Charles Davis is a former law enforcement officer and US Army soldier. In 1999 he moved from the coast of Maine to North Carolina, rented a beach house, got a part-time job as a construction worker, and began writing his first novel. The author currently lives in New Hampshire with his wife, son and dog, where he is working on his next novel. Find out more about Charles at www.mirabooks.co.uk/charlesdavis

Drifting South

CHARLES DAVIS

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Prologue

I came to know that lost place the way only a select few did. I was born there, a month too early on the scrubbed pine floor of a whorehouse in the spring of 1942. Ma’s first sight of me was by lantern light. She said I glowed like sunrise and I was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Conceivings could naturally be expected on any given moment in Shady, but few birthings. Ma told me I came sudden and ready to meet the world on a Sunday at midnight and I wasn’t about to be born in a bed where business was conducted. Especially on a Sunday.

“Bad luck,” she said.

Ma was a charm-carrying believer in astrology, signs, luck, and evilness of all shapes and varieties. She believed in goodness, too, and a life after this one that was full of that goodness. And she also believed in a thing that she could feel more than she could see, that she called “the mystic.” It’s right there living alongside us. And sometimes among us, she said. Ma always did have a superstitious nature and peculiar beliefs about so many things compared to most. She was pretty and graceful with curly black hair, and she was a whore and had to be a hardworking one because she believed in keeping her children fed.

We all had fathers of course, but we never were sure who they were as Ma never got much help raising us. I didn’t think she knew who our fathers were, either, by the way she kept trying to hang each of us around the neck of about every man who’d blow through Shady Hollow. They’d always leave for good or try to once they got wind of what her intentions were.

People who lived and worked in Shady Hollow just called it Shady. Wasn’t but twelve dozen of us or so at any one time who had a bed to sleep on that wasn’t being paid by the night for. Most of the faces in Shady changed quicker than day and night coming through the same window. But some took root for years and years for their own good reasons, which weren’t nobody’s business, Ma said. And she told me it was none of my business why we lived there, either, or why she did what she did for a living, when I asked her one time. Ma was only sixteen years older than I was, but she always seemed a lot older no matter what age I was at, even though she didn’t look it.

Shady Hollow lacked a lot of things, like electricity and flushing toilets and a post office, but a person who had nothing in the world but a stretched-out hand never got too cold or too hungry.

Shady never became a real town and the name never was on any map. If you did hear about Shady Hollow in some rambling story from a man or woman you wouldn’t be apt to believe anyway, you’d think the place never did exist. But it did. It was the realest place I’ve ever lived and, even after all of those years I spent in prison, that’s saying something.

Ain’t many places more real than a prison.

From the stories I heard over and over as a boy, Shady Hollow got started in a two-story barn in 1861 by a man named Luke Ebbetts. He named his place “The Establishment on the Big Walker,” and he sold homemade whiskey and hired a whore from Tennessee who soon had more work than she could handle shaking the rafters in the loft.

Luke believed he could make a sizable profit providing to soldiers what the Blue and Gray armies wouldn’t provide for them. Things like liquor and good cigars and women and a hot bath and photographs of them standing tall and fierce in their brushed uniforms and decent hot food and music everywhere. You could hear music in Shady day or night from the earliest times, they say. Night it was louder.

I’m not sure if Mr. Ebbetts would put the things I listed in the same order that I did per a man’s necessity, but he made sure all was aplenty and more to suit any man’s tastes and size of pocketbook.

Luke was a rebel through and through, but he was a businessman above all and he welcomed any uniform wandering into Shady as long as those boys didn’t ask for credit and stacked their weapons when they showed up with their powder dry and ready. Those long rifles would be stacked quick or there’d be shotguns pointed at them. The soldiers who risked coming to Shady Hollow weren’t shy of a fight for certain, but they’d do what Luke said, because the one thing they didn’t come for was to hurl lead at one another. They’d had enough of that, and that’s why they’d walk away from their guns peaceable for a day or two and sometimes even have a drink with their enemy before they’d go to killing each other again on some battlefield up on the Shenandoah.

It wasn’t long before a couple of men who worked for Luke saw how he was making more Confederate and U.S. money than he could bury in canning jars. With his permission, they soon built their own leaning shacks with hand-painted signs atop them, sold whatever things were needed to keep the place running, and hired their own whores who kept more tin roofs shaking. Luke got his cut from all of it.

Before the end of the war, flatboat drivers were braving boulders and swirl holes to float pianos and piano players into Shady, and the rest is pretty much what it came to be—a haphazard outlaw settlement tucked deep into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia.

Deep. Deep in those mountains.

All sorts came to Shady Hollow once word of the place started drifting out of those foggy hills. Coal miners. Timber workers. Rich northern college kids with old money rearing to depart their new pockets. Gamblers. Orchard pickers. Foreigners. Roamers. Murderers. Thieves. Forgivers. Saviors. And the unrepentant, those rarest of few who in their final dying act would find the will to hold up a shaking middle finger for whoever could see it, and take note of it, one last time.

And politicians and railroaders and mill workers and carpetbaggers and just generally people looking for a good time or those who’d lost their religion or way in some other life.

