The old man hated mornings the most. Hated walking, the itchy wool blanket, the sounds of others; hated climbing down from atop the double rack, the pain of his bare feet on the metal rungs; hated sitting on his locker box to put his socks and boots on.
He hated with dispassion, not with the fiery indignation of youth. Not like when he was young and his hate was fuel. Now, he was old, and his hate was a rut. A timeworn groove through his soul that was quiet and easy and worn smooth. Now that he was old.
Now that he was old, he hated that he had to wait in line, had to stand behind others. Younger men who bounced on their feet and talked with their hands, who used slang and were constantly threatening each other and bumping each other’s fists and calling each other names which still made him mad, even though he was old.
He hated other men passing him by as walked; hated the recreation yard; hated the clanking iron sound of the weight pile; hated the young ni–ers there with their shirts off and their slavery-bred bodies; hated the fact that nobody challenged him anymore, never eyed him, never refused to step aside out of his way when he passed through a gate or held the rail going down the steps, but instead called him “Unc.”
He hated the fact that even his old enemies no longer cared. His old enemies, either dead or gone or living elsewhere in the prison. Making little conversation when they occasionally gathered in the pill-call line to receive their medications through the tiny slotted window from the women inside. Hated them new and afresh each time for having to stand with them, the ones in their wheelchairs, with their walkers, their canes. Listening to them complain. Standing there as everyone else walked by on their way somewhere.
The old man hated the cold. Hated how it seeped into his bones and dried his skin, made his knees and elbows hurt, sometimes his lower back. He hated standing by the sally port gate and rubbing his hands, waiting for his ride to come with a thick pillow of fog lying just off the ground out across the open fields, so he knew he would have to wait a while longer. He hated the fog, hated that he couldn’t move until it cleared; remembered how he loved it when he was younger and it signaled a morning of extra sleep locked in the dorm until the sun burnt it off the row crop’s heads, but he hated it now. Hated having to stand and watch it through the chain link fence, waiting for it like having to wait now for everything else, because he was old. Even though he was a trusty. Even though he had some place to go. Even though the fog had nothing to do with him now.
Waiting until the fog finally lifted just enough, Mitchell would show. Mitchell in his white state truck. Mitchell spitting tobacco. Mitchell who always smelled like gasoline and had a face full of stubble and wore dirty mechanic shirts though he never fixed anything because he was the assistant warden’s son and this was just his job. To drive trusties around and pick them up and talk on his cell phone and joke about porn while the trusty got the work done.
The old man hated Mitchell, hated the other trusties who called him boss. Hated sitting in the truck with him while he ate his free world food— catfish po’boys and double meat cheeseburgers and cold drinks from the Yeti cooler thrown in the pickup’s back– while he ate the cold state tray given to him each day behind the prison’s kitchen. He hated the other trusties who pretended to playfully beg Mitchell for his food, who took what was left over, even ate off of the parts where Mitchell had eaten.
Most of all, he hated to be seen riding in the truck with Mitchell, when Mitchell would stop to talk with a field boss and the big stripes cutting okra under the eyes of the gun guards would stop and watch him and he could see the look in their eyes. A look they had for a ni–er sitting in the front seat of a white man’s truck. A look he knew because he’d had the same look for other truck-riding ni–ers over 30 years ago, while standing in that same patch, wearing an old straw hat with his shirt off under the hot sun.
They just big stripes. They just cellblock ni–ers, he’d tell himself. Can’t even live in general population like men. Hardheaded ni–ers that don’t want to do no more than buck and fight. But he’d stare straight ahead out the windshield and wait to be gone, not even answering when the field boss called his name in a friendly way.
On most Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the old man would ride with Mitchell. He’d wake up, climb down from his rack, put his socks and boots on and wait in the sally port, in the heat or the cold or the rain. It never snowed. He worked the prison farm for the hours Mitchell chose to work. Some days, Mitchell didn’t come at all, which was fine. Mitchell was white and the assistant warden’s son and could do what he wanted. When he did show, they’d drive around until someone gave them some work to do: repairing the fence line or cutting up a tree that had fallen across any of the farm’s back roads or helping at the horse barn or chasing off a gator up on the levee or helping fix the compressor at the rusty ice house or walking the entire three mile perimeter of the Main Prison beating the outer fence line with a stick to make sure the shaker wire still worked. Walking while Mitchell rode.
On the other days, or the days Mitchell didn’t work, the old man would awake, climb down out of his rack, sit on his locker box to put on his socks and boots, and at the sally port, once the light was up, he’d wave to the woman in the control tower who would pop the side gate for him, and he’d yell, “Gone to dig a hole,” and she’d let him go.
