The reformatory, p.29
The Reformatory, page 29
Robert followed Warden Haddock’s finger to a clear portion at the center of the circle, where a child was curled on his side as if he were in a womb, his face upturned, perhaps posed that way. He might have only been sleeping. Robert’s throat drew shut as if he too were gagging on thick smoke. He could not breathe—could not remember ever breathing.
The boy in the photograph was Blue.
23
Robert could barely catch his thoughts after he left the warden’s office and told Mrs. Hamilton everything was fine and saw relief soften her kind face. His shock at seeing Blue in the photo made him doubt the sight of the twilight sky above him and every blade of grass beneath his feet. Warden Haddock wasn’t lying this time: Robert had seen with his own eyes! If Blue wasn’t alive, if Blue wasn’t real, could he trust in anything he thought he saw? He had touched Blue. Talked to Blue. Robert’s skin rang with the memory of Blue’s fingers around his ankle in the cornfield. And the way he’d laughed and laughed.
Who was real and who wasn’t, then? What about Redbone? Did Redbone know Blue was long dead? Of course he did! So many things made better sense: how Redbone had lied to Boone the first night and said he’d been the one telling stories about boys running away, not Blue. How Boone had ignored Blue when he took him and Redbone out to the Funhouse. How Blue had slipped out to the cornfield. And Redbone’s last words to him had been Don’t say anything about Blue. Robert wondered if Redbone might be a ghost too.
And who else? Was he a ghost himself?
Robert didn’t want to be near the other boys until he saw Redbone, so he stood waiting for him beside twin pines outside of the cafeteria near the supper line. He stood near the garbage Dumpster that was so close to the cafeteria door that it was hard to separate the smell of their dinner and rotting food, both clogging his nose. He’d been hungry most of the day, but now his appetite was gone.
As they passed him, two boys he’d warned in the cornfield when Boone and the watchers were near nodded and said, “Hey, Robert,” but Robert barely noticed them. He also barely noticed when Cleo brushed past him with a rough bump of his shoulder and a sneer. He’d been afraid of Cleo in the cornfield, but not anymore. Robert didn’t glance Cleo’s way, staring straight ahead, and he barely heard Cleo say, “Yeah, you better not do nothin’,” before he moved on. Robert stood statue still while all around him boys jostled and joked in line for supper. Robert kept looking for Redbone, afraid he’d see him, afraid he wouldn’t.
But he was more afraid he might see Blue.
As soon as Robert thought Blue’s name, Blue appeared like the ghost he was in a row of boys walking toward him, grinning from ear to ear. But when Robert gasped aloud, choking on his own tongue, he realized the boy was much younger than Blue, and he and his friends had nearly identical plaid shirts he had never seen Blue wear. No, it wasn’t Blue, Robert reassured himself three or four times to try to calm his heart.
Robert had considered Blue almost a friend, at least on the way to being one, but now every moment he’d spent with Blue felt like a violation. Blue had locked them in the freezer, slamming the door behind them, and… then what? Floated in the air? Marched back and forth through the wall until he was bored? And in the locker room, he’d appeared like a phantom from behind Robert’s locker door. And then there was the cornfield. Robert had known something wasn’t right about Blue being in the cornfield the moment he’d felt his touch.
“Stephens!” Boone called.
Robert spun, afraid everyone within earshot knew. He might have jumped ten feet high if his muscles didn’t feel like rocks. No, no, no—this was all wrong. He was supposed to see Redbone first, not Boone. He wanted to undo and unsay everything that had happened in the warden’s office.
Boone wore a leather pouch around his neck. He gestured. “Come on,” he said, and pushed through the line toward the cafeteria’s double doors. He stopped walking and turned, frowning when he saw Robert hadn’t moved. “Show me where it was at. It ain’t gonna hurt you none.”
All eyes were on him now. Robert had imagined a meeting in secret at the rear kitchen door, not a proclamation in front of every boy in line. Robert darted toward Boone to keep him from saying the awful thing out loud, that he was a haint tracker. He helped the warden hunt down boys who had already died—boys the warden himself might have helped kill like he’d killed his sister. Some of them did seem to know, the way they cleared a path for Robert and stared questions at him. Even the boy who reminded him of Blue was staring.
