Page 97 of The Reformatory

Redbone shrugged. “Sorry, but I don’t know you that good yet. Well, I didn’t.”

“I ought to tell on him,” Robert said. “After what he said about my mama.”

Redbone couldn’t deny it. Blue must have told him everything. “He says an eye for an eye is even in Scripture. He’s mad as a hornet you put his friend in the jar. But I think if you try to do what he says… you could end up at Boot Hill, Robert. Buried under the ground.”

So they both knew Warden Haddock was a killer. “I know,” Robert whispered.

“But Blue says he’ll make you pay if you don’t.”

Schoolyard taunts from a haint. If Robert hadn’t been so miserable, he might have laughed.

Redbone shook his head the way an old man might. “He’s helped me out of jams lots of times, but I guess a haint can’t be a real friend. He don’t care a lick what I say now, won’t listen to nothin’. I don’t know him neither, not really.” Redbone’s grief wavered his voice.

“I thought he was nice at first,” Robert said. “Even after the freezer, I wasn’t too mad.”

“No one stays nice,” Redbone reminded him in a faraway voice, speaking to himself just as much. “Anyhow, I’m sorry I played along when Blue wanted to trick you like he was just another kid. Nobody else could see him, and… I don’t know, when he talked to me, I felt like more’n just another sorry nobody counting off time in here. He’s been the best thing about being here. And when he tells how he dies, it’s the most awful story you ever heard. I never want to see Blue go in that jar, but it’s his fault we got sent to the Funhouse—not yours.”

Robert nodded and savored two good breaths before his ribs started cramping again. “What am I gonna do?” Robert whispered. He didn’t care that he sounded like he was crying. Redbone had heard him do worse than crying.

All around them, instruments peeped and squealed while boys enjoyed their moment without troubles. Many boys were practicing their scales like their lives depended on it.

“I dunno,” Redbone said. Now his voice was an old man’s too. “But we’ll figure it out.”

We was a mighty and beautiful word.

All around him—among the oak, pecan, mulberry, and cedar trees on the hill that overlooked his campus—Fenton James Haddock heard the complaints of the dead. The grave sites were pits in the soil imperceptible unless you knew where to look. But every insect at Boot Hill hissed in a frenzy, as if to try to drown him with their rage. A slight burning sensation on the soles of his feet made him shuffle from side to side. Oh, those bones under the soil were mad.

Lucy deviled him at home too, but his baby sister’s dissatisfaction was more inchoate, veering between anger and playfulness as she’d been in life, giggling one moment and then screaming when he tugged on her thin strands of hair or slapped her cheek to make a perfect outline of his fingers in bright red. Watching her skin return to milky porcelain had been his favorite magic trick. “Fenton, why’s the baby screaming?” his mother had called out to him, pretending she didn’t know, unwilling or unable to rise from her whiskey nap.

In some ways, Boot Hill was the place that knew him best and honored him most. The soil recognized his footsteps and warblers in the treetops sang his name. A cloud of mosquitoes and gnats followed him, so Haddock opened his bottle of 6-12 insect repellent and lathered his bare arms where he’d rolled up his white shirtsleeves. Mosquito bumps were already rising. No matter. If angry spirits couldn’t do more than rile up a few mosquitoes, let them have their taste of his blood. Fair was fair.

The slight elevation at Boot Hill gave Haddock his best view of his campus, which was why he took a long uphill walk from his office with his thermos of coffee in the mornings. He surveyed the Negro dormitories he had helped lay bricks for, the infirmary he offered patients to, the kennels (God bless those dogs), the kitchen (he found one there), the Funhouse. He could just make out the white steeple of the white boys’ church past the baseball field on the far end of the campus, closer to his administration building, which he could not see from this distance at all.

Years ago, the Reformatory grounds had been half this size, and now they stretched a thousand acres between the campus and the fields. What other state-run school could boast its own printing press? The bushels of corn his boys harvested? Their famed Christmas display? How many other schools taught their boys to be bricklayers, butchers, and farmers in addition to his harsher lessons on becoming men?

