In their secret burrows, the little men groom the dust off their jackets, cleaning their small claw hands with tiny narrow tongues and chattering happily.
The warden rises from the ground outside York’s cell and dusts off his hands, his sides hurting from the laughter. He looks at York, and their eyes meet. The warden’s eyes say, I will make it okay.
The black shirts rise as well, dusting off their executioners’ clothes. They open the cell door and offer the manacles to York. He is chained. The men in their cells rise. They come to their cell bars to watch him go.
I don’t hear York walk down the hall. I think that is because he is already gone.
In my cell, I rise from the floor, covered in dust, and I wipe my hands across my face to taste it. When I touch my cheeks, I realize I have been crying. My tears taste like salt, like blood, like the inside of a vast ocean.
The white-haired boy drops from the window into the shadows of the yard. He stands in the cafeteria and strips off his blood-spattered clothes, wrapping the bundle tightly around the bloody shank. He buries the damp bundle deep in one of the ripe cans of rotten trash. With luck, the trash will be carried out before dawn, when the trusties wheel the cans to the idling garbage trucks before the first mist clears the river.
The boy stands there naked, shivering slightly, the moonlight on his pale slender body. He walks calmly into the dark kitchen. He reaches under a cabinet where he has stowed a new uniform stolen from the intake room days before. When he puts on the clean dry uniform, he feels he has birthed a new skin.
The lights flash on, and the guards in the towers rise, returning to their posts. The radio comes back on and blares from the towers. The protestors in the parking lot limp to their cars and leave. The horses have run back deep underground to the magic place where they live, with towers of marble and rivers of stone. They shake their manes and roll delighted eyes at each other, laughing and nuzzling each other’s golden necks.
On the floor behind his desk, the corpse of Conroy lies, the blood running in crisscross patterns as the ground settles. It will be morning before he is found—long after the kitchen trash has lumbered off to the landfill, long after the corpse valets have wheeled the bodies of the day, including York’s, across the yard, long after the warden has been escorted to his car across the empty parking lot, strewn with dropped signs from the protestors.
The boy makes his way to his cell, where the old man has been feigning sleep. He rises and lets the boy inside, lifting the small ball of wadded paper in the lock that closes the door. Their cell is coated with fallen dust, and the two men shake out their blankets. The boy crawls into his lower bunk, and the old man looks at him, his eyes large and dark in the night. The old man reaches out to touch the boy, very gently, before he crawls into his top bunk. Within moments he is snoring.
It will be dawn soon, the boy thinks, and a yawn cracks his jaw. Dawn. I have less than two years to go. Maybe twenty months to go, he realizes. It is like waking up. Twenty months is twenty moons. It is twenty birthdays celebrated back to back. It is one rising and the other ending, and it will pass.
Tomorrow, he thinks, I will avoid mess. I will no longer go to the yard. I will stop wandering the prison. I will stay in my cell until the others pass. I will walk carefully in the halls, minding my back and watching at all times. I will no longer go down any dark halls and especially not down any silent stairs.
I will find the places here that are safe for a boy—for a man—like me.
Another yawn cracks his jaw. Maybe, he thinks, I will start with the library.
The lady drives to the blue country once again. She doesn’t stop to see Auntie Beth. Instead, she goes straight to the location York told her about—the shack where he lived with his mother.
The shack is even smaller than she imagined, with a low buckling roof covered in dead moss. The windows are gutted, the buckled siding wormed with rodent holes. The door hangs on its hinges. An ancient rosebush still lives, bent and thorny, under the solitary window. She fingers a dried curl of hip and wonders if the rose was yellow or red. It is too late in the season to tell.
The lady carefully pushes the door open, instinctively ducking in case anything comes flying out. The single room is empty. There are four round scuff marks on the old wood floor where the bed once stood. Cupboards stand empty, their shelves raided by mice. Graffiti on the gouged, crumbling walls—town kids long gone. A mason-jar-lid ashtray is on the floor, filled with butts. The floor is scattered with crushed beer cans. There is the smell of cat urine and maybe something more feral, like bobcat.
