Read Online Rivers to Blood by Michael Lister - Free Book Online

said, “that I just dreamed the whole thing, that I was too young, just heard about one and it bothered me so bad that I couldn’t deal with it, but when I was little I saw a lynching.”
    “Around here?”
    “In the woods behind our house,” he said. “Well, really it was behind the church next door to our house. Preacher used to come from Marianna twice a month. I don’t know what he did, probably spoke to some white woman while he was getting gas or something, but they beat him unconscious, put a noose around his neck, pissed on him to wake him up, then yanked him up and let him swing.”
    “How old were you?”
    He shrugged. “Four or five. Maybe. Don’t know for sure.”
    I shook my head. “I’m so sorry, man,” I said. “Why haven’t you ever said anything?”
    “Wouldn’t’ve said anything now if I hadn’t been acting the damn fool.”
    I waited, wanting him to say more, wanting to comfort or reassure him, but unsure how.
    Seeming anxious to change the subject, he said, “What do you know about the river nigger?”
    “Next to nothing,” I said. “No ID, no evidence, no autopsy yet.”
    “Why hang him way down there? You think the escaped con did it? What’s his name?”
    “Jensen,” I said. “Don’t know enough about him or why he ran yet. Can’t rule him out though.”
    He nodded.
    “Guess I better get on over to the south gate so I be ready if a riot break out,” he said.
    “If you want, we can try to find out who killed the preacher you saw and where they put him,” I said. “What was his name?”
    “Last thing I heard him called was nigger,” he said. “Just another dead nigger.”

Chapter Seventeen
    I entered the enormous building that housed the inmate library and made my way through the dented metal shelves that held the worn paperbacks, their pages ripped and torn, their tattered covers half hanging off the bindings.
    Inmates filled the comfortable, air-conditioned building the way they did the chapel on hot days like these, browsing the shelves for something they hadn’t read ten times, donning headphones and listening to audiobooks, meeting with one of the inmate law clerks in the law library along the back, but mostly just prolonging their stay in the cool, quiet environment. It was one of only a few oases in the hot, humid, noisy wasteland that was PCI.
    When I first became a chaplain every prison library in the state had a qualified librarian. Now many of them were overseen by non-degreed officers with little or no training. Of the officers who regularly rotated through the library, many of whom approached it as a babysitting job, the very best was Sandy Hartman.
    A reader himself, Sandy was knowledgeable and helpful, quick with a recommendation or a review. I found him in the librarian’s office reading a paperback without a cover.
    He stood when I walked in and placed the book on the desk.
    “They already read the cover off that one?” I asked.
    He smiled, his face red from his time on the river the day before. “Actually this one came that way,” he said. “We have a bunch of them that do.”
    “Really?”
    “You keep a secret?” he asked. “When paperbacks don’t sell, the bookstores don’t ship them back like they do hardcovers. They strip the covers off and return them and throw away the actual books. I think the shipping costs more than the book is worth.”
    I recalled seeing the warning in front of many mass market paperbacks about coverless books.
    “When I told the manager of one of the bookstores in Panama City how small our budget was out here,” he continued, “she said she knew a way she could help, but if it got out she’d lose her job. I’ve been picking up her trash ever since.”
    He waited but I didn’t say anything.
    “I know it’s wrong,” he said, “but the thought of all these books being thrown away when they could do so much good here … It just bothered me.”
    I nodded.
    “They found Jensen yet?” he asked.
    I shook