The Choiring Of The Trees (20 page)

Most of the men who were not taken out each day to work were transferred to the new prison farm at Tucker downstate, where conditions were supposed to be even worse than here, and there were afternoons when Nail had the barracks practically all to himself, because even Timbo Red was out somewhere working. The only ones besides Nail who didn’t get sent out to work were those too sick or too frostbitten or too injured from floggings to be able to move. Nail wasn’t sick anymore, but they wouldn’t send him out, because of the law.

He never left the building until, late in the afternoon on January 30
^th
, Short Leg came and got him. Nail’s low spirits soared up, and he walked so briskly that Short Leg had to grab him at one point when he was heading toward the visit room and say, “Not that way, Chism.
This
way,” and then led him into the power and light building where Old Sparky was. For one terrible moment Nail thought perhaps he’d misunderstood the lawyer and that Farrell Cobb hadn’t said April 20
^th
but January 30
^th
, or maybe it was already April 20
^th
and Nail hadn’t been paying good attention.

But it was just that he was required to witness again. It was time for Ramsey. Nail was the first witness to sit, and before the others came he had to sit a long time, expecting and hoping that any minute the door would open and in would walk Miss Monday to do her drawing of Ramsey. Nail looked at the window and calculated that sundown was maybe still half an hour off, and maybe Viridis Monday could come and sit beside him and they could talk for a while, and if no one was looking he’d even sneak her a peek at his tree-shaped gent’s charm. He’d thank her again in a way he couldn’t do in writing because he couldn’t express himself that way. He’d thank her most for wanting to go to Stay More and meet folks and try to find someone who could help get him commuted. He’d tell her what had been on his mind these past few days: that when April 20
^th
came around, he’d appreciate it if she would stay at home. He didn’t want her coming to his execution, not even to yell at Bobo.

He didn’t have to yell at Bobo this time. The other witnesses came, but Viridis Monday wasn’t one of them. Burdell came. Fat Gabe came, bringing Ramsey, who was twisting and screaming at the top of his lungs and begging Jesus to save him. For a minute there Nail couldn’t believe it was Ramsey, who had been so silent and withdrawn. But it was him, changed into a wild lunatic. At one point he broke loose from Fat Gabe and fell down at Mr. Burdell’s feet and wrapped his arms around the warden’s legs and begged and pled and said everything he could think of that might move him, but Mr. Burdell just motioned for Fat Gabe and Short Leg to get him back up and into the chair, and they did. Jimmie Mac tried to say the final prayer, but his words were drowned out by Ramsey trying to get people to believe that if he had just one more chance he’d be the best man the world ever knew since Jesus Himself.

Bobo seemed to be relieved to shut out that noise; he seemed to be pushing down a lever that would turn off all that screaming and pleading, and he left that lever down. He left it down too long, and the room filled up with the choking fumes of blackened flesh. One of the witnesses fainted and knocked over another one while he was falling. Another witness vomited all over himself and one of the others.

It was just as well Miss Monday hadn’t been there.

February came. He imagined the buds were a-swelling. The trees were not going to sing for another month or more, but the buds swole up as if the trees were humming in practice and tune-up. The grimy windows of the barracks seemed to be admitting more sunlight. Timbo Red took to drawing daffodils on the floor, not just stick figures with ball flowers stuck on them but real convincing daffodils that you could almost touch, that looked as if they were bright-yellow although they were black-and-white, that smelled like daffodils although they really smelled like piss.

The men who had “sweethearts” among the other men, the punks and queers, had a Valentine’s party and exchanged modest gifts or sentiments. A lucky few men got to go to the visit room to see their real female sweethearts.

The powers of observation of men in prison take one of two directions: either they become oblivious to all but the most glaring sights around them, or they develop an ability to notice the most insignificant and inconspicuous little details. Nail one day noticed that Fat Gabe’s belt had small notches cut along the upper edge, and he counted them, eighteen, and one day after another one of the beaten prisoners had passed away Nail counted again and there were nineteen notches.

One night in bed Timbo Red whispered into Nail’s ear, “Sometimes I git so pruney and itchy I got a mind to go ahead and let Thirteen have me. Unless you want me. I druther it was you.” Nail could not answer that, or respond, but later in the night, when it was clear the boy was not going to be able to sleep, Nail used his hand to get the boy over the mountain.

Often Nail asked himself why it was that he hadn’t been returned to the death hole. If another date had been set for his delayed execution, April 20
^th
, and he was once more condemned, then why wasn’t he back in his old cell in the basement of the power and light? He preferred it there. It was dark and solitary and even scary, but he didn’t have to put up with anybody except whoever was in the other cell, like Ramsey or Skip, who had been all right, for a couple of murderers. Sometimes he was tempted to request that Mr. Burdell return him to the death hole. Only two things kept him from it: one was he was genuinely fond of Timbo Red and wanted to keep an eye out for the boy and help him in whatever way he could, even if it meant what he had done that one night, which wasn’t a queer thing to do but just handy and charitable; and the other reason was that in the death hole he’d never get to go to the visit room.