She imagines little York, growing the gawky legs of adolescence, sitting in this room by himself for days, eating the wallboard for hunger. Until a seed hatched and traveled up his spine. Thinking of nothing until the nothing became something bad. How many other thoughts—good thoughts—could have come to you instead, she thinks.
She peers through one broken glass frame. The shack is surrounded with an impenetrable tangle of blackberries and rotted fallen trees. There was no escape, no place to run and hide. Down the rutted road is where York waited for the school bus that seldom came.
She closes the door softly behind her as she leaves.
Back in the car, she touches the folder sitting on the passenger seat—York’s folder. It’s okay, she wants to tell it, as if the folder is York and York is not dead.
She drives back down, out of the area, past the town of Sawmill Falls, past the roads she doesn’t want to see again, back to the road she wants to be on, taking her to the emerald lakes. Her heart opens and she breathes.
She parks at the same motel where she stayed before. The Greek owner is out sweeping her porch, her round middle swathed in a faded apron, her iron hair in a kerchief. She doesn’t look up as the lady heads down to the lakeshore, carrying the folder.
The lady is alone on the rocky beach. The sun caps each gentle wave. The lake is quiet today. A lone ripple opens up maybe twenty feet from shore, but no fish jumps. She looks around and sees the blue forests rising up, like reassuring arms around her shoulders—embracing her as she wishes someone once embraced York and all the others. You can wish that now, she tells herself. It doesn’t undo what they have done.
She walks until she finds a large rock at the lake edge. It is a peaceful spot, cupped with trees. She pries the rock up, satisfied to see the dark gravelly dirt below. When the fall rains come, the lake will rise, and whatever lies underneath this rock will dissolve into smears of words that will fragment until they become nothing but letters and then not even that.
I’m bringing you to a safe place, York, she thinks. The place you always needed—a safe place to dream. To hope.
That’s all I want, he told her during their last visit. A place to rest.
She uses her bare hands to deepen the hole. She picks up the folder, smearing it with dirt. She lays the folder in the hole carefully, then tilts the rock back over it. There. York’s past is now another secret.
She thinks she might burst out crying—but she doesn’t.
She stands carefully, stretching her back. She stands with her arms smeared in dirt, knowing it will take scrubbing to get the dark gritty soil out from under her nails.
She takes a deep breath and looks up at the sky over the clean lake.
I saw you, York. I knew you—who you really were and what you truly wanted.
“Are condolences in order?” the fallen priest asks the lady.
They are walking under the giant trees that circle the outside walls. The priest’s face is lowered, his eyes sad and worried. His hands are in his pockets.
The lady has come to pick up paperwork, but really, it is to decide. The attorneys are still calling her. They sound suspicious. Why didn’t she ever call them back, even if to say there was nothing? And where is York’s file?
The end is upon them.
“No.” She shakes her head, her narrow face troubled.
“Why not? You lost York.”
> “Did I?” She looks tired.
“Odd what happened to that guard, Conroy, on the same night,” he says.
“From what I’ve heard, he had it coming.”
He begins to open his mouth.
“Best you don’t ask.”
There is something she wants to ask him but cannot. “Sometimes I imagine what you looked like in your robes,” she suddenly says.
He looks startled.
“But I like you better this way,” she continues. “I think I can see you now.”
“That wasn’t me in those robes.”
They walk slowly, each trying to make the walk last longer without letting it on.
“Will I see you again? For your next case?”
She doesn’t answer. “Did you ever have to wash your robes?” she asks.
“No.” He stops. They are near the front lobby. There is desperate pain and searching and wild hunger in his face. He sees the enchantment now—he sees the enchantment in her.
She doesn’t wait for him to answer. “I would have washed them for you,” she says.
The lady walks down our row.
