There was an inmate whose wife and kids got killed on Christmas. They were driving back to La Vedette after visiting him. There was ice on the roads and they died in a car crash on the highway.

I had to pull the inmate out of his cell and take him to the chaplain that night to break the news. At first the inmate assumed it was his grandfather who’d passed.

I thought, I wish it was your grandfather instead. I’m so sorry, I said.

The next day I got called in. My supervisor wanted to know: Are you a bleeding heart for these convicts?

HER BLACK MOUSTACHE

The higher-ups would always say, Never believe a convict. But as soon as an inmate says to another inmate, She likes me, or, She smiled at me, they have to investigate. They were constantly investigating me.

It wasn’t unfounded. Some of the female officers, nurses, counselors — they fall in love. It happens. But just as often there’d be relationships between inmates and male officers, yet the male officers never got investigated. No one talked about it.

The more you make, the lazier you get. Some of the officers sat around and played cards while I did their jobs for them. I’d find shanks, hooch. Then they’d harass me because I made them look bad.

I broke up a fight once. I had the guy on the ground in handcuffs before anyone else showed up. The captain said, Nice job, but don’t let it go to your head. He said, You women are only here because the state mandates it.

Onakona Penitentiary is huge, dark, old — it looks like a castle. It’s made of stone cut from cliffs by the river. The first prisoners quarried the rock, carried it, stacked it up, walled themselves in.

For a while they kept women there, too. One gal escaped — she was serving thirty years for poisoning her husband. She made a man’s coat and pants from the wool she was in charge of sewing for inmates’ uniforms. She was seen by some meandering up the main street of town — casually twirling her black moustache — before she disappeared.

BLONDE, CUTE, BIG DIMPLES

Years go by. Then, one day in early spring, a farmer was moving his cattle from a field and stumbled over what was left of Baker. Finally I got some peace because they found his stinking remains.

The field where they found him was behind Bruce’s stable. They said his heart exploded. He’d been waiting for me to come back.

At first they thought the body might’ve been Kellie Lankershim, the local news anchor who’d been missing for years.