My Life Including Prison

PROLOGUE

This book has two story lines that eventually intersect. One story is about the life I lived and the other story is about my experience working as a prison caseworker, mostly with male inmates. The stories were originally written separately and then later combined with alternating chapters. I started my life as Eileen Clark; married, I became Eileen Stone, and I worked for seven years as Eileen Stone, until the day my divorce was final in 2000. Then I started writing Eileen Clark on all reassessments and Board reports for the next eleven years. Although I was married again, I remained Eileen Clark at work that last month, and then I retired as Eileen Pruett.

At home I had my childhood, my college years, my family, and finally my working years. Working at the prison meant that I dealt with my husband and children in the mornings, evenings, weekends, and holidays. For five days a week, I switched between my home life to my work life and then back again. My two worlds were completely different: home with children; work with convicted criminals. I switched from a loving, caretaking environment to an in-charge rule-oriented, structured situation. One might compare it to changing channels in the mind as I mentally prepared for what I was to deal with as I made the thirty-minute drive to work and home again each day.

At certain points in the reading, the reader may understand how it felt for me to continually switch back and forth during those eighteen and three-fourth years. Then my life changed and things became more integrated for me. The reader also has the choice to read the odd-numbered chapters together and then read the even-numbered chapters together.

Whether it was maturity, life experience, or an eternal plan, I believe it was a good thing for me to bring the parts of my life together so I could feel like one unified person and not two separate and distinct beings.

Chapter ONE

My older sister, Kathleen, would have been six years old when she came home from first grade and took my bottle of milk away from me. After a few swallows, she probably gave it back to me, her four-and-a-half-year-old sibling.

Small-town country life was an easy way to live until . . . March 13, 1955. Dad, Mom, and their five children climbed in the car as usual on our way to pick up Grandpa Floyd to drive him to work. We stopped in Keene, New Hampshire, to get him and proceeded on the seemingly long drive to the wooden bucket factory where he worked through the week while staying in his one-room little house. On the way home, Dad decided to stop again to ask Grandma Caroline something.

Grandma Caroline came running out of the house in a panic. You better get home, your house is burning! she said. Seven more miles, then we saw it . . . fully engulfed in flames! Dad told us to stay in the car. We did. Being seven years old, I asked Mom all the questions I could think of while trying to understand what would happen to our family.

The youngest child was fifteen months old when he cried, I want to go home. I knew we were home, but it was all burning, toys, clothes, house and all. I felt sorry for him, for me, and for all of us. Our house was gone. Fire trucks and many of the townspeople were there, but little could be done. We watched as our house burned down. After a long time, we decided to go and stay with Mom’s oldest brother and his family. So that is what we did for the next two weeks until Dad bought a large colonial-style house for $18,000.

Dad believed the fire started by a spark from our wood-burning stove in the front room. That room had a newly varnished floor and wasn’t well ventilated due to the cold weather. The fumes could have been the problem. At times, through the years, we would return to our land where the burned out cellar remained and became overgrown with weeds and brush, and pick apples from our trees. I remember Dad entering that house after milking the cow, always with his hat turned around backwards so the visor didn’t poke the side of the cow while he milked.

Our next house didn’t have a barn, so there was no cow during those years, but Mom got a Rototiller and plowed some land for a garden. There were plenty of rocks to toss out of the way during the first few years of gardening in a new spot. New Hampshire has plenty of rocks, hence the name, The Granite State and property lines were made of middle-sized rocks piled along the way. We were free to roam as far as we wanted but were strictly informed never to cross a stone wall, which would have put us outside our eighteen acres. Lots of trees and brush grew; it was fun to wander and explore.

