Page 80 of The Reformatory

Robert tried not to think of Mama to keep the tears from his eyes, but Mama was all he could think about, as if she were hiding behind Warden Haddock’s door. And wasn’t she? Would she give the warden a headache now to save him from having to lie?

“Yessir,” Robert whispered.

“I need someone who sees ’em regular, not just once in a while. Someone who can track ’em and show me where they’ve been. I haven’t had a good spotter in a long while. Boone says you’re the best he’s ever seen, and he’s been here since ’45. Going on five years.”

Robert’s hearing phased in and out as his heart pounded, and he fought against tears and held his face steady as the awfulness twisted his stomach. The social worker had told him to be invisible to the warden, and somehow he’d become an outright marvel. Bad to worse in a heartbeat. He would never get out in six months now!

Robert tested a lie. “I’ve only seen the one in the kitchen, Warden Haddock.”

“That’s not true, son,” Warden Haddock said, and Robert swooned in his seat at being caught. His mouth lost all moisture. He shook his head to try to explain.

“The fire,” Warden Haddock said. “You felt the fire. Not all haints are human, Robert. A big enough corruption can be a haint too. Boone said you flinched in those flames like the fire was still burning. Like you could see every face. He knew what you could see as soon as he met you.”

“I didn’t see faces in the fire,” Robert said after the warden waited for him to say more. He had seen faces in the Funhouse, but he didn’t want to tell on those. “It just felt… hot. Smoky.”

“But chances are, you will—you will. I want you to visit the spot each day. Just like one of our tracking dogs, I want you to get familiar with the scent. Learn the stink of the dead. I used to see ’em as a boy—a lot of us Gracetown boys do, don’t we, Robert?—and if the moon’s right some nights, I still see a shadow in front of my window just the size of my baby sister. My wife can’t see her—only me. You don’t know angry ’til you’ve met an angry baby, Robert Stephens. There’s something they don’t teach you in church.” Warden Haddock winked, a flutter of his right eye. “Now, I know what you’re thinking… she’s got the right to haunt me of all people. I’ll give her that one.”

Robert froze his face so his eyes wouldn’t widen to show his shock. He’d thought maybe, just maybe, the warden had done something bad to his sister when he had seen the old photo proudly on his bookshelf—but was Warden Haddock admitting it to his face? And who would believe his word against the warden’s if he tried to tell? Robert’s heart sped as he feared the warden might spell out exactly how he had done it and force him to hear about whatever dark room he had killed his baby sister in. Robert didn’t want to hear another word. Would the warden beat him if he asked to leave the room? Send him to Boot Hill after he knew?

“I think it’s only right,” Warden Haddock went on, “for me to leave my sister’s spirit alone. In my mama’s memory. A young’un like I was can’t see all the bigger pieces of a thing. She’s still blood kin, temper or no. No real man is afraid of a few broken windows or a missed night’s sleep.”

He waited to see if Robert would speak, but Robert could only stare at him, forgetting he should never look a white man in the eye. Even when he remembered to look away, he couldn’t. Warden Haddock said he wasn’t afraid of his sister’s ghost, but another story was buried in the creases of his quivering crow’s-feet.

Warden Haddock looked away first, tapping a pencil on his stack of photos. “It’s the other haints, on this land—those are the ones I won’t tolerate. They’re tryin’ to give my school a bad name. All a man has in the world is his name. Your name outlives you. You might as well know, Robert… boys died here. Quite a few have, in fact.”

When Robert’s throat closed, he remembered his Coke and tried to force down another sip.

The cold glass made his hand shake.

Warden Haddock picked up a file folder in front of him and fanned through the pages, a breath of hot dust. “By my research… I’d say there’s about sixty in the official records since the school opened at the turn of the century. Another, I don’t know, thirty or so may not be so official.” He said it in a singsong, a math problem that puzzled him. He studied the page his finger had stopped on. “Give or take, let’s call it a hundred haints on this land. I’m sure I’m still missing a few. The truth is, no one knows for sure.” He threw the file down, sending more dust into Robert’s nose.

Robert finished the rest of the math in his head: that meant two boys died a year. At least. “Now, before you get the wrong idea,” Warden Haddock said, stern again, “those numbers got jiggered way up by the fire. One fire in 1920 killed twenty-five boys. It’s the biggest tragedy in the history of this county. Maybe worst in the state. I don’t know of any tragedy worse, do you?”

