The Choiring Of The Trees (15 page)

“Why don’t he?” Nail asked, and when Waymon did not answer but just hung his head, Nail asked, “Don’t he have none of that three hunderd dollars left?”

Waymon tried to explain. It was complicated. That new lawyer they’d hired, Farrell Cobb of Little Rock, wasn’t charging them the whole three hundred dollars for his appeal to the Supreme Court. Part of it was a “retainer,” which, Waymon attempted to explain, was to make sure that Mr. Cobb would do everything he could, for as long as it took, to get Nail out. The agreement with Cobb stipulated that in the event of Nail’s electrocution, Seth Chism would get a partial refund.

“Shit,” Nail commented. “Paw’d be better off if I was fried, after all.”

“Don’t ye talk lak thet, Nail,” Waymon pled. “Yore life is worth a whole lot more than three hunderd dollars.”

“It aint worth more than our whole damn farm!” Nail said. Then he asked, “How’s my sheep?”

Again Waymon hung his head. “Nail, I hate to tell ye. You know I hate to tell ye. What few of them sheep the drought didn’t git, the dogs got.”

“Ever last one of ’em?” Nail asked. “Didn’t they leave me a lamb or two?”

Waymon shook his head.

“Well,” Nail said, and pictured his pastures empty of their flocks. Right now there would be no grass: the last of the autumn grass would be gone, and the spring grass not started yet. He asked, “How’s Maw?”

“Jist fine,” Waymon said. “She wanted to come with me, but Paw wouldn’t let her. She’ll shore be glad to see that I’m bringin a empty box home.”

“Irene? How’s she been?” Nail asked of their sister.

Waymon gave his head a tilt and dip. “Lonesome, don’t ye know? But she’s a big help to Maw, and they keep each other company, I reckon.”

“She don’t see Sull no more?”

Waymon shook his head. “She aint been back to Jasper one time since yore trial.”

They talked until their fifteen minutes were up. Waymon told him that he had accosted Sull Jerram on the square in Jasper and told him that he, Waymon, intended to put him in his grave if Nail died in the chair. Waymon’s parting words to his brother were “Well, you didn’t die in the chair, but I’m a mind to put Sull in his grave anyhow, for what he done to ye.”

Waymon was not the only visitor he had that day. Two more visitors came before dark. You were supposed to get only one visit a month, but these two didn’t count, because they were the preacher and the lawyer. The preacher was Jimmie Mac, who said he just wanted to say he was real happy that Nail was still alive and he wondered if Nail had had time yet to make up his mind that the good Lord Himself had seen fit to spare him, and wasn’t that enough to convince him that the good Lord really did exist and cared for him? Jimmie Mac was disappointed to learn that Nail had not followed his advice and spent his last hours in prayer, but he could understand how a feller might have other things on his mind at such a time. But now that the execution had been postponed, didn’t Nail think he had some time to seek out the Lord and take it to Him in prayer and ask Him for His forgiveness and blessing and promise of salvation forevermore? Didn’t Nail know that God loved him? Didn’t Nail realize that God works in mysterious ways and we are not to question His wisdom but glory in His deeds? Had Nail read Hebrews the twelfth chapter and the verses three through thirteenth, especially the sixth verse: “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth”? Didn’t Nail wish to be a son of the Lord and endure the Father’s chastisement? Couldn’t Nail understand what a challenge it was to be chastened and punished and to survive whole and pure in the sight of God and reap the rewards of life everlasting and the fruits of righteousness?

“No,” replied Nail.

“No which?” asked Jimmie Mac.

“No I don’t have much use for that Lord,” he said.

The lawyer came just before suppertime and wasn’t required to use the visit room but was allowed to sit with Nail right in the mess hall. The lawyer was right at home here in The Walls and had been here many times before. “The missus is expecting me shortly or I’d break bread with you,” he apologized, wedging himself in between Nail and the fat convict named Toy on the long bench. There were only two tables in the mess hall, but each of them was the length of the room; all of the white men sat at one table, all of the black men at the other. “No reflection on the quality of the food, you understand,” Farrell Cobb remarked, lowering his voice conspiratorially. The food was the same Nail had for lunch and for breakfast, the same food they’d served him when he was in the death hole, the same food everybody got three times a day, seven days a week: one piece of cold cornbread, one small chunk of mostly fat probably from beef but hard to tell, one cup of something warm that Nail had never been able to determine was supposed to be taken for coffee or soup but that could be either, or neither. The butcher shops of Little Rock were swept of their scraps at the end of the business day, and the fatty scraps were served at the Arkansas State Penitentiary.

