The Canute jail speaks of desolation and neglect. The small, concrete cage sits like a heavy fragment from a century-old memory, surrounded by abandoned cars and obsolete farm equipment. I never knew such places remained until I saw it jutting from the parched grass one hot, summer afternoon while visiting my Granny.
Granny told me about the only man ever detained in the Canute jail, and remembers the day he was arrested in 1926. Her family lived across the street from the accused man and his wife, and she told me how he murdered his father-in-law Christmas morning.
The husband was a brooding, jealous man who had a rage that always simmered beneath the surface of his face. He did not allow his wife to leave the house while he was away, nor did he allow her to have visitors. Furthermore, very little grass grew in their yard, and upon returning home, the husband would promptly check the dirt outside the house for footprints. If he found any, he would beat his wife for disobeying him.
The couple had an infant and Granny told me that she and the other neighborhood children would stand on a tiny patch of grass that grew under one of the couple’s windows so they could see the baby inside. “The wife would open the window and let us see the baby through the screen,” Granny told me. “All of us little kids in the neighborhood wanted to see that baby, naturally. But she never came outta the house.”
Then one day, the man’s jealous fury erupted in a violent outburst. In a tragic maneuver of disobedience, the young wife had written to her father to come take her home for a Christmas visit. The woman’s father and brother arrived Christmas morning and were speaking to her out in front of the house. “That’s when her husband came out,” Granny said, “and shot her daddy and killed him, right there in the middle of the street. You could see bullet holes in that house for years and years.”
Granny said her father witnessed the whole event. “Dad was sittin’ in the window shelling peanuts,” she recalled. “I think Mama was going to make some candy or somethin’, because he had peaunt shells all over the living room. Boy, we jumped up when all this shootin’ started!” she exclaimed. “That was pretty exciting!”
The sheriff arrested the accused man and put him in the Canute jail until he could be taken to the county seat for the trial. Eventually, the Canute jail and others like it were shut down. As Granny said, “they’d put ‘em in there and there was no bathroom, no running water, no nothin’. So it was just left closed.” Despite my great-grandfather’s testimony of having witnessed the murder, the jury acquitted the man and he took his wife and moved to Kentucky.
When Granny reflected on the rest of the events that Christmas, she said that her folks brought the young wife over to their house, and she remembered the woman’s sorrow. Granny paused a moment, then quietly added, “But we got to see that baby all over the place that day.”