Fugitives and fortune seekers all of them were, winners and losers, adventuresome folks who’d heard about it and some who came from thousands of miles away. The strangest and the bravest and the most curious of the needy or greedy or forgotten or unwanted seemed to collect there. Good and bad they were, most often a troubled mix of the two things churning away in the same person.

And women were among them. Shady was full of women. Most didn’t stay long like Ma, but they were always coming in and out. They were all sizes and shapes, showing up barefoot and hungry most of the time, a few with a dirty baby nursing on a tit and a screaming little walker in hand.

But some gals made up all fancy would come to us riding tall on a hungry horse or, later, sitting in a new shiny automobile running out of gas with a smile on their face that anybody from Shady could see right through. They had life growing in their bellies, and like everybody else, I reckon they all hoped what they needed to find was there. And one thing for sure, everybody found their true nature in Shady Hollow, because it was the sort of place where a person’s true nature was bound to run into them right quick.

Anyway, Shady wouldn’t have been what it was without its women—it would have been one mean miserable place for sure then—and I reckon the place probably needed children, too. It’s where I grew up.

During my time there, the churchgoers scattered around that part of the Allegheny wilderness country called Shady Hollow “No Business,” because they said no man nor beast had no business going near there. The faithful would proclaim in their town meetings that the government should destroy Shady because there was evilness just a day’s walk from their back pasture fences. The Shady elders would send spies to their gatherings, and we’d soon get secondhand tellings of all the goings-on.

There’d be family men standing up, quoting the Holy Bible in the strongest voices they could muster after their church visits, all of them worn down from trying to save our souls.

But as I’d come to learn already, what some people would say or pray in church on a Sunday morning, and actually do in Shady Hollow on a Saturday night, were two different things.

And you could put a fair wager on that about every time, if you could find somebody foolish enough to take such a bet. Which weren’t likely.

In those church meetings, some of the folks with the loudest voices would come back alone when they could get away with it unnoticed, and they wouldn’t be thumping on a Bible. We figured they had butter and egg money in their pockets, and God sound asleep on one shoulder and the devil picking a five-string banjo on the other. And they’d come back again and again.

We’d welcome them with their stern or bending ways as it suited them, politics and people and religion being the way they are and always have been. So we were a tolerable lot in Shady, even with the Bible toters.

My whole world my first seventeen years, save one trip not so far by miles but a long distance by all other measures, was that curved riverbank with shacks and stick buildings lining both sides of a one-lane road that was mostly mud, tire tracks, horseshit and changing footprints.

Besides the occasional car coming in or out, people rode horses and mules and walked and even peddled bicycles through the mountain country to get there, because the law was so bad about stopping anybody coming in or out on the only dirt road that led to Shady. And some of those yahoos were lazier at thieving than we were by the way they’d hold up folks leaving and charge them for this or that crime, before telling them that if they paid their fine in cash on the spot, they’d be let go and there wouldn’t be a jailhouse stay or court hearing at the county seat of Winslow.

And the fine was always however much money the law could find on them. They’d take watches and rings, even wedding bands for payment, too. When they started taking vehicles and sending people walking out of those freezing hills in the deadness of a January night, something had to be done.

A couple of those lawmen never left the outskirts of Shady Hollow once it came to light what they’d been doing. They were running off business, Ma said, and they were giving Shady the crookedest name of the very crookedest kind.

Those deputy sheriffs never even made it into the hard but forgiving dirt of Polly Hill, neither, once they ignored threats and turned down bribes and were sentenced according to a final judgment by the Shady elders. They ended up bobbing down the river with their bellies bloated and their badges pinned to their foreheads for all to take warning of downstream.

I guess Shady is where I grew up in about every way a young man could and I saw almost every kind of good and bad there is to see. Almost.

Shady Hollow is all gone now, all of it, except for the dead still buried there. I still ain’t sure if the kneelers finally got their prayers tended to or it finally outlived its times. Maybe it just came down to plain bad luck that outsiders might call prosperity.

Over the years many more than a few died trying to find and get to Shady, wandering up on the wrong liquor still or copperhead at the wrong time, or just getting lost in the wilderness. If for no other reason, I still figure there must have been something decent—and maybe even special about the place—if so many folks died trying to find it. It was something in its day, and I’m sure in the last moment before it took its final breath, the diehards of the holdouts threw the party of all parties.

I missed that fine celebration that I can only imagine. But contrary to what some people still claim, it wasn’t because I had six feet of clay piled over top me on Polly Hill.

Most days I’m still pretty sure I ain’t dead yet. Maybe a little bit dead, maybe a whole lot more than a little bit.

But I’m still here.

I had to leave Shady in a great big hurry on September 28, 1959. September 28 fell on a cool early fall Sunday, and I was seventeen years old. And even though I’ve survived so many things since, I still think about it. Especially when dark falls and all gets still and quiet but the visions and ghosts of once was, and once that was never to be, who come back again and again to pay me a visit.

Almost half a century has passed since the shooting. But the sounds and sights of Ma’s yelling and crying, and Amanda Lynn’s screaming, and every single thing that happened on that Sunday afternoon is carved as deep into me as it is into homemade river-rock tombstones overlooking what once was a place called Shady Hollow.

Chapter 1

Harrisburg Federal Penitentiary June 16, 1980

“You’re not out yet, Henry. Well, keep that in mind, yep,” he said.