Farrell Cobb stared at Nail’s plate, and his lips formed themselves into a suggestion of nausea. “In Mississippi,” he whispered, “they don’t get any meat whatsoever.” He looked around to see if any of the other men crowded along the benches were listening, but none of them were paying any attention to him, having already noted his suit and tie, his heavy overcoat which protected him against this biting cold, and having either recognized him or stopped wondering what he was doing here; or having never cared to begin with. “Just beans or cowpeas,” Cobb added, and added to that, “Well, I guess you’d not mind a serving of beans or some other vegetables too, but my experience is, the prisoners given a choice would always rather have a bit of fat meat than a bit of beans.” Nail ate. “Now, here we are discussing the menu when we ought to be considering more important matters, such as those contusions and risings you’ve recently acquired. Can you hear me?” Farrell Cobb kept his voice low and his mouth close to Nail’s ear. “If your beatings were provoked, all I can advise is to be very careful, to follow all the rules, to show proper respect for your keepers and superiors, to strive at all times to conform to the system, and to do nothing that might be construed as rebellious or aggravating. On the other hand, if you were beaten without provocation, that is indeed a sorry state of affairs, and one that I have protested time and time again, to little effect, I’m afraid, since, as you may have observed, it appears to be the routine in this institution, as everywhere else. I suppose we ought to condone a little corporal punishment in our efforts to wipe out capital punishment. But I know it hurts. I don’t approve of the strap, let me tell you.” Cobb’s gaze wandered up and down the table, seeking out the men who had obviously been victims of the strap and had recent cuts, welts, stripes, or scars to show for it. Nail kept chewing and let his eyes follow Cobb’s. He had not received any strap yet himself, only the backs and fronts of hands, and wooden clubs, which were bad enough. They had better not try to use any strap on him. “Well now, here we are talking about the mistreatment of prisoners as if anything could be done about it, when that is not really what I’m here to talk about at all. What I came to say was to give you a little report on our little efforts to get you out of that little old hot squat.” Cobb’s chuckle was audible to the other men, who raised their eyes from their plates to see what humor was the cause of it. Cobb noted his audience, and appeared on the verge of repeating his clever term for Old Sparky in order to amuse them. But he did not. Instead, he asked Nail, “Well, what do you say?”

“What do I say?” Nail asked.

“Yes: what do you have to say?”

“I’m fine, I reckon. How about you?”

“No, I mean, aren’t you going to say anything to me for what I did to get you a stay of execution?”

“Oh,” Nail said. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. I was on the telephone all of Tuesday night and most of yesterday. Thank God and Alexander Graham Bell. I’ll have you know I even placed through a telephone call to Fort Smith, to reach Judge Bourland, and that’s what? a hundred and fifty miles of telephone wire. If that wire hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t be here right now. It was Judge Bourland who got the Supreme Court to agree to hear your appeal, and it was his special-delivery letter hand-delivered to Governor Hays at 4:50
P.M.
yesterday, just ten minutes short of the time the governor was to quit for the day, that persuaded him to use his authority to stop the execution.”

The gong clanged to signal the end of suppertime. The men stood as one, executed a right face—except Farrell Cobb, who turned the wrong way—and marched out in lockstep. Mr. Cobb got himself in line and attempted the lockstep in following after Nail, continuing to talk into his ear from behind but having to crane his neck to do so: “Judge Bourland said, and I quote him, that your defense was ‘butchered.’ Without naming names, he as much as called your James Thomas Duckworth a dolt and a bungling idiot who ought to be disbarred. I know that if we get the case to the full court when it meets again in January, we can convince them that Duckworth didn’t take the proper steps for appeal, not to mention that he made a perfect shambles of the trial itself.” At the door to the barracks, which Farrell Cobb could not enter, he quickly asked, “Is there anything I can do for you? Anything you need?”

“You said you’d get me home for Christmas,” Nail reminded him.

“Well, I am always an optimist,” Cobb said. “In this profession you must be constantly hopeful and confident. What say let’s shoot for Valentine’s Day, at the latest?”

