The Prison Book Club Read Free Page B

her five daughters, including Carol, into the study of English literature at university, encouraging them to teach. Her brother, like her, became a serial entrepreneur. I sensed that Carol was partly motivated by a need to succeed in a high-performing family and to leave her mark. We talked and laughed long into the evening, with Carol telling stories about her mother and Bryan guffawing heartily. I knew then something about where her courage came from. Now I had to marshal my own.
    In the end, the decision to go into the prison was made for me. While turning it over in my mind, I had filled out the Correctional Service Canada (CSC) volunteer application form, just in case, because there was a long lead time for approvals. When the prison system granted my clearance, I felt I had to follow through with it. I have difficulty walking away from sunk costs and I lack a reverse gear. Just go in once, I said to myself. You can handle this.
    What I didn’t know until my first visit to the prison was that Carol and I would meet the eighteen or so heavily tattooed book club members in a remote building within the prison walls, with no guards present and no visible security cameras. Carol’s idea was to put the men at ease. Our only protection would be a chaplain wearing a personal security alarm that would alert guards in the main building on the grounds, some eighty metres away. Great .
    Locals know Collins Bay as “the Red Roof Inn,” a play on the name of the discount North American hotel chain. The red metal roof and Gothic turrets are the prison’s most distinguishing features. Built of local limestone in the 1930s, it’s a grey castle fronting a vast square of limestone rampart, with red-capped guard towers at each corner. In my childhood, when my mother drove me past it for my annual eye exam in Kingston, from our home in Prince Edward County, I would ask her if that was Disneyland and whether it had a drawbridge and moat.
    So it was strange to finally approach this building as an adult, in October 2010 for my first visit to Carol’s prison book club. A warm Indian summer breeze was blowing the tall grasses of the surrounding meadows, and red-winged blackbirds called out from the marshy lowlands that stretched down to the St. Lawrence River where it meets Lake Ontario. The prison farm was barely visible at the rear. Just two months earlier, cattle trucks had removed three hundred Holstein cows from the farm buildings, as the federal government ended the forty-eight-year-old dairy operation that had provided milk to local prisons and farm skills to inmates. I was surprised to see how the city had filled in across from the prison since my childhood. There were car dealerships with metallic pennant streamers and rundown malls with pawnshops selling paintball guns in the shape of AK-47s.
    That day I had followed Carol’s instructions to downplay my curves and eliminate showy jewellery. I was wearing a breast-flattening sports bra, a turtleneck, a buttoned-up stiff tweed jacket and pants. I’d left my emerald engagement ring in the city, and wore only a gold wedding band and simple pearl stud earrings. I was also wearing my nerves. My hand shook as I signed the official guest logbook at reception. Through the one-way glass to my left I could see the outlines of heads, where guards operated the mechanized gates into the core of the prison.
    From that moment on I remember only brief impressions. I was fearful to the point of shock. My peripheral vision closed down and I felt like I was looking through a zoom lens, catching only concentrated bursts of images. After the double set of metal doors at the entrance slammed in sequence behind me, I remember being hit by the smell—an unpleasant yeasty odour that I couldn’t quite identify, as though decades of hardship, hate and regret had condensed on the walls. I recall walking down the main hallway with Carol and her co-facilitator Edward, a