"Go ahead."
"Walk away, or sort of run away sometimes, I mean off into the woods or like that, and practically have to be dragged home. I thought it was—can I say this?—I don't want to say anything wrong, I—"
"Go ahead, Miss Welsh."
"Well, just—I thought it was real unnatural, that I never heard Callista cry."
"No further questions."
IV
Callista sampled and pushed aside the inoffensive meal. The state of New Essex was feeding her well. Treating her well too—a star prisoner. A room of her own and, now that the trial had begun, meals in private, on a tray no less. No utensils of course except a spoon. She rose and performed the infinite journey of three steps from the barred door to the barred window a few times: shorten stride and you could make it come out to four steps. Best room in the hotel, southwest exposure 'n' everything—gee! She adjusted the blanket on her cot to sharp military precision: it would make Matron Flannery happy. A pity to sit down now and spoil all that wonderful work. Anyway Biddy Flannery would be along in a minute for the tray, with her usual not unfriendly clash of keys; then back to the courtroom for the afternoon.
Callista gazed at the flat-faced wall where smears of old writing had been not quite obliterated—for everything in this building was more than a little tired, peevish, ineffectual. Indifferent mop or washrag took a swipe at the graffiti, to keep busy; the law took a swipe, the best it could manage, at the perennial smears of human confusion, dishonesty, violence. High up—the woman must have been tall—enough remained of a lipstick inscription to indicate a heart symbol enclosing a pair of names: DAVY & ——: the other name had defied Callista's months-long effort to decipher it. She tried again now, bemused, and once more gave it up, although somehow this time she did feel a bit nearer success. It was exasperating as a sore tooth.
She gave up also another effort to interpret the almost destroyed black-pencil picture below the heart, probably someone else's contribution. A thick phallus not quite erect, a baby with the facial features gone, perhaps just a round-petaled flower or geometric design? No use. Call it a Rorschach blot—but even for that, the months of seeing it had made it impossible to see it at all. Callista turned away, glancing with an amusement that held the warmth of gratitude at the third and last writing—off in the corner, tiny and squeezed, it had almost escaped the washrag's faint assault, and still transmitted a cocky, not too cryptic message: WE DID IT IN A SNOBANK ON LINCAN'S BIRTHDAY 1957.
In the death house too they would feed her well and treat her very kindly, within the meaning of the statute. Callista examined this, perplexed, trying to recall what form of the auxiliary verb her thought had used. Did the gray cells say WILL or WOULD?