The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley Page A

the meeting expecting to pitch books to their peers, and none of them had been compelled to select books from the donated summer reading material. They could have slacked off and watched TV all summer or fallen back on pulpier books. But it seemed that the hunger for good reading material was growing.
    At the end of the meeting, several of the men streamed by to shake hands with me and say goodbye until next month. As I said goodbye to Dread, I extended my hand for what I assumed would be a conventional handshake, but he deked his hand sideways and gave me an elaborate “brother handshake” instead . He smiled broadly as he did so, making me feel I had entered some inner circle of acceptance. Before he left, we made plans to talk at the prison the following day.
    On the ferry ride back to Amherst Island after the book club discussion, Carol, Derek and I found seats together on the upper deck, where a warm, dry wind was blowing. Carol applied some lipstick without looking in a mirror, a skill that I watched with admiration. She was wearing a scarf to protect her hair from the sun, “so it doesn’t turn brassy,” she informed me. I pulled at a strand of my own hair and saw that the colour had indeed bleached out over the summer. It wasn’t something that mattered to me much, though. All I cared about at that moment, after that day’s session in the stale air of the prison, was spending a moment with my head thrown back, eyes closed, enjoying the breeze on my face and being on the water, feeling gratitude that I was free to step outside the prison walls.
    Carol opened her purse a few minutes later and pulled out a letter that had been mailed to her via the Collins Bay chaplain. It was from Graham writing from Beaver Creek, where he and Frank were now serving the next stage of their sentence. She read the letter aloud to us. Graham wrote that there was no book group at the prison and could Carol please help him start one. She looked up, her eyes shining. I whooped for joy. Derek and I high-fived. Here were men who were becoming hooked, not on drugs, but on books. It was the first concrete triumph for Carol’s project.
    Derek waved goodbye to us as he drove his car off the ferry and turned east to his island house, while Carol and I drove our cars off the ramp and turned west to her house. Once settled at her place, she proposed a swim. We grabbed towels and bathing suits and walked across the sheep pasture to the island’s westernmost tip. Rams with enormous ankle-grazing testicles led the way along the sheep path. That night I celebrated Carol’s birthday with her, giving her a Guinness ginger bundt cake and one of my favourite novels: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, a series of funny vignettes about an inquisitive six-year-old girl and her crusty grandmother and their family summers on a remote island in the Finnish archipelago. It was a perfect book for summer and I had given it to some of my most cherished friends.
    Carol talked about the frantic feeling that she sensed was building in the men because of the difficulties of prison life. One inmate for whom she had found legal representation had been caught with pineapple juice, she told me, which meant that he was suspected of fermenting it in a plastic bag to produce hooch. She seemed to be frustrated that just as she was helping him finally get a fair shake, he was busy screwing it up.
    The island fauna, too, were under stress following the unusually wet spring and the summer heat. As I fell asleep I heard coyotes howling and a lone lamb baa-ing. One animal penned in, the others desperate to get at it. The next morning, on my drive to the ferry, I passed, quite close, two young foxes with white-tipped tails, black stockings and amber eyes, lounging by a stream bed. They should have run off. But they just sat there staring at me, perhaps dazed by the already oppressive morning heat.
    As the ferry pulled away from Amherst Island, I