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Our second place High School winner is Krista Hawkins, a student attending the Schuyler R-1 High School in Greentop, Missouri. |
They lie to us so many ways with anything they can, because they got power that way. They lie when they tell us supper is fixed with the finest home ingredients while we watch a dead spider floating to its surface and when they smile and hand me this pen and say it’s because they trust me. They don’t, and no reason why they should. The thing is—I know it—they want me to do it, to get me off their hands. Ole Sam be long gone and they will sigh relief. See, none of the prison staff is suppose to hand out things that could be used for a weapon, to themself or another man, unless under close watch, and right now I’m not.
They lie when they tell me everything is okay, Sam it was just a dream, they say, right before the black bar smashes into my face and I’m gone. They say that or tell me it’s all in my head and this is worse because it might be the very truth. Who can say. I been in the Alabama State Prison for 37 years. During that you see a lot of things you never knew of, if in your dreams or in the walls of this jail, and sometimes they are enough to make a right man go mad, and sometimes they do.
So this is a way to tell what they and everybody here won’t believe. There is a few who believe me and my rants and you should see the fear in their eyes, friend. A time or two ago I looked over a guard’s shoulder at the cell across from me and the man standing there nodded, and he was scared just like me. And some will deny it all in the day to make nice with the guards. I try to hold back like they do but in the night everything changes and I’m in the hands of nothing I can control.
They say no man lasted past his 65th year here, except one. Nobody know why. Maybe it’s the guilt or shame that works down their health, or something else. I can believe both. This place is misery. It hangs in the air and waits for the man like an infecting disease, and maybe its name is time. Lord knows we all come down with it and the man who don’t was and always will be out of his mind.
It waits all the same, but it’s got no name, or one that is shared, because in secret those who believe got their own names for It. We don’t know whether it’s a blessing that can take us before the insanity steals us in its grip or pure unknown and lost evil. Don’t matter. Something gets you in the end anyhow.
I call it The Taker if I speak aloud. Most times I don’t. The Taker’s past goes far back as the first decade this place stood, and there is a lot of versions of who It be. I’ll tell you, friend, as it was told to me.
Nobody knows his birth name or right where he came from. Story tells it he was brought in for slaughtering a lot of missing people in the area. This was around the start of the Civil War. He lived to be 92 here, and quackering about demons and angels and the Everlasting Battle and Lord knows what other up until the end. See, he was already a old man when he was found after all those years, and any other man been hung there on the spot for all to see, but they was scared of him. That was the plain and honest to God truth. They was scared to do it and they thought if they waited long enough he would die soon anyhow. During that he saw through 19 guards in about 12 years, they say, and all of them was dying with the same disease. Suffering was more like it.
So they waited and watched him waist away day after day. The morning they found him dead, well, they didn’t even know it. His skin was rosy, eyes glistening, he was sitting up against the wall and staring forward, and the only thing changed was he wasn’t jabbering to himself. But day after day came, and his dinner plates started piling up, and he be sitting up and staring forward at them, studying them. They couldn’t tell no different. It was some weeks later when the head guy found out and went in and saw the man was dead. If a man was what he was at all. There is others stories. Guards and what they say, how sometimes they could sworn to the Lord they saw his eyes move, like he was following them.
A lot of men wonder out of everything what cell he stayed in all those years. For all any of us know it could be the very one I am writing this in.
There is other ways to be told of The Taker. Some say he is our past and its justice. Lord knows It could find something in any one of us.
For me it’s my Delilah.
We met at sixteen. Well, I was sixteen, she fifteen. This was 1946. It was at what my town use to call a “cross-county” dance, when anybody from anywhere in north Alabama could come for a good time. Most times it was just the same people, but that night I broke away from a few of my buddies to use the bathroom and I saw this girl. No girl I ever saw around before. She was slim and nice in a pink dress and her hair pulled back from her face. Course she was there with her girlfriends and didn’t see me. Why should she? I never had no beauty like that, never, so when my buddies pushed me to ask her for a dance and she said yes I thought I couldn’t hold myself up on the floor. But I did. Her hands on my shoulders kept me up. And while we was swaying back and forth to the music I was looking away, shy, over her shoulder and here and there, but Delilah, she was looking at me.
There was a second and a third dance and we got talking and pretty soon I was ditching school and riding all day to her town and sneaking her out at night.
My beautiful Delilah, just like that Chuck Berry song.
She wasn’t the first girl I ever took to bed. There was one or two weekend girls me and my buddies went around with before. Sixty-two years old and I can still remember the way her eyes looked—scared and mysterious and excited all at once—and that lavender skirt she been teasing me with all day. All the time I was finding other things to look at and not her, but I could feel those wonderful eyes always on me in the dark.
We got married when she came seventeen and moved into a neighboring town south of the both of ours. Delilah was heavy with a child by then, and we were happy. Poor and happy like a couple of paupers should be. I was working at a supermarket downtown and helping people around with handwork when I could. Delilah, well, course she worked until she was along and big. Found out it was twin girls the last time she went for a checkup. The next time she went screaming and crying and they was born just the other way, four months early.