The guard behind my left shoulder—the head goon who ducked through doorways and always walked behind prisoners with my kind of history—tapped me on the right shoulder with his stick. Tapped probably ain’t the right word. He hit me with it not hard enough to leave a mark a day later but hard enough to where I’d feel it a week later, whatever that word is. I was used to him walking behind me, and had come to know his stick in a personal kind of way. My head had put a few dents in it.

Officer Dollinger always ended everything he said with the word “yep,” and he was letting his stick tell me that I’d been mouthing off too much to a new guard walking in front of me.

Anyway, the head of the beef squad behind me had never called me Henry before. It seemed the whole bunch of them would come up with new words to call us every few years, same as we’d come up with new words to call them. Lately the guards called all of us convicts either Con or Vic.

Don’t see that in movies, prisoners being called Vic. Don’t see a lot of things in prison movies, at least the ones they’d shown us in prison, that actually make being locked up look and sound and smell like what it is, which is similar but different in an uglier, more crowded, louder, smellier way.

But mostly the guards just called me and the rest of us “you.” After I’d learned to write, I’d signed so many of their forms over the years with that name.

You.

But in D Block, Pod Number Four-B of the Number Nine Building known as the Special Housing Unit of Harrisburg Federal Penitentiary, the few pards I trusted with some things but not all, and had become friends with as much as you can in a place like a prison, called me “Shady.”

At some point in some lockup or lockdown, I was feeling dangerous lower than is good for a man to feel, and I decided I might need something to remember who I used to be before I had to live behind tall walls and wire, even if I couldn’t feel that way no more. On my last day in prison, both of my arms were covered in fading blue ink, pictures and words. Those prison tattoos read like a book of my youth, and across my back and shoulders in big letters was the word “Shady.” It was the first thing I’d ever had scratched into me. Nobody knew what Shady meant because I never told anybody about my past or what little I knew of it, but it came to be what I was called by the other inmates.

So anyway, given a kind warning by stick standards, I decided to not say anything more to the new jug-head guard in front of me. I just kept shuffling slow and steady, wearing irons on my ankles that I’d gotten used to so much that I’d grown permanent calluses from them. I kept shuffling slow and kept my bearing about me as I tried to ignore the irksome clanking of the chains at midstep, because it wouldn’t do me well to raise hell about any of it.

I’d already been through eight hours of a hurry up and wait drill, first in my empty cell with a rolled-up bed, and then sitting outside the warden’s office watching the guards keeping an eye on me over top issues of Life, Field & Stream and National Geographic magazines.

An old trustee with heavy glasses on and small shoulders who seemed to have been there before time began and a man who I’d always gotten along with somewhat tolerable came in to say at long last that the head man of the Harrisburg Federal Penitentiary was busy attending to a bunch of local politicians touring the place.

All of the guards laid down their aged magazines, bored, like they’d probably done a thousand other times, and then they grabbed me up and escorted me to another waiting room. After I watched them sip on cold bottles of pop for another hour, I finally had my farewell talk with the assistant warden.

The tall shiny wooden sign sitting on top of his desk yelled that his name was Theodore Donald O’Neil, the Third. And he was young, a good bit younger than me, and I wasn’t that old. He seemed proud of himself sitting behind his long name and polished oak desk in a way a young man is until he’s really tested and finds out what’s really inside of him.

But like this old Chinese lady had come in to teach us once, I kept focusing on my breathing. I took in air slow like it was the gift of life and let my lungs fill up with the gift before letting it out, just as I’d done over and over from years of trying to let out what was about to make me explode, or eat my insides away to nothing.

The assistant warden told me to sit.

I sat.

He looked so serious, and then he grinned.

He leaned back carrying that grin and stared as hard as he could for what seemed a decent long time until his eyes started to get watery.

“If it were up to me, you wouldn’t be leaving. I’ve scanned your file and sitting here looking at you, I know you’re still a threat to society. It’s written all over your face.”

I kept staring at him because my eyes had dried up years ago when something deep down in me turned the water off, and I could now stare at anybody until I just got so bored with it that I’d decide to stare at something else. It was written all over Mr. O’Neil that he wasn’t quite yet the hard man he’d need to be in this new job, as his eyes left mine and he began talking again and fiddling with a pencil that had teeth marks on it.

“Besides not making parole several times for various violations, you’ve been involved in several serious altercations. You even managed to kill an inmate here.”

“I’m sure it’s in the file what I did and why,” I said.

“Actually, the file only has your version of what happened, being the other man is dead.”

“I had to defend myself if I wanted to keep living is the short of it.”

“Yes…you never did say why the man tried to kill you, as was your story.”

“Don’t know.”

He looked over the papers at me. “Well, we can’t ask his version of what happened, can we?”

“You could dig him up but I suspect he wouldn’t say a whole lot,” I said.

He kept looking at me for a good spell, then at the head guard before he eyed his watch. Then he turned his attention square back at me.

“The warden doesn’t have any other recourse than to let you go. I’d like to believe that you’ll begin leading a decent life, but your nature toward violence will lead you right back into incarceration, if you don’t get killed first, of course. But you’re a hard man to kill, aren’t you, Henry Cole?”

“This damned place hasn’t killed me yet.”

