The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend Read Free

are here in a prison. You do as you are told. Button your lip, mind the orders, and do as you are told, and you’ll get along.”
    That was the usual flow of the dialogue. They never believed that he was the Warden. It didn’t matter how much he pleaded or reasoned or argued or produced this evidence or that evidence to document his position. They in turn could produce their evidence. In his dreams once, he had been asked,
    â€œWho decides to be or plans to be or dreams of being a jail guard, a turnkey, or even a warden? Who? A child wants to be a fireman, a policeman, a soldier, a doctor, a lawyer, a driver, of a four-horse team—but who on God’s earth ever wanted to be a jail guard or a warden?”
    Awake, the Warden reflected upon the deep truth of this: particular challenge of his dream. At moments when he pitied himself, it seemed to him that people who worked in prisons were wind-tossed people who arrived at a destination that was never of their own choice. This morning he wanted to believe this. He awakened with a woeful feeling of emptiness. Somewhere in his sleep, along the way, he had lost something; and there would be no finding it today. He tried to tell himself that today was a day he had neither made nor ordered.
    With such thoughts, he sat up in his bed, put his feet into his slippers, and went to clean himself and shave, and make himself look like what a warden should look like. He gargled and he combed his hair, and all the while, he conducted an argument with himself, telling himself that this was not his doing. In the course of that kind of thing, he had a sudden realization that each and every person connected with the executions today must be saying the same thing; that each absolved himself. His own absolution was a middle matter. He was neither the most important nor the least important person concerned. He had been the Warden before today, and unquestionably he would be the Warden after today. Things would quiet down a little. One had to remember that people possessed the facility to forget. They could forget anything on earth. Never was a lover born who in time could not forget his own true love, and that notwithstanding how true the love was. The Warden, to some extent at least, was a philosopher. This was an affliction of the trade, an occupational disease. He knew that all wardens were philosophers. Like old sea captains, the very ark they ruled gave them a dignity at odds with the crew and passengers they carried.
    â€œWell,” he said to himself on this particular morning, “it’s no use going on thinking that way. Here’s today which had to come, and in time it will be over. The thing to do is to get about it and see that everything is all right and make things as easy and comfortable as they can be made.”
    He finished dressing, and decided that he would take a look at the death house before he had his breakfast. He walked across the yard and was greeted by the captain of the guards, and even by a trusty or two who were already about their work. The morning life of the prison he ruled had begun. Metal doors clanged open and rolled shut. Prisoners came by, pushing hand trucks full of laundry. The clatter of pots and dishes, a whole bustle of activity, went on around the kitchen and bakery doors, and already, corridors were being mopped, swabbed down, washed with gray lye-impregnated water. At this time of the morning, a little past seven o’clock, the prisoners were going to their morning meal. The Warden heard the regimental tread of their feet, the chopping sound of half a thousand men moving in rhythm, of a thousand leather shoes slapping the concrete. A little later, the sound of trays and spoons came to him through walls and along cell blocks. His ears were marvelously tuned to all the various sounds and noises of the prison, for these were the sounds and noises of his life. In that sense at least, his dream was most deeply true. He lived his