"We was digging the foundation and broke into a hole," declares Loy Patrick sliding his metal food tray onto a wooden picnic table in the darkening mess tent at the end of a long work day.
"You don't say! How deep?" Oil whispers, leaning across the table over his mushy plate of red beans and cornbread.
"Ain't seed bottom," the moonshiner murmurs back without knowing why they needed quiet, "but a stone dropped a ways."
The prison site at LaGrange is at the outer edge of a karst region in which limestone in the soil had been washed down over millennia to leave a dry surface favoring drought-resistant grasses. Underground rivulets gradually created a vast cave system draining into the Kentucky River basin. Rainwater runs into those caverns through surface sinkholes scattered throughout the nutrient-poor grasslands that would become prized for raising lighter and faster thoroughbreds.
The two-hundred inmates transferred over from the flooded Frankfort prison had been assigned the grunt work for construction of the new reformatory. A group of six prisoners bunked and labored together in a newly conceived team model of rehabilitation for non-violent offenders. The completed penitentiary would have dormitories with open floor plans to foster interaction instead of the traditional individual cells.
"What building is you working on?" continues Oil, trying to look Loy in his wandering eye.
"That old guard said the basement'll be a slaughterhouse."
"Tell you what, jam a sheet of plywood in and cover it with rocks and dirt."
"I declare, Oil's gonna run into a hole in the ground!"
"Keep it down hillbilly! A secret storage place might come in handy someday."
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