“This institution didn’t try to kill you, it tried to rehabilitate you. And we failed in that task. The taxpayer’s money has been wasted in that regard. You are living, breathing proof that some men cannot change their behavior, and therefore they should be restrained and kept from society that they will naturally prey on and do harm to. It’s my opinion that you should be kept here for as long as you have the capacity to continue to be a threat to others, which would be until you are either a feeble old man or until you die. But as you know, even though you still have evil in your eyes as you sit there staring at me, I lack the authority to keep you here and throw away the key, as they say. I did want you to know my feelings on the matter, however.”

I couldn’t hardly stand to be quiet anymore with that young man with not a scar on him judging me the way he was doing, but I kept trying to sit on my temper best I could. It was starting to catch my ass on fire.

“What’re your plans?”

“Don’t have any,” I lied.

“None?”

“Not a single one,” I lied again.

“What do people like you think about in here for…what was it…eight years?” he asked.

“I’ve been here a lot longer than eight years.”

“Didn’t you ever think about what you would do when you were released?”

“What do you think about in here when you’re locked up behind the same rusty bars as I am, day after day?” I asked back.

The assistant warden tried to grow another grin but it slid away.

“I can leave here whenever I want. You can’t. But to answer your question, I think about how to make sure predators like you stay here where you belong,” he said. “It’s very, very satisfying.”

He looked like he meant what he said, and I respected him more than I did when I’d first laid eyes on him, but still not much. He went back to scanning and flipping page after page of I guess what amounted to my life in prison, which amounted to all of my adult life. He stopped to read one section with a lot of care.

“You’ve been housed in protective custody most of your time here. Why?”

I didn’t say anything as he kept reading. He finally looked up.

“Why the attacks?”

“If it ain’t in there, I don’t know,” I said. “I was actually hoping you might.”

“You don’t know why inmates on two other occasions tried to kill you?”

“I didn’t even know them.”

“This is a complete waste of time.” He closed my file and threw it onto a stack of other files.

I noted mine was the thickest and an old pain shot through me in a thousand old places.

“The reason we received the order to release you two days early is certainly not because of good behavior, it’s because the Bureau of Prisons has red-tagged you a security risk. The unannounced change of date reduces the threat of another violent incident just before, or on, your actual court-order release date. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded.

“Your file reads that either you have a very difficult time playing with others, or someone has wanted you dead for quite a long time. If it’s the latter, we would rather that not happen on our grounds, especially the moment you walk out of the gate unprotected. You will be a standing duck for anyone who may have been waiting for such an easy opportunity. It’s happened before and we don’t need the mess or paperwork.” He started showing what looked like his first real smile. “Your safety will very soon be your own responsibility. I do wish you good luck with that.”

He acted like he was waiting for me to say something. I couldn’t think of anything to say besides wanting to tell him that if the guards were to leave, I’d probably try to mop the buffed floors of his office with his face to get rid of that real smile and the smirk I’d had to stare at. He was lucky because if it were just another day and I had a ton more time to pull, I’d try it even if I was chained up with guards all around me. I’d get one lick in for sure somehow that he’d carry with him for a long time, and maybe he wouldn’t smirk at and talk down to the next man sitting in front of his desk who’d pulled his time. He definitely wouldn’t smirk at me again.

I kept staring at young Mr. O’Neil, thinking how three months in isolation and catching another charge for assault on a federal officer and two more years on the tally is worth every minute of it, every now and then.

But not that day.

Hewas lucky. And I figured that Iwas lucky, too, because my better nature was in charge of me sitting before him. The nature I’d known as a boy. He finally asked if I had any questions.

I leaned forward as far as I could and shook my head.

He shot up all of a sudden. “You won’t be out for long.” He then nodded at Dollinger, and that’s when I could feel being let free. I could feel it all over me like I was standing under a waterfall. It made me nervous, and that was a feeling I hadn’t felt since I didn’t know when. It hit me at that moment how long it had been since I’d felt anything at all except rage or rainy-day late-morning hollowed-out lonesomeness.

The guards stood me in an elevator, facing the back of it, and we went down to the bottom floor of that building and when the doors opened, we all walked like a formation again into a bright room that looked like a poured concrete box. Wasn’t anything in it that wasn’t colored gray. Even the prison clerk behind the counter wore a gray uniform and he must’ve been down there so long, his face had taken on the same colors of the walls and file cabinets.

“What hand you write with?” the stump guard beside me asked.

I raised the first finger on my left hand and he took off the one cuff from it, and then cuffed that bracelet through an iron ring mounted onto the top of the long counter. One of the older guards behind me took off the leg irons, being careful to stand clear in case I bucked.

I looked over my shoulder and made sure he was out of the way, then I stretched and shook out the cramps in my legs as the clerk handed me a pen and shoved paper after paper in front of me to sign while telling me what I was signing. But I’d learned to read and write, probably the only good things I did learn in prison, and even though I was in a hurry to get out of there, it looked like they were in a bigger hurry than me to finally get me out-processed. I saw on the clock that it was shift change.

I decided to take my time reading those papers. I read careful and signed every single sheet with the name “Shady.” They’d been kicking me all day long. I figured I’d get in one last kick from Henry Cole.

