A dog came to live in the jail. He walked in one day right through the front door. The criminals slipped him bits of bread, let him lick their bowls. The dog was missing his tail and the pads of his paws had been sliced away. He held one paw up in the cold then another. The Crazy Swede loved the dog more than anyone else. The dog sat with the Crazy Swede, so misplaced, so mutely heartbroken. The dog slept on his pallet at night. The Crazy Swede was a painter. No one asked where he got his paints. He made little river scenes, maybe places he’d seen as a boy. He painted the dog in. He said the dog made him think of purer times. He called the dog by a girl’s name. Genevieve. Jezzila. Galinda.

“Whip the dog,” that same guard said.

He handed the Crazy Swede his whip. The Crazy Swede hesitated a breath, then he whipped the dog, whipped the dog, and whipped it. When the guard said stop it, “Stop whipping that dog,” the Crazy Swede kept whipping.

They left him alone after that. He never tied anyone’s boots. The guard never asked anymore, anyway. They dreamed about the Swede all their lives, the other prisoners, said he went to America, somewhere out West, far away from the cruelty of Old Bloody Europe.

The trouble with Dan is he thinks people can’t read his face. He thinks he’s opaque, that people are too dumb to read the set of his shoulders and his hands in the rain, his back with the rain pouring off it, to read everything about him from a look.

This might sound like a tantrum.

Ella’s another one. Ella thinks she knows right all the time, but sometimes not only doesn’t she know it, she can’t say or do it to save her life. But to get along everyone humors a person like that, gives that person what she wants, and then, in time, she starts thinking this is exactly the way things ought to be. Her way. Say a man goes behind the tree when she tells him to and does what she told him to do behind that tree. She thought she was right at first when she told him to go behind the tree and do what he did. She knows she is right no matter what it might do to the man later, her suggestion or even command to do this thing. But maybe she wasn’t right. Or later she changes her mind about what he should’ve done. She lays that on him too. How can that be right? But she thinks by now the reason everyone does what she says is they see great wisdom oozing out of her, not because they’re trying to get along and getting along is more important to them than rightness. It’s a vicious cycle.