“Let’s go,” Robert whispered, mostly to be away from their eyes.
Inside the doors, heat and the smell of over-steamed vegetables swamped Robert as he followed Boone to the building’s left side, away from the cafeteria and toward the kitchen in back. Redbone was in his white cap, pushing a mop; Warden Haddock had already put him back in the kitchen. Redbone stopped mopping when he saw Robert. Boone was so intent on walking to the big metal vat against the rear wall that he didn’t tell Redbone to get back to work. Boone surely hadn’t seen the loathing in Redbone’s face.
Robert gave Redbone a shrug he hoped would look like an apology, but Redbone’s dark eyes sharpened on him as if he knew his every secret thought.
“Where was it again?” Boone said. “Show me where you saw that haint.”
Why had he said it aloud? Redbone’s face changed to a pale shade, melting away into an expression that reminded Robert of Papa’s when he had sat at Mama’s sickbed.
“That floor’s wet!” Redbone called out. “I just mopped it.”
“Don’t seem wet to me,” Boone said, and kept walking, and Robert had to follow. He couldn’t make himself look at Redbone.
The floor wasn’t a bit wet, or even clean—it had tracks through spilled flour in places—but Boone didn’t catch Redbone in the lie because Boone was only interested in the vat where Robert told him a haint had stood. Why had that white boy shown himself? Why hadn’t he been more careful? White boys didn’t belong in the kitchen—not even as haints. Robert tried to convince himself this was all the haint’s fault. He even tried believing Warden Haddock’s claim that the haint hadn’t been stabbed in the back; he only showed himself that way to make people feel sorry for the victim of such a low-down, cowardly act. Or to try to scare him. All the storybooks and picture shows were about haints scaring people. Hurting people, even.
“Tell me where he was at and I’ll sprinkle all around. If I had enough powder, I could do the whole kitchen.” Boone surveyed the floor and finally frowned. “He said he mopped this damn floor.” But instead of yelling or threatening to send Redbone to the Funhouse, Boone reached into his pouch, the floor forgotten, and pulled out a saltshaker full of red-brown powder.
“What’s that?” Robert said, although he knew everything except its name.
“Goofer dust,” Boone said. “Fresh batch I just scooped from my grandmama’s grave. That’s what draws ’em. Sprinkle goofer dust where you saw ’em last and they’ll come right back. Must smell like frying bacon to a starving man. Long as the trail’s fresh, they’ll come back an’ get caught. And they sure ’nough turn to dust like a li’l anthill.”
Robert felt sick to his stomach as he remembered the warden’s proud jar of dust. If you’re dead, stay dead, Blue had said. With his own mouth.
“Right there,” Robert said, all the while praying that Mama had never come near this spot, that she had stayed far away from the kitchen.
“Speak up, boy. I can’t hardly hear you.”
Robert didn’t move his arm from his side as he stuck out his index finger ever so slightly to point to the corner beside the vat. Robert could still remember the boy’s freckles as clearly as the knife. “That’s where he was standing, and then… he walked through the wall.”
“That right?” Boone caressed the wall nearest the corner as if he might find a soft spot and walk through the wall his own self. “This spot here?”
“Yessir.” Robert wasn’t sure. He hoped not, but it might be.
Boone rubbed his palms and paced like he was about to feast on the beef stew simmering in the large pots on the oversized stove. The carrots had been overcooked to a dull, sickly shade nothing like orange, and the meat alongside them had turned gray. The smell made Robert feel sick. This day, this week, this year, made Robert feel sick.
Boone was squatting in the corner, and ordinarily Robert might have laughed because his pants were tugging down low past his butt crack. He looked back at Redbone to see if he might be smiling, but the crushed look on Redbone’s face lashed Robert, so he turned away as fast as he could. Redbone would never be his friend now. Tears nearly snuck from Robert’s eyes, but he wiped them away while Boone wasn’t looking.
Boone was shaking powder from the saltshaker, oh, so carefully. He could have been drawing a picture with the grave dust, the way he took his time. “This here’s my trap,” Boone said, and backed up a step, still shaking dust out in a careful way so he wouldn’t spill a fleck, “and I’ll lay out a trail from where he was standing. Right here?”
