It is what it is
Dale returned from The Hole after three weeks of unending torture and acute hunger. He was released in the evening when the second round of work was almost over and before the dinner’s whistle was heard. Dale managed to totter around with his legs that were stiff and moving of their own will until he reached the laundry room that he was supposed to work in. He remained at the entrance to the room not able to drag along any further. Barry and Tristan were not in the room, they were doing mending jobs in the other room and Peter was the first person who sighted him.
‘Dale’, he called and dropped the clothes he was folding to help Dale. Every other person stopped too and one other person joined Peter to help him in. His face was swollen and it was sore. It was expected. Someone who said and did the things he had done was expected to get a death penalty but Dale dropped their guns with gait, he had survived death but the officers were bent on making sure that The Hole was as an unbearable experience as Peter and the rest of them had painted it before. It was indeed hell. Instead of food, he was fed by jabs almost breaking his limbs and all the bones in it and he was given only one cup of water daily. The verity that Dale looked so confident even in the face of the danger produced a kind of intense anger in the officer, fuelled by their sadistic fortune they gained from it inflicted enough pain on him. The more Dale screamed, the more they liked it and what served as the factor of when the torture being perpetrated was going to stop depended on when their gratification peaked.
A few minutes after that, the whistle blew and so Dale was going to have his first meal after about seven days. He gobbled it up and even ate Barry’s food too. Everyone watched him and couldn’t take their eyes off him for obvious reasons. The obvious reasons, not being the torture that was inflicted on him but the phenomenon of the actions that brought him there. Everyone wondered what had happened to the Dale they knew, as scared as a cat crying all the time to this new kind with the heart of a tiger that didn’t even fear death. Of all the times they have been in the prison, that Death Toast was definitely going to be the most memorable one and the most extraordinary thing they had watched anyone do in their lifetimes. He didn’t only confront the governor and insult him disparagingly, he didn’t only face death and didn’t clinch, he didn’t only chuckle after the governor pronounced he was going to die, he changed the view of everyone to the way they beheld The Death Toast, that it wasn’t really as horrendous as it seemed, that being alive wasn’t that imperative as being free, as stating what you believe, as picking your dignity over any other thing. Because whether you liked it or not, it was Boorbunk and an average prisoner in there will at the end of it all having his skull smeared in ink and hanging from a nail in the death row.
Whether you remain silent or not.

‘We have waited this whole week for you to return before we give our last respect to our former mate, Simone Broadbent because we are not a set of bitter, bereaved people left to deal with our problems alone’, Peter said turning to Dale. ’The fifteenth ward is now a place where a set of bitter people will deal with their bereavements together. Simone was as innocent as any other one of us in here and it could have been any of us. Another one of us will leave here in three weeks’ time but the only duty that we have to offer is to join our hands together to give them our last honour as friends, as kinsmen, as family’, he said. They were all sitting round the relaxing room with their palms edged together and then they remained silent for the next few moments that they believed was long enough to be one minute. All the prisoners in Boorbunk gradually and gradually develop a talent of calculating accurate durations because they were no clocks to use.
‘And tomorrow, we are all going to be out there in a different room standing together with about nine hundred other people from different wards to in orange uniforms too. We can only hope that this unity that we share now will set one of us free tomorrow and celebrate for him’, Peter said and everywhere went back to silence. He looked at Dale again and he smiled. ‘Of all my time of being here, many awful things have happened but we were made to experience one thing that we can at least hold on to. Dale, you did something that none of us ever dared to do’, Peter said and everyone exclaimed and echoed and clapped in consonance.
‘You know, I thought you were crazy but you sure aren’t’, Peter said and some of them laughed. He stood up and hugged Dale and the others followed along too.
That meant the end of the meeting and then they did what they wished to do before the whistles came again and got them rushing helter-skelter to their cells. Barry, Tristan and Dale were the ones left together.
‘Are you okay, Dale?’, Tristan asked. Dale looked at him and nodded.
‘As heroic as it seems, I don’t think you should have done that what you did there. You shouldn’t’, Barry said. ‘You could have died right there and then’
‘I don’t think so too’, Tristan added. ‘As in, why did you even think of doing that? What came over you?!’
‘I, I don’t know. I am not sure’, Dale replied and he knew that was a lie, the exact opposite of what had really happened. He knew why he did it and there was nothing more specific than the reason.
‘Did you ever think of the consequences?’
Dale gave a negative nod because he didn’t.
‘Now, you are going to…’, Barry didn’t say it but they all knew what he meant. The way the governor had said he was going to die an agonising death.
‘In any way it happens, it is going to happen and I don’t care’, Dale said. ‘I have rethought everything and I am not going to keep calm’, he said to Barry. ‘I am going to do what my mind tells me to do’, he said and looked away. ‘And it is telling me to do just one thing. Fight’, he said.
The whistles came and the sound from the loudspeaker followed and then the rush and then the lights went out.
Dale remained standing in his cell, turning and turning, thinking and thinking, the routine activity for him when darkness just set in. What his mind went to was the letter he had seen in The Voyant’s room on the day he was killed. He stretched his hand above to the top shelf and moved it to find that sheet of paper. He did and although he couldn’t read it, it was like he was reciting the words from the letter out, but he wondered what he was going to do with it. There was no way he was going to move out of the garrison surrounding the dungeon, not to speak of doing anything about the contents of the letter. He thought he should tell the rest of the inmates about it or at least, Barry and Tristan but his mind was telling him something else. He dropped it off his mind and returned the letter neatly to where he kept it.
It had been a long week without food or without the comfort to sleep. He pulled out his metal bed and collapsed into it. The next day wasn’t that far away.
There were no special rituals or feasts before The Redemption, no intense handling just more armed guardsmen aligning them in columns and rows. No chains and no horizontal arrangement like The Death Toast. All the prisoners in the different wards were scattered across themselves, about a thousand of them and one of them was going to leave. Officer Eel stepped forward to cast the vote and the entire process was made very quick.
‘Olger Shrew! Tenth ward’, there was a roar of delight across the room and Dale didn’t bother to turn back. He just remained there waiting for the loudspeakers to order them back to their cells. The days for The Redemption and The Death Toast were two days when no activities were done by the prisoners.
All the men of the fifteenth ward returned to their place dejected and bored. Their resolutions weren’t working but it didn’t feel as bad as before, they almost already knew before the day that nobody was lucky enough to make it as the only redeemed one.
Another Death Toast came and one man down. Not Dale but that didn’t stop the prisoners from experiencing another Dale showdown. The governor was not going to go scot-free from the piercing thorns that Dale’s words and not even the guards, daring them to send him to whatever hell they had in stock for people who spoke the pinching truth to them. But they didn’t. Dale had pushed them into a courtroom’s dock and they were the ones who were feeling guilty as he spoke. Nothing to do to him. Yet. They were all waiting for the plank to be turned and Dale Eagan read out. Then they would lick their lips and slide their palms against each other as excruciating pleasure and viciousness was about to descend on them at the same time.
They returned to the room holding hands together for their fallen friend, Robert Modsung and by so doing, rekindling the ties that they shared, making their connection feel alive, keeping the cord of promise and anticipation thickly knotted.
In any case, the rest of The Humour Sect gathered themselves together and kept doing what they were known for. Even though Barry didn’t have his partner to sing with, even though Tristan didn’t have Pierson next to him; even though Dale didn’t have anybody to call him bud and couldn’t feel comfort in the reassuring smiles of Michael, it was what it was.