X’s and S’s
Ruth Moritz
Are you going to eat? Inmate # 0074935 asks.
Probably not, I reply.
Minutes later, following the sidewalk’s meander toward the ménage à trois of barred gates, my gaze snags on the crosshatch of coiled wire at the top of the penitentiary fence—each barbed X hugs the back of each sinuous S like a cowboy pitting spurs into the flank of his ride. It is then that #0074935’s question and my answer echo inside my brain—his question asking for more than discussion of my sustenance, my answer stopping him short.
Are you going to eat?
What vicarious joy if my reply would include culinary possibilities beyond the lunch queue he is about to enter. But no. Probably not, with its two self-negating words, X-out such chance. #0074935 turns, and the dark doorway at the end of the hall swallows him whole.
W
Does not penitentiary, by its very Latin, require that it be a repository for penitents, that disharmonious horde of regretting, pleading, begging wraiths levitating at the very lip of hell?
Bless me father for I have sinned. This mantra, inculcated into my psyche by Sister Mary Bernard as she prepared me for my first confession, extricates itself from memory as I turn from the prison yard and head west instead of toward home.
As I accelerate into the curves that follow the budding elms along Turkey Creek, all of those equally spring-like mornings so many years ago come flooding back to where, once again, I sit squirming in a pew, awaiting my turn to step into the confessional’s dark rectangle, to hesitantly lower my knees down onto the prie-dieux, the kneeling upon that triggers the little green light outside to turn red, thus marking my penitent presence inside. As I fidget, hugging the wall so I will not slip from the narrow knee pad (thus flashing that exterior occupancy alert) my face is only inches away from the tiny window that opens into the murky place where Father Senecal waits, his forehead crimped into the sling of his left hand. The window’s opening is covered in moiréd silk, sandwiched between two layers of filigreed metal. The heaviness of the intertwining metal scrollwork puckers the silk. As I wait for my confessor to open the sliding door on the other side of the window, I slip my child’s fingernail between the intersecting S-shapes and puncture the silk in one place—twice. The tiny perforation of that X collapses the bubble of ancient air trapped inside the cloth. It dissolves next to my face like a sigh.
Bless me father... it has been almost 40 years since my last confession.
W
Just like the S-curve of the blue heron trundling its weight across the sky ahead of me, so too the graceful intent of the mangled deer as it strains toward the creek, extending from pavement to right-of-way. The graceful arch of its head and neck still manage to escape across the grass toward water. Only the heavier baggage of its body lies crushed mid-transit, faltering in the middle of the road like all unanswered prayers. Overhead, above my lane, the contrails of two indiscernible planes intersect—the stuttering X of their crossing effaces my windshield’s glass.
W
Looks like you’re going to fix up good there, says the woman across from me in the café on the main street of Wilson, Kansas. She straddles her chair, knees due NW and SW. Her napkin spans her ample lap like an apron. I look up from sectioning my bierock into even quadrants in order to release the steam and wonder what she means. The sunlight from the window slants across her eyeglasses, her pupils become restless flies suddenly cast in amber.
Yes, I smile, still not sure to what I have acquiesced. I lay down my knife and turn my attention to the manuscript open on the table beside me.
But the woman is not to be rebuffed. She fixes her frozen pupils on me and stridently announces, you’ve got lotsa’ studies there—more a pronouncement than a question.
No, actually I am a teacher, I respond before I can stop myself.
Not around here, she fires back, the accusation in her tone taunting me to disagree.
No, not here, then, relenting to her open stare, I add, I teach at the Ellsworth Correctional Facility. All the heads, bobbing atop all of the overalls at the long table to my left, swivel in my direction, the synchronous whiplash of their scrutiny bearing down on me like an approaching squall line. A pickup with stock racks passes outside on the street, and the momentary disruption of the window’s light X’s the trapped suspension of the woman’s pupils inside their frames. I take the welcome reprieve to escape into the first line of Inmate #0069687’s manuscript open on the table to my right:
the impression she made in the mattress is still there and sleeping here just seems...
the insinuation of each alliterative S an airlift for my silenced tongue.
