Candlemoth Read Free Page B

you dead meat. Calls it out as you walk
from your cell to the yard, or to the washroom, or to the gate.
         Dead
meat walking, he shouts, and even Mr. Timmons turns cool and loose inside.
        How
Mr. West ended up this way I can only guess from what I was told, what was
inferred. I don't know, but seems to me he's the most dangerous and crazy of us
all.
        Down
two cells from me there's a guy called Lyman Greeve. Shot his wife's lover and
then cut out the woman's tongue so she couldn't go sweet-talking any more
fellas. Crazy boy. Crazy, crazy boy. But hell, compared to Mr. West Lyman
Greeve is the Archangel Gabriel come down with his trumpet to announce the Second
Coming. Lyman told me Mr. West was a Federal agent in the Thirties and Forties,
did the whole Prohibition thing, busting 'shiners and whores and bathtub
gin-makers. Said as how he came up to Charleston when Prohibition was lifted
and was employed by the government to keep track of the black movements, that
he was down there in Montgomery and Birmingham for the Freedom Rides, cracked a
few black skulls, instigated a few riots. Another day Lyman told me Mr. West
raped a black girl, found out she got pregnant, so he went back down there and
cut her throat and buried her in a field. No-one ever found her, or so he said,
and I listened to the story with a sense of wonder and curiosity.
        Seemed
everyone had invented their own history for Mr. West. To me, well, to me he was
just a mean, sadistic son- of-a-bitch who got his revs beating on some poor
bastard who couldn't beat back. Few years before I came here someone made a
noise about him, some kid called Frank Rayburn. Twenty-two years old, down here
for killing a man for eighteen dollars in Myrtle Beach. Frank made a noise,
people from the Penitentiary Review & Regulatory Board made a visit, asked
questions, made some more noise, and then Frank withdrew his complaint and fell
silent. Month later Frank hanged himself. Somehow he obtained a rope, a real
honest-to-God rope, and he tied it up across the grille eleven and a half foot
high. The bed was eight inches off the ground. Frank was five three. You do the
math.
        No-one
had a mind to complain again it seemed.
        And
then there's Max Myers, seventy-eight years old, a trustee. Been here at Sumter
for fifty-two years. Jailed in 1930 for robbing a liquor store. Liquor store
guy had a heart attack the following day. That made the charge manslaughter.
Max came here when he was twenty-six years old, same as me, and on his
thirty-second birthday in 1936 he got a cake from his wife. Someone stole Max
Myers' cake, stole it right out of his cell, and Max got mad, real mad. He
argued with someone on the gantry, there was a scuffle, a man got pushed, fell,
landed forty feet below like a watermelon on the sidewalk. Max got a First
Degree. For the manslaughter he would've been out around 1950, would've seen
another thirty years of American history unfold. But he got the real deal, the
no-hope-of-parole beat, and here he was, pushing a broom along Death Row,
delivering magazines once a week. When he was jailed his wife had been
pregnant. She had borne a son, a bright and beautiful kid called Warren. Warren
grew up only ever seeing his father through a plate glass window. They had
never touched, never held each other, never spoken to one another save through
a telephone.
        Max's
son went into the Army in 1952, got himself a wife and a home, a cat called
Chuck and a dog called Indiana. Went to Vietnam in '65, was one of the first US
soldiers killed out there. Killed in his third week. Warren Myers was buried in
a small plot somewhere in Minnesota. Max was not permitted to attend.
        Max's
wife took two handfuls of sleepers and drank a bottle of Jack Daniels six
months following. Max was all that was left of the Myers family line. He pushed
his broom, he passed messages, he could get you a copy of Playboy for
thirty cigarettes. He was