Chapter 2
Two
The family room held half a dozen stainless steel tables bolted to a sticky tile floor. Arthur took his usual seat, only peripherally
aware of the Nighswanders at the next table over. His mother was one of the first inmates through the door, limber and easy
in her prison blues, her hair clipped short.
Erin Oakes dropped into the seat across from him, kissed the tip of her pointer finger, and touched it to his. Physical contact
wasn’t allowed in the family room, but if any of the guards saw, they declined to object. Erin and Arthur sat across from
each other, the slender white woman serving seven for manslaughter, and her son, the long-limbed and gangly Black kid finishing
up a four-year stretch himself in the one of the whitest colleges on the East Coast—where he was on the dean’s list every
semester, in case anyone had any questions about his right to be there.
“I missed you all summer long,” she said. “How was Old Blighty?”
“It’s the only country in the world where they think Spam is one of the five major food groups,” Arthur said.
Arthur spent his summers in the UK, with his paternal grandparents, who were Windrush generation, shipped over from Jamaica
in the 1950s to rebuild what the Krauts had bombed into rubble. Arthur’s father was there too, in Kent. He had the newest
marble monument in a graveyard full of mossy, tilting, four-hundred-year-old headstones.
“Do anything fun?”
“I spent an afternoon in the British Library looking at illustrated manuscripts. I think I’m going to write about them in
my ‘Book as Object’ class this semester.”
“I was hoping you screwed a red-headed Scottish barmaid out of her plaid socks and got arrested protesting Margaret Thatcher’s criminal incompetence. Maybe you’ll get around to busty barmaids when you’re into Magdalen.”
“If I get into Magdalen,” he said. He shrank from even talking about it, the school where his father had earned his master’s
in English literature. As a teenager, Arthur had done his homework under a framed poster of C. S. Lewis and had experimented
with wearing tweed. Dark days. “And I’m not going if you’re still in here.”
“February,” she said.
“February,” he repeated—the date of her first parole hearing. In February she would know about early release, and not long
after he would know if Oxford wanted him or not.
“What about your summer? Shank anyone in the prison yard?” Arthur asked.
“No, but I did start a book club! We voted on our first book yesterday.”
“Oh yeah? What was the winner? How to Win Friends and Influence Your Parole Board? How to Escape in Ten Easy Lessons?”
“I suggested Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism—”
“Bet that racked up the votes.”
“—but I was shot down in favor of Jackie Collins. Hollywood Wives. Which is fine. I can work with that. It’s still an opportunity to talk about the way the culture strips women of their personhood.
It’s right there in the title—women defined by their marriages instead of their ideas.”
“You think that’s why they want to read Jackie Collins?”
“Naw. They want to read it ’cause it’s the smuttiest book in the prison library.” She lowered her voice to a mock whisper.
“There’s three copies going around and they all smell like countach.”
“Shit,” Arthur said. “That reminds me, though. I had my picture in the paper. They did a profile on some of the rare books in the school library and they quoted me.” In his final year at Rackham College, Arthur had been made the senior student librarian and tasked with making a digital inventory of the books in the rare collection—copying them to big floppy disks in the library’s new computer.
It was the card catalog of the future and a good reason for The Podomaquassy Record to do a fluff piece about the most peculiar items held in the special collection: a letter from Walt Whitman, an early typed
draft of Our Town, and, of course, the Enoch Crane journal. No way anyone was going to do an article about the Special Collection at Rackham
College without talking about Enoch Crane.
Arthur sat up and patted his pockets—then sat back down. “Shit,” he said again. “I musta left it in the car.”
“I just think it’s great one of us got in the paper and it wasn’t in the police blotter,” she said. “I’m so proud of my little
boy.”
Someone cleared their throat. Arthur looked back and saw Jayne Nighswander standing behind him, her sister at her side. Jayne
had a hand on the nape of Tana’s neck in what was either a gesture of comfort or a way to keep her pinned.
“’Scuse me. Dr. Oakes, isn’t it? Am I correct in saying you are a sort of political prisoner here? You were convicted for your convictions, so to speak.” She laughed at this fine bit of wordplay.
“I was convicted for trespassing and damaging federal property.”
“And manslaughter.”
Erin shifted her gaze from Jayne to Tana and back. Tana’s face was once again hidden behind her lank strands of hair. Ronnie
Volpe and Tana’s mother watched from the next table over. The eldest Nighswander was a tiny woman with lean, haggard features
and hair that was some colorless hue between blond and gray.
“A man died, yes,” Erin said. “Although we came unarmed, and in a spirit of nonviolence, there was an accident. A security
guard lost control of his weapon and was shot.”
“And you stuck around?”
“To put pressure on the wound.”
“And he died anyway, huh? You ever think you woulda been better off if you just legged it?”
