Across the Fence
My mother is uneasy about living across from the prison. For the most part, she can ignore it. It’s a minimum-security work camp, and breakouts are rare. When she drives past in her minivan she doesn’t wave or stare at anyone. But on Mondays, she complains, she can’t mow, because she doesn’t feel comfortable. A decade ago some prisoners yelled “compliments” at her and whistled. My mother turns red when she tells me this and sets her jaw. This pains her, because my mother’s truest hobby is mowing. It seems that all of central Illinois loves to mow. The lawns here are plentiful and bountiful, and in the summer you can’t go from one neighborhood to another without hearing the drone of an old push mower or seeing someone bump through his yard on a John Deere rider. Even when the grass is as beige as her living-room carpet, as it was last summer, she’s out there trimming it to the nub. But on Monday mornings she stays in the house.
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When I was younger the school would call every now and then to tell us that boys had escaped. Mom would keep my two sisters and me in the house. “Don’t go outside,” she’d say. “The boys are out.” We’d lurk around the living-room windows until they were found. They’d run through our yard sometimes, though I never caught more than a glimpse of them. Before we’d moved there, a neighbor told me, a boy got out and climbed up one of the apple trees in the yard. About six or seven guards came over and milled around with their walkie-talkies, until the guy who lived there stopped his mower and said, “Are you looking for that kid? He’s up there.” The kid was laughing.
Isbell worked as a maintenance electrician. When the boys moved in, he took on four at a time to teach them his trade. “We made out little test sheets for them to measure what they learned,” he says. “Didn’t have them long enough to go into details. Just the basics–the difference between AC, DC and always turn off the power switch before you work on something.”
“For a long time they weren’t allowed to smoke. They’d steal butts out of car ashtrays and take steel wool from the laundry room, wrap it in toilet paper, and stick it in the light socket. The end would immediately turn red, and that’s what they’d use to light ’em. They called ’em ‘squares.’ ‘Get me a box of squares,’ they’d say.”
When I asked to tour the prison I told the warden at the time, Rodney Ahitow, that I’d grown up in Hanna City but not exactly where. As soon as I went through the gates, a guard in a light green shirt and dark green pants came trotting toward me. “Can I help you?” he asked. I told him I had an appointment for a tour. “Oh, are you the girl who lives across the street?” he said, checking my car doors to make sure they were all locked. My last name’s on the mailbox, and my uncle is a night-shift guard. The guard introduced me to the supervisor saying, “This is the one who lives across the street.” I asked them not to refer to me that way, as a favor to my mother.
“No sex offenders,” Reynolds said. “No murderers. No. They never reach minimum security.” He said that all the inmates have three years or less to go on their sentences and were among the best-behaved prisoners at the larger, more secure prisons from which they’d been transferred.