He didn’t always have to dig a hole but more than anything, he hated not going. Sometimes Mitchell would take him or he’d walk or sometimes catch a ride with another field boss or with roving security, all who knew him and would pull over if they saw him walking along, but he liked to walk alone. The walk was not long. The prison owned thousands of acres of alluvial deep south farm land that had known a thousand old men before and he knew he would not be the last. He knew that for sure.
The prison cemetery started atop a small hill and ran down its gentle slope, opening out as it had grown over the years like a fan near the bottom. There was an older section of the cemetery a ways away, so old it almost wasn’t a cemetery anymore but the old man still kept that clean, too. He had a small hut that kept his tools: An old whirlybird lawn mower that he sometimes still used, a push mower and weed eater and a hoe, and shovels. Lots of different kinds of shovels. Spades, he’d say, that’s what they are.
In the summer, he worked all day. In the summer, everything grew. As fast as you could cut it down, it grew. And the white split-rail fence would need painting in the spring. It mildewed in the humidity this close to the river. And the concrete crosses painted white needed cleaning or else they’d turn green so you couldn’t read the names. There were names here. Names going back over 100 years. And graves with no names. With nothing more than unfinished granite marking stones stamped with numbers that no one alive knew what they stood for.
In the winter, he hated the cold; in the summer, he hated the wasps. He hated the wasps and dirt daubers that would crawl into the hut and set up home. Hated having to chase them, being stung. Hated the fire ants that popped up after every hard rain and put welts on your hands and ankles whenever you dug. Hated the midges and bull gnats that swarmed his body while he worked, covering his face and the back of his neck, little black specks drowned in his sweat.
Sometimes Mitchell would come or roving security, kicking up dust to check on him, to put him on the count and he hated when they would stop, not just blow the horn as they drove by or to call him out of the hut if he was inside, but when they stopped and turned off their truck and wanted to talk or tell him things he needed to do or asked to see the inventory for the tool hut to make sure everything was there or put on order whatever was broken and needed to be replaced or fixed. He hated when they brought him his state tray that all he ever did was feed to the cat.
There was a horse in the pasture next to the cemetery that would often come and hang its neck over the fence to watch him. The old man did not mind it. He didn’t know for how long it had been there and he never saw anyone ever come get it or ride or feed it like the gun guards’ horses for the field lines, and he never paid it no mind but maybe to stare back at it from time to time. And there was the cat that lived in the cemetery that appeared almost out of nowhere after every time he arrived and opened the lock on the hut and went inside.
Inside the hut the old man had an old coffee pot and a small space heater that he hid if Mitchell came about because Mitchell would take it and the old man hated that. Hated that he had to hide simple things. Hated that he paid for stolen coffee grounds from the kitchen and made his coffee with well water from a pump next to the hut. Water that smelled like rotten eggs and copper from a well so old it had to have a lead pipe. A well that would never run out of water, so close to the river, to make coffee he drank from an old tin cup he’d found when he’d first been made trusty and taken to the cemetery and told this would be, what they call in prison, his drop.
On funeral days, the old man would be there. He’d be told a few days before and he’d wake in the morning, climb down from his rack to sit on his locker box to put his socks and boots on, and he’d make his way to the cemetery. He’d choose his spade and mark out a spot three feet over from the last and cut a rectangle in the soft loam.
They had tractors now and a Bobcat with a backhoe that the white trusty drove, cutting the fields and clearing the drainage ditches but he never came unless the old man asked. Most times not even then. The white trusties had the tractor repair shop and electrical shop and the maintenance shop next to the back of the prison, by the sally port where the old man walked out each morning. The white trusties had a tv and a refrigerator—and in the electrical shop—air conditioning. The white trusties had a grill made in the welding shop they cooked chicken stolen from the kitchen on.
He hated the white trusties and how easily they sat around. How they talked to Mitchell or the other foremen like they were home. How they rode around the prison farm in the front seat of their bosses’ trucks with the window down and their arm hanging out. He hated when their bosses stopped and they got out and stood watching, looking down at him in a hole with his spade, talking over him like he wasn’t there.
Cutting a grave by hand took the old man two days now, now that he was old. He had cut hundreds of them and you could tell his work by the lay of the cross line, where the crookedness of the previous man’s work ended and his began. He hated the other man’s work, hated all the other men before him. Hated how the graves seemed broken up into separate patches as they had been laid out over time, though they all faced East in the same general direction.
