There was a prison up on Saw Creek Lane in the small town where I grew up. They called it Saw Creek because, well, people sawed there. The prisoners spent their time there making paper for the lumber companies that overextended their contracts and needed some extra help. Not much compensation, but it kept them occupied. The other way they occupied their time was through prayer. A church set into the prison offered the inmates a chance at redemption. A chance to see a whole universe beyond, despite the walls and the bars that held them tightly caged.
Man by the name of Dexter Hadley didn’t like either of them. Caught robbing the general store some five years previously, he’d been sent to Saw Creek Penn for a 20 year term. He wasn’t a bad man, exactly, but he had a way of looking you in the eye and getting exactly what he wanted. What he wanted was to get out of Saw Mill.
I was up there on a school field trip one time and I passed by his cell. To look into his eyes was like looking through a well of total darkness and hitting the bare essence of the human soul. That’s why I don’t blame Arther Martin one bit for helping him escape.
Arther was one of the kindess men you could know. So kind to his wife, in fact, that he gave her six children. Oldest one is my age, we grew up playing ball by the general store. The one Dexter tried to rob.
Arther was the priest of Saw Creek Penn. He was also, due to lack of funds, the gravedigger of the prison. You could tell when his services were required by a large bell that tolled out. Dong. Dong. Dong. I was sure you could hear it for miles. It woke you up from sound sleep, that much I could tell you. Arther would say a prayer over the man, then bury him. Most times it was done by himself, if the prisoner wasn’t too popular. Sometimes he had a helper or two.
Well, Dexter Hadley got to thinking of an escape plan and he knew he needed help. He couldn’t stick around the prison, what with the walls closing in on him day by day by day. So he decided it would be Arther who helped him out. Maybe Dexter thought him an easy mark. Maybe he just liked converting the pious to the wicked. I never did find out.
But Dexter went to church as often as he could and prayed as hard as he could pretend to pray. Dexter thought it was a load of baloney, the whole religious thing, but he needed Arther to believe he believed.
Soon they became friends. At least, Arther thought so. It wasn’t long after that when Dexter told him he needed to get out. Arther had heard it all before, but looking into his eyes, looking straight down into the man’s soul, he couldn’t help but comply. So they set about a plan.
Dexter’s cell was right next to the chapel, where they kept the body of the recently deceased overnight until Arther could come in and say a prayer over it and then take it out to be buried. The graveyard was outside the prison. So Arther told him to dig a hole into the chapel. Keep the hole covered and don’t complete it until the night the bell tolls. When he hears the tolling, sneak into the chapel in the middle of the night, hide in the coffin and wait until morning.
Morning comes, Arther would take the coffin to the cemetary. If no one was with him, he’d let ol’ Dexter free right then. If he had parishoners, he’d come back in an hour and dig him up. Desperately wanting to escape these walls, this prison, this personal torture, he readily agreed.
Well, it was a good two weeks before it happened. It took a week to dig the hole through the floor and it was another week waiting. Then, at three minutes past one on a brisk October morning, the bells rang out. Clear and true, it rang three times for the whole town to hear. Dexter scrambled through the tunnel, popped out into the chapel, and covered up the hole he created.
In as near of blackness as the dead of night could produce, Dexter groped his way past the pews and ran his hands along the fine oak coffin that lay atop the altar. He opened it up, and climbed in, nearly shivering at the thought that a dead man was right below him.
Well, he waited until morning. It seemed like forever, but finally the coffin started moving. Soon enough he was lowered into the grave. “Ah,” thought Dexter, “Must be someone popular. People at least bothered to show up to this one.” He could hear the sound of dirt as it thumped in piles above the wood. A few minutes later, it was muffled a bit by the dirt already on top. After that, nothing. Silence.
An eternity of silence.
Longer than an eternity when you’re six feet under and waiting for your salvation and can’t hear a damn thing but your ragged breath heaving in and out and in and out. Soon he could barely hear that. Dexter was quickly running out of oxygen. It was an hour wasn’t it? It had to be. Arther had double crossed him! A man of God had up and lied to him. He was enraged. He pounded on the coffin lid. With all his might he tried pushing but he hadn’t the strength to lift the lid through the dirt.
His breath came in ragged steps now as the oxygen was all but gone. He fumbled for a lighter in his pocket, knowing that the light would eat up nearly all of his remaining air. He didn’t care, he was desperate for a way out and if he needed to see to do it, that’s what had to be. He would escape and then he would kill that Arther for his failure to keep a promise.
He flicked the light. One, two, three times and the spark turned to a dim flame. He searched the coffin for a release of some kind, a hole, a flaw to punch through. Nothing. Sturdy as oak could be.
He turned around and caught his breath. One of the last he would ever have. For in the dying, flickering, fluttering of the flame, he came face to face with Arther Martin.
They’re more “written-style” stories than things you’d expect to hear around a campfire–I polish a story a lot more when I’m writing than when I’m speaking; it helps make up for the lack of tone and expression.