a small barred window eight feet above the floor. It was a foot square in dimension and its top was even with the ceiling. It was brightest with daylight in the late afternoons. Through it came birdsong, leaves off a looming water oak, the frost of winter nights. During hard storms of westerly wind the rain spattered into the cell and he positioned himself to receive the drops on his face. He loved the thunder and sporadic flaring of lightning at the window. His narrow bunk was bolted too far from the window to serve as a platform and there was nothing else on which he might stand, and so the only way he could look out was to pull himself up by the bars and hold there by arm strength and with his toes effecting the barest purchase on the wall. In this way would he gaze out on the trunk and branches of the oak that stood almost near enough to touch, on a portion of a highwalled weedgrown yard littered with broken wagon wheels, torn harness, and rusted parts of automobiles and other machines. At various times of the day he would cling to the window until the burning in his biceps became unbearable and he’d drop back to the floor. To straighten his cramped arms was then so painful he’d nearly cry out.
He never saw nor heard anybody in the little yard but often saw birds—mostly jays and crows and mockingbirds—come to feed on insects in the grass. He sometimes spied cats hunting in the yard and once saw a scruffy tortoiseshell catch a mouse and devour it on the spot in less than a minute. One time a sparrow flew into the cell and couldnt make its way out again and it flew wildly until it hit the wall in exhaustion and lit on the floor. He picked it up and felt its tiny heart quivering against his palm and the light in its eyes dimmed as if some wick within were being turned down and it died in his hand. He pulled himself up to the window and dropped the bird outside and felt foolish in his notion that it was now freer than he was.
Since the day of his arrival at Raiford he’d not again seen the warden nor anybody else except the guards who twice a day brought his meals on a tin plate they slid through a narrow slot at the bottom of the door. In the beginning he’d tried to make small talk but neither of the hacks ever made reply nor even looked directly at him and so he quit trying. He was as hungry for conversation as he was for food but would be damned if he’d let them know it. Almost without variance he was fed on fatback, cornbread, molasses and coffee every morning, on blackeyed peas, greens, rice and water every night. Occasionally his plate held a thin watery stew of pork or rabbit. Besides the exercise of holding himself up to the window several times a day, he also did daily pushups and situps and stretching routines of every sort. He took to punching the wall every day, one hundred times with his right fist and then one hundred with his left. He punched the rough stone lightly at first but as the months went by and his knuckles enlarged and gained thicker callus he could hit harder and harder without breaking the skin. He stood on his head for a count of two hundred every morning and again every evening because he’d heard that the habit improved your upright balance and that such regular infusion of blood to the head would make you smarter.
He talked to himself to keep in the practice of speech and hear a human voice if only his own. He described the splendors of the Devil’s Garden, the vast sawgrass horizons and the skies without limit, the veils of heat that rose and shimmered in the heart of summer midday as if the air itself had been crazed by the sun. He held forth on thunder-heads that swelled like encroaching mountains of coal until they overwhelmed the sky and sparked with lightning and detonated with thunderclaps and burst into storms as explosive and incandescent as heaven’s own war. He remarked on the ripe smells of verdure and muck that followed hard rain. He talked of whitetailed deer bounding through the pinewoods in misty dawn silence, of redtail hawks wheeling in graceful hunt over wide savannahs, of the dogbark call of alligators and the ruby glint of their eyes just above the waterline where the lanternlight found them in the dark. He spoke of the cold blue colors and fast deep currents of the Gulf Stream, of the exhilarating sight of porpoises cavorting alongside a boat far out to sea, of the sound of ocean nightwinds and the strange faint melodies they sometimes carried which graybeard sailors said were ancient songs of drowned women whose undying love had transformed them to mermaids. To cockroaches skittering across the floor he confessed that the sea had always scared him.
He was determined not to break under the weight of his isolation nor to dwell on the length of his sentence. But he sometimes found himself thinking he’d missed forever his chance to even the score with Bob Baker and he cursed himself aloud for not havin settled things with him when he had the chance and to hell with his daddy’s order to leave Bobby alone. Such ruminations made him want to howl like a dog forlorn. He’d punch the walls till his knuckles looked like purple grapes.
On clear nights he stood with his back against the door bars and gazed on the small patch of stars framed in the window and among the oak branches. In phases of the lunar cycle he’d see the moon for brief periods of the night and his chest would tighten with the beauty of it. He sometimes saw the moon showing after daybreak like a bruised pearl or a segment therefrom against a soft patch of blue sky.
Excepting the mermaids and their sea-songs he did not speak of women, not even to the cockroaches. He tried hard to keep women from his waking mind. But from the start of his isolation he dreamt almost nightly of Loretta May who was blind but could see across time and distance and into the heart of things, she whose nipples were sometimes the color of caramel and sometimes of brown sugar, depending on her state of excitement, whose skin smelled of peaches and her hair of daybreak dew. And he dreamt of course of Laura who smelled always of the swamp and whose joy in sex was as abandoned as a cat’s. He dreamt of dancing with her at Elser Pier to plinking ragtime and blatant jazz bands. In his sleep he sometimes revisited the three occasions on which they had all frolicked together in Loretta’s bed and he sometimes ejaculated as he dreamt and he sometimes woke with a throbbing erection that flexed like a snake in his hand as he came. He dreamt also of seeing them together without him, kissing and caressing each other’s bare flesh, and he knew the dream was true but he did not mind that they took comfort from each other that way. He could not have explained how he knew they were doing it as much for love of him as for any other reason. But so rousing were these visions that by the end of his fourth month in isolation he was masturbating several times a day. He continued this excess for weeks. The deepest reach of his rectum developed a chronic ache. Not until his raw and discolored cock became infected and too painful to touch was he able to free himself of the mania. Once his penis was hale again he refrained from choking the chicken—as he and his brothers had called it since boyhood—but a few quick times a week. Over the next months the practice palled to the point that he abandoned it altogether. He thereafter spent himself only as he dreamed of Laura and Loretta May.
