VOICE

A jet stream swept into the yard, ricocheted from limestone wall to limestone wall; then repeated itself and clawed his face. It was two degrees hotter than hell, and Seán Tyler knew he was in the middle of it.
Seán, lean and agile with a view of the future rare in this setting, saw shapes break through the whirling dust – young men strutting with heads raised, eyes alert – temporarily above the rules; rail-thin, mustached men in tight shirts and tighter jeans, prancing behind rough-cut, burly men with scowls, heads lowered like bulls; older men, hope absent; and the oldest men, bent and limp like effigies expecting another body blow – nothing to see, nothing to say.
Seán heard his wife’s voice in that jet stream. He could describe her words verbatim if he felt safe. Which he didn’t. He could describe her face, the lilt of her voice, her clothes, her touch. He could describe how he, as a young man, had risen from seasonal carpenter to master carpenter with dreams of building entire houses, large communities. He could describe how his wife had followed him in that dream. But he didn’t. He could describe what she advised him to do, if he trusted anyone enough. Which he didn’t. He knew, but chose to forget, even to deny, his wife’s infidelities.
He had spoken with her often since her death twenty-six years ago. On the day of her funeral, she said, in a rushed, almost staccato voice, “Seán, after our Sunday dinner. Shot in the head in his car. You weren’t even in town when he killed me.” Her words conveyed a feeling in him he had long felt but could not name. He took comfort in what she said, “Seán, you don’t belong in there. Work to get out. Help find him.” Unsure whether it was a dream or a vision, he settled on vision and stuck with it.
Then, as quickly as it happened, she disappeared, and Seán was on the edge of his bed stunned as if he had been administered some drug without his permission. “Hell, for years, everything’s been without my permission,” he said to no one.
Seán never spoke of his wife’s visits, not even to Joe Kilmer, his cellmate in the Ninnescah County jail when they were young men. Together, they had secreted rare reading materials through bars and around thick walls, learned how to convert the water faucet into a drinking fountain, and memorized the rhythms of incarceration. Shackled one to the other, and transported to Lecompton State Prison, then assigned to the same cell.
It seemed that just last year he was a young married man with a clear view of his future. Then his wife’s death and he was the defendant in her murder trial with no money and a court-appointed lawyer. As the husband, he was the first suspect, and when he refused to take a lie detector test, became the only suspect. After the jury verdict and life sentence, his family, money, visits, and friends disappeared. No money meant that he researched and wrote his own appeals. He relied on Kilmer, to help him decipher tortuous legal opinions.
Each evening, after his laundry job and dinner, Seán walked up three flights of stairs to the library, a compact room with no windows, a few tables and chairs, metal bookcases containing a lean selection of relevant books, scattered Fed. 2nd volumes, the 1963-1971 volumes of U.S. Supreme Court case law, and an incomplete set of the U.S. Code.