A MOMENT FROZEN IN TIME
THIS IS IT. You've waited the year for this week, and now it's here. You have your clothes packed, but Mom checks them to be sure they're clean and don't have any holes in the knees. She makes the call to the cab company, and in a little bit the cab arrives to take you on another of your annual journeys. The bus station smells of Lysol and beer; strange men look at your mom and the brood she is herding around. We sit and wait. Danny wants one of those stupid toys in the vending machine. Mom says no. She knows how much this whole thing is going to cost and doesn't have any extra; maybe later we can splurge but not now.
"Attention: Greyhound Bus for Columbus, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, now boarding at Gate 8." We cue up and step through the doors to the waiting bus. The smell of diesel engines tells me this is real. Mom hands over the tickets to the man at the well worn metal stand with all the baggage tickets hanging over the top. He eyes the family and tends to a few of the suitcases. The man at the gate punches the tickets one by one--he's seen this type of group before--and helps Mom get us all on board. We find our seats and scope out the other travelers,wondering if one of them has a guitar or a radio like other trips before. This will be our home for the next 18-24 hours and 400 miles if the weather is kind to us. Once we get south to Columbus, Ohio, U.S. Route 40 will be the only road we ride until we get to our destination, Terre Haute, Indiana. The super highways are not yet, so it is a two-lane road that hits every small town across the flat expanse of mid-west America. 25, 35, 50 mph and then the next town, reduce speed back down to 35, then 25, go through another town and then the routine repeats again and again. We watch the endless barren fields of last year's corn pass by. The moon follows along in the night, another Stuckey's Diner closed for the evening.
Somewhere in the night someone does pull out a radio and plays it quietly. Little Richard is playing "Too Tall Sally" and other tunes of the day, but the jam sessions with harmonicas and guitars of trips past do not happen. It's still dark when the bus pulls into Indianapolis. The Greyhound Bus center is new and white and brightly lit. Much unlike the many other stops before this. We are grateful that we're so close now but sleepy and tired of sitting. Gratefully, we have a chance to stretch and use a bathroom that isn't swaying. Another two or three hours and we will be in Terre Haute, a town in the Wabash Valley on the Indiana-Illinois border.
Funny that they always refer to this as "Wabash Valley," for the whole state is so flat that I can't see cause for the term "valley" anywhere. But it's Wabash this and Wabash that. I saw theWabash River during one of these trips. I have to say that, contrary to all the popular songs written at the time, I found it to be flat, stagnant, and totally uninspiring. Steve Martin once caught hell for making the comment that Terre Haute was THE most boring town he had ever been to. Sorry, Terre Haute, but he was totally correct.
Just about daybreak, we roll into that town. It still smells the same--bad. No matter where you go, you smell it, the paper mill. Or was it the whiskey distillery? Whatever it was, it was pervasive and constant. It always reminded me of dead fish, and it hung in the air with a thickness of dense fog. The cab to the motel is exciting. We love to watch the meter click, but Mom doesn't share our interest. She pays the man, and we get our room that will be our home-away-from-home for the next two days. At least we don't have to stay with that family again, the ones that were from some Christian help group. They were nice, but staying in someone else's home was kind of odd. Better to be in our own motel room. Mom, knowing her purse, wished otherwise.
The cab arrives to take us to visit. The cabbie knew from the dispatcher where he was going ahead of time. "So, you want to go to the prison?" No address was needed. It almost seemed cruel the way he asked. Where else would a woman with five children be headed in this small town? He heads out of town down the highway and turns off a side road not unlike all the other side roads around here. More barren corn fields pass by until you can see the buildings in the distance, the smoke stack, the barbed wire. Long before you get to any of these is the front gate.
No one is there, but the driver, having done this before, stops at the small box. "Visitor arriving," he speaks. The box clicks and the voice says, "Name and number of the inmate." My mother leans towards the driver's window and speaks louder than normal: "Charles E. Sparks.....number 233334." My heart sags a bit hearing my own name minus the Jr. and the number that I think I will never forget spoken as if the two are inseparably joined forever.
