“Themongrel.” Frank snorted. “Always claiming she was white.”
“Ol’ Faye failed more than the one-drop rule,” the corrections officer clucked. “Girl had herself a bucket of mixed-mutt blood, if not a bathtub full.” He leaned in to Frank and murmured something while I backed against the wall and tried to make myself small.
The officer studied me out of the corner of his eye and whispered again to Frank.
They drew their eyes to my breasts, then dropped gazes downward. The men suddenly laughed.
I tucked my chin in tighter and stared down at my feet.
“Say, real sorry to hear about you and Ginny’s loss,” the guard said to Frank.
Frank shifted uncomfortably. “We’d been hoping this onewould be the one to make it, but the baby…” He rubbed his brow and turned his back to me. “Well, after losing three, it don’t appear we’ll ever—” His voice dipped lower.
The men talked in hushed tones until the guard suddenly barked at me. I cocked my head, trying to make out what he’d said. I was muddled in one ear, and sometimes my hearing didn’t pick up words in my good one. Themuddledcame and went ever since my first husband had ruptured my eardrum. Especially when the fear pounded from my ticker and reached up beyond the lobes, drowning out everything.
I looked at him quizzically.
“Said,follow me.”
Relieved, my legs nearly collapsing, I moved away from the weeping women inside.
Another corridor led us past the Geriatric Ward, with about a dozen inmates inside the barred wing. A graveyard of reed-thin ghosts moaned in beds while some of the elderly women were folded into tatty wheelchairs, eyes blank, weighted in agony, others with lids shut tight as if the horrors would cease if they couldn’t see them. A putrid soup of feces and urine overpowered the disinfectants hovering in the halls. The guard coughed, and I buried my nose against my bag of belongings, but it weren’t no match for the odor. I gagged as the smells slithered down my throat, knotting my innards.
When we turned into a dimly lit hall and passed a metal door with faded, red-blocked letters that read DEATH ROW, I stood stock-still, gawking at the sign.
“Lucky for you, that’s not your stop.Today.” He gestured ahead.
Finally, he paused in front of wing B and reached for his keys. “In here.” He shoved me over the threshold into the dormitory. Voices quieted, and all eyes fell on me.
Waiting for his next order, I studied the nearly two dozen inmates and double rows of cots lining opposite walls.
“You’re there,” he said, stretching an arm toward the womanlying on a mattress with her back turned. “She’s the only one who didn’t bellyache about your color and volunteered the empty bed beside her.”
I couldn’t help but wonder why. The others they’d tried to put me with claimed my disorder had given them nightmares, and after their screams awakened the dormitory wing, the corrections officer believed them and spirited me back to the infirmary.
The guard knocked the toe of his boot against the woman’s metal bed frame. “Waldeen Parker, your new bedfellow’s here.” Then to me: “You’d do well to sleep with one eye open with this ’un, Lovett.” The guard kicked her bed again. She ignored him. “Parker, she’s been assigned kitchen duty. Have her there at four sharp.”
When he left, I set my pillowcase on the narrow mattress, stealing peeks at the woman. I’d heard slips of prison prattles from the nurses about Waldeen Parker, the inmate in charge of the kitchen. The old woman had been in the Kentucky State Reformatory far longer than anyone could remember, serving time for shooting a man. Occasionally, she’d brought trays to the infirmary. More than once, I’d caught her staring at me with questioning eyes.
I arranged my clothes, toiletries, and the assigned Bible inside the wooden footlocker at the end of the bed.
The woman shifted her bones, keeping her face locked from my sight. “Call me Waldeen. What are ya in for, kid?”
I looked down at my cast, rubbed it alongside the stitching on the mattress, then tucked in the sheet and thin blanket. “Cussy Lovett. I’m in here for marrying.”
“No crime in that unless ya killed him.” Waldeen laughed.
I winced. I’d done just that to my first husband. Unlike during my second marriage, we’d stood before a yawning officiant and his suspicious-looking wife on a cold winter’s eve in ’36. During the ceremony, when he’d asked if anyone objected, not his woman nor the sleeping rabbit dog in the corner of his crampedkitchen, nor the field mouse scurrying behind the woodstove, nor anyone in all of Kaintuck raised a whispered protest.
Yet the objection had rang loud in my knotted throat.
Our arranged union ended as abruptly as it began when the old man, Frazier, turned dog-pecker pink while beating and raping me in our marriage bed. Then he’d collapsed, and soon a veil of spoiled bologna-gray spread across his anguished face. Doc said his ticker done broke, but it always felt more like I’d willed it to.
It was only after I married again that the sheriff forbid it.
Waldeen turned over partway to study me, her fair cheeks gaunt, hollowing with age.
A broke ticker that had done ticked its last thieving tick.I rested the unspoken truth. “For miscegenation. I’m a Blue, but the man I married isn’t.”
