Read God of the Rodeo for Free Online Page B

penitentiary farming; he rose directly to warden from there. For Cain, more solid personal connections had played a role. His brother was a long-entrenched state senator. Edwin Edwards, governor until recently, was a longtime associate. Cain, too, was made head ofagribusiness for the Department of Corrections; then, after running Dixon Correctional Institute, a smaller prison in the state, for thirteen years, he became Warden of Angola.
    His rule extended over the prison’s 18,000 acres, grounds larger than the island of Manhattan. And those grounds were lovely. Coming through the gate you drove down a corridor of trees, oak and cypress and crab apple. Farther on, in season, the dark pink blossoms of crape myrtle lined the road, and, year-round, flowers bloomed in neat beds beside the white slats of corral fences, flowers that seemed impossibly large and vibrant, bright yellow balls twice the size of a fist and purple spears long as hay grass. Then came the tall magnolias, budding white.
    The road arrived at Main Prison, but it was easy to look away from the barbed wire, at the fields. Long ago the flooding of the Mississippi left behind a sediment that made this low-lying acreage among the most fertile in the South. The darker, heavier earth of the surrounding areas was good; the alluvial soil of Angola was superb. Lift both in your hands and you could feel the difference in weight. It was easier to till. Gaze around and you could see what its minerals gave rise to. Okra and corn, eggplant and peppers, snap beans and tomatoes, and soy plants that started wispy and grew swiftly broad, so that within weeks their leaves merged into an endless cloud of green three feet off the ground, seemingly thick enough to walk on. And there was cotton, chest-high, in resilient, spiny rows running toward the levee.
    After the crops the graze land went for miles. Almost three thousand cattle fed in fields sprayed yellow with wildflowers. One hundred horses worked the prison, and a herd of mustangs owned its separate pasture. The tall, pitched banks of the levees held back a rushing bend in the Mississippi, which bordered the prison on three sides, but there was plenty of water on the grounds. Every road seemed to hit some shore of Lake Killarney, giving the constantchance to glimpse blue herons taking off in ungainly, graceful flight. In front of Camp F, where prisoners with the best records had unofficial freedoms, inmates fished for perch under the delicate leaves of pecan trees, and, in the fall, gathered up the thousands of pecans to shell and eat.
    Throughout Angola’s idyll the convicts lived in several fenced compounds, Main Prison and the outcamps. Barbed concertina wire, the coils piled three high, lined the tops and bottoms of the chain-link fences. Guard towers stood at the edges of the exercise yards. Cinder-block buildings, most of them one-story, most built in the 1950s, housed all the inmates. They contained the cavernous dorms, where the cots, with their inch-thick mattresses, stood two feet apart, and where each inmate lived out of two state-issued locker boxes, about 18 by 18 by 24 inches. The noise of huge industrial fans (there to reduce the risk of tuberculosis), and of the industrial-sounding steel toilets (partitionless and utterly exposed to the dorm-the men squatted in public), and of a single shared TV blaring above the fans and the flushing, and of a manual typewriter pecking out a convict’s seventy-second writ, all of it echoing off the cinder block, was relentless and difficult to talk over. Steam wafted nonstop from the showers, thickening the already hot, humid air, stagnant in the many places the fans didn’t reach. The fluorescent lights, too, were constant, lowered only to a security level blue after ten at night.
    Inmates convicted, in “D.B. court” by Angola’s disciplinary boards, of violations committed within the prison—sex offenses, drug offenses, violence, vandalism, or repeated