“Where’s my belongings?” I asked.

The clerk bent down and pulled up a wire basket that held a big paper sack. He dumped the sack onto the counter. A button shirt, dungarees, old drawers, white socks and a pair of withered-up brown shoes lay in a heap. Uncle Ray’s revolver wasn’t there as I surely knew it wouldn’t be, and the razor and whetstone and Ma’s roll of money were gone, too. But it made me want to smile seeing the clothes because I could remember wearing them. It made me feel young in spirit for one of those too-fast seconds you try to grab hold of but the next second it’s off on some breeze.

I didn’t want the clothes to wear, knew they wouldn’t fit and I figured it might be bad luck anyway to put on clothes with sewn-up bullet holes, but it was nice seeing them because they brought back a feeling of better times. I did need the shoes because I figured there was still a ten-dollar bill sewed between the sole and the bottom leather for just such a predicament, as Uncle Ray had taught me when I was a boy in Shady Hollow, just before he’d gotten killed.

I ran my one free hand through everything, checking careful and hoping with all the hope in me to find a folded piece of pretty yellow paper with her handwritten words and scent on it. Amanda Lynn’s letter to me. Feeling through that pile of old things, I was afraid that it hadn’t made it through all of those miles and years. But I looked and kept looking, because if by some chance it had survived such a journey, I was going to be certain right then about locating it. I kept feeling for it, not paying any mind to anything else. It was the letter she’d given me in Shady Hollow, the same one I’d never gotten to read, and the same one that was taken from me after a shoot-out years before, and before I’d even learned how to read. I could read now, but that letter and whatever was in it was as gone and still as big a mystery to me as she was. The scent of her was nowhere in that dumped basket of old things, either. All of it just smelled like the sort of dust that only collects in a prison.

“What’re you looking for?” the clerk asked.

The quiet noise of his voice sounded like a slamming door to me. I gave up my search, stared down at the truth before me, grabbed the shoes and clothes and threw them back in the bag. I took hold of everything in my one uncuffed hand, then after I’d signed the last of the paperwork and it was official that I was a free man, they uncuffed my other one.

“Want to throw those clothes away?” the clerk asked.

“They’re mine and I’m taking them,” I said.

Just like I knew I could give that young assistant warden sass and the one green guard some serious mouth, I could surely speak to that clerk like a man would to another man and not get in a bad way about it. I felt like saying more, and I would’ve said more with so much battery acid still going through me, but he’d treated me fair and seemed all right.

I could’ve raised a lot more ruckus than I did that long day and gotten away with it. I wasn’t getting out on parole. They’d denied me that three times. I knew, too, as much as I was glad to be getting out of there, that some of those guards were glad to get rid of me, so I didn’t expect any trouble from them. It’d been a long twenty-one years on both sides of the bars in the two prisons I’d been in.

Around five that evening, I walked through the yard toting my paper bag of all I owned in the world, and with no steel on me anywhere. I had on a nice suit of clothes that the prison issued me, blue pants and a white shirt, stiff black shoes and a canvas tan jacket. In my pocket was fifty dollars of state money, and a bus ticket to Wytheville, Virginia. Ma was on my mind heavy at that big moment.

She’d told me from the time I was a little boy I’d grow up to be a wealthy, powerful man, and that I had a true good nature hiding amid the boy mischief in me. She also told me that one day I’d use that wealth and power for the good, because I’d outgrow the bad and all that was left would be the good. But I never could figure why she’d say such things, except maybe that was the sorts of hopeful wishes all ma’s say to their young’uns.

On my last day in prison and with so many things working in me, I knew for certain I’d turned out not to be any of those things, especially good. I’d turned out to be no good account at all…an apple knocked from a tree limb when not half-ripe, then left on the ground to do nothing but rot slow and turn dark from the inside out. I figured if I’d turned out to be anything, I was maybe just an old name in some worn-out old story told in the beer halls of Shady Hollow.

Somehow I’d aged behind gray prison walls to be almost as old as Uncle Ray was when he died. That hit me hard on the morning of my release. I didn’t know if he was a good man, but he was a far better man than I’d ever turned out to be, and he’d passed so young in such a bad, bloody way trying to protect me.

I never expected many visitors or letters or anything like that while I was locked up. Most of the people I was close to couldn’t write and didn’t have the means to up and travel to prisons for visits, plus most of them steered as far from them as they could anyway. But I did expect to hear from a few, like my ma and my brothers, and maybe even Amanda Lynn. Just maybe. I don’t know why, but every night I hoped to hear something from her that next morning, but that next morning always was exactly like the sliver of a fast-fading golden streak on a double reinforced concrete wall morning before it. I never heard from nobody, and my worries over it grew every year, but I kept trying to tell myself things like it was because they wouldn’t know the name that I’d been going by for so long, and they were having a hard time locating me.

But even trying to believe in that reason, Shady Hollow would’ve gotten some wind of what had happened to me. Had to. And they would’ve known I wouldn’t have given the police my real name of Benjamin Purdue all of those years ago.

I was raised better than that.

Ma had to know where I was, I was almost sure of it, if she were okay and nothing bad had happened to her after I’d left. She’d know where I was, I kept telling myself, probably just like some of the religious prisoners I’d known believe Jesus always knows where they’re at and he’s listening to the prayers that they mutter asking for the same old important tired things and important worn-out blessings over and over while trying to fall asleep.

