One of Us Read Free

worked for Lost Creek Coal for the rest of his life. It was Fiona who never stopped talking about revenge. According to her, Prosperity never killed anyone or committed any crime as crime was known to be in this country or any other. She saw it only one way from beginning to end: her husband had stood up to Walker Dawes and for that he was murdered. The mortal sin and legal iniquity aside, she was not the type of woman who allowed others to mess with her own.
    “Most people eventually came to regard her threats as the ravings of a deranged old woman, but some bought into the story that she hadturned to the Devil to get what she wanted and had become a powerful witch.”
    “Was she? Was she a witch?”
    “Truth be told, the only black art she ever practiced was the burning of the pot roast every Sunday, yet I trusted her predictions. I was certain injustice would be avenged. But not because I believed in curses or kismet.”
    “What did you believe in?”
    “For the longest time I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t put a name to it. It was just a feeling I had that our family would get back a little of our own someday. But now I know.”
    He stood up from the table and walked out the kitchen door onto his back stoop. It was a warm night in late September with just a tinge of autumn chill in the air. I joined him and followed his gaze past the roofs of the row homes to the worn-down mountains crouched on the horizon. Soon they’d be a riot of color when the leaves changed. Tonight, bathed in the glow of a full moon, they were the deep dark purple of a fresh bruise.
    It was an amazing story, terrible and wonderful at the same time, like my mother’s love, like these precious, poisoned hills that were the source of our survival and our ruin. I didn’t want it to end.
    “What, Tommy?” I asked again. “What do you believe in?”
    He didn’t look down at me but said to the sky, “I believe in you, Danny.”

one

    I WATCH THE CORRECTIONS OFFICER with his back to us standing outside the Plexiglas-encased interview room. The fingers on his right hand hanging next to his pepper spray occasionally flex the same way a dog’s paws twitch while he dreams of chasing a rabbit. I wonder if he’s asleep.
    Over the years I’ve come in contact with a countless number of men in law enforcement, a phenomenon that began when my mother was first incarcerated. I’ve developed great respect for some, but most have proven to be variations on a theme, adult versions of the boys who tortured me when I was a child, with the same no-neck bulldog compression of head to torso, the same tightly wired yet somehow easy manner that would enable them to crack open a few skulls then go home and eat a bologna sandwich.
    “You seem distracted,” Carson Shupe says. “Thinking about your trip?”
    I pull my attention away from the guard and focus on the convicted killer of four young boys sitting across the table from me.
    “How are you feeling?” I ask him.
    “I’m fine. I’m good.”
    He looks at me with his strangely jaundiced brown eyes, the color of watery beef broth, and as usual I don’t find anything there except normalcy. Despite what he’s done, this has always been a relief to me because it confirms my faith in the mentally ill. They are rarely violent. On the contrary, the desire to harm others is deeply rooted in the psyche of the sane. We’re all capable of killing someone, although everyone isn’t capable of killing just anyone.
    Carson unclasps his fingers and tries to spread out his hands and raise them in a sign of acceptance, but his restraints shackled to a bolt in the metal tabletop keep him from doing this.
    I glimpse his mutilated fingertips, shiny and pink with smooth scar tissue. Since he was a child, long before he began his career of unspeakable crimes, he’s been obsessed with removing his fingerprints. He’s tried rubbing them off with sandpaper, coating them with Krazy Glue and peeling them off, slicing them off