Like every other weekday, the old men were gathered around their table there at the general store, eating their burgers and fries, or their chicken sandwiches, if they happened to be watching their diet, catching up on the news and trying to make sense of all that was happening around them. Just like any other day, until the Sheriff’s patrol car pulled in to the pumps. They watched the deputy sling the door open and jump out, then rush back to the car and poke his head in through the open window. Then in a flash he rushed in to the little store where they were all sitting, right up to the counter.
“Scottie, you got a pay phone I can use real quick?”
“Well, sure, Jimmy Lee, there at the back wall right beside the freezers.”
“Good!” the deputy said, and rushed towards the back. Then, “A quarter, Scottie, you got a quarter?”
“Sure, I’ll bring you one,” then grabbed some coins, took his mop and followed the deputy to the back.
“This is private, Scottie!”
“Of course, Jimmy, of course.”
Scottie fell into mopping the floor there near the freezers. Jimmy Lee made the call.
“Cindy, this is me. I ain’t got much time, so listen close. I heard on the police car radio they’re having a riot out at the old parish prison. The prisoners’ll probably be busting down the front gates any minute. And it’s even worse than that. Now I want you to lock the doors, and don’t let anybody you don’t personally know into the house. Now you know where I keep my extra gun. Load that damn thing, and be on high alert. You got it?”
“You said it’s worse?”
“It is. The warden is dead. You know what a good guy he is….he was. I heard it come over my police radio. I couldn’t tell if he was choked to death, or if one of them animals got him into a bear hug and squeezed him till he broke his spine. I heard them dispatching an ambulance to the prison. Probably should have sent a hearse. Now Cindy, honey, you know I’ve got to go out there. It’s my job. If I don’t come back, you know I love you. Gotta go!”
Scottie had slowly moved away from the freezers back toward the front of the store, and waited. “Jimmy Lee, I wasn’t listening in…I ain’t that kind… but your voice sure sounded awful tense just then!”
“All I can do is tell you what I know,” said Jimmy Lee. And so he did, finishing with a firm, “Now, you didn’t hear this from me,” then left in a rush.
The men sat quietly. One of the men, Doyle Marlar, broke the silence.
“I better call my brother Merle. They live there on the road right down from the prison. Got to warn ‘em.”
Brother Harold Richardson sat quietly. Tearfully. “Warden George Henry was the finest man I ever broke bread with. I can’t believe he’s gone. You reckon his wife even knows?”
Even before the words passed his lips, he knew the answer. She did not know, else he would have been the first to have heard from her.
“I wish this hadn’t fallen to me,” he said, and got up from the table.
“I tell you where it all went wrong,” said Scottie, “was when we let the liberals call that place a detention center instead of what it was, a damn prison!”
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It was well past noon, and the two Witnesses had already put in a full day.
“Lord ought to be proud of us today,” said the younger of the two, remembering when he used to drink beer, and thinking of how good a cold one would taste right now.
“Just a few more places and we’ll call it done,” the older one said. “There’s a house down this little lane. Just park here and we’ll walk up and talk to the folks inside.”
There at the house, Merle had just hung up the phone with his brother, Doyle.
“Load up my pistols, Hazel! Lock the doors. Them prisoners gonna’ be surprised if they come trying to hide out here. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ sayeth the Lord. But I’m gonna’ help him get to it a little faster!”
He had just finished loading his shotgun when he heard knocking at the front door. He carefully looked out the picture window. Two men, one older, one young and bearded. Dressed in clothes that didn’t quite fit them, as Merle saw it. Carrying something, and acting a little strange.
In one violent motion, he flung the front door open, and levelled the shotgun at the two missionaries. “Fine clothes you got on there. What the hell did you do with the good people you killed and stole ’em from?”
The two Witnesses froze in place, staring at the barrel of the gun. “Thought you’d catch us by surprise, I reckon. You hold still while Hazel ties you up. Don’t you move a muscle or say a word, or you’ll wish you’s back in that prison.”
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The pastor walked up to the front door, tears in his eyes. When the woman came to the door, he broke down crying, “Patricia, I wish this sad task hadn’t fallen to me. But it has. But it has. No easy way to say it. George is dead. Killed by his own goodness. Always loving on them prisoners, treating them nice and all. But he’s gone.”
The woman was stunned. “Brother Harold, what are you saying? I spoke to George just this morning. He was fine. He and the inmates were about to have a big meal together, celebrating what a great year they all just had. You’re saying he’s dead?”
“He was killed by one of those very prisoners,” Brother Harold said. “Choked to death, like he didn’t even amount to anything. I got it straight from the deputy’s mouth. They cracked his spine open, even, is what Jimmy Lee said.”
The woman fell to the ground. She came to, her head spinning, and looked around at a world she did not recognize. Tried to speak, but no words came forth.
“Patricia, I know this is a hard thing we got to do, but you’re going to have to go and identify him. I guess there at Parish General. It’s one of the last things we’ll be able to do for him.”
“I wish this task hadn’t fallen to me.”
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The warden was signing the last of the discharge papers there at the hospital. Even signing papers was hard and painful, with his newly broken rib. His assistant, always knowing what was needed, pushed a wheelchair up beside him.
“Sit yourself down, George Henry,” she commanded, and he did. “We’re taking you home, and you’re taking some days off.
“We’ve had some wild days there at the place, Janie, but this one just about takes the cake.”
“I told you to slow down,” she said, “eating too fast and talking your head off, making those dumb jokes and laughing at ‘em like you hadn’t told ‘em a hundred times before.”
“I was having a great time,” he said.
“Great time, my ass, George Henry! What if big old Dominique hadn’t known how to do the Heimlich maneuver? We’d be calling your wife to come and identify your body.”
“Yes, I guess you would,” he said.
“You’re lucky that broken rib only stuck your lung, and not your heart. Of course, it wouldn’t have damaged your brain.”
At just this time, the warden’s wife and Brother Harold walked into the hospital. She saw him sitting there in the wheelchair, and fainted away for the second time that day.
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Sheriff Roy Naquin was the very epitome of steadiness, so he had taken it in stride when he first started getting calls about the prison riot and break-out. He’d actually been out to the prison that very morning for a cup of coffee and a quick game of chess with the warden, one of his best friends. If something was amiss, he knew he’d be the first to hear about it.
And yet….
The calls started coming in. Escaped prisoners trying to murder a couple, Hazel and Merle, living along the road. Some poor hitchhiker thrown into a trunk, taken out and handcuffed to the prison gates. Brother Harold Richardson trying to resign as pastor of the church. A couple of Jehovah Witnesses taken hostage at gunpoint. The warden’s wife in the hospital for some kind of nervous condition. Scottie Anders starting a petition to change the name of the parish detention center. Seemed like his peaceful little parish had gone collectively crazy.
Well, he leaned back and thought, at least Jimmy Lee hadn’t picked today to go off on another one of his wild tangents.
He thought about that a minute.
He spoke aloud: “Jimmy Lee…”
