JENNINGS leaves the hospital the next morning.
“Wasn’t so bad,” he tells us in the yard. “They got all the shot out.” The triumph in his voice doesn’t match the blood in his eyes, or the shuffle in his walk, the way his hand goes to his side again and again, pressing. The next day, his back’s bowed, a crease that never rights itself, and then he starts sweating, his face gone gray and dusky.
He seeks me out in the yard, wanting to hear the whole thing told again. “What’s it like seeing someone shot down like that, Ross? Which way did I fall? I can’t see it. It’s all too quick for me.”
“I don’t know. You fell forward.”
“What’d old Taylor do?”
“He walked over.”
“Bastard counted his steps along the way, didn’t he?”
I nod.
“Nineteen,” Jennings says. Everyone knows the number, now, shooting through the fields and the cells like some secret we’d been trying to figure out for years — far enough away to miss and scatter that shot all over the field, but close enough to blow a man’s side open should it land just right. Nineteen. We whisper the word like a curse.
Jennings is sweating too much, beads on his lips and forehead.
“You all right?” I ask.
“I’m feeling a little hot, tell you the truth. Think I’ve got myself a fever.” He pushes at his side again and tries to straighten his back. It catches at an angle, keeping him bent, then he drops down to his knees.
One of the guards comes over. “What’s this?”
Jennings doesn’t speak.
“I think he needs to go to the hospital,” I say.
“He that idiot got himself shot?”
“Yes, sir.”
The guard laughs. “Hey, Buckshot. Come on. Let’s get you to the infirmary.” Jennings doesn’t move, and the guard finally drags him to standing by one of his arms. “The hell you expect?”
The chapel is just past the hospital, and I know they’ll be calling on Chaplain to come discuss Jennings’s soul while he sits in his sickbed. Jennings is in on a liquor violation. He can’t have more than a year or two left. But he’s a damaged man walking next to that guard, not the same man to get me cigarettes, not even the man running through the fields just a few days ago. We change so quickly in here.
TAYLOR pulls me from the barn the next day, ordering me back through the east gate.
“Jesus Christ,” Beau says.
He pushes me through, and the guard on the other side walks me to the pens, his gun pointed at the ground.
“You hear about Jennings?” Taylor asks as soon as I’m level with him. In the same breath, he says “Go on” to the guard.
“I was with him when he went back to the infirmary.”
“Died this morning,” Taylor says. “Blood poisoning. Goddamned doctor didn’t get all the shot out. X-rays showed a ball lodged there in the boy’s kidney. Wasn’t anything to be done then.”
I have seen a man shot and killed from nineteen steps away.
“No sense in a death like that, Martin.” I cannot tell whether Taylor’s truly mournful for the loss of life or whether Jennings is just another lost prisoner to him, a man taking his release early. “No sense.” Taylor shakes his head.
I can hear Marie’s voice in the rustle of the dog bodies: You know all about senseless deaths, don’t you, dear?
Taylor and Marie are both wrong to rely on sense as a measurement, though. Making sense is about logic, and logic follows instructions, like electricity culled from water and transported along lines. If you point power somewhere — no matter the kind — it’ll follow its course until it hits something. Perfect sense.
“How are you feeling about this work, Martin?” Taylor turns his face from the dogs to look at me. “Think it suits you?”
“Due respect, sir, but I don’t know that it does.”
Taylor almost smiles. “You’re wrong, Martin, but it was a hell of an introduction, I’ll give you that. You stick on the barn for a while yet.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Ain’t for you, Martin. Can’t have a boy out here who’s not ready for it. You best be next time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, go on.”
I glance once more at that pack of dogs, all red and black and needy, so different from the dairy cows in the barn.
“Go on,” Taylor says.
I could run right now, take to the cotton like Jennings, crawl my way through its branches until I get to the woods. I do this again and again. I run. I escape. I return to my wife and son.
I don’t know if they’re still there.
CHAPTER 3
Roscoe used galvanized storage cylinders from the shop for the transformers’ bodies, but he had to go into Rockford for the copper wire. The local mercantile was called Bean’s, and Marie’s family had been frequenting it since Edgar Bean opened its doors, a charge account still on file, though there wasn’t money to cover the things charged.
Roscoe took the mules and wagon in. He left Wilson back, not wanting him to take part in this particular dishonesty.
When he walked in the door, Bean hollered, “Roscoe Martin! What brings you here?”
“I finally have some electrical work.”
“You and your fancy electricity.”
Bean was like Marie’s father in his love of flames over bulbs. They’d both sworn that the country would never let itself get fully electrified, and if the country failed them, well, hell — they’d stay strong at least. “You’ll never see a wired lamp in this store,” Bean had told Roscoe once. “Fire needs to be out in the open, someplace we can keep an eye on it. Don’t belong inside wires.” Marie’s father had conceded slightly since his son-in-law was in the trade. “Never my library, though. If you light up the house someday, that’s one thing. But you stay out of my library. I want to know what’s near my books.”
“It’s trapped,” Roscoe tried to explain, both to Bean and to Marie’s father. “All that power is stored inside wires, which are stored inside rubber coatings. There’s no threat to you. In fact, it’s safer than flame. If you break a lamp bulb, the light just goes out. If you break a wicked lamp, you’re likely to see your whole house go up.”
“No, no, son,” the men would reply, and Roscoe would keep at them until Marie laid a hand on his arm, or one of them forced the conversation in a new direction.
Roscoe couldn’t understand their hesitancy and mistrust. He had only experienced fascination, intrigue, desire to know more. That first time he’d seen electrical streetlamps, in Birmingham, he’d thought he was seeing magic — something from the fairy tales he’d once told his sister. Those glowing bulbs belonged with princes who could be changed into toads and then back again with a kiss. They belonged with talking animals and flight for flightless creatures, rather than his father’s world of coal and tunnels and prosperity at the expense of others’ bent backs and widowed families. Then he’d found Faraday, and science had supplanted the magic — long descriptions of experiments that took Roscoe months and sometimes years to understand — and all while still working for his father in the mines, a candle’s flame lighting the pages of the books he read every chance he could, trusted and esteemed narratives to which he could return. Electricity had freed him from his father’s life.
He’d told as much to his father-in-law, and the man had listened, genuine care in his pale eyes.
“We find our own salvations, Son,” he’d said. “You have your electricity, and I have my farm, and we both have my lovely daughter and a wagonload of books. We’ve more in common than not. You keep to your lines, and I’ll keep to my land, and we’ll meet over the supper table to talk about what we’ve been reading.”