84 × 28 × 20

Northwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane was a stone-faced bastion in the rugged Appalachian coal country of northern Pennsylvania. I was a trusty there, an inmate who had garnered a modicum of independence by virtue of having a record of passable behavior, and also of providing a service that was desirous of the miscreants charged with making the hellscape function. I was the woodworker. I had learned the trade on the outside before my assignment to this dismal pit.

I won’t delve into the circumstances that landed me at Northwood, but suffice it to say that most all of us had plead guilty by reason of insanity to some unspeakable crime, rather than risk a date with “Old Sparky.”

My cellmate, a soft-spoken, slightly built fellow named Łukasz, was hardly more than a boy. He preferred the Polish pronunciation of his name, “Wooʹ-kash,” or even the Americanization, “Lucas,” but most people just called him the Polack. Being small and seemingly timid, he was an easy target for ridicule and abuse, but bear in mind, there was a reason he ended up in Northwood. Łukasz, also a trusty, was assigned to the infirmary. He had served as a medic in the Polish-Soviet War.

As woodworker, one of my duties was to keep a coffin at the ready for the interment of the poor wretches who at long last found release from the cruelties of this horrid place. Under a worn tarp in my shop, among the splintered bookshelves and broken chairs awaiting repair, rested a white pine box measuring eighty-four inches long by twenty-eight inches wide by twenty inches deep. When one of the tortured souls at last slipped this mortal coil, they were brought from the infirmary to my shop, usually by Łukasz and Odum. Odum, a vicious and sadistic man, was chief orderly in the infirmary. He had a most annoying habit of jangling the ring of keys that hung from his belt, presumably to flaunt his authority, or perhaps to make sure he wasn’t mistaken for a trusty or worse yet, one of the lunatics. Under Odum’s direction, and certainly without his assistance, Łukasz and I were charged with placing the decedent in the coffin, securing the lid with eight three-inch common nails, then heaving the sealed box out to the burying ground in the back lot of the compound. There we would lower it into a previously dug grave and cover it with the loamy Pennsylvania mountain earth. Before leaving the gravesite, Łukasz would bow his head and whisper, “Niech spoczywa w pokoju wiecznym.” May you rest in eternal peace. This would invariably provoke ire from Odum, who would kick at Łukasz or spit on him, or both.

“Speak English, you dumb Polack.”

Łukasz was not dissuaded by such cruelties, for every soul that departed Northwood under his watch was dispatched with his humble blessing.

Most all the inmates spent their first and last days at the asylum in the infirmary. The dying were held with little or no medical care, and the new arrivals were housed there while they were dewormed, deloused, checked for syphilis and tuberculosis, and then quarantined for observation. It was rumored that the younger and healthier boys were given an extra examination by Odum in the seclusion of their cells in the quiet hours before dawn. Some just surrendered, but most put up quite a struggle. A few drops of chloroform soaked into a handkerchief and capped over the nose and mouth rendered the scrappiest of the resisters compliant.

Many a night in the dark hours, when the block was draped in a hushed stillness, Odum would show up at our cell door and slip his passkey into the lock.

“Knock, knock. . . It’s Odum. I’m here for the Polack.”

Without protestation Łukasz, submissive as a three-legged dog, would follow Odum down the hallway. He would be returned to our cell in about thirty minutes. Łukasz never commented on these encounters, and I never asked. But I never had to.

“Are you awake?” Łukasz whispered one night after being returned to our cell by Odum.

“Yes,” I said. “What is it you want?”

“How big are the coffins that you make in your shop?”

“They’re 84 by 28 by 20 deep. Why do you ask?”

“Curious is all. I hear the guards are laying for Olaf. He may be our next customer.”

“You two better keep it down,” old Josiah whispered from the cell across the way. “We don’t want to rile the guards. Hush up and go on to sleep.”

Josiah was the oldest inmate at Northwood, which afforded him a cell on the block where the trusties were housed, giving him a little more freedom in his waning days. According to asylum lore, at one time Josiah was the meanest, most feared inmate at Northwood. Rumor was that it took four guards to subdue him when he became agitated and out of control. But that was many, many years ago. His days of being a threat had long passed. He was now bent and frail and had hardly the girth of the gnarled walking stick he leaned on.

One late-summer afternoon Odum and Łukasz came wheeling the morgue gurney into the woodshop. There splayed out like a slaughtered boar lay Olaf Thorenson, a massive mountain of a man. I judged by the looks of him he had had an unfortunate run-in with the guards, for he had a gash the size of a canyon running down his left temple, and his nose took an unnatural right-angle turn. Both eyes were swollen shut and a purple tongue protruded from raw-liver lips.

“What was the cause of death?” I asked Odum as I made the entry into a ledger kept for that purpose.

“Heart attack,” he responded.

“I seriously doubt that Łukasz and I alone can get him into the box and out to the graveyard,” I said. “He must weigh over three hundred pounds.”

“That’s your problem,” Odum replied. “You and the Polack figure it out. And clean him up. Smells like he shit himself.” Jangling his keys, Odum left the woodshop, mumbling under his breath.

Though Łukasz was small and wiry, he was as stout as a bull and tenacious as a badger. Together we were able to stuff the oversized Olaf into the pine box, and with not an inch to spare, we secured the lid per protocol with eight three-inch nails. Odum returned with a couple of the trusties from the laundry to help us cart the dead man out to his final repose.