Chapter 3 - THE MUSIC ABOVE THE WALLS
The first state response arrived after six years of letters.
A clerk from Augusta informed Warden Ketteridge that the legislature had allocated two hundred dollars for books and requested that the inmate responsible stop writing.
Caleb read the letter twice.
Then he smiled.
Elias, standing beside him, shook his head.
“You're going to stop?”
“Of course.”
He began writing twice a week.
Donations followed.
Church groups sent novels. A college sent old encyclopedias. Families mailed boxes of paperbacks that had sat untouched in attics. One shipment contained several records and a battered phonograph donated by a music society in Boston.
Caleb found the record late one afternoon.
Mozart.
He stood alone in the new library, which now occupied two rooms and contained actual desks, reading lamps and shelves built by prisoners in the woodshop.
The guard assigned to him had stepped into the corridor.
Caleb looked at the record.
Then at the prison's public-address microphone.
Later Elias would insist Caleb had planned what happened.
Caleb always denied it.
He claimed the decision lasted less than ten seconds.
He locked the library door.
Placed the record on the turntable.
Lowered the needle.
Then switched on the prison-wide microphone.
Two women's voices rose through Blackridge.
The sound drifted into workshops, corridors and the exercise yard. Men carrying laundry stopped walking. Guards looked toward speakers bolted into ceilings. Conversations faded.
Elias stood in the yard with his face tilted upward.
He did not understand Italian.
Neither did Caleb.
It did not matter.
For several minutes, the prison sounded like somewhere else.
Men who had spent decades measuring life in whistles and steel doors listened to music that had not asked permission to enter.
Ketteridge reached the library first.
He hammered against the locked door.
“Whitmore!”
Caleb leaned back in the chair.
For perhaps the only time in all his years at Blackridge, his smile was completely unguarded.
He turned the volume higher.
The punishment was two weeks in solitary confinement.
When Caleb returned, thinner but strangely peaceful, Elias asked whether it had been worth it.
Caleb sat against the yard wall.
“Easiest two weeks I ever did.”
Elias stared at him.
“You lose your mind in there?”
“I had the music.”
“They don't allow records in solitary.”
Caleb tapped his temple.
“That's the part they can't reach.”
Elias shook his head.
“Hope will get you killed in here.”
Caleb looked across the yard.
“No. Hope is the reason this place hasn't already killed me.”
Elias disagreed.
He had survived Blackridge by expecting nothing.
A man who wanted nothing could not have much taken from him.
Caleb wanted things constantly.
Books.
Music.
A future he had no legal reason to believe existed.
That should have made him fragile.
Somehow it made him nearly impossible to break.
By 1963, Ketteridge's corruption had grown into an enterprise.
The state expanded prison work programs, and the warden offered Blackridge labor to municipalities and contractors at prices no private workforce could match. Prisoners resurfaced roads, cleared timber and built public structures.
Ketteridge took payments from businessmen desperate to avoid competition.
Sometimes they paid him to receive prison labor.
Sometimes they paid him not to bid.
Caleb handled the money.
He created a paper identity named Arthur Hale.
Arthur had a Social Security number.
Tax records.
A driver's license.
Bank accounts.
Investments.
He existed everywhere except in flesh.
Ketteridge believed Arthur Hale was simply a tool.
Caleb understood something the warden did not.
A man who existed only on paper could become almost anything.
Years earlier Elias had teased Caleb about the tiny rock hammer.
By the early 1960s, Caleb had gone through two of them.
He still carved stones.
Chess pieces mostly.
The hobby seemed harmless.
In 1964 Elias acquired a new poster for him, this one of Grace Kelly.
They were both older now.
Caleb's hair had begun graying at the temples.
Elias had stopped counting parole hearings after the fourth denial.
The new poster replaced one that had hung above Caleb's bed for years.
Elias watched him smooth the corners against the wall.
“You ever get tired of looking at women you can't meet?”
Caleb stepped back.
“Not especially.”
“You're a strange man.”
“So you've mentioned.”
Elias never examined the wall behind the poster.
May you like
No one did.
That was the point.
