Page 85 of The Reformatory

Blue stared at him awhile and finally seemed to feel sorry for him. “Do what I say,” Blue said, “and I’ll leave your mama be.”

Robert nodded so hard and fast that he dizzied himself. “What can I do? I never wanted it. He made me—”

“Shut up,” Blue said with that hiss in his voice again, the grin gone. “I’ll help you stay out of trouble with Haddock. You messed up bad already, but I’m gonna fix it so Clint ain’t in that jar for nothing. I’m gonna get him out—and every other boy he’s caught so far.”

“They’re not… gone?”

“No thanks to you,” Blue said. “But they gotta be buried and prayed over, or set free in the creek.” The words set free electrified Robert. Of course! “But none of them will want to go while Haddock’s still here. Before he’s paid for what he’s done.”

This time, the pounding of Robert’s heart had nothing to do with fear of punishment. The idea dawning on him was so awful that his heart sped just to imagine it. “The… fire?”

“That’s right, Albert Einstein. Course he set that fire.”

“But why?”

Blue scowled at him. “There you go being dumb again. ’Cause he’s a killer, fool. He’s a raper and a killer. He’s been a killer his whole life. He poisoned his daddy’s favorite hunting hound. He smothered his baby sister with her blanket. You haven’t figured that out yet? Why you think he stays on here where nobody troubles him? Where he has say over everything? He took it too far killing us all at once like that—people noticed—so now he does it a little at a time. And he’s scared to death of the haints coming back, in case we might tell. In case we prove it.”

“Can you?” Robert whispered. “Can you prove it?”

“No, I can’t—but you can.”

“Prove it how?” Robert said.

“He showed you pictures, didn’t he?”

“Just one. The one… with you. The circle all around you. Everybody burned up.” Blue didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and Robert expected to hear the terrible CLANG again from the way his face turned so hard.

“That ain’t the only one. There’s more: the ones he looks at in private. The ones he doesn’t want anyone to see. He’s got his own darkroom in his shed ’cuz he can’t take that film to a five-and-dime. Him with naked boys. And other ones from the fire. Posing and grinning. He can’t help it, see? He needs to look at all his pictures every day. He’s too scared to keep them at home ’cuz he thinks his wife might find them. So he locks them in a drawer in his desk. Nobody has the nerve to go near his drawer, not even his secretary. Not even me: he’s got a haint trap under his desk. Everyone’s scared of Haddock.”

Robert was scared of Haddock too, and more scared now that it was dawning on him that Blue expected him to somehow steal the warden’s most precious hidden possessions.

“So, for now, you keep playin’ along,” Blue said. “Act like you’re out hunting haints. I’ll try to find you at least one more—one of the SOBs who used to work here died in the fire too, but by accident. He didn’t know if he chopped open that door the flames would come flying out. He’s not so bad now, I guess—keeps clear of us—but he did plenty of bad while he was living. I’ll let you know where to tell Boone to put the dust down so it won’t catch nobody but him.”

“When?”

“You just gotta wait. You’ll see me when it’s time. Then Boone will keep on hooting and hollering, and Haddock will feel like he’s on top of the world. Then you gotta get those photos and his jar of dust. You’ll climb out his window when he’s not looking.”

Blue made it sound like he only had to snap his fingers. Blue might as well have said he would need to storm Omaha Beach without an army.

“Then what?” Robert said.

“What you think, dummy?” Blue said. “Then I’ll help you run away.”

VI LOWER SPRUCE

24

Gloria was shaking again by the time she got back to her cramped room at Miz Lottie’s and burrowed beneath the quilt to cry, a slow unraveling. This guilt was a new feeling, enflaming her grief about her family’s dead and missing—a hot spear stabbing every pain she’d tried to bury. She saw Mama’s slack-jawed face on her deathbed pillow, where Gloria had sat and stared too long, wanting to look away and yet not able to, chronicling each missing movement and breath while Robbie wailed and kicked the wall and Papa paced the garden outside Mama’s window, saying, “Oh dear God. Oh dear God,” in a stranger’s helpless voice. Until Mama died, he had never stopped believing she would get better.

Papa had been good at everything outside of the house but almost nothing inside except to threaten a whipping. He could not make himself wash Mama when she was too weak to use the outhouse or the corner tub, so Gloria had wiped away Mama’s watery stool and seen to the folds between her legs. When Gloria had needed the back-porch Robert Stephens to help her, instead he had leaned on her—he had come home less than before, working longer hours (“We’ll need the extra money,” he always said), and moved his meetings farther away. A sob tore at Gloria’s throat as she remembered how she’d been robbed of school, which Mama had said was her only chance every day for the last three months of her life, her last words to her before her mind was gone: Don’t quit school. Go to college. When Mama was senseless with pain and medication, Gloria had begun lying to her, promising her she wasn’t missing class. Every lie to Mama haunted her now that Mama was gone. Gloria had been so good a liar that Mama had believed her. It was a new, loathsome idea: she could lie to her own dying mother.

Gloria wailed, her face hot in the pillow to stifle the sound.

Because that wasn’t even the worst. The worst—the worst—was how instead of freeing Robbie like she’d promised Papa, she’d ignored the advice from Mr. Moore and even John Dorsey, who had known better too but hoped to make up for a boy in Live Oak he couldn’t save. She had stirred up the courthouse, which meant she might have stirred up the town.

This day felt worse than Mama’s dying. She hadn’t caused Mama to die. If she and Robbie had stayed on Lower Spruce in Miz Lottie’s house, they never would have met a McCormack on the road. Thinking of Lyle touching her while Robbie watched with shock, then the way Lyle had pushed her up against his gate at night and rubbed his body against hers, made her remember the deputy on the road and the plans in his mind. She smothered herself in the pillow to try to contain her scream. Gloria only quieted when she was afraid Miz Lottie might come to check on her. She couldn’t stand the thought of adding a single ounce of burden to Miz Lottie.

“Hurry—check the back.” A man’s voice.