XXI
The other day a man was brought up to the hospital to have his broken arm bandaged. He had got up in the mess hall and started to voice a protest against the rotten meat. Two keepers jumped on him with their sticks and beat him until he was insensible. Later the "Dep" came upstairs to look him over, and said: "So you think you are a tough guy!" The man kept silent; but later he was sent to the "cooler."
There is an old Italian tailor in the hospital who has become popular because he mends our socks and makes pockets in our trousers. He eats enormous quantities of food, and after he is through he wipes his mouth with the crust of bread which does service for him as a napkin!
A dope fiend, who had kept us awake five nights: in succession, was allowed to sit at the table after he had broken his fast with milk. He was warned to eat sparingly. One Friday, as fish was served and I knew only two pieces had been eaten, I was wondering where it all had gone when I emptied the dishes in the garbage can. Out of sixteen pieces of fish that had been served, only two could be accounted for. I turned to look over the room, and I noticed our dope fiend still chewing away at something. Then I noticed the shirt round his belt bulging in an unusual fashion across his very lean body; and I was surprised to discover what had happened to the missing portions of fish.
Not satisfied with having eaten two pieces of fish, our dope fiend had stuffed the other fourteen pieces inside his shirt, so as to make sure that he would have enough food to last him through the night.
For five consecutive nights he had kept us awake with his moaning and raving, sitting upright in his bed, swinging his body back and forth pendulum fashion. He could not keep anything in his stomach, either food or water. He begged piteously for an injection of morphine, but the new doctor was obdurate; he said that it was either cure or kill. When the morphine was eliminated he became himself again, and he was cured of his habit. Some morphine fiends die from the stoppage of the supply, but many of them are effectively cured.
A bald-headed, consumptive negro keeps us in constant laughter—when prison lets us laugh—with wonderful and never ending stories of his adventurous life. Even the doctor will stand by the hour listening to his quaint speech and stories. Although he is an old rascal and an old offender, one cannot help liking him for his cheerful, gay attitude towards life.
He related how one time, after serving a term in the reformatory, he went back to his wife in New York. She lived in an apartment on the ground floor, and she seemed to be happy to see him again. She inquired about his health and asked about his future prospects. While they were talking he heard somebody opening the front door with a latch key. He became quite nervous, and asked his wife who it was that dared to come in without ringing the bell. "Dat's de husband I'se married while you was in jail; and he's a big black coon," she said.
He jumped hastily through the window, he confessed to us, so as not to embarrass husband number two, and leaving behind a grip with his clothes. He came back next night to get his belongings, and he used the window this time as a means of entrance. But fate was against him. As he emerged from the window again he fell into the arms of a watchful policeman, who promptly arrested him. Being an ex-convict, he was sentenced to a year in the penitentiary, as he said, for stealing his own pants!
A tall, blond Pole behaved in such a disgusting manner at the table that the keeper ordered him back to his bed.
The first two weeks that he was in bed we could not induce him to get up to perform the most normal animal functions. But, as there did not seem to be anything the matter with him, he was finally forced to get up and go to the bathroom.
For more than two weeks we had plied him with questions—myself, the doctors, and all the convicts who knew different languages. He looked at us with his big, blue eyes, shaking his head as if he did not understand what we were talking about. We finally came to the conclusion that he either spoke some unknown language, or that maybe he was deaf and mute.
One day Richard, the young assistant, made him get up, but instead of walking, he crept on all fours to the bathroom. Then he got up like a human being and started drinking water from the faucet. Richard took him to task for his uncleanliness. He said to him: "Wash your face, you dirty pig!" And to the utter amazement of Richard, the supposed deaf mute turned round angrily and said, in perfect English: "You go to hell, will you!" A few weeks later he was taken to Matteawan.
Later I gathered from another Pole who had talked to him and succeeded in making him answer, that he had been a petty officer in the Russian navy, and that he had mutinied, and later had succeeded in escaping to America.
He had hit upon the idea of feigning insanity in order to foil the vigilant Russian secret service agents, who would be on the lookout for him upon his release from the Island; he feared that they would create an opportunity to "shanghai" him on board a Russian ship, and he knew that they would hang him if he ever was returned to the fatherland. He had been sentenced to sixty days on the Island for vagrancy.