Page 32 of The Reformatory

“Junior swears he thinks he missed, he didn’t hit nobody. But he was tryin’ to hit one. He said he didn’t give it a thought when he pulled that trigger three times—not ’til later, when he couldn’t sleep. That was the worst thing. But wasn’t the first. He didn’t tell me ev’rything, but you could see it in his eyes. All those secrets. An’ he said the others working there, it didn’t hardly bother them none. They’d say, ‘You gotta teach ’em a lesson,’ and ‘You gotta show ’em who’s boss,’ and all the while boys are hollerin’. Carried off in the night. Or disappearing, never seen again, with a note home to their families with a made-up reason.

“Now, Junior wasn’t there way back in 1920—he’d barely been born—but that’s how I imagine it was then too. Ev’rybody doin’ they job, showin’ the boys who’s boss. Way I hear it, there was a mess o’ boys in trouble that day, white and Negro. I don’t know what they did or why it was so bad, but they got locked up together—maybe that was punishment to the white boys, since white and colored don’t mix. Twelve, thirteen boys, maybe more, locked together in a shed behind the warden’s office all night long. What folks say is, the workers was drinkin’ and carryin’ on while the warden was away, so they decided to go to look for beer. Gracetown’s a dry county, see. Say they planned on comin’ right back to keep watch on the boys. And somehow—somehow—a fire started while they was gone. And since those boys was trapped, locked from the outside, not a single one of ’em could get free. Folks say they was screamin’ to raise the dead. But it was too late ’fore help came. They all died. Every single one.”

Did that explain her feeling when they’d driven to the Reformatory? It had felt as if screams were fresh in the air. So many boys dead at once! Gloria held her cramped stomach.

Was Miz Lottie right? Did Robbie feel it? “Miz Lottie… was the fire an accident?”

“Like I say, that’s how folks tell it. But after Junior quit there, he told me it wouldn’t s’prise him a teeny bit if somebody set that fire on purpose. To show ’em who’s boss. ’Cuz when you start working there, Junior said, it turns you into somebody else. Brings out all the worst, buried parts of you. Any wrong you ever wished you could do—that place sets you free.”

Miz Lottie had told her not to walk home after dark—“Ev’rybody knows who yo’ daddy is”—but Gloria had left Miz Lottie’s as fast as she could, promising she had made the walk dozens of times and would be fine. She’d heard all she could stand.

Miz Lottie’s terrible stories rang in Gloria’s head the whole while she walked past the settling homes and shuttered businesses on Lower Spruce. Only Pop’s General Store stayed open until nine because Pop sold bolita tickets and whiskey in brown bags at his back door. She walked past the watchful eyes of old and young men gathered by Pop’s window. During the day, she might hear, Good afternoon, Miss Stephens, or, from someone bold, You growed up nice, Gloria, but from the shadows, these men spoke to her with their eyes. Gloria couldn’t get used to men she’d known since she was young looking at her like a stranger. Maybe it was only Miz Lottie’s stories, but their silence quickened her pace.

“You be careful out on Tobacco Road,” Pop called to her from his window. Many people in town called the road Tobacco Road, or “Out by the farms,” but Gloria’s family used the name from slave times because her family had known the name a hundred years: McCormack Road.

“I will,” Gloria promised him, trying to sound cheerful. She wanted to ask Pop to send his oldest son, Mikey, with her to escort her, but no Negro man could help her with what she needed tonight. Asking would be the same as sending them to jail, or worse.

On darkened, unpaved McCormack Road, Miz Lottie’s stories rang fresh in Gloria’s ears.

Every sound was amplified: the chorus of crickets and cicadas, the rustling of raccoons and rabbits in the brush, the swamp water along the road that growled and splashed with snakes and gators. The noises seemed to follow her. Was there an unseen world in Gracetown, hidden beneath the angry soil? Even the full moon, her torch and beacon on dark nights, filled her with suspicion: it was too bloated, colored a deep golden orange so fiery. It looked unnatural.

She was small and alone: on the road, near the woods, in the world. Her smallness threatened to smother Gloria—until she saw the lights.

