The Walls
It was the worst of times; the age of foolishness; the epoch of disbelief; the season of darkness; the winter of despair. The Depression had been in full swing for just over three years. Our only hope was heaven because, on Friday, December 2nd, 1932, we were already in hell— leastways, those of us workin at “Walls” in Wetumpka, Alabama had no reason to think otherwise.
Walls or “Walls of Alabama” are the nicknames we gave the Wetumpka State Penitentiary on account of the twenty-five-foot-high walls surroundin the prison. Walls was a co-ed prison durin the Depression, segregatin men and women in different barracks.
December in central Alabama possessed the kind of cold that gnawed at your bones and made you think twice about drawin your next breath. Dawn light broke weakly over Walls, bleedin pale gold into the black silhouettes of the tall concrete and iron partition. I stood in the yard, hands shoved deep in my coat pockets, watchin my breath curl in the air like smoke from a dyin fire.
Even in winter, the air here carried a sourness. Most folks couldn’t place it. But I could. I’d learned to live with it the way you live with an ache in your teeth— you try to forget it’s there, but it never lets you.
But worse than the cold on the seasonal eve of 1933, was the smell. Evil had a scent— I know y’all are goin to think I’m crazy, but it was my “gift,” for lack of a better way to put it— and the Walls always had a little bit of sin’s aroma lingerin in the cracks.
Today, it was stronger.
I was warmin my hands over a tin mug of coffee in the mess hall when Frank Minter plopped into the seat across from me. Frank was the oldest guard on staff— thin as a rail, with a white moustache that always seemed dusted with tobacco.
“You keep sniffin round like that,” he said, stirrin sugar into his cup, “you’ll find somethin you wish you hadn’t. Some things best stay in the dark, young buck.”
I didn’t say anythin. Just stared into the swirl of black coffee, the steam curlin like a ghost’s breath. I’d learned a long time ago that what a man didn’t know could kill him just as fast as what he did. Sometimes faster.
I’d been at Walls for over a decade, since comin home from France after the Great War. My ma called me a fool for enlistin at fifteen, and maybe she was right. By the time I was eighteen, I’d marched through mud, carried men on my shoulders who wouldn’t live to see another sunrise, and killed more Huns than I cared to count.
Work here suited me. Followin orders weren’t no different than the army. Guard duty too. A post where you kept your back straight and your mouth shut. The pay was poor, the food worse, but in the middle of the Great Depression, I was lucky to have it.
Everythin changed when the fire gutted Speigner Prison. The whole lot of prisoners— men and women— were brought here. Overcrowdin turned the place sour. Not just in noise and filth, but in the smells. Petty thieves stank like stale milk; killers, like meat was rottin on a cobblestone walk in the summer at high noon. And then there were the ones I couldn’t even describe— smells that made my stomach twist and my head pound.
The new arrivals brought more than stink. They brought something that clung to the air like mold, something that made even the chapel feel unclean.
Thankfully, Speigner guards escorted a good many of the prisoners to the mills in Elmore County daily, which kept us from feelin too claustrophobic. The weekend was upon us, however; and from Friday evenin until Monday mornin, we would be asked to accommodate, to make due, to put up with.
I ain’t complainin, mind you. I know I said it before, but I’ll say it again, that in these times of woe and want, I’m lucky to have a job. Many farmers all over the state have had to leave their families, or their land altogether, to work in the mills and foundries of Anniston, Huntsville, and Birmingham— if they got work at all. Thousands upon thousands lost jobs in the Birmingham steel and iron industry.
The Stench
It was the second night of their stay. I was posted in the east block when I saw him— tall, pale, the kind of face you’d pass on the street and forget before you’d taken your next step. Only I didn’t forget him.
He stood by the bars of his cell, as casual as a fella takin a factory smoke break. He was whisperin to the man across the corridor. I couldn’t cipher a single word. All I could make out was the low hiss of breath on stone. Then, without warnin, the other man’s voice exploded into a scream— a high, shrill, like a greased pig tryin to evade capture from a bunch a teenage boys at the state fair in Dothan.
I ran. Keys clattered in my hands. But by the time I reached him, the prisoner was on the floor, eyes wide and blind, mouth frozen in a rictus. The fella was dead as a church pew on Monday mornin.
The pale man had stepped back into the shadows. His face was unreadable. His smell… God help me. A stench, really. It was like bad incense smolderin on a dug-up coffin.
I didn’t put the incident in my report. It’s not because I didn’t want to— I couldn’t. What would I write? That a man whispered another to death? That the scent of the offender was enough to make my teeth ache from a distance, and pungent enough to kill a man a few feet away?
Old Frank told me to chalk it up to bad nerves and bad health. “Hell, young buck, man coulda had a heart ready to bust. You want me to write that you smelled him to death?”
I tried to leave it alone. But the smell didn’t leave me alone. It followed me back to my quarters. It seeped into my clothes. It jumped into my cot, tucked itself in, and wormed its way into my dreams. Lordy, in the mornin, it was right there, joinin me for the first cup of coffee of the day.
I told myself to keep my head down, work my shift, and wait for Monday when the mill crews would clear half the cells again.
But some part of me already knew— by Monday, it might be too late.
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