Getting Life by Michael Morton

Author:Michael Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I embarked on my new life before the sun was up.

The guard had come to my cell without warning, as is typical with inmate moves. TDC didn’t want anyone to be able to plan any kind of shenanigans. It was pitch-black when I walked out of the Wynne Unit for the last time in the early morning hours of Halloween Day 1999. I left as I had arrived, in the dark.

The guards began handcuffing prisoners together in pairs, but when they got to me, there was no one left to handcuff me to. I was handcuffed, but I felt a weird sort of freedom not being shackled onto someone else. In the world of a prisoner, incremental, relative freedom is often all there is.

We got on a bus loaded with other men cuffed or chained together—­some from other units, some going to other destinations—and off we went to the Ramsey I Unit, a hulking old monstrosity south of Houston.

It was my first look at the free world in years, since I had tasted those chicken tacos on the way back to Williamson County to begin my fight for DNA testing. I felt like a blind man who suddenly had his sight restored. As we sped along the freeway deep into the city’s massive sprawl, I stayed glued to the bus window. The color and novelty of the shopping centers, car lots, fast-food chains, and gas stations mesmerized me. It was so early in the morning that there were very few people up and about, but the sides of the interstate were packed with a riot of new development.

As we drove through the endless stretch of what passed for progress, I was surprised at how quickly the color and flash, the big and the brand-new grew old. Strip malls were thrown together with no forethought, fast-food joints had all the beauty and textured history of plastic silverware, and the many lots selling house trailers and used cars ultimately made me sad.

The gaudiness and never-ending concrete had me longing for the rural greenery I had been looking out at for so long. Luckily for my scenery sensibilities, it turned out I was headed right back into the middle of nowhere—only this time it was muggier, buggier, and in many ways, a step back in time.

Ramsey I sits in the heart of miles of farmland, some of it cultivated, some of it given over to the various creatures of the South Texas ecosystem—a humid, almost tropical place filled with head-high grass, angry fire ants, giant mosquitoes, and snakes of all descriptions, plus the occasional alligator. These critters became as much a part of my life as the inmates I would be living with. That’s because all of us—men and beasts, bugs and swampy bush—were going to spend a lot of time together.

My first day in the fields was instructive. We were up at the crack of dawn, piled onto wagons, and driven to what felt like the edge of the world, finally stopping at a series of very long, very deep drainage ditches.

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