McCormack’s farm was the only property with lights this far from town, with a lamp at the gate and several at the house set back a couple of acres from the roadside fence. Whenever she reached the McCormack lights at night, she knew her walk was two-thirds done, only another half a mile to home. When she was little, she’d thought of McCormack Farm and its swimming hole as a piece of her home—until Papa made her swear to stay away. Gloria could hear Papa’s warnings in her head, fresh. And Miz Lottie’s story about the Negro men who had died after Isaiah Timmons stormed to this place with a shotgun, looking for his missing boys. Those boys had never been seen again, just like Isaiah Timmons and the Negro men the sheriff rounded up. This land hid bones that had not been properly spoken for.

Gloria wanted to keep walking past the McCormack gate, but how could she? This place was the root of Robbie’s troubles. She couldn’t stand the thought of Robbie spending a single night at that Reformatory, and only one call from Red McCormack to Judge Morris might get Robbie sent home. She couldn’t sleep if she left Robbie to fend for himself against haints and lost souls.

The property proclaimed itself MCCORMACK on an iron archway trellis painted bright white over the private driveway that wound to the house. The driveway gate was closed, but the latch was only to keep animals from straying out—no lock. A simple nudge, and the latch raised to let her in. The ranch-style gate yawned open. The red clay driveway waited.

Gloria’s heart pounded as she closed the gate behind her. The colonial house ahead was large, more a mansion than Miss Anne’s modest house in town. This was the Big House in Miz Lottie’s stories from slave times, the house where Ma Ma had grown up, before the McCormacks’ and Powells’ lines had diverged. This was where the cakewalks and Christmas dance had been held, where Miz Lottie’s mother had felt privileged to cook and polish silverware even though her child had been expected to warm the mistress’s feet. The slave cabins were long gone, but Gloria could imagine where they had stood in sullen rows across the field.

At the house, most lights were still on downstairs, one light on upstairs. It was eight o’clock and already dark, but it was after suppertime and before bedtime. McCormack would be surprised by her visit, but the hour wasn’t late enough to doom her effort. Not if he was reasonable. It’s now or never. Just walk.

Gloria had walked only half a dozen steps toward the house when she heard barking. The dogs! Two dogs, maybe three. And swishing in the grass moving toward her from the trees at a running pace. She looked toward the sound and saw a blur of pale fur in the dark.

Gloria was a quick thinker and a fast runner, but her body would not move. She became as fixed as a tree herself, a part of her hoping the dogs might run past her. Her only movement was twitching skin all over from the cascade of adrenaline and her heart’s thrumming race.

The light-colored dog ahead of her growled, a partial blur in the dark. From behind, two paws landed against her back and broke her uneasy balance, sending her to the dirt in a heap.

Gloria screamed as a muzzle lunged for her face. She webbed her hands across her face and neck. Slobbering drool from a dog’s tongue washed her cheeks, her forehead, her mouth.

Drool and a tongue, but not teeth. No pain.

Gloria opened her eyes—and saw a German shepherd’s coat, mostly dark with a beige muzzle and belly. A bright red collar. A wagging tail?

“Duke!” she choked out, remembering his name, and the dog’s tail wagged harder.

Lyle’s German shepherd Duke, named after actor John Wayne, had been less than a year old when she and Robbie used to visit the swimming hole, and sometimes he’d splash in the water with them. He was bigger now, fully grown, but he still knew her scent. She’d often brought Duke jerky as a treat when she saw him at the fence, and now she was glad. Dear Lord, the dog knew her!

Two other dogs she didn’t know circled, one still growling, but Duke nipped at the lighter-colored hound that tried to come closer. Duke was bigger, and Duke was boss. The third dog was a smaller German shepherd, a female, who barked from a cautious distance.

“Hey, Duke,” Gloria said, rubbing the dog’s neck with an unsteady hand. “Hey there, my good boy. That’s right—it’s Glo.” Her voice was happier than she felt. Tears fell from her eyes. She’d been certain she was about to die—a deep, clear perception of life’s ultimate lie—and now that she wasn’t being torn apart by dogs, life felt so good that it stung.

Once Gloria was back on her feet, wiping dust from her knees, she saw a flashlight beam swinging as someone came running from the house. She thought she saw a shotgun too. All her fear had been spent by the approach of the dogs, so she wrapped her arm around Duke at her side and hoped no one would take a shot at her with a beloved dog so close.

Gloria made out only one person behind the bright beam before it blinded her. “It’s Gloria Stephens!” she called out.

“Glo?”