Chapter 17

“Can you tell me about it?” I ask.

He gets up, pulls a blanket around him, walks around the room, then takes a chair by the fire while I wait.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to speak on it,” I tell him, “but I think it might help if you do. Bottling things up is bad for the digestion.”

“I never told anybody.”

“Well, I’m not just anybody, am I? We’re getting pretty close and whatever gets said in here remains private. I am not one to talk out of turn.”

“I thought prison would be like jail. They put you in a cell, work you some, and you do your time. But it wasn’t that way. They had some fool idea that keeping men in solitary would reform them. I was brought into the prison with a hood over my head so I wouldn’t see other prisoners. I was put into a cell alone and that was it.”

“Did you get out to do some work or take exercise?”