Accueil / The Friend I Sent to Prison / Chapitre 1 - Chapitre 9

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Chapter 1

"Evan, I know what I did was rotten."Lucas talked fast, the words running over each other, half of it pleading."But you know how it was at my house. My folks were sick. I'm the only son they've got. I needed something steady or the whole family goes under."You're different. You're smart, you pick things up fast. You did all right down south, didn't you?"He held out five ten-dollar bills."Take the fifty for now. If it's not enough I'll bring you more after next month's check. I'll make it right with you. Okay?"I looked at the money in his hand. Then I looked at his face, and I'd never seen anything so practiced.Make it right?Pretend it never happened?The university place they took from me. The four years of my life. The road I should have been walking this whole time.Fifty dollars.I didn't take it. I flicked my wrist, and the bills slid out from under my hand and went down into the gray coal dust on the pavement.Whatever was left of the pleading went out of Lucas

Chapter 2

Then he hesitated, and gave me a careful look."So. Did you and Mr. Cole really have it out?"My fork stopped."Mr. Cole?""Lucas." Nathan said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "That's what everybody calls him now. He took the name when he went off to school. University man, engineering degree, walked in here straight onto the management track. They think the world of him."He sighed and lowered his voice."Don't go picking a fight with him. He's the golden boy around here. And his father's Henry Grant, the assistant plant manager. That's not a fight anybody wins."Assistant plant manager.Something went through me, sharp and cold.I set the fork down. "Nathan, I want a straight answer.""Go ahead.""Lucas's family was hard up, weren't they? His folks sick, younger brothers and sisters to feed?"Nathan stared at me. Then he nearly choked."Evan, did four years down south knock something loose?"He tapped his fork against the tray and dropped his voice.

Chapter 3

"That machine's too fine for us.""The Germans built it. Let the Germans come fix it.""Line's down. We're losing money every minute it sits there.""Nobody in this building can read that thing."Curtis Boyd, the Workshop Two supervisor, saw me come in, and I watched his face decide what it thought of me. The cafeteria story had already made it around the floor."Cole." He waved a hand at the machine without much interest. "You're the specialist from down south. Go ahead and try it."Then his voice cooled off."Don't just talk. You've got skill; let's see it."A couple of men laughed under their breath. They were all waiting for me to fail.I set my tray down, picked up the tool case, and walked straight to the machine.I pulled the housing and looked at what was underneath: the lines and the valves and the gear train and the control assembly, all of it crowded in together.The room went quiet behind me.Tyler had followed me over from the cafeteria. He stood off to the sid

Chapter 4

Mr. Adams wiped his face with the back of his hand."How could I, Evan? Henry Grant came to me."You have to understand what that man was in this town back then. He walked into my school and told me that if a word of it ever left my mouth he'd have my certificate pulled and see to it my family couldn't stay here."And he told me that if I ever tried to reach you, he'd send men south to find you."He stopped, and then made himself go on."It wasn't only me. Walter Davis carried that letter. He was the rural carrier on your road for thirty years. Henry got to him too. He made it plain that anybody who talked would never work again."He took hold of my hand."But you came back. You came back and you got into that plant with nothing but your own two hands, and I'm proud of you, son."Take the score report. If you want me to testify, I'll testify. I've lived with this for four years and I'd rather not live with it any longer.""Thank you, Mr. Adams."I walked back toward the plant

Chapter 5

At nine that night I came into the old warehouse behind the plant.Lucas was already there, in a dark wool overcoat with his shoes shined, a cigarette going between two fingers. He took one hard pull off it when he saw me, dropped it, and ground it out under his toe."You fixed one machine, and now you think you're somebody around here."He laughed at me."Hayes told you to write an apology, and you turned him down. You honestly think you can take this place on?"I stopped five paces short of him."You sent Tyler into that cafeteria because you're scared.""Scared?" Lucas laughed out loud, like I'd said the funniest thing he'd heard all year. "Of some laborer who washed out down south?"Then it dropped off his face all at once."Let me explain something to you. This plant belongs to my family. Half the men with an office in that building owe my father something."You think you're fighting me? You're fighting him. You're fighting every favor he's handed out in this county for

Chapter 6

I closed my hand around the note, and for the first time the thing had a shape I could see.That morning I took a half day from Boyd and borrowed Nathan's old bicycle.The late-autumn wind came straight down the road at me, and the gravel banged under the tires the whole way out. I rode close to two hours before I found the township.A farmer pointed me down a side road to a small place with black shingles and walls that hadn't seen paint in twenty years. There were rose bushes along the front of the porch, and an old man in a straw hat was down on his heels working at them with a pair of shears.He looked up when he heard me."Who are you after, son?"I leaned the bicycle against the fence, walked over, and took my cap off.That was for four years. For every day I'd spent on a line that should have been spent in a classroom. For the truth this whole town had been made to swallow."Mr. Davis. My name is Evan Cole."I looked him in the eye."Four years ago you carried a letter

Chapter 7

A name in looping fountain-pen script sat across the signature line, clear as a verdict.Henry Grant. Signed as agent for the addressee.Beside it, the post office date stamp, four years old and still red.My fingers weren't steady when I took it from him.Four years. Almost to the day.And there it was in my hand, the one thing nobody could talk their way around.It was evening by the time I got back to the boarding house.I laid it all out across the desk. My score report from the school's file. The return receipt. Written statements from Raymond Adams and Walter Davis, each one signed and dated.Then I got out a pad of paper and wrote the complaint.Across the top I put: To the Office of the State Attorney General and the State Department of Education.I didn't spend one line on how I felt about it. I didn't claim anything I couldn't put a document behind.Facts. Evidence. Dates.The letter taken out of the mail. The name used in my place. The threats that came after it.

Chapter 8

I had the one thing that could finish that family, and I had it in my hand.All that was left was to wait.Five days after I mailed the complaint, the plant looked like any other morning from the outside. Underneath it, everybody could feel something coming.At ten o'clock three state sedans came through the front gate with their lights turning and pulled up under the administration building.Men in suits got out, and the credentials came out with them.A joint team. The Attorney General's office and the State Department of Education.It went through that plant like fire through a hayloft."The state's here.""They're here for Grant.""I heard the son went to school under somebody else's name.""That can't be true. Can it?"Work slowed everywhere and then stopped. Men came out of every building and stood around the administration steps, up on their toes to see.Tyler was at the back of the crowd, white as paper, and I could see his hands shaking from twenty feet off.Lucas

Chapter 9

He came up off the ground, and in front of a few thousand men he started to shout, and everything he'd been sitting on for four years came out of him at once."If he hadn't been breaking things in my house every night of that summer, ashamed of himself, couldn't stand to be looked at."If he hadn't gone on and on about how he couldn't face his friends."If he hadn't had to have a degree, had to get down to that campus and chase city girls."You think I'd have put my name and my job on the line? For that? Over some farm boy?"You had nothing. You came from nothing. That score was wasted where it landed. My son had more use for it than you'd ever have had."Nobody at that gate made a sound.No sick parents. No family on the edge. No man with no other choice.It had been pride. A diploma to hold up. A way to be looked at. Girls on a campus.And because Henry Grant believed his son counted for more than I did, he'd taken my whole life and never thought twice about it.Then the an

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