From time to time, I’d driven past those men walking down County 519. They’d been carrying clear plastic bags filled with things, not completely filled, maybe one-third, and not big like a garbage bag, but smaller. Always alone, they’d been heading toward town, wide cornfields on both sides of the road, farmhouses and silos along the way. They seemed small against the land, like one of those paintings of a wheat field or the ocean where the artist wants to make nature look even bigger than it is. Actually, they kind of reminded me of kids walking home from school, that run-down, sagging look they have when it’s really hot out. It was only after my third or fourth sighting I put it all together that these folks were coming from the county lock-up and that the bags held their personal effects. That explained the look each of them had, not happy at release, but more forlorn at re-entering this free world, concerned about a future that had suddenly become a lot harder to predict.

These parts have a thing for punishment. Of course, this is rooted in tradition. Let the rest of the world change, we’ll be content to stay the same and watch you fall. And maybe that’s not a bad thing considering the strange path progress has way of sometimes cutting. When the subject of crime comes up, punishment and justice and humanity all sort of come to mind, fine lines between each of them. Repentance, too. Ultimately, I’m sure repentance is what the higher mind of society is after from any inmate, even if their preferred method of atonement is predictable: That’s fine, son, very well, just make sure you do it from behind razor wire at your jail Bible study, is all.

When I was found stone drunk in a stolen car by one Deputy Zane Willis, most people probably thought I had tumbled to a place where becoming unwedged was near impossible. They weren’t even close. Truth was, the tumbling had started before, and that kind causes a man to almost want to keep his legs folded underneath, let gravity do its thing, allowing whatever is going to happen just happen when the bottom finally arrives.

So, as I walked down 519 carrying a clear plastic bag, I had to remind myself I wasn’t on the road crew, picking up trash, clearing brush out of drainage ditches. I half expected people - teenagers mostly - to shout things from their cars as they did when I was on the crew. Of course, saying something like that ten yards away while doing sixty is a lot different than being three feet away and standing face to face. Inmates quickly learn to ignore the insults as any sort of shout or gesture would be grounds for a CO in a ripe mood to pull you from the crew. Sunlight would change to fluorescent light and you’d find that roadside tan disappearing in favor of a jailhouse pallor.

No doubt the system could have come a lot heavier at me. Charges for resisting arrest and assaulting a peace officer would have pushed it past four years for starters, and that would have had me up to Clacksville to the state prison and into a world I knew I didn’t want. This Deputy Willis also had a nine-year-old boy, and although his is still alive, he must have imagined for a moment what it would have been like to lose him, and as a result, arrangements were made to drop the other charges. They couldn’t do much about the stolen car - I was in it and it wasn’t mine. I don’t remember stealing it, just remember some keys left on a bar top, and some talk. After that, I was waking up, Deputy Willis’ flashlight in my eyes, and both my hands on his chest, shoving him backwards.

And how exactly does that happen? How does a nine-year-old boy who loves collecting frogs and fishing for bluegills end up at his favorite swimming hole, under the shade of an oak tree, dead? His friends said Tyler swung out over the water on the rope swing, dropped down into the river, and swam back. They said he stretched out under the oak, put his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes. They thought he was resting. The coroner said it was an undiagnosed heart problem, something that could have been corrected when he was younger. Nine year olds are supposed to have strong, clean hearts, the corruption of bad habits still decades away. Nine year olds deserve parents who don’t fail them. They need to become ten. That’s the only thing we should ask, that they become ten.