Ma wasn’t some God or some God’s perfect son in some fancy black book that you best never disagree or quarrel with too much, though. She was real. She was as real as the bars in my prison cell or as real as the feel and look of a sunny day long ago in a place I’d seen through young eyes, not through bars. She was real, and she’d told me that she’d find me, and that I could never ever come back home until she did, when it was safe.

At the end of serving my state and federal time, I was thirty-eight years old, tall and convict lean with a head of hair still dark as Ma’s, and a ponytail fell halfway down my back.

I’d changed so much in prison that I figured quite a bit had changed in Shady Hollow. Not just the looks of me or the looks of that lost place, but the stuff inside of both of us. I hoped it wasn’t all hollowed out and hadn’t gotten as mean and hard as I had over those years. I wondered if even my own ma would recognize me. Almost all of Benjamin Purdue got killed a long time ago. I didn’t just go by the name Henry Cole now.

I was Henry Cole.

My whole life was still one awful, empty mystery. On my very last day locked up, I had a lot of reasons and questions and especially darkness inside of me—old wounds that had never healed up right, and a lot of other things I couldn’t even put to words—calling me back home.

But I guess the first thing calling me back was that sometimes a person just needs to go to his roots and see old faces that knew you when you wore a different face…a face with a smile on it that only a young man who thinks he’s got the world by the tail has. Sometimes a person just needs a thing like that in a real bad way. To go back and try to grab back hold of something you once had, and had felt the missing of it every day since. Then maybe some repairs could be made to some things.

Just maybe.

I was twenty-one years older than the day I’d gotten arrested, and as I was about to take my final steps toward being a free man, the last thing I cared about was whether it was safe or not to go back to Shady Hollow. I didn’t have a care if I died once I got there.

I was finally heading back home.

Home.

Chapter 2

I was still inside the fence but outside the walls, and the air already tasted different. I guess most of all, it just tasted clean. The prison control room popped the first gate, and I walked through it by myself and stopped before the second gate, doing just what the loudspeaker told me to do. Once the first gate closed, the other one chugged open, and I didn’t need any instructions on what to do next. I’d always figured I’d hurry at such a moment, but I didn’t. I took a firm step at a time, cleared the last gate and, as I’d suspected, there wasn’t nobody who I knew outside to greet me. I thought of the people who could have been there but weren’t.

Remembering what that assistant warden had said about somebody wanting me dead, I took a scan at the tree line about a half mile away in case somebody with a scoped rifle who had dying business with me may have found out my release date got moved up.

“Take care of yourself, Henry, yep,” the guard in charge of the beef squad said. I turned around to look at Dollinger. He was twenty yards behind the first gate, and he was nodding at me with his stick smacking into one hand that was as big as a ball glove.

“You’re getting a little slow with that thing. Bad thing for a man with your responsibilities,” I said.

“We’ll keep the light on for you if things don’t work out, yep,” he said.

He didn’t smile or wave or nothing like that and I didn’t, either. But out of all of the guards, he always did seem fairest to me and as that goes, I didn’t wish bad on any of those fellers who worked there. Well, a couple I did, but you just got tired of it all, and they were part of it all.

A van sat in front of me with the middle doors open. I knew it was my ride out of there. It felt strange getting in a vehicle without being all shackled up the way I could move so easy.

I slid into the backseat and sat my paper sack beside me. Except for looking to see if the driver had a gun on him anywhere—and I didn’t see one poking out in the usual places—I never took my eyes off of his. He was a mountain of a black man, almost as tall as Dollinger and twice as wide, but he looked gimped-up in his neck and right side the way he sat off-kilter and had a hard time turning his head. I sensed he was a former guard or soldier or police officer of some kind who’d gotten out on some kind of medical. Could be a stroke or car wreck, or he almost got beat to death by a prisoner or shot up, something that messed him up bad.

He didn’t say anything after we locked eyes so long in his rearview mirror. I didn’t have nothing to say to him and I don’t think he had much to say to me, either, at first. I was enjoying the quiet. There was always some sort of loud in prison, breaking the still. Always. Even at night, there’d be the sounds of loud ugly. Men pissed off at somebody or another, or just mad at the whole goddamned world, even in their sleep.

I rolled down my window and, besides the humming noise coming from the van and the nice sound of tires on gravel, all I could hear was the sounds of a country evening. It’d been a long time since I’d listened to such a peaceful thing.

But after we got held up for a few minutes at a train crossing, he started talking. His voice sounded nervous, but I knew sometimes folks just talk that way even when they were calm, so I noted it but didn’t pay much mind to it.

“Want to hear some music?” he asked loud.

I shook my head.

“Well, good thing,’ cause the radio don’t work.” He laughed a little and turned toward me all bent-up looking. His grin faded and he turned back around. “Wished it did, though. Sometimes wished it did.”

The train started hitting its whistle every five or ten seconds. Listening to it brought me closer to home, recalling the late-night sounds Norfolk and Southern trains made on the other side of the Big Walker across from Shady Hollow.

“How long were you in?”

I was suddenly back in that van, not sharing a bed with my brothers listening to a faraway coal train across a river.