Rosewood was worse, according to Miz Lottie’s stories. But he hadn’t felt the killing fires in Rosewood the way he had here. Besides, Rosewood’s screaming Negro men, women, and children wouldn’t count as a tragedy to Warden Haddock.

“No, sir,” Robert said.

“You’re damn right. It’s a hell of a thing for an institution to bounce back from. Tongues are still wagging thirty years later. The mayor, the town council, the governor’s office—they all wanted to shut down Gracetown School for Boys. It was my first job—I was a bricklayer—and good-paying jobs weren’t easy to come by. Still aren’t, Robert—not for swamp boys like me. I put down the foundation for your dormitory with these two hands. Then, just like that, they wanted us gone. We’re too big to shut down now, but the wrong kind of stories make it hard to keep order, Robert. It’s all meetings, meetings, meetings, instead of seeing to my boys.”

Warden Haddock wanted Robert to feel sorry for him, so Robert nodded. “And about your daddy…,” the warden went on.

Robert couldn’t keep from squirming.

“You know this about me by now: I’m a man of God and duty,” Warden Haddock said, an outrageous lie. Warden Haddock was a master of lies. And maybe a baby killer too! Still, Haddock gazed at Robert with soft, wet eyes. “The Funhouse, what happened between you and me, was duty. I didn’t lay down that strap as hard as I could have. Every lash gave me a goddamn headache, Robert. And I respected the way you defended your father, when you spoke your mind. You knew good and damn well you could say the wrong thing and swing from a rope, but you said, ‘Yessir, that white bitch is lying.’ ”

The room spun until the warden winked again.

“I’ve even told the story a time or two, how you spoke your mind. Half the town, including the sheriff, knows she only made it up to cover bruises from her drunken boyfriend, and the other half are swamp trash who couldn’t spell ‘investigation’ with a dictionary. Now, there’s plenty I don’t like about your daddy, who is a communist—make no mistake. But the Constitution says ‘free speech,’ and I’d be a hypocrite to lay a finger on you over a lie. I’m saying all this, Robert, because you need to understand I’m not a monster. Like all God’s creatures, I’ve made mistakes; I made my worst one when I was younger than you.” Robert thought of Warden Haddock as the boy in knee pants holding the baby he’d killed on his lap… with a smile. “I’m only saying this because… if you can get your heart around this endeavor, being my spotter, we can be a great help to each other, Robert. You can help me clear the stink out of the Gracetown School for Boys, and I will ask the judge to let you out early.”

He pushed a form toward Robert and turned it right side up so Robert could read it: PETITION FOR EARLY RELEASE. Followed by, on the next line: STEPHENS, ROBERT E. JR. It was the first time Robert had ever seen his name from a typewriter, so official and important. Only the blank signature line waited. The white paper shimmered like gold.

“Spotting is an honor system, Robert. Boone says spotters sometimes don’t tell all they could. See it as bein’ ‘tattletales.’ Start to feel like they’re hunting down innocent boys.” He searched Robert’s face, nodding when he found the floating boy from the infirmary in Robert’s eyes. Or, God help him, maybe Warden Haddock saw Mama too.

“So you’d better know this: there’s nothing innocent about haints. They say one thing to your face and whisper how to die in your ears when you’re sleeping. They want you to keep ’em company. What’s six months or a year or ten years to a haint? The worst haints are children: always bored and wanting to play. Haints only want what they want, not a damn thing you want. They can’t be bargained with. Can’t be trusted. Haints will sure enough get you killed.”

Robert’s memories of the pathetic haints he’d seen must have been plain on his face. “Ah, I see,” the warden said. “They’re already getting to you. Trying to make you feel sorry.”

“He didn’t want to get stabbed in the back,” Robert said, thinking of the white boy in the kitchen. He tried to make himself believe the boy was a bully like Lyle McCormack or the ones who yelled Nigger! as their shiny yellow school bus rolled past him and Gloria on the road. But more likely that white boy in the kitchen had been just like him, another boy who had waited to get whipped at the Funhouse and wanted to go home so bad that his stomach burned. Tears came to Robert’s eyes before he could stop them.