Page 18 of The Reformatory

An icy sting shot across Robert’s skin. The smell of smoke choked him again—not cigarette smoke, but the terrible charred smell that had met him at the gate. Robert squeezed the peppermint in his fist more tightly, waiting for something terrible he could not name.

Haddock went to his door and opened it to call out. “Doris, tell Boone to come fetch him. And bring me some Bayer’s. Cancel my one o’clock call, hear?”

“Yessir, Superintendent Haddock,” he heard the woman say, chipper.

Robert dared one last look at the photograph, at the infant in the dressing gown, eyes closed tight. Yes, something was terribly wrong with the photo, every piece of it. The mother’s eyes were wild with grief. The father’s face looked whittled to the bone. Only young Fenton Haddock wore the barest trace of a smile. Robert finally understood what he had almost seen at first glance: the limp baby sister Haddock hugged to his chest was dead.

7

Robert was glad when the man who came to fetch him at the rear door was a Negro. But this Negro laid cold eyes into him, roughly grabbing Robert’s arm to pull him outside through a rear door, already cussing: “If you think a ashy li’l damn coon like you’s ever gonna get the best of Boone, you can lay down an’ die right now. ’Cuz there ain’t been one yet, and won’t never be one.” He squeezed Robert’s arm hard enough to pinch bone. “You hear me?”

“Y-yessir.” Robert noticed how thick-chested Boone was, his arms swollen with muscle. Like Papa, but not as tall. Boone wasn’t even six inches taller, but big in the ways that mattered.

“I don’t give a damn about you—’til you mess up. Then you gonna be all I care about.”

“Yessir.”

“When Warden Haddock say, ‘Boone, who’s ready to go home?’ if Boone don’t call yo’ name loud and clear, you gonna stay here ’til you don’t remember nothin’ else. You gotta git past Boone.”

“Yessi—”

“If Boone say, ‘Lights out,’ you better be the first one ’sleep. If Boone say jump over the barn, you best learn how to fly.”

Boone was walking so fast that Robert stumbled to keep pace to reduce the pinch to his arm, his boots ready to slip off. Even concentrating on his feet and stones hidden in the grass that might trip him, he noticed Boone’s odd habit of calling his own name—Papa said only conceited or crazy people did that—and how his words rushed out in a fountain, his voice not changing as if he were reading from a schoolbook. He just wants to scare me, Robert thought, and his nervous heart slowed. Him and the warden both. They just want to put on a show.

So Robert made his first promise to himself as the newest resident of the Gracetown School for Boys: he would please the adults by acting scared, but he would never be scared from that moment. He would never again wet his pants. Maybe the warden’s threat to give him twenty lashes was just like a church school skit for every new boy. Robert let himself forget, for the moment, the terror that had crawled in his belly with his last glance at the photograph of Haddock holding his dead sister. Mama and God would protect him from evil, he decided. So he would put on his own show with a sad, scared face.

Boone stopped his march and stared Robert down again. “What I just said?”

It was like Mr. Harris’s hourly quizzes to him at school, since Robert sometimes forgot to hide how far his attention had wandered. Not listening was a sure way to get a paddling, so Robert had trained himself to recall words even when he did not remember hearing them.

“ ‘And if you give that schoolteacher a lick of trouble, you’ll deal with Boone,’ ” Robert recited. For his life, Robert would not have remembered the sentence before, but his partial recall satisfied Boone, who yanked him forward again.

“You damn right you will.”

At that instant, in the middle of the bare field between the warden’s office and the colored schoolhouse, the first unusual incident happened to Robert Stephens at the Reformatory: his skin began to burn. He cried out and swatted at the arm Boone held as if it were swarmed with bees. If not for Boone’s stare, Robert might have tried to pull away.

“S-somethin’ bit me, sir,” Robert said, a lie. An insect’s bite did not feel like fire. He had touched flames somehow.

And the heat! The June sun in Gracetown from noon until dusk was almost as legendary as the sun in July or August, but the wall of heat he passed through with Boone was packed more tightly, a baking oven. The air was too hot to breathe, stinging his nostrils and throat. But Boone just kept walking and talking, his voice lost in a deafening whooshing sound plugging Robert’s ears. His sore eardrum pounded him. His skin felt like it was sizzling grease in a pan. The sky above him went black as he waded into thick smoke.

Then came the worst: the screams. Mama had whimpered and screamed in her sickness, but Robert had never heard human screams so wretched they were like animals. The sound was solid enough to touch, all around him. Boys. A room of screaming boys. Burning in a fire.

In a flash of knowing as thin as a spider’s web, Robert saw the writhing boys, faces twisted with pain and terror, half hidden in the smoke clouds, some already charred black. They pounded with frantic arms against a wall, thunder.

Begging and screaming. Dying.

Boone gave him a hard yank again, and Robert was plucked from the smoke and the burning room, only in the empty field strewn with pine needles and cones again. He expected to see the soil charred black behind him, but nothing remained of his vision except a watery dance like the air above a campfire.

Robert panted at the coolness, trying to soothe his lungs. Had Boone felt it too?

Boone leered back at him as if they were sharing a joke children shouldn’t hear. “You like that?” Boone said.

Mute, Robert shook his head.

Strange excitement played in Boone’s eyes—or behind them. “Ev’rybody don’t go home,” Boone said. “You best ’member that every damn day.”

Robert nodded, his eyes so wide, they hurt from the effort of holding back tears.