The resonance of my time with Andrew never faded. And yet, as the days before and after the Fourth went by, I did not ride my bike back to Mill Street. Why? I think I was afraid. Afraid of how much I cared. Afraid I might say or do the wrong thing—Cannonball Cammie!—and spoil the memory of that perfect day.
Then the coal came.
By 1959 all the houses in town were heated with oil or gas, not coal—except for the Big House. My father got most of the improvements he asked for from the county authorities. But oil-burning furnaces were not one of them.
Halfway down the alleyway side of the prison, before the exercise yards began, there was a pair of green wedge-shaped hatchways jutting out from the base of the stone wall. The hatches were about twenty feet apart. They were secured with the biggest padlocks I had ever seen. This was how the coal got in, the coal that kept the prison so toasty in the winter that inmates often lay about their cells in underwear. (So I was told.) Like the Quiet Room and the Christmas party and steak once every two weeks, this was my father’s doing: “It’s a penitentiary. Shivering in the cold makes you bitter, not penitent.”
So once in the summer and every month in winter, a convoy of J. Gresh coal trucks lined up down the alley from the hatchways to Marshall Street. The hatches were opened, a pair of sliding board–like chutes were lowered into the black maw and down came the coal, truckload after truckload. A guard stood by the hatches until they were padlocked once again.
On the morning in July when the coal was coming down the chutes, I opened the back door and let the full force of the noise hit me: thunder falling down a bottomless stairway. I closed the door. No yard today.
Eloda was cleaning the bathroom. I was on the living room floor playing Monopoly against myself. I didn’t know someone was at the door until I heard the knock. The roar of the coal had muffled the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
I knew it wasn’t Reggie. She never came this early. And she’d never asked to visit the women’s yard again. Her interest in the prison was now focused on the person of Marvin Edward Baker.
With a chill I wondered if it might be Danny Lapella. I hadn’t seen him since the Fourth of July night. I’d been trying not to wonder what it all meant. If I’d truly believed it was him on the other side of the door, I would have run and hidden under my bed and let Eloda answer. But the knock had the sound of a little kid’s hand, not a big kid’s.
I opened the door. It was Andrew.
He was beaming. He threw up his arms. “I’m not s’pose to come but I comed anyway!”
A shadow me left my body and scooped him up and squeezed and tickled while he howled with laughter. The skin-and-bones me said, “Hi.” I was uneasy but I wasn’t sure why. I was about to find out.
He frowned. “What’s that noise?”
“Coal.”
“We get coal,” he said—then suddenly he was looking past me, wonder-struck. He pointed. “Is that a crimimal?”
I turned. Eloda was standing by the dining room table, gawking back.
“No,” I told him. I cupped his little shoulder. “She’s a trustee. Now what—”
He broke from me and started darting about the apartment. “I wanna see crimimals!”
Eloda had disappeared.
I caught up to Andrew in the kitchen. He was looking out the back window. He pointed. “What’s that?” he said.
It was before ten. The women were not out yet. “It’s the exercise yard,” I told him.
He brightened. “Jumpin’ jacks!” He did a few.
“Right,” I said. “Keep everybody in good shape.”
I pulled him away. He broke back to the window. “Where are they?”
“Too early,” I told him, and suddenly he was out the back door. I caught him at the bottom of the steps. I hauled him back up, squirming and whining.
Eloda was waiting in the kitchen. “He goes,” she said. She pointed to the front door. “Out.” Her face, her voice said, Don’t mess with me.
Andrew froze in mid-whine. Even then I didn’t trust him to go on his own. I carried him to the door. I was on the landing watching him head down the stairs when suddenly he turned and raced back up. I slammed the door shut behind me and got set to block him, but it wasn’t the exercise yard he wanted; it was me. He plowed into me and gave me the kind of wraparound squeeze I’d seen him give his mother that day. Before I could return the hug, he raced down to Reception and out to the street.
When I opened the door, Eloda was right there.
“Shut the door,” she said.
I shut the door. I expected her to step back. She did not. For the first time, I could count the freckles under her eyes and across her nose. I could smell the dustrag in her hand. Lemony. Coal was roaring down the chutes.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said.
I didn’t understand the question.
“You don’t do that.”
“Do what?” I said. And recalled my vague uneasiness when Andrew arrived.
“Bring little children in here. A place like this.”
“Eloda,” I said, “I didn’t bring him. He just—”
“You don’t talk back. You listen.”
Not only was defense useless, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t even want to defend myself. Circumstance had delivered to me the very thing I’d wished for. She was scolding me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Never again.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Expose a child to this.”
“No, ma’am.”
“And me”—she flapped her hand behind her, toward the yard—“us. We are not on display. We are not a freak show.”
“No, ma’am.”
She took my face in her hand.
“Do you hear me?”
I was shaking. “Yes, ma’am.”
She squeezed my face till my mouth was fish-lipped. “You will straighten up and fly right. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She squeezed harder. The hurt both startled and thrilled me. She yelled in my face: “Camille?”
The coal was roaring. I yelled back: “Yes, Mother!”
We stood gaping at each other, both of us astonished at what I’d just said, petrified in a suddenly empty bucket of sound: the coal had stopped falling. I broke first. I left her there, facing the door as I ran to my room.