I can tell by the sound of her footsteps that this is her last walk. She tells herself she cannot continue this work anymore—not after what she did. If anyone ever found out, she would lose everything. There is something in the muffled clop that says goodbye. I will savor this sound as I have savored all her other sounds.
I touch my chest under my cover. My heart is beating.
If she keeps going far down the row to the chamber, she will find the priest is in his office. He is sitting at his desk, sick with the thought of losing her.
I want the lady to go down there and find the fallen priest. I want her to tell him—tell him what? Tell him she needs him. Say to him, Come with me, priest. Let us know each other together.
I hear her pause. One more step, lady, I think. One more. Go to him. Save yourself, save him. But she is turning. She is uncertain. She doesn’t believe she deserves him or anyone or anything ever knowing her. She thinks she will always be alone.
I cannot let this happen. I rush off my cot and find myself at my cell door. It takes so much effort—I cannot do it, but I must. I push my hands out of the bars and feel the shocking slap of the air on the walk.
The lady is turning. She will see me. I wave one skeletal hand in desperation. The lady freezes, seeing me. Our eyes meet. She is the first person to look at me in a lifetime.
She stands rigid. She looks at me and looks at my bony hand gesturing.
Go, lady. I push with my mind. Go, lady. Go to him now. Please—let him know you.
She just stands there, seeing me—seeing me—with her eyes. Then she turns and bolts down the hall, toward the priest.
I am shaking. I go back on my cot and hide under the covers. I wonder what retribution will come. Will the monsters under my skin haunt the lady? Will she infect the priest? Will the little men hear and bring their hammers, or the flibber-gibbets writhe in anticipatory celebration? Will the golden horses return to pound an answer on the lady?
The walls are still. The little men do not come. The flibber-gibbets are quiet. The horses are silent. And my heart is filled with peace.
I sit under that cover for an eternity before I decide the lady is strong enough to have seen me. Someday she will see the monsters for what they are and stop questioning herself about why she seeks them. She will stop feeling bad about wanting to make castles for them. Even monsters need peace. Even monsters need a person who truly wants to listen—to hear—so that someday we might find the words that are more than boxes. Then maybe we can stop men like me from happening.
The lady has a gift, and I hope she keeps using it. It is the gift of understanding men like me.
The light above me has flicked on and off many times since. Fall is here. I can smell it in the damp shredded leaves on the bottom of the guards’ boots, and I can taste it in the odd leavings on my tray: days of spoiled, green-spotted pumpkins cooked into mush. The fall rains are here. I can taste them from the moisture left on my bars from the leather gloves of passing guards. The rain tastes like rivers.
They say that when the warden heard what Conroy was really about—the shackles of fear removed from men’s mouths by his death—he ordered an investigation, a real inquiry, and there have been many changes in our enchanted place. Risk and his cronies no longer shout with drunken power from the Hall of the Lifers. Their cells have been stripped of camp stoves and pruno bags and hidden caches of knives. They wait their turn at the weight pile just like everyone else, and they dine on the same wretched food as everyone else.
Their victims—well, some things never change, but the new men are not so harassed. They have a fighting chance.
The white-haired boy walks among others without fear. His head is high, his eyes are clear. He is counting his final months. He has learned to recapture time, which we all want. Everyone can see the clock in his eyes, like a mystical power that shines the minutes, days, weeks, and years ahead. They can see the future in his eyes. It is like a bright dawning light that lets the young man see far from this enchanted place.
The warden comes for me.
He stands outside the door of my cell. Behind him, I see guards, their faces set. They are wearing the black shirts. These are men I have known outside my cell for so many years, farting and talking and laughing and shoving food trays through the slots, but now they are nothing. I feel the hard shield around their hearts. I know they have put the shield there to protect themselves from what they are about to do.
The warden has soft eyes. He is not afraid of me. He is okay with what he is doing. His heart is clean. “Are you ready?” he asks.
My legs feel frozen. I stand up carefully and leave The White Dawn on my cot.
