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By Root 800 0

yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated. I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets. This was the lesson, perhaps, that I was sent to learn: The old life was worth having at any expense. Had Theresa been imprisoned, she would have guessed the moral after five minutes. I would know, wouldn’t I, when I got out, what things were worthy of complaint? Maybe there was value in going to jail to weigh the feelings I had for Howard, to determine if the scale would tip one way or the other. I thought so often last summer of the pond all those years ago, when Howard and I swam back and forth that first night in Prairie Junction. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the last year, but I could remember and find sense in that single evening in the past. At face value it had been a dip on a hot night. But it was something else too, I could see that now, something on the order of a baptism, a kind of blessing. It had been impossible to see at the time, to understand what was taking place right under our noses. Without minister and feast and candlelight and absolution, our swim had marked a beginning.

When I returned to the pod after the incident an unexpected change had taken place. I came through the door, and just as happened on my first entrance, the girls stopped their talk. They stared unabashedly as I made my way to the cell with my white bandage wrapped around my head like a squashed turban. I looked beaten, my hair was gone, but I did my best to stand up straight. I moved slowly across the floor without looking to the left or to the right. They watched me walk. I had lived, presumably still capable of telling the story, whatever it was, while Dyshett and Janet scratched at the walls of their cells across the corridor.

It was Sherry who came to my side just as I got into bed, who gave me a hand. She may have known that I had doctor’s orders to rest and as much Demerol as I wanted. “She don’t know what hit her,” Sherry whispered.

“Who?” I said.

“Dyshett,” she answered. “You took it, like a sponge or somethin’, you jus’ soak all a her—” She wasn’t sure what to call Dyshett’s fury. “She screamin’ at you somethin’ fierce after you knock over—she screamin’ at Janet to kick at you. Big dumb Janet was like, ‘Huh?’ But you, you was somethin’ all raggy on the floor but we knowed you got strength inside a you. You wasn’t using it except you was too using it. We been tryin’ to figure that out ever since.”

She held my stiff back as I eased down into the mat. “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.” She squinted at me as if my halo was hurting her eyes. “I don’t have any idea what happened,” I mumbled.

“Some of them, Natasha, Hilda, Rita, they say Dyshett and Janet beat on you. But the way it happens—and I seen it, I seen every move—Dyshett jus’ about ready to get you and you do it for her, you take all a her and dump over wid it. I tell myself, don’t get involved with this scene because there ain’t nobody goin’ to see it the same way. I tell myself, the Almighty’s takin’ over this picture. I seen you, with the grin on your face like you at heaven’s gate. And then you bump over, slam, head goes on the table, and then you fall to the floor, smack, head goes on the cement. The way I see it the whole story is one big trap, only I can’t figure out who got caught.”

“Dyshett didn’t hurt me?” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Let’s put Debbie’s pillow under here too,” she said, lifting my head and sliding the flat pillow under me. “She don’t need it with all her padding. No, it make Dyshett lose her mind a little. She not used to people jus’ takin’ her, right in the face. She been fighting her whole life and people been fighting back. You sat like you some dead sponge, soakin’ her up. Maybe you got so full a her you can’t take it no more, you jus’ drop over with all that shit she give off. When the guard ax what happen, she look at him like she a poor little lost lamb who accidentally kill her best schoolteacher. She don’t even