Drifting South. Charles Davis
in the strongest voices they could muster after their church visits, all of them worn down from trying to save our souls.
But as I’d come to learn already, what some people would say or pray in church on a Sunday morning, and actually do in Shady Hollow on a Saturday night, were two different things.
And you could put a fair wager on that about every time, if you could find somebody foolish enough to take such a bet. Which weren’t likely.
In those church meetings, some of the folks with the loudest voices would come back alone when they could get away with it unnoticed, and they wouldn’t be thumping on a Bible. We figured they had butter and egg money in their pockets, and God sound asleep on one shoulder and the devil picking a five-string banjo on the other. And they’d come back again and again.
We’d welcome them with their stern or bending ways as it suited them, politics and people and religion being the way they are and always have been. So we were a tolerable lot in Shady, even with the Bible toters.
My whole world my first seventeen years, save one trip not so far by miles but a long distance by all other measures, was that curved riverbank with shacks and stick buildings lining both sides of a one-lane road that was mostly mud, tire tracks, horseshit and changing footprints.
Besides the occasional car coming in or out, people rode horses and mules and walked and even peddled bicycles through the mountain country to get there, because the law was so bad about stopping anybody coming in or out on the only dirt road that led to Shady. And some of those yahoos were lazier at thieving than we were by the way they’d hold up folks leaving and charge them for this or that crime, before telling them that if they paid their fine in cash on the spot, they’d be let go and there wouldn’t be a jailhouse stay or court hearing at the county seat of Winslow.
And the fine was always however much money the law could find on them. They’d take watches and rings, even wedding bands for payment, too. When they started taking vehicles and sending people walking out of those freezing hills in the deadness of a January night, something had to be done.
A couple of those lawmen never left the outskirts of Shady Hollow once it came to light what they’d been doing. They were running off business, Ma said, and they were giving Shady the crookedest name of the very crookedest kind.
Those deputy sheriffs never even made it into the hard but forgiving dirt of Polly Hill, neither, once they ignored threats and turned down bribes and were sentenced according to a final judgment by the Shady elders. They ended up bobbing down the river with their bellies bloated and their badges pinned to their foreheads for all to take warning of downstream.
I guess Shady is where I grew up in about every way a young man could and I saw almost every kind of good and bad there is to see. Almost.
Shady Hollow is all gone now, all of it, except for the dead still buried there. I still ain’t sure if the kneelers finally got their prayers tended to or it finally outlived its times. Maybe it just came down to plain bad luck that outsiders might call prosperity.
Over the years many more than a few died trying to find and get to Shady, wandering up on the wrong liquor still or copperhead at the wrong time, or just getting lost in the wilderness. If for no other reason, I still figure there must have been something decent—and maybe even special about the place—if so many folks died trying to find it. It was something in its day, and I’m sure in the last moment before it took its final breath, the diehards of the holdouts threw the party of all parties.
I missed that fine celebration that I can only imagine. But contrary to what some people still claim, it wasn’t because I had six feet of clay piled over top me on Polly Hill.
Most days I’m still pretty sure I ain’t dead yet. Maybe a little bit dead, maybe a whole lot more than a little bit.
But I’m still here.
I had to leave Shady in a great big hurry on September 28, 1959. September 28 fell on a cool early fall Sunday, and I was seventeen years old. And even though I’ve survived so many things since, I still think about it. Especially when dark falls and all gets still and quiet but the visions and ghosts of once was, and once that was never to be, who come back again and again to pay me a visit.
Almost half a century has passed since the shooting. But the sounds and sights of Ma’s yelling and crying, and Amanda Lynn’s screaming, and every single thing that happened on that Sunday afternoon is carved as deep into me as it is into homemade river-rock tombstones overlooking what once was a place called Shady Hollow.
Chapter 1
Harrisburg Federal Penitentiary June 16, 1980
“You’re not out yet, Henry. Well, keep that in mind, yep,” he said.
The guard behind my left shoulder—the head goon who ducked through doorways and always walked behind prisoners with my kind of history—tapped me on the right shoulder with his stick. Tapped probably ain’t the right word. He hit me with it not hard enough to leave a mark a day later but hard enough to where I’d feel it a week later, whatever that word is. I was used to him walking behind me, and had come to know his stick in a personal kind of way. My head had put a few dents in it.
Officer Dollinger always ended everything he said with the word “yep,” and he was letting his stick tell me that I’d been mouthing off too much to a new guard walking in front of me.
Anyway, the head of the beef squad behind me had never called me Henry before. It seemed the whole bunch of them would come up with new words to call us every few years, same as we’d come up with new words to call them. Lately the guards called all of us convicts either Con or Vic.
Don’t see that in movies, prisoners being called Vic. Don’t see a lot of things in prison movies, at least the ones they’d shown us in prison, that actually make being locked up look and sound and smell like what it is, which is similar but different in an uglier, more crowded, louder, smellier way.
But mostly the guards just called me and the rest of us “you.” After I’d learned to write, I’d signed so many of their forms over the years with that name.
You.
But in D Block, Pod Number Four-B of the Number Nine Building known as the Special Housing Unit of Harrisburg Federal Penitentiary, the few pards I trusted with some things but not all, and had become friends with as much as you can in a place like a prison, called me “Shady.”
At some point in some lockup or lockdown, I was feeling dangerous lower than is good for a man to feel, and I decided I might need something to remember who I used to be before I had to live behind tall walls and wire, even if I couldn’t feel that way no more. On my last day in prison, both of my arms were covered in fading blue ink, pictures and words. Those prison tattoos read like a book of my youth, and across my back and shoulders in big letters was the word “Shady.” It was the first thing I’d ever had scratched into me. Nobody knew what Shady meant because I never told anybody about my past or what little I knew of it, but it came to be what I was called by the other inmates.
So anyway, given a kind warning by stick standards, I decided to not say anything more to the new jug-head guard in front of me. I just kept shuffling slow and steady, wearing irons on my ankles that I’d gotten used to so much that I’d grown permanent calluses from them. I kept shuffling slow and kept my bearing about me as I tried to ignore the irksome clanking of the chains at midstep, because it wouldn’t do me well to raise hell about any of it.
I’d already been through eight hours of a hurry up and wait drill, first in my empty cell with a rolled-up bed, and then sitting outside the warden’s office watching the guards keeping an eye on me over top issues of Life, Field & Stream and National Geographic magazines.
An old trustee with heavy glasses on and small shoulders who seemed to have been there before time began and a man who I’d always gotten along with somewhat tolerable came in to say at long last that the head man of the Harrisburg Federal Penitentiary was busy attending to a bunch of local politicians touring the place.