“Sometimes. But then I would’ve been in a different kind of prison. A mental one.”
Jayne wagged a finger at her. “Uh-huh. Now we’re getting to it. You didn’t mean for anyone to die. But you made a choice to break into federal property and someone did.”
“Sorry,” Arthur said. “But if it’s all right with you, my mom and I are trying to have a quiet visit.”
Jayne paid him no mind. She went on, “You were a priest of some kind, weren’tcha? Or was you a professor?”
“I taught practical ethics and theology at Dartmouth. I’m also a pastor with the Episcopalian Church.”
“They don’t defrock you for manslaughter?”
“They haven’t got around to it yet.” Arthur’s mother narrowed her eyes and tried a smile on Tana. “Are you all right, honey?
I love your Biko sweatshirt. I have one just like it.”
“That is your sweatshirt,” Arthur said, but it was like he was talking to himself; no one even glanced at him.
“She’s fine,” Jayne said. “So you’ve done enough ethical professorin’ to help us puzzle something out. You set out to do a
good thing, only there’s a freak accident in the process of breakin’ and enterin’ and some poor fella eats it. You didn’t
want it. But you’re responsible for it, all the same.”
“I think that’s true. When you choose a course of action, you accept the consequences—those you intended and those you didn’t.”
“There you go,” Jayne said, lowering her head to look into Tana’s face. “See? Voice of educated reason, right there.”
Tana lifted her chin and glared at Erin with wet, reddened eyes.
“Screw this,” she said. “Screw her and screw you. I’m going to the car.”
She twitched out of her sister’s grip and started toward the exit. Her path took her past her mother, and as she walked by,
the elder Nighswander kicked Tana behind her left knee.
Her leg folded and Tana dropped behind the table. There was a guard a few yards away, but he was staring at the TV hanging
from a bracket in one corner of the room.
“You burned up my shit, you fuckin’ flake,” Tana’s mother yelled, rising from her chair.
“An’ Imma have it back, every cent. I don’t care if Jayne gotta rent you out to hobos for ten bucks a pop.
” She had a paper cup of coffee in one hand and she threw it at her daughter’s head. “Drink up, you thirsty bitch.”
Arthur didn’t remember coming to his feet. He was, simply, suddenly, between them. It was the kind of leap in time one often
made in dreams, but it was the first time he could ever recall it happening in waking life.
He had his back to Tana’s mother, to help Tana off the floor. He sensed Mama Nighswander rising from her chair, and he held
one hand out behind him, palm raised, like an officer trying to stop traffic. He meant no harm by it. He reached with his
other hand to take Tana by the elbow.
“Fuck off me,” Tana hissed, and pushed him away.
The sudden motion rocked him backward, off balance, and he slammed the heel of his extended hand into Mama Nighswander’s face.
The impact snapped the older woman’s head back. Her calves struck the chair behind her and she toppled. The chairs were bolted
to the floor, same as the table, and had no give. She crashed across it and went sprawling.
“My node!” she cried, blood spouting from her small, hard, bony nose . . . a nose that looked suddenly, disturbingly crooked.
“You mudderfugger!”
The elder Nighswander sprang to her feet and lunged, but before she could get her hands on Arthur’s neck, a prison guard caught
her in both arms and lifted her right off the floor. Jayne shouldered Arthur aside, sinking her fingers into Tana’s upper
arm. Jayne turned a furious glare upon Arthur. “The fuck you think you’re doing, sticking your oar in?”
The guard was retreating with Mama Nighswander in his arms while she kicked her legs helplessly in the air. Two more prison
guards smacked through the doors at the back of the room. One of them caught Mama Nighswander by the thrashing feet, and then
they were carrying her out like a pair of movers with a rolled-up rug. The third guard unsheathed a nightstick and began to
strike it against an iron radiator.
“Inmates, line up against the far wall! Do it now! Visiting’s over. Visitors, move to the exits.”
Mama Nighswander writhed and arced her hips, bucking in the arms of her captors. She howled—a scream of fury that was cut
off as they carried her out. Arthur’s own mother moved slowly toward the far wall with the other inmates. She kissed her fingertip
and pointed at him, smiling with a kind of tired resignation.
Jayne Nighswander was cursing and marching her sister across the room. Ronnie tossed Arthur a wink before he followed them
out. “You got some touch with the ladies, pardner. At my absolute best, I never pissed off more’n two at a time. I think you
just collected the whole set.”
Arthur was another forty minutes in the waiting room, filling out an incident report. He looked for the Nighswanders when
he left, with a touch of anxiety, but they were long gone.
He was halfway home before he realized Tana Nighswander still had his Biko hoodie. And as for the article he had wanted to
show his mother, the one about the Brooks Library at school, it was a week before he had cause to think of it again.