W
I turn South on 105th Road. If there truly is some latent desire in my grounded condition to understand the exhilaration of flight, then I know in my bones the fluttering joy of the newly budded elm tree, uprooted and supine on the truck bed ahead of me, as it realizes its equally frivolous desire to ride. As I crest a hill, there it is—the whole girth of that tree rolling smoothly down the asphalt—no visible wheels, no obvious driver, no sound—just the tremulous chatter of its limbs as they practice new words for air.
But, as with any magic, it follows the downward slope of its own sleight-of-hand, slows, almost stops, turns. It is then I see the truck’s hard mechanical head, its faltering wheels and the crude sign to the east: LANDFILL. My breathing stalls as I watch the last guileless branch disappear to my left over the rise. As I finally accelerate, my own wheels spit to gain traction. My mind is a jumble of unanswerable static:
how long can buds remain green buried from light?
how long will limbs remain supple under the press of earth?
how can joy continue to arc under the weight of imminent despair?
As I look over my shoulder, I see a bulldozer fretting the hillside, its answers cross-barred and final.
W
Genesis: The LORD God said to the serpent “Because you have done this, cursed are you... upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.” In Grandma’s long-ago admonishments, I heard avoid the near occasions of sin. But her voice confused me with its mix of sternness and obfuscated pleasure. Thus it was that I began to understand the exquisite joy of the forbidden. Even as the S of the snake was censured to slither forever, I could still fathom the circuitous release innate in that sliding, still see how the sashay of that shape plotted a course to heaven on earth, still taste the sound of seduction at the commencement of words like sex and supper and sleep.
But today, I simply long for the ability to see the S of possibility languishing in the center of escape. In its stead, I find the ax of the X, deadly as the crosshairs of a rifle’s stare. Is this the way we are destined to go—GUILTY rubberstamped in red across the text of our confessions? The terminal blip of our breathing’s S flat-lining on some monitor’s screen? The cold hands of some power beyond us, crossing our wrists over our chests and padlocking the stopped heart inside a box forever?
W
Inmate #0074935 enters our last evening session. He does not ask, Are you going to eat? Instead he says, Here. His eyes read, Do not say anything about it. Our hands cross in the act of giving and receiving. I silently gauge the heft of it, absorb the warmth that suffuses my palm.
After class, I again traverse the escape route that alone is my privilege, hear the heavy doors close behind me. I do not know then that it will be the last time I ever enter and leave. At the western periphery of the compound, I turn north down a dirt road. The only thing mentioned more often than sky in the writing of these men is the view offered beyond the northern confines of “the yard.”
If I drive into the space of their looking, will I inherit the sum of such seeing or will I simply become one more mirage in the disappearance that is their life?
The road shifts, dips, rises then repeats the progression. My wheels kick sand, gravel. I glance in the rearview mirror, search for the point where the compound first becomes visible through the screen of dust I incite behind me. Only then do I slow, finding the exact spot where a man on the inside could see no farther—the terminus of earth meeting sky in his eyes.
I pull off the road, pull the keys, tug at my briefcase. I stumble through waist-high grass in the ditch, use my hands to support a toe-hold up the opposite bank. The ragged path leading into a fallow field follows a fence line of straggling barbed wire. Rusted, released of its torque, it long ago gave up its mission to contain. Now its barbs insinuate no more threat than the sandburs that skirmish in the folds of my skirt.
A quarter mile in, darkness falls and two twisted osage orange trees are the only interruption of nothing meeting nothing on opposite sides of the fence. I pause and look south. If incarceration has a core, it is here I see the epicenter of all that holding. In that moment, the flood lights corralling all those bodies appear as some inscrutable, earthbound constellation. I stop, sit down in a furrow of dirt, tentatively lean back against a bug-riddled fence post. I unzip my bag, and feel forthe hand-made burrito still warm inside the foil.
Bless us o lord, and these, thy gifts...
It is then that tears have their way. They twist and refract the image of each flood-lamp atop each pole into a posse of X’s. In the blur, I close my eyes. In that moment of enforced invisibility, I am able to hear it—the almost imperceptible escape of all that contained breathing. The exhalation of each man rises, untethered. Hundreds of them together arc, a flotilla of S’s, over the X of each barb of light, of each barb of steel
and they slowly drift down into the lap of my muteness.
I take the first bite and wait for their answers.
—for my students at ECF
