Lane doesn’t have much of an appetite, but Seward finishes his steak for him, gristle and all. As he watches the captain eat, Lane thinks about the man in the jail cell across town, and wonders if they’d afforded him his choice of a final meal. Lane would choose oxtail soup and collard greens cooked in drippings of fatback if he had to, though he can’t imagine having much of an appetite then, either.
His father’s last meal was chitterlings and grits. Lane knows this because he was the one who found the man, facedown on the kitchen floor, the plate of food his wife had left out for him half eaten on the counter. At first Lane thought he was sleeping, deep in a drunken coma, but when he went to turn his father over he knew even before he saw the lifeless face roll into the early sunlight that the man was gone; his body had already stiffened coldly into death. The doctor later told them that his heart had simply stopped. His mother said his heart had stopped many years before.
When the captain has finished eating, he pushes abruptly away from the table and tosses onto his empty plate the napkin he’d tucked into his collar. Lane watches as the remaining juices seep into the linen. “Couldn’t eat another thing,” Seward says. “You?”
Lane shakes his head.
The captain reaches into his pocket for his billfold. “I’ll go settle up,” he says, standing. “Meet you at the truck.”
Lane rises and makes for the washroom at the back of the place. The tavern has grown even more crowded in the course of an hour; the din of music and laughter comes together as a single sound, and the crowd seems a single entity. He keeps his head low and shoulders through, the disorderly mass of bodies a foreign thing around him after months of row by row, and he is sweating when he reaches the washroom. He bends down over the sink, splashes water across his face. It is tinged brown, and smells of the bayou’s sulfur depths, but it is cold. He stands, dries his face with his shirt, and then he’s face-to-face with his own reflection in the mirror.
He studies it with a deadened interest; it is the first good look at himself he’s had since being in prison. Six years he’s done hard labor in the prison fields, farming okra, soybeans, wheat, and it has changed him. His shoulders and chest have hardened, and the forearms are ridged and tan. His face is a darker, toughened version of itself; his mouth is a line; his eyes are sunk and hooded. Once he’d woken at the edge of a wheat field, his head bloodied by a forgotten blow, half his ear gone. The other half stands small and jagged against his head; he touches the now familiar countours of the interrupted flesh, seeing it clearly for the first time.