Free Falconer by John Cheever

Farragut, very sadly. “They’re putting you in a private room.”
    He passed Farragut his crutches and helped him into his shift. Farragut, swinging forward clumsily on his crutches and with the pen up his ass, followed the guard out of the ward and down a corridor that smelled sharply of quicklime to a door locked with a bar and a padlock. The guard had some trouble with the key. The door opened onto a very small cell with a window too high to be seen from, a toilet, a Bible and a mattresswith a folded sheet and blanket. “How long?” asked Farragut. “The lawyer’s booked you in for a month,” said the guard, “but I seen Tiny give you some tomatoes and if Tiny’s your friend you’ll be out in a week.” He shut and barred the door.
    Farragut removed the pen. It was with this precious instrument that he would indict Chisholm, and he clearly saw Chisholm in his third year of prison grays eating franks and rice with a bent tin spoon. He needed paper. There was no toilet paper. If he demanded this he would, he knew, with luck get one sheet a day. He seized on the Bible. This was a small copy, bound in red, but the end pages were a solid, clerical black and the rest of the pages were so heavily printed that he could not write over them. He wanted to write his indictment of Chisholm at once. That the lawyer had been determined to deny him a pen may have exaggerated the importance of his writing the indictment, but the only alternative would be to phrase his accusation and commit this to memory and he doubted if he could accomplish this. He had the pen, but the only surface upon which he could write seemed to be the wall of his cell. He could write his indictment on the wall and then commit it to memory, but some part of his background and its influence on his character restrained him from using the wall for a page. He was a man, he preserved at least some vision of dignity, and to write what might be his last statement on the wall seemed to him an undue exploitation of a bizarre situation. His regard for rectitude was still with him. He could write on his plaster cast, his shift or his sheet. The plaster cast was out since he could reach only half of its surface and theroundness of the cast left him a very limited area. He wrote a few letters on his shift. The instant the felt pen touched the cloth, the ink spread to display the complexity of the thread count, the warp and woof of this very simple garment. The shift was out. His prejudice against the wall was still strong and so he tried the sheet. The prison laundry had, mercifully, used a great deal of starch and he found the surface of the sheet nearly as useful as paper. He and the sheet would be together for at least a week. He could cover the sheet with his remarks, clarify and edit these, and then commit them to memory. When he returned to cellblock F and the shop, he could type his remarks and have them kited to his governor, his bishop and his girl.
    “Your Honor,” he began. “I address you in your elective position from my elective position. You have been elected to the office of governor by a slender majority of the population. I have been elected to occupy cellblock F and to bear the number 734–508–32 by a much more ancient, exalted and unanimous force, the force of justice. I had, so to speak, no opponents. However, I am very much a citizen. As a taxpayer in the fifty percent bracket I have made a substantial contribution to the construction and maintenance of the walls that confine me. I have paid for the clothes I wear and the food I eat. I am a much more representative elected member of society than you. There are, in your career, broad traces of expedience, evasion, corruption and improvisation. The elective office that I hold is pure.
    “We come, of course, from different classes. If intellectual and social legacies were revered in this countryI would not consider addressing you, but we are dealing with a Democracy. I have never had the