And the basis for this determination, as far as Callaway could discern, was entirely opaque. There was no test, no trial, and no measurable standard. The patriarch simply decided, and his decision was executed without question. Callaway asked the second how many children had been sent away during the time the second had been alive.
The second thought about this for a moment, counting silently on his fingers. Then he said, “Eleven, maybe twelve.” Callaway asked, “And how many came back?”
The second looked at him as though the question were unintelligible. Then he turned and continued the tour. There is no definitive proof in the sealed documents that the Pardio family systematically disposed of male children deemed unfit. Callaway himself acknowledged that his conclusion was inference, not observation.
But the circumstantial evidence he assembled over his remaining time in the compound was substantial enough that the researcher who later examined the documents, the legal historian from the Mississippi Archives, described Callaway's conclusion as the most conservative possible interpretation of the evidence. The alternative interpretations were worse. The buildings that the patriarch had initially forbidden Callaway to enter included the underground structure he had noticed on his first afternoon, the one accessible only through a trapdoor. The second led Callaway to it on the morning of September the 16th, and lifted the trapdoor without ceremony.
Below was a room approximately 12 feet square and 7 feet deep, with walls of packed earth reinforced with cypress planks. The floor was dirt. There was no source of natural light. The only ventilation came from a clay pipe that ran from one corner of the ceiling up through the ground to the surface, a pipe perhaps 4 inches in diameter.
The room smelled, Callaway wrote, of long human confinement. The room was empty when Callaway descended into it, but the walls told their own story. Scratched into the cypress planks with fingernails or with sharp stones were marks, hundreds of them grouped in sets of five. They were the traditional method of counting days. Callaway counted the marks carefully.
The longest unbroken series he found was 312. Someone had been kept in that hole for 312 days. Callaway asked the second what the room was for. The second said, “Correction.”
Callaway asked what kind of correction required keeping a person underground for nearly a year. The second said, “The kind that works.” Callaway climbed out of the hole and stood in the clearing, breathing the open air, and wrote in his journal that his hands were shaking. He wrote, “I have walked surveys through country where men have killed each other over cattle and water rights.
I have seen the remains of violence on the frontier, but I have never stood in a place so precisely designed for the systematic reduction of a human being to something less than human. This is not punishment born of anger. This is punishment born of method. And method is worse than anger because method does not tire, does not relent, does not feel remorse.
Method simply continues until the desired result is achieved.” The desired result, as Callaway would learn over the remainder of his time in the compound, was total obedience, something beyond cooperation or mere compliance. Obedience. The distinction mattered because the Pardio system did not merely require its members to follow rules.
It required them to cease to understand that any alternative to following the rules was possible. The goal was not to control behavior. The goal was to eliminate the very concept of choice. And the system worked.
Callaway observed over two and a half days inside the compound a population of 67 people who operated with the mechanical efficiency of a single organism. Meals were prepared and consumed at fixed times announced by the iron bell. Work assignments were issued each morning by the patriarch from the steps of the main hall. Sleeping arrangements were fixed and could not be changed without the patriarch's explicit permission.
No one left the compound without permission. No one entered a building other than their own without permission. No one spoke to a visitor, meaning Callaway, without permission. The children did not attend any form of school.
They worked alongside the adults from what Callaway estimated was the age of four or five. They hauled water. They fed livestock. They cleared brush.
They dug. And they did all of this in silence because the compound operated under a standing rule that Callaway found almost impossible to believe until he observed it with his own eyes. The rule was this. Speech was forbidden outside of designated times.
The patriarch determined when speech was permitted. The iron bell signaled the beginning and end of these periods. Between bells, every person in the compound conducted their activities without speaking. The only exceptions were the patriarch himself, the second, and two older women whom Callaway identified as the patriarch's wives.
Everyone else communicated through gestures, nods, and a system of hand signals that Callaway compared to the signals used by military units in the field. Callaway watched a woman carry a heavy bucket of water from the well to the cooking area, stumble, spill the water, pick herself up, and return to the well to refill the bucket, all without making a sound. He watched a child cut their hand on a piece of split wood and clamp their other hand over their mouth to prevent any cry from escaping. He watched an elderly man bent and slow-moving drag a log across the clearing with visible difficulty and not a single person moved to help him because helping without permission was itself a violation.
The silence was not natural. It was enforced and the enforcement mechanism Callaway discovered was not the underground hole. The hole was reserved for serious infractions, for minor violations, for a spoken word out of turn, for a moment of unsanctioned laughter, for a task performed too slowly. The punishment was delivered immediately and publicly.
The instrument of punishment was a length of braided rawhide approximately 3 feet long that the patriarch carried coiled at his belt. It was not a whip in the cattleman's sense. It was heavier, denser, designed not to cut, but to bruise, and the patriarch used it with the casual precision of a craftsman using a familiar tool. A single stroke across the shoulders, a single stroke across the backs of the legs, delivered without anger, without raised voice, without any change in the patriarch's expression, delivered the way a man might flick a fly off his arm.
And the recipient of the stroke did not cry out, did not flinch, did not stop working. They absorbed it the way the cypress trees absorbed the rain, as something that simply happened inevitably and without appeal. Callaway watched this happen four times during his stay. Four strokes delivered to four different people, two adults and two children for infractions so minor that Callaway himself could not identify what the individuals had done wrong.
Each time the patriarch delivered the stroke, replaced the rawhide at his belt, and walked away. Each time the recipient continued their work without pause. On the evening of September the 16th, Callaway sat in the clearing outside the main hall and wrote the entry that would later be cited more than any other passage in his journal. He wrote, “I have been in this place for 2 days.