One day, when a brother and I went and looked around, we found what I could only describe as an altar. It was a pile of rocks carefully placed in a round circle about four feet across and maybe four feet tall. The astonishing part was that the top center of the pile must have been used as a pit for fire; those rocks were blackened. My parents didn’t know anything about it, whether it had been used for animal sacrifices, cooking or camping or whatever from people long gone. Later I learned that three different Indian tribes had lived there many years before. My other grandfather, Perley, said that some of the wood shingles on the back of his house had been there since the time of Abraham Lincoln, but the Indians would have been around long before that.

Grandpa Perley’s house wasn’t too many miles into the woods. His house used to be in town, but there was no town there when we went to visit him. Later I learned that he was in town, but the townspeople moved away into the cities during the depression when they lost their houses. The dirt road to Grandpa’s house was never plowed. There were a few months in the winter when he was completely snowed in and alone. When it warmed up, Dad would buy groceries that we would take in to him such as can beans, saltines, Kool-Aid, sugar, lemon drop candies, and other things that Dad knew he liked. Dad took several of us older children and we drove for a while, but then we had to hike that last mile or two through the snow. Plastic grocery bags with handles weren’t used then, so we brought our pillowcases and some cloth bags.

Grandpa lived in the large front room, where he had his chair behind a huge loaded oval table. It was covered with empty cans—one had spoon in it—empty saltine boxes, jars, bottles, and just plain stuff he hadn’t cleared off. Near Grandpa’s chair on the back side of the table was a huge pile of newspapers. I remembered him fingering his way down to a certain spot in the pile and pulling out an empty Kool-Aid package, from where he took a few dollars, handed them to Dad, and asked if he had a few coins to pay the children for helping him carry in the groceries.

Grandpa would ask if it was much trouble carrying the bags through the snow. We just said that we liked to come visit him. Our cousin wrote a book about Grandpa, Perley: The True Story of a New Hampshire Hermit. It was fun to read more about him than I knew of. He was a good man, but did go to jail for not paying child support, even though he gave her the house they lived in. We also visited Grandpa in the springtime. He showed us how he would make a hole in a maple tree, then pound a round wood spout into the tree and hang a bucket on the spout. He would go back a few days later and collect what was in the bucket. He let us taste some; it was like sweet water and very good. Then he showed us a shed where the sweet sap got boiled and boiled until it was the thickness of syrup—real maple syrup. He would give Mom a gallon of the syrup, but would sell the rest. Mom said that she was his favorite child.

Mom boiled the maple syrup until it was even thicker. She would tell one of us kids to get some clean snow in a metal pie pan. We had plenty of those since she usually made about thirty pies for Thanksgiving. She tested the thickened syrup to see if it was ready by drizzling a small amount onto the snow. It was either declared ready or we had to wait longer. Then the older kids had to go and get more pie tins of snow so there would be enough for all of us including Dad and her—probably about seven or eight kids at that time. She served it by drizzling a stream of the thick syrup over each person’s pie plate of snow. We gladly had our forks in hand as we anticipated eating the chewy sweet treat that quickly thickened as soon as she handed each person their pan of snow. It was very good.

Dad decided that we should have something to do while we enjoyed the treat, so it became a tradition that he got out his slide projector and had us set up the screen so we could watch his 35 millimeter slides of the family or of around town. That was always a fun evening to have with the family. Sugar on Snow was what we called it, but we only had it in the early spring, when there was still snow.

The rest of the year, we enjoyed maple syrup on pancakes and French toast. Mom once explained how she could make everyone in the family happy. First she made plenty of the egg and milk mixture and dipped the bread, cooking it for those who wanted French toast. After adding flour and baking powder, she cooked for those wanting plain pancakes. My next younger brother, Warren, and I waited till the end because then she added corn to the pancake mix for those who liked their pancakes with added corn. As Grandpa got older and no longer made maple syrup, Mom bought Mapleine to flavor the sugar and water that she cooked into syrup. It surprised me to learn that you use twice as much sugar as you use of water. Grandpa enjoyed having his goats, usually a few dozen goats, but sometimes there were more when the new little one were born in the spring. He almost always had fresh milk and little goat friends too play with. We never wandered far on