The first three feet were always the easiest, not easy, but the easiest. Then would come the clay. He hated the clay that stuck to the spade and his boots and the water that filled in the holes made by the spade as he dug. He hated the digging after weeks of rain when the clay was like slime and he had to dig the grave wider and longer with slanted walls to keep it from constantly falling in. The digging was the best, not easy, but the best after a dry spell, when the ground was harder but the loam and clay held its lines and he could cut clean box corners all the way down and measure the hole exactly for the length and width of the cheap plywood casket.
Now that he was old, his shoulders hurt from the digging, and his back, and sometimes his hands, and he’d want to stop short, maybe head-height down, but he was a short man and knew this would not be good enough, and he hated that. Hated that he’d want to quit, that he needed to take breaks, that he needed an old milk crate down in the hole with him now so that he could crawl back out.
He hated when Mitchell asked him, “Ain’t you getting too old for this shit?” As if he really cared. Mitchell with his 30-year-old pot belly, bad knee, and thinning hair. Mitchell, who wasn’t even born yet the first time the old man had dug a hole in the cemetery.
On burying days, the old man would stand a ways away if there was family. If there was family, he would put out the old bench next to the grave for the people to sit. Poor mothers or sisters, sometimes a brother, who couldn’t afford no real grave but were allowed to attend the funeral if the body was being left to the state. Deaths registered with the Department of Corrections, with the body listed by the state as having been buried in a pauper’s grave.
If there was family, the body would be brought by the prison ambulance from the prison hospital and a trusty might say a word or read from the Bible. Always a black trusty called “Pastor” or “Rev” who’d found Convict Jesus or the Holy Prison Ghost and who only wanted to talk now about the Hebrews and Moses and the Promised Land and being released from the bondage of slavery, so that he might go back out into the world now to do the Lord’s work.
If there weren’t no family left, or if the dead had been a sex offender or pedophile so that not even his own family wanted to come see him, the body would be brought on the back of the kitchen’s old flat-bed truck and the old man would help drop the casket down the hole with straps. They wouldn’t use the manual crank-lift to lower the body like they would if there was family. If there weren’t no family, or if he’d been a pedophile, nobody cared, they just put him in the ground and left the old man alone to begin filling the hole back in.
The old man hated digging the holes but had no dispute with filling them back in. Whether it had been someone he knew or not. Whether it was some new kid stabbed to death or OD’d, or some old convict settling up his final bill with the past. Either way, he had no dispute with putting the dirt back.
Afterwards the old man would use the pump to wash his tools before storing them in the hut. He would wash his boots and might take off his clothes if the weather was right to rinse himself down of the clay and mud and sweat. He might wash his pants and shirt and hang them to dry, changing into new clothes he had stashed in the hut. He hated coming in from the cemetery dirty.
If there was a time, he might make himself a cup of coffee and listen to the silence. Of the wind in the surrounding trees and sometimes a bird or a grasshopper or the horse nibbling on the fence or the cat meowing for his attention.
He would listen for the sound of the truck always sent to get him at the end of the day. He could hear its engine from some good, long ways off before ever seeing it, and he hated to hear it come. Hated listening to its engine speed up or slow as it traveled the narrow, winding prison road towards him until he could finally see it and he’d stand to throw out the remainder of his coffee and lock the hut’s door.
Tomorrow they would bring him a new grave marker—a heavy cement cross made at the prison’s trade school—and he’d paint it and use a posthole digger to set it at the head of the new grave. Tomorrow he’d get the metal tag with the dead’s name and a number on it from the metal shop where they still made license plates and he’d attach it to the cross with masonry nails.
Tomorrow he would wake and climb down from his rack and sit on his locker box to put his socks and boots on and make his way to the sally port, past the pill-call line and the recreation yard and the weight pile and the gym and the chow hall, and when the light was up he’d wave to the woman in the tower and say, “Gone to dig a hole,” and she’d pop the side gate for him to step out and be on his way.
Unless there was fog.
If there was fog, the woman in the tower would shake her head and holler down, “No movement,” and he would have to stand there rubbing his hands, staring out he gate. If there was fog, he would just have to just stand there, Maybe forever, he thought.
He’d just stand there and wait.
Lawson Strickland has been incarcerated at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for 30 years, serving a life sentence for first degree murder stemming from a bank robbery. His short story, “Waiting,” won the PEN Prison Writing Award for Fiction. This is Strickland’s second time winning the award, which he also won last year. In 2016, he placed second. The two previous stories were published under the pen name Ellis Acton Currer.
The Lens interviewed Strickland about his story, the language he uses, and his work. The interview can be found here.