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ledger and then tell them to sit down on molded orange plastic chairs in the hallway and wait. Moorehead had an insane rule that only one visit could take place at a time. Perhaps this was due to the small staff or Moorehead’s limited facilities. Either way, it created an atmosphere of interminable suffering as for several hours mothers sat and waited and wept and tapped their feet and blew their noses and complained. In an attempt to fend off my own hard feelings, I fashioned meaningless surveys and handed out the mimeographed forms on clipboards to the most antsy of the mothers. I thought having to fill them out would give the women a sense of importance, create the illusion that their lives and opinions were worthy of respect and curiosity. I had questions on there such as “How often do you fill your gas tank?” “How do you see yourself in ten years?” “Do you enjoy television? If so, what programs?” The mothers were usually pleased to have a task to handle, although they’d pretend to look impinged upon. If they asked what it was all about, I told them it was a “state questionnaire,” and that they might leave their names off of it if they preferred to remain anonymous. None of them did. They’d all write their names on these forms much more legibly than in the visitors’ ledger, and answered so ingenuously, it broke my heart: “Once every Friday.” “I will be healthy, happy, and my children will be successful.” “Jerry Lewis.”
    It was my job to maintain a file cabinet full of reports and statements and other documents for each of the inmates. They stayed at Moorehead until their sentences ran out or they turned eighteen. The youngest boy I’d ever seen in my time at the prison was nine and a half. The warden liked to threaten to have the bigger boys—tall or fat or both—transferred to the men’s prison early, especially the ones who made trouble. “You think it’s rough here, young man?” he said. “One day in state would make any of you bleed for weeks.”
    The boys at Moorehead actually seemed like nice people to me, considering their circumstances. Any of us would be ornery and disgruntled in their place. They were forbidden to do most things children ought to do—dance, sing, gesture, talk loud, listen to music, lie down unless they were given permission to. I never talked to any of them at all, but I knew all about them. I liked to read their files and the descriptions of their crimes, the police reports, their confessions. One had stabbed a taxi driver in the ear with a pen, I remember. Very few of them were from X-ville itself. They came to Moorehead from across our region, Massachusetts’ finest young thieves and vandals and rapists and kidnappers and arsonists and murderers. Many of them were orphans and runaways and were rough and tough and walked with swagger and aplomb. Others were from regular families and their demeanor was more domestic, more sensitive, and they walked like cowards. I liked the rough ones better. They were more attractive to me. And their crimes seemed far more normal. It was those privileged boys who committed the perverse, really twisted crimes—strangling their baby sisters orlighting a neighbor’s dog on fire, poisoning a priest. It was fascinating. After several years, however, it had all become old hat.
    I remember this particular Friday afternoon because a young woman came to visit her perpetrator—her rapist, I assumed. She was a pretty girl who had a tortured flamboyance, and at the time I thought all attractive women were loose, sex kittens, tramps, floozies. Such a visit was strictly forbidden, of course. Only close relatives were allowed visits with inmates.
Kin
was the word we used. I told the girl as much, but she demanded to see the boy. She was very calm at first, as though she’d been practicing what to say. I can’t believe my