Later Fat Gabe came to his bunk, with Short Leg and two of the Negro trusties, whose job, he discovered, was restraint more than anything else. “Uh-oh,” said Toy, and Stardust looked off into the next century, and Thirteen pretended he didn’t exist.

Fat Gabe said to Nail, “Who told you to talk to that man?”

“He did most of the talkin,” Nail replied.

“You think you’re some kind of privileged person? You think just because you beat the chair you can have special treatment? You think you can have company at supper?”

“I didn’t invite him,” Nail pointed out. “He’s a lawyer.”

“You talkin back to me?” Fat Gabe yelled.

“Nope, I’m jist tellin ye who’s who and who’s what.”

“That lawyer was Farrell Cobb, the biggest ass-licker in Pulaski County,” Fat Gabe said.

“You may be right,” Nail said.

“You sayin I’m not right?” Fat Gabe said.

“Naw, I said you may be right.”

“That’s what I thought you said, Chism. You think you’re somebody important, don’t you, just because you beat the chair? The chair couldn’t kill you, but I’ve got a notion to do it. Take down your pants.”

“Huh?” Nail said. “It’s too cold.”

“TAKE DOWN YOUR PANTS!” Fat Gabe yelled into his face. Nail did nothing. Fat Gabe looked at the two Negro trusties, each in turn. “What are you coons just standin there for? Take off his pants.”

While one of the Negroes and Short Leg held him, the other Negro pulled off his pants and then ripped off his underwear. “Turn ’im around,” Fat Gabe said, and they turned him to face the bunk and held his arms along the upper bunk. Nail could not see the instrument of punishment, but as soon as the first blow had fallen, he could picture it exactly: a strap of harness leather two and a half feet long by two and a half inches wide, attached to a wooden handle sixteen inches long, held in Fat Gabe’s hand, and swung back as far as he could reach. The other convicts made way to give Fat Gabe swinging room. Nail’s father Seth had tanned his hide, the last time, with a length of plow harness, when Nail was eleven years old and had refused to get up in the middle of the night to stoke the boiler in the still. Nail could still remember it, and he remembered counting the blows: ten in all, which had been enough to persuade him to obey his father the next time Seth asked him to do anything. I haven’t disobeyed anybody, Nail thought now, except I wouldn’t take down my pants like he asked me to, and I had a good reason for that: it’s freezing in here. But he felt already the heat of his smarting buttocks warming his whole body. He wasn’t cold anymore, just incredibly sore, and he counted the number of licks beyond ten: eleven and twelve and thirteen. You’d think Fat Gabe’s arm would tire out, but it didn’t. Something wet was trickling down the back of his legs, and he hoped it was shit but knew it was blood. Fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. As long as the blows had been falling on his skin it had been possible to bear them, but now each lash cut into wounded flesh and seared the raw underskin. Seventeen was an awful one unto itself. Eighteen was unbearable. Nineteen made him feel faint. Twenty…

He heard a voice say, “Turn him around,” and the two blacks who were keeping him from reaching his dagger and murdering Fat Gabe turned him toward his assailant, who was wearing a look as if he were not tired but enjoying himself, and who swung back the strap aiming to lash Nail on his genitals.

He begged for the first time in his life. “No!”

But Fat Gabe hit him there, and it was much worse than being hit on his buttocks. Even the torturer seemed to retain a shred of fellow-feeling to realize how hideous the scourging must have felt, and he was not putting the full force of his swing into the blows but checking them so that they slapped against Nail’s genitals without cutting, only stinging and bruising. Nail lost consciousness.

How much later he came to he couldn’t tell, except that it was dark and there was a face close to his own, speaking to him. The voice was Toy’s, and Toy had very bad teeth, which gave his breath a rancid stench, especially so close: they were lying side by side in the lower bunk. “They done that to me last week,” said Toy. “It helps if you kind of draw your knees up towards your chest. Here, you can have my space to draw up your knees. Like that. It keeps your balls from killing you. Don’t it? Do you feel some better that way?”

“Hush,” Nail said. “Let me sleep. Thanks.”

“You know what they strapped me for?” Toy went on. “At dinner once Stardust wouldn’t eat his bread, sometimes he don’t eat at all, and once when he left his bread like that I was real hungry so I took it and ate it. You know we aint supposed to touch nobody else’s food ’ceptin our own?”