And a haint was trying to wrest it all away. The mealy-mouthed governor, who grasped at his skirt after every complaint from a parent or an investigator, would try to take the school from him at the first whiff of an opportunity. Gossipers and reporters from the Gracetown Herald had written the governor letters with sob stories and accusations, hinting not only that Haddock should be removed but that the entire Reformatory ought to be shut down. The fire had been thirty years ago, with a second world war and the atomic bomb behind it, but the memory rang fresh at the town council and governor’s office. That damned fire.

Haddock spit bitter coffee into the soil. “What’d you go and do that for?” he said.

He’d been drunk on cheap corn liquor when he lit that match. No question about it. He’d blamed intoxication, so he’d given up corn liquor and whiskey, or even wine with his dinner or a Falstaff at a ball game, suffering every missed sip. But he couldn’t blame drink for how he’d balled Lucy’s blanket between his hands and shut up her crying for good when he was a boy.

Even sober—and he was never drunk at work—he’d been furious at those boys goading and defying him when he was a dorm master with peach fuzz. He’d whipped some of them in the Funhouse two or three times over and they still kept trying to run. Since those white boys wanted to act like coloreds so bad, let them be locked up in the shed with the coloreds. Let them piss on the floor, sleep on the cold ground, and feel their stomachs howl with hunger. Let them pound on the wood until their hands bled. Let them choke on black smoke and scream until their throats burned to ash.

No, he couldn’t blame the drink. Even now, knowing the consequences, he could feel the young man he’d been arguing how he was right to do it. For a long time after, no boy had tried to run. With all the grumblers and agitators gone, hadn’t the rest fallen in line? With less energy spent on chasing runaways and more on building the school, look how far they’d come. The state football championships. The Christmas parades. God help him, if Haddock could go back in time and counsel his younger self, he might light that match stone sober.

The real truth: This Place had told him to burn the shed. From the moment he’d set foot on the Reformatory’s grounds, fresh from the turpentine camp he’d hated after high school, This Place had found his dreams and shown him how he didn’t need to tolerate shit from anyone ever again. This Place had shown him images of how these boys must be molded and corrected, and sometimes correction wasn’t pretty.

If he could change only one thing, he would have kept Robicheaux from breaking that door down so the flames wouldn’t have eaten his friend’s face and sent him screaming in circles, clutching at his burning ears. But other than Robicheaux, God rest his soul, the memory of the fire helped Haddock sleep at night. He’d been 4-F on account of his bad knee after Grandpa thrashed him when he was ten—which pained him even now, standing so long on the hill—but he envied the men who’d traveled overseas where killing was just another day’s work. Where you got a medal for it, if you did it in high enough numbers or with a brave enough story. He could have had a Silver Star pinned to his lapel. Instead, he was worrying about what would happen if anyone found out how he’d soaked the wall with kerosene before he lit the match.

“What you got to say now, you little bastards?” he’d called inside to them, and their pounding fists against the planks with the first wisps of smoke had rolled like glorious thunder.

No surprise that one of the haints was after him now. Kendall Sweeting, that was the one. Haddock remembered him well, with his odd, careful speech from the islands, like he thought he was King George of England. He’d seemed like a little black gnome at first, a man dressed as a boy. That fussy little imperious boy hadn’t learned yet how to talk to white men and had petitioned for a meeting with him. By right, Sweeting used to say. He should meet with the superintendent by right. He shouldn’t be at the Reformatory by right.

Of course Sweeting was the one. If Robicheaux hadn’t held his strap hand back, Haddock might have beat Sweeting to death on the Funhouse table instead of locking him in the shed. All week long he’d surveyed those boys’ faces, white and colored, and collected each one who’d cut their eyes at him, or laughed at the wrong time, or was uppity like Sweeting. Twenty-five of them all locked up in a hot house with no windows, built of aged but sturdy Florida pine. When Robicheaux and the others wanted to tip over to Leon County to get beer, like they always did during the Friday night shift, Haddock had stayed behind with his private corn liquor jug.

That was his favorite time, when almost everyone was gone. The time he came alive.

After the fire, when the burned shell of the shed still smelled like frying ham, he’d photographed Sweeting at the center of the circle with other boys fanned all around him, and no hint of a burn on his skin. No blisters or boils or pooling, charred blood. Haddock had expected Sweeting to sit up from where he lay and say by right Haddock should get the electric chair.