Читать книгу The Blackest Bird - Joel Rose - Страница 32

17

The Bridge of Sighs

The door from the Hall of Justice opens and Tommy Coleman is led in. As young as he is, the accused is already as hardened a cove as there is in local environs. He is aware as all eyes turn on him. He heeds not a single soul.

Following his arrest, his hearing has just ended. Across the Bridge of Sighs he comes, escorted by two prison guards, one of whom tap-tap-taps his keys like castanets against the iron handrails.

The Tombs is arranged in four tiers with catwalks skirting each. Each catwalk is connected to the next by stairs, a bridge spanning the two sides of each gallery. On each bridge a guard sits idly reading or dozing. On the ground floor an iron Franklin stove sits idly, ready to heat the whole; diffuse light filters down from a skylight above the fourth tier.

Next to the cold stove, High Constable Jacob Hays sits. As he is led to his cell, Tommy Coleman, the unrepentant youth, feels Hays’ eyes boring in on him. He chooses not to meet them, staring down at his feet instead.

He is escorted to a cell on the first tier. A key is fitted to the lock by a harelipped keeper, and the door, reminiscent of that fronting a furnace, replete with small grated window, swings open.

“Step inside, hardbody,” the jailer says, removing the boy’s leg irons and wrist shackles before prodding him inside. “That’s a good young feller.”

The door clangs shut, the lock reengaged. The keeper smirks and is gone. His flat footfalls slap the granite cobblestones of the cell block.

It is late October yet warm, Indian summer. Still the prison floors are chilled and damp. Tommy gives his cell the once-over. Stone floor, stone walls, iron-barred window and door. A wooden slops bucket in the corner reeks of human waste. He knows all too well, from the experience of his brother Edward before him, that this is death row, and no rabbit-sucker was meant to leave this place alive.

He has made peace with his fate. If asked, he would not have said he was innocent. He would have said he was guilty.

But he considers murder too strong a word for what he has done.

What he has done, Tommy Coleman, is kill, and if he had to do it all over, he would have killed again, just the same.