I think of Delilah to get away from here, the way we was before that happened. I don’t feel scared then.
But after that Delilah changed. Can’t say how at first. Most times she mourned. Blamed me, blamed herself, her work, what she fed herself, the neighbor’s cat, out of everything! Something about it being sick one time and might of spread it to the babies. I was sad, sure, but I wasn’t like her. It really tore her up. Called herself a murderer one night and that was the first time I ever used my hand against her.
During all that she never let me get too close to her, like she thought she was dirty and horrible or I was. I kept working and let her have her time though, and after things got a while to pass we was okay again and loving and living just like before.
Never could and never did get a child. Delilah beat herself up about it because that was what wifes did back then. Get married, bear children, nuture the family, look after the house and cleaning and what not. She felt like a failure, and that was all there was to it.
We got a little older. Worked most of the time. She was okay but that zest died in her eyes. Like bubblegum lost its flavor.
Delilah was twenty-three when I killed her.
Work was hard to get. Racism was just as bad as it’d ever been. Our little cracker box on Washington Street was slipping from us. My mother back home got sick and I spent most my time over there and Delilah didn’t believe it, said I was fooling around. Funny, friend, because I never even thought about a woman that way who wasn’t my wife. Come to find out she was the one not being true, but I tried to work past it.
It was just one little fight over all this—the twins, work, money, not being true—with some alcohol thrown in the bargain and I killed her. It was a Friday night after I came home from the bar after work. One little comment, turned into an argument turned into screaming and her, coming at me, and I reached out to stop her and had her pinned against the wall and Delilah was screaming at me, it was my fault we was doing so bad and what not and I just meant to slap her to come out of it and calm her down and it ended up harder than that, enough to knock her to her knees on the floor. I just stood there, too shocked to move. She raised her head slowly and her eyes met mine and there was only one thing there, hate, like I knocked out what was left of the woman I married when I hit her, my beautiful Delilah hated me, and I just wanted to get rid of that look in her eyes, so I pinned her under my calused, hard-working hands, hands that tried to build everything for us, and she coughed and fought and then the feeling of falling, falling, falling, and not believing.
See, maybe I got reason to be crazy.
I dreamed of my Delilah since the first night I was here. Sometimes they are the good kind, us back when, and I am happy again and I want to stay in them forever, but I wake up by the metal stick clanging against the bars of my cell. Sometimes she is lying under me, chocking, and her eye are pleading and somehow thankful. The good dreams save me from the nights when The Taker comes. The bad ones just add to how loud I scream and how hard the guards take to me.
I lay on my bunk when the day is done. I watch the ceiling and the lights go out and I feel a scream rising in me to beg them to keep them on, and I hate to see the night when I can’t hold back no more. I asked a new guard on our E wing a few weeks past if maybe he could and he laughed in my face.
When the lights are out, that is when the big battle starts, when I feel panic coming and my head goes on and on. Use to be I only woke up in the middle of the night. Those was the nights when I was first introduced to The Taker.
The first night It was standing at the bars of my cell. I woke up by a weird sound, like a slithering sound, like the janitor man bringing the mop across our cement floor outside. Graveyard shift tonight I thought and went back to sleep. The second time that night was a tapping-scratching sound on the bars and I turned over and my eyes came wide and every part of my body was prickled with gooseflesh, just like it is now.
It wasn’t no guard I saw.
A lanky black figure with hands that was claws. Smiling in the dark.
Never have saw that face, and I know I don’t want to.
That was just the first night. It came to see me more nights after that, but not every one.
Some told me in secret It visited them.
Bruce Franklin, a few cells down, was found dead and gone on his bunk just like that, a man of twenty-seven, good, fit man. I heard his hair was silver when they found him.
There was a lot of cases like that.
Second time I remember It coming It wasn’t at my cell, no. I heard that same sound and rolled over and It was standing at ole Tom’s cell across from me, and It looked to be leaning over his bunk. I wanted to scream but course I didn’t try. Wouldn’t been able to anyhow. Pretty soon I blinked and It was really gone—in the wink of a eye, like they say. But I know what I saw. Had to be true because the next morning another body was added to the list.
Name: Thomas Pattonburg, age thirty-four.
That was when I turned really scared when night came. Couldn’t sleep right after that haven’t never since.
Then It started playing with me. Played with me more than one way, and I figured them all out. Wasn’t it funny everybody who knew about The Taker and who I could talk to was going out one by one like lights during a thunderstorm? And, the other thing, It kept getting closer and closer to my cell. One night It started out of my view, but I could hear its slithering.
Then It was twenty or thirty feet away the next night when I woke up.
Then ten.
Five.
Smiling.
At my cell and caressing the bars with its claws. I can see its small but awful sharp smile in the dark and that is all.
I know it doesn’t matter if I stay awake or not. There’s going to be a night when I roll over and see It towering next to me. Over me.
Maybe I will look into the face of my beautiful Delilah once again.
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