“What?”

“I say how long were you in for?”

I liked him better before he got so windy with so many things working in me at that moment. He turned with a sack full of green apples and offered me one. I shook my head.

He pulled out a lock-blade knife careful and looked at me in his mirror quick before he grabbed one and started peeling it.

“A long time,” I said.

“Big day for you then,” he said, looking at me and smiling again like we were big buddies. “How long is that, if you don’t mind me asking.”

“I’ve been locked up in one place or another since I was a boy.”

I figured he’d pulled out that knife and was asking questions about how much time I’d pulled to figure out how bad a person he was sitting there with in the dark, stuck at a train crossing way out in the countryside. Peeling an apple was just an excuse to have some kind of weapon out if he needed one. Never know what something wild just let out of pen was apt to do, I figured was what he was thinking. I’d probably do the same thing if I was half-crippled and driving the van and was hauling somebody who looked like me. You’d ask the time first, not the crime. You’d maybe ask that later if the conversation got off on the right foot.

“Where you heading?” he asked, after a few moments and a dozen more train cars passed by.

“Home.”

“By your accent I’d guess that’s down South somewhere.”

I nodded, looking all around us again to see if we had any bad company. I wouldn’t feel safe until I was a long way from that prison. At least I knew the driver wasn’t a threat. He had the knife but not the eyes to use it.

“So where you heading?”

“Why?”

“What you say?”

“What’s it to you where I’m heading?” I said.

“Just talking…”

“You talk too much.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment and then said, “Always had a friendly nature, I guess. No harm meant.”

I leaned back in my seat, remembering how I used to have the same easy friendly nature and used to enjoy conversation. I didn’t just enjoy it, I was good at it. Ma used to tell me that talking was my one true gift of many. I was the only person she’d ever known who could “outtalk a mockingbird,” she’d say on many an occasion with an ending to that always of “Let’s hush now, child.”

Anyway, after a while I finally said to the driver, “Gonna stay with my ma for a while. She lives in Virginia.”

His head was still and then he nodded and nodded like we’d made up and he peeped at me again in his mirror. “I used to take my family to Virginia Beach until the kids got older and my wife passed. She passed last year. Emphysema took her last breath. That’s when I started eating all the time and got fat. I smoked more than she did and she made me swear off of them before she died. Almost killed me quitting them. Probably eating will kill me now. Get rid of one bad thing, you just pick up another. You quit bad things but the hole the bad thing was filling never goes away is what it amounts to. Just end up filling it with something else no good.”

I blew out a deep breath, wore-out with his stories already, and I looked as far down the tracks as I could. That had to be the longest train I’d ever seen.

“Heard the place is all built-up now.”

“What is?”

“Virginia Beach. Probably wouldn’t even know it if I saw it.”

I didn’t say anything, but just hoped he’d still himself or I was gonna have to tell him to. I’d never seen a beach and I didn’t care to comment about it or his wife passing. I didn’t want to get ugly with him being as mangled up as he was and he seemed like an all right feller, so I figured me not saying nothing back would work to let him know finally that I wasn’t definitely in the mood for talk. But it didn’t.

“What you gonna do with yourself once you get settled in back home? Got you a girl to go see?”

“Had one a long time ago. How far’s the bus station from here?”

“Few miles. I say, what you gonna do once you get back home and settled in? Gonna go see that girl?”

I wasn’t going to talk about the only girl I’d ever had that I would ever call “my girl.” I wished I hadn’t brought the thought of her into that van. She wasn’t the kind of girl to be spoken of in such ways in such conversations in such places. But I knew he didn’t mean no harm even though it bothered me in a dark way and I said, “Have quite a few things to do,” louder and faster than was necessary.

“Like what?”

By that point, I figured he was one of those folks who couldn’t help himself to shut up even if he really tried. If he wanted to know what I was gonna do after I got home, I’d tell him a few things for him to ponder on, because I’d been pondering on them a long time.

“First thing I’m gonna do once I get settled home is find out why a man tried to kill me when I was seventeen years old for no reason I can figure.”

The driver’s voice dropped. “I see. You gonna go looking for him?”

“He’s dead. I got some other people I need to find and have some serious business about it. Gonna go see a preacher, too.”

The driver set his sack of apples to the side careful. “The preacher help you through your trials and tribulations?” His voice had gotten shakier.

“Not quite like that. He helped get me into my trials and tribulations. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna kill him over it. Been leaning that way heavy for a long time. Gonna go see a sheriff after that. I owe him a visit, too, just like that preacher. He might survive my coming. I haven’t made my mind up about him.”

The driver dropped his knife on the floor and reached down to get it back in a hurry, just before he turned around to where he could barely get a wide eyeball on me. Then he turned around quick and we both sat in the stillness for a good five more minutes until the train passed. After ten more minutes, he dropped me off at the bus station, pulling right up front.

He didn’t wish me good luck or offer me any more of his apples or nothing else, but he nodded after I thanked him for the ride. Both of us knew I was dead serious about the business I’d spoken of. It was the same business I’d figured that assistant warden didn’t have any business knowing a few hours before when he’d asked what my plans were when I got out. Assistant Warden Theodore Donald O’Neil the Third had seen it in my eyes though, sure enough.

