12.
The next morning, Ruby was up early, drinking coffee made with the motel room pot. She ate a granola bar she found at the
bottom of her bag and carried the movie she hadn’t watched to the front office.
The owner was there, smiling.
“Where to now?” Willa asked, examining the tape.
“Down to the low country,” Ruby said.
“Really? You got family down there?”
“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.
“Mother?”
Why was it so many of the dying asked that question? She knew why. Return to the source.
“I’m helping a man named Mitchell Brown. Do you remember him?”
Wes’s lips were lifeless. His cheeks were so thin she could see his tongue moving inside his mouth. The cancer had started
in his brain. Or maybe in his lungs. They didn’t exactly bother with diagnostics in prison. He was dying. That’s all there
was to it.
“I remember everyone,” he breathed.
In his moment of extremis, maybe he did.
“He was in the bar the night a woman disappeared. The police may have tried to talk to you later. Did you talk to them?”
“Grass talk,” he said.
“That’s right. The grass talks to you, doesn’t it?”
“Peaches.”
Along with peaches, the prisons specialized in raising the other dangerous crops of the new South: blueberries and watermelons.
They were dangerous because they had the highest pesticide count of any crop.
“You’re dying of the peach tree disease.”
He was silent, looking over her shoulder at the rectangles of light.
“Glad,” he said, and she knew what he meant, even though she couldn’t explain it.
She reached for his hand, thinking he would be able to offer nothing, and that was okay. It was just another moment in her
life.
His hand was small and dark, with scars raised along the inside, from grabbing the fruit, trimming the bark. His nails were
coming loose from their beds, and she felt the tremor inside his hand. She closed her own eyes and felt those nerves trace
all the way back to his heart—and hers.
“I remember,” he whispered. “He was at the bar that night.”
She opened her eyes. His were steady on hers. She could see deep down into them, into a well of memory. This little crumb had floated to the surface like a wet leaf.
“He was sitting next to a man.”
“I imagine he was,” she said, and stopped.
None of the witnesses who’d testified at the trial had talked about Mitchell sitting next to a man.
Wes was struggling now, his tongue too big for his mouth. The trustee nurse appeared at Ruby’s side, large and comforting.
“He doin’ all right, miss?”
“I don’t think so.”
The large man leaned over. She smelled bleach and hope.
“It’s them seizures. They take them.”
She looked over the trustee. “Were you a nurse on the outside?”
“Yes, miss. That’s why they keep arresting me. One reason after another. Men like me—they need us here.”
He stroked the man’s head, then wandered away, and Ruby sat for a bit with Wes, waiting to see if he would come back. But
from the twitching, he fell into a deep sleep—one she thought he might not awaken from.
Ruby stood outside the prison. It was so hot, it was making the world tremble.
She had already looked up Mary Baldwin, driver of the pink Mary Kay car. She had died of cirrhosis years ago. The cook sitting
at the bar was dead, too, killed by a drunk driver while on his way to visit relatives in Mexico.
On the wall of Ruby’s apartment across the country, the flags waved, though there was no breeze.
They were waiting: a thousand tiny cries in the dark.
They wanted Ruby to come here, go there.
Each man she exonerated was an answer: this one didn’t kill her.
But every missing woman she found led to a glorious reunion, even in the spirit world.
They were the patchwork of her life. They were as rooted to the earth as a tree.
Back in the death house, Mitchell stood at the bars of his cell. The inmates called their cells rooms, perhaps for a semblance
of normality. Mitchell was in room—cell—44, and the death row held two hundred cells. It was a hopeful number, Mitchell thought,
that the state might be able to kill so many. But in truth, only about fifty or so inmates were housed here at a time. Of
course, more came as others left. The only way there was to leave.
For ten years, he had lived in this tiny cell. He had come straight from court, those muddy days after his arrest, and then
from the trial. He had never been in general population. From death row, it was hard to think general population even existed,
though he knew, through the concrete walls, that it did. Outside this cell, this room, across an expanse of wet ground, was
another prison, where thousands of men yelled and played ball in the yard and worked. In some prisons, the inmates raised
crops, from the dangerous fruit to wheat and corn, and in others they ran massive fish farms—raising so much tilapia that
it had come to be called slave fish by the incarcerated—but in this prison, the board of directors had devised an ingenious
plan that they said saved on labor costs in the local towns. The inmates not on death row were sent to clean the parks, work
on wildfire crews, maintain the roads, do construction, even take care of the governor’s mansion. If there was anyone working
around Jackson, it was probably one of those inmates. Of course, since the costs were so low, the prison easily outbid any
local contractors. Heck, it was the local contractor.
The death house was lucky to have cells with bars that allowed the imprisoned to view the hall.
On some other death rows, Mitchell had heard from the staff, the inmates were housed behind locking metal doors with slots.
He would have gone crazy without this limited view to the cell across the hall.
In the decade he had been here, there had been three different men in that cell.
One had met his maker naturally, dying of a stroke one night.
This had greatly disappointed the family of his victim, who had been looking forward to his execution.
The other had been executed a few years before.