"They's a hanging tree back a the corn field," whispers the field hand wriggling around in the slight breeze coming in from a small window above the top bunk.
"Things ain't that bad yet," titters the kitchen aid from the stifle of the bottom bed in their dorm room.
"Only ears'll be swinging in that wind," Waters chortles into the shadows of their first private room since the flood. "Takes dried corn to make that mash, don't it?"
"Yep, give 'em two weeks in this heat and we're in business," groans Oil tossing off the thin sheet in the swelter of a bluegrass Indian summer.
The inmates had just been moved into the dormitory of the nearly completed reformatory building. The official opening date was to be 1940, but Governor Happy Chandler, in keeping with his humanitarian prisons plan, decided to get the construction crew out of the tent city before winter by moving the dedication ceremony up to October 4, 1939.
The new prison was Chandler's experiment in social rehabilitation. The ten-floor main structure had staff quarters, dining hall, hospital, and vocational school besides the twelve housing wings. There would be mental health and visitation buildings beside the tower, and even a cemetery for the indigent was being scratched out back behind the chicken coops. Dorms were initially set up with common rooms for group interaction, unfettered access to outdoor space, and private rooms with self-selected bunk mates.
It's a heady experience to be picked as a roommate for the first time. Oil and Waters were solitary men who'd made it in the world by individual entrepreneurial ingenuity. The former bus company owner hadn't known intimacy for more than ten years after being booted from his family for impregnating the oldest daughter. The ex-longshoreman had only ever known the occasional lonely hobo and had come to crave their rough treatment thrust onto him on the Covington docks.
"Tell you what little buddy," begins Oil settling on his back beside his diminutive roommate on the narrow twin of the upper bunk. "Leave a space inside the crates they're trucking down to Louisville next week."
"Big man like you'll never fit under all that corn," Waters worries.
"It's a test run for our product, silly."
"I get caught and you might as well dig me a hole on Chicken Hill."
"Don't fret yourself!" chides Oil sliding his big hand around Waters small one. "That crate space'll be empty this first run."
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