Frank Conroy
WHITE DAYS AND RED NIGHTS
Guy and my mother had weekend jobs as wardens at the
Southbury Training School, the Connecticut state institution for the
feebleminded. Every Friday afternoon we drove out to an old cabin
deep in the
hills
they had bought for a few hundred dollars on the
installment plan.
The first dirt road was always plowed for the milk truck, but
never the second, and in the snow you could see the tracks of wagon
wheels and two narrow trails where the horses had walked. A mile
down the road was the Greens's farm. Every morning they hauled
milk to the pick-up station, a full silent load up the hill, and then
back, the empty returns from the previous day clanging raucously
behind the horses as if in melancholic celebration. No one else ever
used the road.
If
it
was passable we drove to the cabin, if not, we
walked, single file in the horse's tracks, our arms full of food.
Every Friday the cheap padlock was opened, every Friday I
stepped inside. A room so dim my blood turned gray, so cold I knew
no human heart had ever beaten there ... every line, every article
of furniture, every scrap of paper on the floor, every burnt-out match
in a saucer filling me with desolation, depopulating me. A single
room, twelve feet by eighteen. A double bed, a bureau, a round table
to eat on and against the wall a counter with a kerosene cooker. In
the exact center of the room, a potbellied coal stove. All these objects
had been watched by me in a state of advanced terror, watched so
many long nights that even in the daytime they seemed to be whisper–
ing bad messages.
My mother would make a quick meal out of cans. Corned beef
hash or chili. Conversation was usually sparse.
"I have a good cottage tonight."