I look around my cell. There are no drawings on the walls, no television, no diary on the stone floor. An empty meal tray is left on the floor. I did not order a last meal. I ate the same food I have eaten for so long.
I will go as I have hoped to become: forgotten.
The warden opens the door. I turn and put my hands out so the guards might cuff me. The manacles feel so cold and surprisingly heavy after so long.
Quiet, say the walls. Quiet, says my heart.
Once I am cuffed, I wait, my back to the guards. They finish chaining my legs. The metal cuffs dangle on my ankles. I seem to have shrunk over the years. The warden waits patiently for me to get chained. His eyes are kind and absent. He is thinking of his next day or what he wants for breakfast or something irrelevant. He wants to get this over with. I am glad he is thinking of his tomorrow and not me. I am glad he kept my secret, glad he honored my wishes. It is better this way; better not to enter the maelstrom like York, better not to see myself reflected in the warm eyes of the lady.
The black shirts signal: Time to move on.
Shuffling, I move. This isn’t as hard as I thought.
I am out in the open, beyond my door. This hasn’t happened in so many years. The stone halls feel hard and bumpy under my paper slippers. The bottoms of my feet hurt. I am not used to the stones, with the lifts and crannies and ragged edges that stick up.
The warden cups one of my arms. It is the first human touch I have felt in many years. It runs like a shock through my system, so much that I feel like fainting.
I am led, shuffling, down the row. The cell York lived in holds a new man. The small men scatter in the walls, and I think they are taking messages to all corners of this place. The other men do not line up at their doors to watch me pass. There are no calls of “hey man” or “hail Odin” or “keep striding.” No brother-to-brother calls, no long-distance goodbyes.
The silence echoes down the long walk. I bow my head and listen to the silence, hear the shuffle of my paper slippers on the walk.
We get to the far end of the row, and slowly, we shuffle down past the office that once belonged to the priest. It is empty, but they say a new priest is coming. The warden s
ays the new priest is young and eager and thinks he can change the world. He won’t last long.
The fallen priest and the lady are gone. She took the priest away to the sound of rain in the blue forest, to the sound of laughter and lovemaking after dark.
The lady doesn’t know it yet, but I have left something for her. It lies on my cot with a last request for the warden. I have asked him to send my copy of The White Dawn to her. I wrote a note on the inside jacket, just from me to her, written with that pencil stub. The note for the lady doesn’t say much. Just one word.
It isn’t far now.
The warden’s face relaxes. The hand on my arm is reassuring and firm. I feel the grip of his fingers and marvel at the layers of feeling through my body just from those two dimples of flesh.
Suddenly, we are there. The door is open. The orange room is bare except for the table in the middle. Next to the bed is the machine. My eyes begin to swim a little. I see the milky tubes on the stand, the red buttons.
There is the old black phone on the wall.
I am not worried about the phone. It will not ring.
There is silence beyond the walls. No voices rise in defiance. No one has come to protest. No one has come to celebrate, either. There are some horrors too deep to contemplate. There are some acts that defy redemption or rage. We all just want to close our eyes to them and forget.
In the distance, I hear the sweetest sound of all. It is a bird singing. Maybe it is one of the soft-tufted night birds, come to say goodbye. It is the most beautiful thing I have heard in many years, prettier than bells, and I know this trip was worth it just to hear that sound. It almost hurts my ears, it is so lovely.
The bird trills and then falls silent. I savor the sound like I used to savor the sound of the lady’s feet walking past my cell.
The warm reflection on the side of my face reminds me of the window. I raise my head. The heavy black curtains are opened so the audience can see. The witnesses are lined up in folding chairs in the other room.
That’s when I see her. Donald’s mom. She is sitting to the far right in the watching area, almost shrouded in darkness. She is much older than I remember from my first trial. She is wearing a pink cardigan that has seen better days. Her face is sagging, and her hair is gray. The last time I saw her, I was eighteen. She was a young mother then.