Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [37]
“I restrained myself in the jail too and tried hard not to escape. I had determined to be a reasonable man, you see. I just sat tight and waited for my trial. No one that knew me would bail me out, and my mom didn’t have no cash. I had to stay in. It wasn’t easy. I had these funny kinds of sweats at times and hives come up over nine-tenths of my body, but still I held back from escaping.
“Now, this lawyer they got me said I ought to plead guilty. He said there wasn’t no question about it. I said I would be telling a falsehood, if I did that. I said I had been forced to wreck that place, had no choice in the matter whatsoever; Marvel Hodge just drove me to it. ‘Call that guilty?’ I said. ‘No sir, I’m pleading innocent.’ We argued back and forth some over that. And time was passing. Understand that every day was just stretching me one more inch beyond the breaking point. But I held tight, I held tight.
“Day before the trial, Mom brought me this letter. She was my only visitor, see. Sally, my sister, she wasn’t speaking to me. And naturally Marvel didn’t come. If he had of I’d have killed him. Broke out of my cell and killed him.
“Mom brought this letter from Mindy, one I showed you. Addressed to the house. Evidently Mindy hadn’t heard about my trouble. Her mother either didn’t know or hadn’t passed the news on, one; though I can’t imagine her missing the chance. Anyhow, here’s this letter, asking if I wanted for my son to be born in a prison. That tore me up, I tell you. Seems like I just went wild. How come this world has so many ways of tying a person down? Now there is no way I would sit by and let that happen.
“Next morning they come to take me to the courthouse and on Harp Street I slipped loose, with this one guard’s gun handy in my pocket. Nothing to it. They watch you less careful on the way to a trial; they know you’re thinking far ahead, got some hope of being cleared. Except me. I didn’t have no hope at all. I was like, barred, boxed in. Everybody carried such a set notion of me. I knew the only hope I had was to get away.
“How did I go so wrong? I thought I would clear a thousand at least, hitting that bank. Thought I would be free then and unencumbered. But here we are. Seems like everything got bungled. Every step was stupid, every inch of the way. Every move I made was worse than the one before.”
“You were just unlucky,” I told him. “Never mind.”
“When you think,” said Jake, “that I set all this in motion just to show I ain’t a bad man, don’t it make you want to laugh?”
Late in the afternoon we arrived in Linex, which seemed to be one very wide, empty street. We stopped in front of a grocery store to use the phone booth. “Now the name of this place is the Dorothea Whitman Home,” said Jake. He was leafing through the directory, which was no thicker than a pamphlet. His stubby finger slid down the columns. He had kept the door open and I looked past his shoulder to see, of all things, butterflies, spangling the yellow air. We truly had traveled; we’d left that cold false Maryland spring behind and found a real one. “Look!” I said, and Jake spun toward the door. “Butterflies,” I told him.
“Will you let me get on with this?”
I wasn’t wearing my raincoat any more and he had unzipped his jacket. We were showing whole new layers: identical white shirts. Glassed in the way we were, under the last of the sunlight, we both had a thin shine of sweat like plants in a greenhouse. “In Clarion, it may be snowing,” I said.
“Not likely,” said Jake. His finger had found its mark and stopped. “Dorothea Whitman Home,” he said. “I’ll dial, you talk.”
“How come I have to talk?”
“You don’t think they’d let a man through.”
“I can’t imagine why not.”
“Well, I ain’t taking no chances. Ask for Mindy Callender, say it’s her aunt or something.”
He dropped in a dime and dialed. I pressed the receiver to my ear. A woman answered: “Whitman Home.”
“Mindy Callender, please,” I said.