Epilogue

     An aunt once warned me "Be careful what you look for! You might not like what you find." Such was the case for my paternal grandfather. Family lore held only that he was booted from the family by Granny Beatty for his drinking. It was up to the grandchildren to unearth the rest of his story - the successful early bus company and garage, the bootlegging during Prohibition and beyond, the flight to Kentucky, the extradition from New Jersey, and the imprisonment back in Kentucky.  

     Orville Leslie Beatty remained a prisoner at the Kentucky State Reformatory without parole for the duration of his five-year sentence for grand larceny and illegal distribution of alcohol. Upon release in 1942, he was able to secure a job as a conductor for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, living estranged from the family in Wheeling, West Virginia until his death at the age of sixty-eight in 1948. 

      Governor Happy Chandler's experiment in humane rehabilitation at the new Kentucky State Reformatory apparently worked for my grandfather, but the prisoner allowances for interaction and free movement were soon rescinded. A series of escapes and dormitory fights in the early 1940s brought the return to locked cells and restricted movement. By then, Chandler had moved on from politics to become the second commissioner of professional baseball, succeeding Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1945. 

     It was a delightful surprise of the writing process to discover a prison romance, but nothing in family history corroborates this particular fiction. While the attempted escape of black inmates through the women's building during the flood of 1937 is accurately portrayed, a crossover to the white side and subsequent escape of a prisoner named Robert Waters is entirely fictional, though a later stowaway attempt in a compartment created by stacks of license plates did occur. 

     Historical fiction is tricky writing, risking family alienation and non-family boredom. It's my hope that this attempt at minimizing both is as entertaining for the reader as it was insightful for the writer. In penning it, I came to know more of the man who had become a ghost in the family through his own actions, offering him a small measure of forgiveness and redemption.

      

     

Chapter 13: Plea Bargain

     "Well inmate, we know all about you and Waters," retorts Warden James Hammond to Oil's denial of any knowledge of the whereabouts of his bunk mate. "Sodomy is a felony in Kentucky."

"We just share a bunk," contends Oil standing in front of the large desk on the top floor of the tower and trying hard to keep eye contact despite a view of the distant Ohio River valley out the picture window.

"Tell us how he escaped and we'll see about dropping the bootlegging charges. You'd be eligible for parole in a year."

     Oil was no novice to plea bargaining. He hadn't hesitated to point the finger toward an out-of-state son when the Pennsylvania state police traced an intentionally burnt out car to his former bus garage. The favor was returned five years later when that son was arrested for bootlegging in Kentucky and named his father as the kingpin to save his own skin.

     He would be sixty in December and, like any older person, knew that an intimate relationship ending might mean never again. Ratting out Waters for stowing away in the corn shipment might shorten his incarceration by a year or two, but it would be the death sentence for his diminutive young companion to be shipped to the notoriously violent maximum security penitentiary known as the Castle on the Cumberland.

     "Sorry Warden," Oil mumbles down at his worn black boots to hide the welling tears.

"In that case Orville, we're sending out the flying unit to hunt down your bunk mate. Do you have anything else to add that might save Waters?"

"Roll on," Oil mulls across the broad floodplain, balding forehead reflecting a wan sunset with arms hanging limp and hands held forward by the manacles binding his wrists for another five years.