Robert nodded. “Right next to the big pot, like he was stirring it.”
Robert had to admit he felt a twinge of excitement now, the way he’d gotten past feeling bad for the rabbits Papa had hunted with him and concentrated instead on the thrill of finding their hiding places and timing the buckshot just right. Once he’d shot a rabbit’s head clean off, leaving the rest perfect for stewing, and Papa had put his hand on top of his head and said, “Great shot, Robert”—not Robbie, not Junior, which he hated (and reminded him too much of Uncle June), but his full name spoken aloud as if to remind him they were both the same.
Boone surveyed his work when he was done: a thin, barely visible line of dust about twelve inches long led from the spot in front of the vat to the corner of the wall, where, indeed, Boone had drawn what looked like a loose circle. The trap was obvious if you knew what you were looking for. The haint might catch the scent and follow it to the circle like a lit match.
“What happens now—” Robert started to ask, but his words were snatched away by a keening scream between his ears like nothing he had ever heard before. Heard wasn’t the right word, because it wasn’t his ears; it was in the place where he’d heard Mama’s voice in the Funhouse, a secret place beyond hearing. But it wasn’t Mama, not this time. The sound was barely human, but Robert knew in his bones that it was the boy with the knife in his back.
“Well, I’ll be… god… damned…,” Boone was saying. Robert thought he was hearing the sound too, but instead Boone was pointing at the wall. “Look! Look here!” Boone raised such a fuss that other boys gathered behind them, curious.
At first, Robert didn’t see anything except the circle in the floor, but then Boone raised Robert’s chin to look up, and he saw what looked like pale dust motes gathered in the air above the circle with lazy swaying as they floated toward the floor, the way Papa had described snowfall. These fell with a loose order inside the circle, never outside, clinging more tightly as they fell, until they grew to a small pile: an inch-high gathering of gray, dead dust. With a peak at the top like a mountain. And small as it was, it seemed like a mountain because the air had conjured it.
“He was right here!” Boone said, slapping Robert’s back so hard that it hurt. But Boone hadn’t meant any harm, because his face was full of that too-big grin. “Musta been standing close by the whole time! I ain’t never seen one caught so fast! Ain’t never seen one, not like that.”
Boone looked at Robert with wide-eyed wonder the way a small child might. “I knew it,” Boone said, nearly whispering. “Soon as I drove you through the flames. Most boys, they don’t feel a thing, maybe just get an itch. But you? You felt it all right. You felt every lick.”
Boone watched and waited to see if more dust would come or the pile would grow, but it had all happened within a few breaths. If either of them had turned their heads, they would have missed the falling dust and only seen the pile left behind.
Boone’s hands were shaking as he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a laboratory tube and a brush like the one Mama used to paint her cheeks and a miniature dustpan. Working carefully again like an artist, he swept up the dust and shook it into the jar, hissing behind his teeth if he dropped a single speck. The dust wasn’t as impressive in the jar, a thin layer across the bottom, but it was perfectly visible. Boone admired the jar in the light, and all of the boys behind them tried to see it too. At the bottom of the tube, the prick of a miniature firefly’s flare came and went so quickly that Robert was sure he was the only one who’d seen it. He couldn’t have named the color: not golden, not bronze. Something in between.
Robert turned to look for Redbone among the watching boys, but Redbone was gone. “Lookit, he’s a haint catcher!” Boone said. “All of y’all hearin’ bumps and jumpin’ at shadows can rest easy now. We won’t have no more haints in the flour bags and under your beds.” The boys—now ten or twelve of them at least—let out a cheer. The sound of their celebration helped unlock Robert’s stomach and make it seem less like he might throw up. Instead of thinking about the white boy with the knife in his back, who had actually died long ago, Robert took in the happy eyes and smiles all around him. Would it matter if Redbone wasn’t his friend? He would have many friends now.
