He'd come up out of the waters sputtering and coughing and reaching out hard with his lungs for the sweet salvation of air--air, free and clean, in and out, living air.  They handed him a spade and a grey uniform with a number printed on it in blue just under the words Angola State Prison.

That was the beginning, and the beginning was the word, and the word was spade-- the spade became his pal.  He put his foot to it in the corner of the exercise yard, turning up the earth.  He could smell the air in it, the air, free and clean, in and out.  Beneath the hard crust of the earth, he could taste the muddy waters in his nose.  They were part of it too--earth: muddy immersion--and air, free and clean.

In the beginning the pilgrims came, the women with their faces heaped up with sadness and their bodies scrubbed into their best clothes as if their visit was an occasion, a prayer meeting. Sometimes they cried and wrung their hands and called out "Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy."  Other times they reached into their pockets for candy smiles and told him stories with artificial color and flavoring.  Their eyes were pole hooks stabbing at him, prodding him, trying to pull it out of him.  But he didn't know what it was, knew only that they wanted something from him, something he would have surely given if he had had it or known it. 

Most times they brought him tasty tidbits from their kitchens or drawings from their children.  He had no taste for their food, but thanked them politely, and when they'd gone, he'd given the food to the other men who clamored like children for it.  At first he had anticipated their visits with eagerness, then with dread, and finally not at all.  These women (his women, they said, but it wasn't true) were connected to the man that laid at the bottom of the muddy river, not to the man that sat before them stretching out his lungs for air.  They didn't know that, couldn't see it, and so month after month they brought their pole hooks, their tears, and their candy smiles.  They seemed to congeal in front of him, until after awhile he could not tell one from another, could not call any face by name, could really only say the names into the air. It was only the music of their names that he could bring inside himself.  He held the names there like photographs of strangers and grabbed hold of the ache because it was sweet and maybe once had been beautiful.

His first job after being born again was on the road crew, spading out sand and sometimes asphalt, spading out dirt for the culverts.  Seemed like every day from first sun to first dark, he had the smooth round wood in his hands--cypress--he often thought, wasn't that the holy wood.  He didn't know much about holiness, though he thought he should.  He knew that the man laying at the bottom of the river had been raised up by the Bible, but he couldn't reach into that man's memory now and pull anything out.  If holiness was a feeling, then maybe that was the name he put to how he felt spading up earth in the exercise yard and planting apple and orange seeds from his supper.

Some of them seeds grew up too, pushing little green heads and arms out of the brown womb, stretching out for the air and the sun, but they never lasted.  They cringed under the weight of running boots, withered when angry hands ripped them from the brown breast.  When he found them brown and dry, a sweet ache bounced against his ribs like an echo.

The women stopped coming months, maybe years, after he stopped anticipating them.  He did receive a brown paper package one day, perhaps from one of the women, he doesn't remember. Inside were a few thorny stems and wispy roots knotted up in rich brown earth. He smiled from a place deeper than inside himself, deep enough perhaps to reach the man laying at the bottom of the river.  When his exercise time came, he took his spade to the corner of the  yard, turned the earth anew, spaded in deep, and planted the rose. He sat the rose into the hole, gently spreading the wispy threads, seating them in the soil, and sang the name Emmaline--silently like an incantation.  Then he mounded up the dark earth against the thorny stems, breathed in the earth’s muddy fragrance. Emmaline, Emmaline, Emmaline.
The rose did not succumb to the hapless steps of antsy muscles in grey uniforms, nor would she permit angry hands to touch her naked flesh. So when the Spring came, the leaves came too, bright and tender, like a cooing child.  Emmaline, Emmaline, Emmaline.  The new men with animals in their throats and poison on their tongues kept their distance, and the old men with eyes full of sky would squat next to her and smoke their cigarettes.

He earned four cents an hour for his labors on the road crew.  Every couple of years, he'd saved enough up to buy another rose from the mail order catalog.  Each rose was a different song, each song a name of a brown-faced woman, a woman that had visited perhaps, or a name that fell from the lips of the man at the bottom of the river. Raynelle, Maretha, Shannalee, Donisha.

He had developed a reputation now of being a good man with a spade, and when the grave-digger died (a murder one lifer named Grounder), the bootjacks with the rifles handed him the job. Sometimes in the middle of the night, they'd rattle something up against the bars, and he'd open his eyes, but he wouldn't stir.  "Hey Spade," they'd say, "got a rose for you to plant." They'd laugh and mumble nonsense to themselves and walk on down the cell block.

As the years passed, he buried a lot of men--young men eager to get it over with--old men who just laid down in it--'lectric chair men, whose death was a spectacle conjuring up salve for scabby wounds.  Buried them all at night, just him and the spade and the Coleman lantern and a bootjack with a rifle and an attitude.  The burying place was rocky, and sometimes the spade would ring against a rock, peal like a bell in someone else's ear, sounds in the ear of the man at the bottom of the river.

Like most guys who do a lot of time, he got religion of sorts. Some guy in a preacher collar gave him a Bible--and for a long a time it just leveled out the legs of his chair so it didn't rock when he sat in it.  But after a while he took to reading it, maybe because he was curious, maybe because the thought fell out of the river man's head and floated up to the surface where he could scoop it up and taste it.  Whatever the reasons, he read it and liked the stories and language and what it had to say about living.  He wondered if God was like the man at the bottom of the river, or if God wore a grey uniform with a number printed under the words Angola State Prison, or if God carried a rifle and an attitude and rattled on the bars in the middle of the night.  Sometimes  he'd think about this while he was spading out sand, or turning up earth, or ringing his spade against a stone.  It seemed to him that God was just a name like Emmaline and Raynelle--a name that made music inside his head.

The years began to wear out like the soles of his work boots.  Most of the men he buried now were younger than him. Sometimes it made him tired and he wondered if he ought to dig out his own grave and just lie down in it, but he didn't do it, he just thought about it. Emmaline, Emmaline, Emmaline. The spade and the roses and the names singing in his head.

One night at the near hind end of his years, the bootjacks came rattling at the bars.  "Hey Spade," they called out, "Governor says you're a free man." He lay there listening, his eyes wide open, and him not saying a word. "Hey Spademan, you listening to us? Gov says you're walking outta here come Sunday."  They rattled the bars some more, but he didn't move.  He just tried out the words  inside his head. They rattled the bars again, then moved off mumbling something angry.

Every night after that, every night right up to that Sunday, he dreamt about the river man, dreamt that he and the river man were scuffling, wrestling with each other deep down under the waters, struggling. He'd wake up sweaty, his lungs aching, hungry for breath. 

Come Sunday, they took away his grey uniform, took away his boots with the worn down soles and gave him new clothes and new shoes.  At midnight, the bootjacks came for him, two of them, like they do for the 'lectric chair men.  They opened the door, but he didn't budge. "Come on," they said. But he didn't come on, he wasn't going to come on unless they gave him his spade.  They said they couldn't do that, that the spade belonged to the Angola State Prison.  But he didn't move, and finally one of them took the radio off his belt and spoke into it. 

They gave him them the spade--for forty years of faithful service. Then they walked him to the gate and pushed him out into the blackness, into the dark swirling torrents, into the flood.  When the sun emerged from the darkness and the waters grew quiet,  he was standing on the front porch of a brown-faced woman, standing there holding some fool spade.  The brown-faced woman, threw open the door. 

"Moreese," she sang. 

The river man stepped into the light.