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history. We ranged back to the nineteenth century and convict-leasing, and returned to the present, while he drove eighty down the winding state highway inmates call the Snake Road, the only way to and from the prison.

    My chances of finding reassurance and affirmation at Angola were much increased by Warden Cain’s determination to elicit the good in his men. And switching between Jesus and Attila the Hun, he himself was an example of the elevated within the Hobbesian. But there may have been yet another reason for my attraction to him. I cannot be sure it was a reason at all, and if it was, I cannot guess its importance, great or small. While Cain spoke of himself as the inmates’ father, he became, in a certain way, my own.
    My real father had spent his working life as a public health official. In tiny, rational ways he tried to improve upon human fallibility. His legacies were a study leading to child guards in the windows of New York City, and a more efficient Emergency Medical Service in Seattle. Undoubtedly, indirectly, his work had saved lives. Yet I had always been somewhat disappointed in it. There was something lacking in his pragmatic career, in his reasonableness that was so unshakable—and in his scorn for all things religious. Warden Cain was his opposite. Warden Cain wrestled with human fallibility on a giant scale, embodied in the convicts. He believed in miracles and meant to carry one out. He had preached to his inmates, most of whom lived in open dorms of sixty-four men, “You are your brother’s keeper. Your bed is your house, the aisle is the street, and two beds down is two houses down. That dorm is your neighborhood, and this is your community.”
    And meanwhile the convict club called the Toy Shop would give away 2,500 handmade wooden trucks and push-along grasshoppers through Head Start and Louisiana’s State School for the Deaf this Christmas! And the CPR team was even teaching policemen! Cain was the most unlikely healer, the most unlikely savior, a man whose very existence—warden inspiring respect and redemption in his inmates—defied my father’s rationalism.
    Just outside Baton Rouge, Cain pulled into a McDonald’s. When I looked confused, he explained that he had to talk business with a friend there before going on to his meeting with the state’s Civil ServiceCommission, to which he had been elected the sole employee representative. “I love McDonald’s,” he said with exuberance, pushing himself out of the car. “Those fries are killing me!”
    Then, as his press secretary trailed us inside, he handed her a ten-dollar bill. “You all treat yourselves.” It was the only meal of mine he ever paid for, and if it was a bribe for favorable writing it was the smallest one I’ve ever heard of. The moment was strange. He ordered and went off to talk business in a Formica booth, while we, the press secretary twenty-four years old and me nearing forty, took our trays to our own corner of the restaurant, as though to the children’s table.
    Before Cain and I separated, I mentioned something Johnny Brooks had told me: that he’d given Cain the buckle he’d won for all-around runner-up in last year’s rodeo.
    “That’s right. That’s a cherished gift. I couldn’t win it. I couldn’t win it in all my life. I keep it in my other office up at the Ranch House. He walked up to me and told me, ‘Warden, I want you to have this buckle. I want you to have this from me.’ It was all he had. I know that. I just told him thank you. He just wanted me to have it, and that felt really great.”
    Cain’s metamorphosis from high school agronomy teacher to warden was odd but not unique. Early in the century one man went straight from running a Baton Rouge hardware company to running Angola. A more recent predecessor had started his career selling fertilizer for Allied Chemical; a customer introduced him to the secretary of corrections, who appointed him to manage the business end of