“A prisoner I’m going to try to interview.”
“Really? Whatever for?”
“I’m a death row investigator. I have a client named Mitchell Brown. Do you know of him?”
She saw the betrayal, and confusion, in the woman’s eyes.
“Of course I do. Betty Dubois was a cousin of mine.”
“I thought you looked like her. I’m sorry to bring you pain.”
“Is that why you stopped here?”
“No, actually, I was looking for a VCR machine.”
Willa nodded. Her eyes looked wet. “Well then.”
“Would you be willing—”
“No. We put all that to rest years ago. Now we’re just waiting on him to die.”
“I understand,” Ruby said, because she did. She never pressed people. It didn’t work. At best, it resulted in hostile witnesses; at worst, it resulted in false testimony.
“It won’t be long now,” Willa said.
“Only ten days.”
The days were passing so fast. Ruby was used to this, but it shocked her anew on each case. Each day was eaten up and gone forever, and while she didn’t regret taking this particular case, she knew that it would trouble her, that she would forever think of all she could have done—the paths she could have taken and did not. It was always this way, when she thought she would lose. Often she did lose. Being innocent was not an inoculation against injustice.
Willa hesitated. Then she reached under the desk and pulled out a small box of motel soaps.
“Brought back something for you.”
Ruby was touched. Not just that the woman had thought of this, but that she was doing it anyhow, despite what she now knew.
Willa watched Ruby leave. The sound of the cicadas was very loud. When she was sure the woman was good and gone, she made a call.
The low country was like a mist of air, and the alligators in the swamps lay with their silver-green snouts showing.
The fields started miles from the prison, surrounded by razor wire fences. Ruby drove past the work gangs that were no longer chained but were still supervised by overseers on sweaty horses. It could have been a scene from slavery times, and, in fact, this had once been one of the largest slave plantations in the South. The clothes had changed, but the labor remained forced.
Ruby remembered reading once that if the country wanted to improve the economy, it would outlaw forced prison labor the same way slavery had been outlawed. This no one wanted to do, and so wages stayed suppressed and small farms were put out of business. And the motive to put people behind bars remained.
Grim-faced, she pulled into the prison lot. In the distance, the men worked, the sun so hot it made the sky white.
Only the sick were allowed to skip work, and that was how she found Wes Rogers, spending his final days on a cot in the infirmary. His skin was glassy, his nose almost gone. The cancer had eaten it away from the inside. He lay on his stained white cot, his eyes as yellow as parchment paper.
In prisons, they called it the peach tree disease: the strange assortment of symptoms that came from working the fields. It started with a blurring of thought, advanced to yellowing skin and eyes, stumbling, and twitching. Sometimes the cancer exploded from the inside out; other times people died of seizures.
It was known outside of prison as pesticide poisoning.
Ruby found a chair and dragged it to his bedside. A trustee nurse was making his way among the cots, casting a long shadow. The lights from the high, barred windows came into the room, which was as large as a gymnasium. At least the men could look at the sun as they died, Ruby thought.
Family wasn’t allowed back here. Just professionals, like her.
Wes labored to breathe, his lungs full of disease. His eyes turned to her, yellow and confused. She saw herself in them, shrunk down to size. She thought of stepping past that portal into whatever was left of his brain.
“Wes,” she said. She might be the last person from the outside he ever saw. Six years in those fields and this was the result. Maybe he had done other turns. People often did.