Her head turned sideways and then almost upside down, which made a big mop of red curls fall over her face. She was leaning so far out of her bus seat that when she took one hand to move her hair, she fell into the aisle. Her mother and baby brother didn’t notice the commotion, or her holler, as they kept sleeping while she climbed back up, situating herself for more room. It worked and she got a little bit. Her ma put an arm around her again, I guess out of instinct the way she looked sound asleep when doing it. The little girl soon moved it again without much notice.

Looking out the bus window, I kept feeling a strange peacefulness trying to come on me as I stared at a landscape that went on in all directions to the sky and that had no fences, or at least they were ones a man could jump over without effort. I hoped the busy little girl would soon find something else interesting to help pass the miles…besides me. We were the only two people awake on the bus. I kept seeing her out of the corner of my eye leaning toward me, even after I cleared my throat loud to wake her momma.

She’d been studying on me for some time. Something about my hands had caught her attention not long after the last stop, and even after I moved them to where she might study on something else, she kept trying to get a good look at them.

I finally closed my eyes, and my mind was still drifting south to thoughts of home when I felt the bus seat move a little and felt a small finger touch my left hand. I pulled it away.

“You get on back to your seat now,” I said.

She looked up at me and smiled. “What’s that on the back of your hand?” she said.

“None of your business,” I said. “Now go on back with your momma.”

“My name is Grace.”

I turned to look out my window.

“What’s yours?”

I tried to give her a hard look and then said, “It don’t matter none is what my name is.”

“‘It don’t matter none’ isn’t a name, silly goose.” She started to laugh at her joke but stopped. “My dad used to have an ink drawing on the back of his hand.”

“Grace, leave me be like I’m telling you.”

“Momma likes men with tattoos. Frank doesn’t have one on his hand like Daddy did, but he has one on his arm.” She grabbed one sleeve and pulled it up to her elbow and pointed at the place Frank has a tattoo. “He’s meeting us at the bus station. We’re moving in with him. He’s got a house and a car but it doesn’t run right now.”

“Hopefully he’ll get it running soon. Go on, now. I need some sleep.”

“You haven’t been sleeping like everybody else, just watching what everybody is doing and looking out your window like me.”

I grabbed her by a shoulder easy as I could to move her toward her ma when she turned back toward me. “I just want to know what that picture is on your hand.”

I cleared my throat again loud, this time waking the old woman up in front of me, who turned around shaky with a scared sneer, and then I decided I best show my hand to the little girl if I was to get back my quiet. I turned it the right way so she could tell what it was and said, “It’s a big oak in the middle of a field.”

“Why do you have it there?”

“Something nice to look at from time to time, I reckon.”

“Frank is a war hero. His is an army picture of a parachute with wings. Momma said Dad was a drunk. He had Momma’s name on his hand, though.”

“Frank sounds like a fine feller and sorry about your daddy. Now go on. I need the rest.”

She slid down and as she took a step across the aisle and jumped back on the seat beside her ma, she said, “He’s not nice but Momma keeps saying he’s got a job and a house with a big yard and a dog, and lots of other stuff.”

I looked at her ma, who was still sleeping while trying to hold on to a baby boy on her lap through the whole conversation. She looked like a woman who could use a house and a big yard, and especially a lot of other stuff, minus Frank most likely, as her daughter pulled out a pad of paper and coloring sticks from a sack.

For a good while the girl kept asking me questions and telling me things about her and her ma and brother and her dead daddy and Frank, and drawing pictures and wanting to show them to me. I kept playing possum with my eyes closed through all of it. I didn’t want them closed, I wanted them open to see what I’d been missing all of those years out that window. But I did feel safe that I could close them without worry of harm, because I’d studied every set of eyes at every stop that bus made and never saw a threat. And I could always tell the blazing look trying to be too still, or almost always.

I did notice, watching everyone on that bus earlier that evening, that I was different in ways I hadn’t figured on, even when so many seemed not to be much more prosperous than I was, like that little girl and her family. But not so different. So much had changed, but some things surely hadn’t.

I guess Frank was waiting for Grace and her family in Carlisle because that’s where they all got off in a hurry, but not before she laid a picture on the seat next to me. It was a nice colored drawing of a green tree in a yellow field. I ignored it at first but then gave it a good look over after they got off, and then I put it careful in the paper sack with the rest of my things.

With no more commotion beside me, I was able to not pretend I was asleep anymore. On the half-hour stops in Hagerstown and Chambersburg, I did a lot of walking around and spent over five dollars buying Coca-Colas and Zagnut candy bars. Things I hadn’t tasted in quite a while and they tasted so good I couldn’t get enough of them.

Between the stops and just looking out my window and trying to figure how I was gonna fit in any of it, I had a lot of time to think about Shady while watching the quiet miles of highway go by and drinking my odd-looking bottles of Coca-Cola. The pop tasted the same, maybe even better, at least to me, but the bottles and machines they came out of were a lot different.

For some reason all of the new around me made me not think about what was to come and all of the things I was gonna do; it made me do a lot of remembering on being a young’un and growing up in Shady Hollow, and the bad that happened there on a nice Sunday evening, September 28, 1959.

September 28,1959 was the last day before my life ended, and I never saw it was coming.

Ma did, though.

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