When Boone looked down at him, Robert wondered if it was sweat or happy tears falling from the big man’s eyes. “Warden Haddock’s gonna be so pleased,” Boone said. “When the warden’s happy, we all git a piece. You go an’ eat—have all the sweets you want. No more cornfield. No more kitchen. The only job you got now is catching haints.” His face glowed.
Before Robert could finish fixing his plate of stew and runny mashed potatoes, the younger boy who’d fooled him because his height was so close to Blue’s was tugging on Robert’s shirt to ask if he could sit at his table. “Haints keep me up all night,” the boy said. Up close, he was gap-toothed, nothing like Blue.
“Me too,” said another. “Bad enough we stuck in here, but we got haints too?”
Robert had filled a table before he took his seat. A crowd of boys raced for the seats nearest to him, then at the edges, until all eight seats were taken and a few boys were left standing with their trays, jostling for space behind him.
“You got some nice boots,” a cross-eyed boy told Robert. “Where’d you get ’em?”
“From my papa,” Robert said. He was glad to speak of Papa with pride instead of shame. Every boy agreed they were the finest boots they had ever seen.
“You gotta have good boots to be a haint catcher, you know,” one said wisely.
Robert told the boys how he’d caught the kitchen haint, although it was a flimsy story because he’d only pointed the way. He remembered how Redbone exaggerated his stories and added, “I could smell where he was. Like a coal burning in the stove.”
Two or three boys gasped like it was the most amazing thing they had ever heard. In return, the boys told Robert how the captured haint had surprised them around corners and hidden in the cabinets and whispered curses in their ears. How once it had spilled a whole bag of rice on the floor and gotten three boys sent to the Funhouse. How it had left a burner lit and caused a grease fire. Every wrong they could imagine, it seemed, was laid at the feet of the haint Robert had caught.
Robert almost believed every word.
* * *
Sleep was impossible. Robert didn’t feel natural sleeping on his stomach, but his back was still sore. And the awful heat in the dormitory still hung everywhere, made worse because every breath he took felt used up by someone else. And Robert’s mind was racing in circles. All he saw when he closed his eyes were those odd flecks of dust falling from the air into a pile. And he heard the awful scream. He remembered the freckled face of the boy with the knife in his back. A stranger had stabbed that boy to kill him, but Robert might have stolen his soul. Thinking of it, Robert trembled despite the heat. “I’m sorry,” he whispered through tears.
Redbone had not looked Robert’s way once before bed, avoiding him in the shower room, the radio room, and the dorm before the lights went out. Robert had hoped to explain himself to Redbone, but what could he say? He was a haint catcher. Everyone knew it now. And what if Mama was drawn to that spot like the stabbed boy? Would he return to the kitchen tomorrow and find another small pile of dust? Robert was so anxious to know that he wanted to fling off his thin blanket and sneak out to the kitchen to see. Only his memory of the Funhouse kept him in bed, his mind wide-awake and worried.
Although Robert was on his stomach, his scarred back sweating in the dark, he felt someone above him, just out of his sight. The tiny hairs across the back of his neck quivered, and the sweat on his back changed to ice water. He hoped it was Redbone ready to talk to him at last—a daring move after lights-out—but even before he turned his neck slightly to try to see, straining his muscles, he knew it wasn’t Redbone visiting his bed. Robert’s eyes looked up, only his eyes moved, and he was relieved no haints were floating above him in retaliation.
But then he saw a kneecap. Someone was sitting cross-legged on his headboard, someone small with impossible balance, and he didn’t have to look further to know it was Blue. Blue still smelled like the cornfield. Now that Robert noticed it, he smelled faintly of soot.
“Don’t you touch me,” Robert whispered, “or I’ll call for Boone.” He sounded braver than he felt; his heartbeat was banging hard against the mattress.
“That was wrong,” Blue said, not a whisper but not loud. “What you did to Clint.”
Well, if that didn’t beat all. A haint telling him he was in the wrong when a haint had no business trying to talk to living folk! Robert was ready to tell Blue to go back where he’d come from, but hot shame clamped his mouth. Another tear came to the corner of his eye.
“I tried to tell you, didn’t I?” Blue said. “Haddock’s the worst of the worst. And now you doin’ just like he said, so that makes you the worst of the worst too.”