"Very good, proceed to the main entrance please," the voice instructs, and the driver pulls away, drawing us closer to the tall barbed wire fence. We are dropped off, and Mom asks that he return around a quarter to five. He nods an affirmative. As Mom reaches for the heavy steel door that separates the outside from the inside, a buzzer rings angrily. I look and spot the man in the towers watching us. I can see what looks like a machine gun in his hands. Once inside, we hear the door slam shut with a loud permanent "clack!" I am aware we will only leave again if allowed.
The main front building is old, but well kept, built in a time when government buildings were stately and had fine stonework facades, not like today's modern cheapness. Inside the front entrance doors, the room opens into a large central hall with a desk in the center. The floors are waxed shiny and perfect. A man with a short crew-cut has Mom sign us in. "Mrs. Alice Sparks, children Nancy, Charles Jr., Daniel, Mary Ellen, Jacqueline, 8:54 a.m." Done, we're in.
There is a man buffing the floor with a heavy industrial buffer. He moves slow and with attention to his work. I can tell he is an inmate by his light tan uniform and black shoes. The man at the desk picks up the phone and makes a call. We are led down a long hallway with portraits of some men in officer's uniforms on the walls to another locked door that is the waiting room. The guard pulls out his key ring and selects a large, wide, flat key unlike any I have ever seen before. As he slides the key in and turns it, you can tell this is a serious lock. Every door in this place looks like it could weigh 300 pounds.
The waiting room is pleasant: inmates' paintings in frames on the light green walls and a row of vending machines with big red and green cushioned art-deco lounge chairs. Other people are also waiting, about fifteen or twenty groups. Other children sit quietly, maybe scared, alongside their mothers. Danny and I go over to the door to the large visiting room and look in across to the other side where Dad will eventually emerge. The visiting room is empty, and all the chairs and tables are arranged with precision. One single-person lounge chair on one side of a flat coffee-style table and a wider lounge chair of the same style across from it. More art works are hung in this room as well. The artists seem fond of horses. Later I found out that the inmates are not allowed to paint women, so they do horses. These horses all have some very nice legs.
There is a nervous quiet, a calmness in the waiting room, until the sound of a distinct clack from the door on the far side of the visiting room breaks the stillness. Men start to proceed through the door single-file until Dad's face appears. He looks smaller that I always remember him. His eyes pierce around the empty room, nervous and unsure. He, like the others, takes a chair of his choosing and sits down. There is a guard at a desk just inside the visiting room. He stands and unlocks the door for us to enter. We must not run or move too quickly, Mom warns us again. We say OK. The other visitors gather around the door and are let in. Finally we make it through and head over to Dad's table. He beams a big smile, so do we, but first he hugs Mom long and hard. She hugs back equally. We can tell the deep emotions going through them right then. It is hard to watch for some reason. Dad hugs us trying to do everyone at once. We are all over him, and he laughs with joy.
What was said during this visit, or any of the other visits over those six years, I cannot say. I don't remember the words, just the feelings. The happiness, the sadness, the sense of unfairness that this all has to be. I remember the box lunches purchased from the prison--large white boxes that had home-made-bread sandwiches with meat from animals raised on the prison's farm. Everything in those box lunches except the condiments came from the prison. So did the chairs and tables in the visitng room. An inmate with a Polaroid camera would take photos for $2.00--a good amount of money for a mother on "public assistance" back in 1967. We would always get a photo. Don't ask me what ever happened to those old black and white pictures, I don't know. A lot of things were lost back then, photos being only one of them.
Part of what was lost was a part of me. That prison took a part of me, or maybe I took a part of that prison with me, forever. If you are old enough, you can always recall where you where when Kennedy was shot or the Challenger went up in flames. Those visits were much like that--30 years later--forever frozen in time.