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Show page 56 several times probably came upon him, until a guard shortly appeared. "Bassler, John? Ready?" Within an hour he was dressed out and escorted to the prison's front gate. A raspy sound of a turning key, a click, and his years of confinement xvere behind him. The sun shone brightly on the prison steps. Stillness gripped him. He turned and looked back at the guard and back down the long corridor up which he had walked. He seemed to follow that x^alk again, step by step, until he was looking at the guard again. "You're looking the x^rong way, Bassler," said the guard. "You're a free man now." Bassler turned around and looked out over a thousand yards of green lawn, to the highway and passing traffic. A slight breeze teased the grass and made small waves of shadow emerge and disappear, similar to the wind in a wheat field. He began to blink his eyes. "Look at the pink peach blossoms," he said. "That's a bus on the highway," the guard said. But Bassler's mistake became a more vivid reality. The guard's voice had no effect, seemingly; it could have been a voice somewhere in the long corridor up which he had walked, back somewhere in the lost years. He moved forward, down the steps. "Beautiful pink peach blossoms," he said loudly. "Freedom, Ruth, with beautiful pink peach blossoms." |