Not that he ever got summoned to the visit room. As February drew to its foreshortened close, he consciously prevented thoughts of the visit room from ever again torturing him. Some men in prison are capable of such self-control of their minds; they are able to put themselves to sleep at night or to resume sleep after springing awake in the middle of a nightmare by preventing their minds from thinking too much, or thinking about the wrong things. The visit room was a wrong thought, and Nail succeeded at last in abolishing it entirely from his consciousness.

Thus he was totally surprised one morning in late February when Short Leg came to his bunk, kicked his foot to draw his attention, and held out the handcuffs. “Visit room, Chism. There’s a lady waiting to see you.”

On

H
e looked terrible. His hair was growing back in uneven patches, which were white as well as blond, reminding her of dustings of snow on the Stay More hillsides beneath the dark branches of trees. But his head was still splendid compared with his body, which looked starved and emaciated. He was smiling at her as if he’d never been happier in his life, but his body looked as if it had already died. She held out her hands to the screen that separated them, a screen so fine that she could not even get her fingertips through it to touch him. He put his hands up to hers, and although their hands did not touch, it was almost as if they were in contact. The guard motioned with the end of his shotgun barrel for them to remove their hands from the screen. Dropping her hands, she found her voice: “Hello, Nail.” It did not cause her any discomfort to address him familiarly; she felt she knew him very well; indeed, she now knew many things about him that he probably did not know himself.

“Howdy, Miss M—” He started to address her formally but then asked, politely, as if making an important request, “What can I call ye?” And then suggested an answer: “Do you want me to call ye Viridis?” She nodded. “I’ve been lookin for ye,” he said in a way that told her he had been counting the hours waiting for her.

“I’ve done a bit of traveling,” she said. “I’ve been to your Stay More and back. It took me a while.”

“On a horse?” he asked, grinning.

She nodded. “A mare, actually. Named Rosabone.”

“You rode Rosabone all the way to Stay More?”

“No, we took the train as far as Clarksville.”

“‘We’? Oh, you mean you and the mare?”

She nodded. He laughed. She declared, “Stay More is a beautiful place. A fabulous place.”

“This time of year?” He raised his heavy eyebrows, which were the only good hair he had remaining on his head. “Swains Creek must be froze.”

“Banty Creek is iced over, but not Swains Creek.”

“You went up Banty Creek?”

“I went everywhere.”

“Even my—even the Chism place?”

“Especially the Chism place.”

“You met my momma?”

“I had some long talks with your mother.”

“And Paw—how is he?”

“Middlin to fair.”

Nail chuckled. “‘Middlin to fair,’ huh? Who taught ye that?”

“Who does it sound like?”

“
Him.
Paw. You said it almost like he was standin right here.”

“He wishes he were. He said to tell you, ‘Boy, don’t ye never fergit, yo’re a Chism, and Chisms don’t never quit.’”

Nail shook his head in wonder. “It’s almost like you brought his voice with ye.”

“I brought all their voices with me.” She looked him closely in the eye, as near as the screen would permit. “And the voices of the trees too. In your front yard, looking out over the whole valley and the next valley over, there are two huge trees. Sockdolager old trees!”

“‘Sockdolager…’” Nail chuckled. “You didn’t hear that one from Paw.”

“No, from Willis Ingledew. But he wasn’t talking about your trees. Nobody called your trees that, except the trees themselves.”

Nail squinted his eyes intently. “They spoke to ye?”

She smiled. “In a manner of speaking. They don’t use our language, of course. And you and I are both crazier than coots.”

Laughing, he said, “Those trees are a walnut and a maple. I used to climb that walnut plumb nearly to the top, and I could see all the way to Jasper. And that old maple, the peckerwoods would ring it and make the awfulest racket while I was tryin to build play roads around the roots.”

She saw him again at the age of nine, alone, building his play roads beneath the maple. Alone because, Nancy Nail Chism had told her, the nearest kid his own age, E.H. Ingledew (always called E.H.), now the village dentist (who’d sat Viridis in his chair while he answered her questions because that was the only way he could talk to anyone), lived a long way off and was from a better family that didn’t “mix” with the Chisms.

A precious one of their fifteen allotted minutes escaped while Nail reminisced about the trees in his yard and Viridis again pictured him there. She was hoping he wouldn’t ask about his brother Waymon so that she wouldn’t have to tell him.

“Well,” he said at length, “didje git to talk to Latha Bourne?”

“Oh, yes!” Viridis exclaimed. “You told me once there were only three people who really know you are innocent: yourself, your mother, and Dorinda. That’s a very conservative estimate. Everyone in Stay More
believes
you are innocent, but Latha Bourne
knows
you are innocent. She’s a remarkable young lady. She is, as you told me, honest and smart and kind. I’m very fond of Latha Bourne.”

Nail shook his head. “What I could never figure is how come a nice girl like her become chummy with Rindy Whitter in the first place.”

She looked at him. She did not know how to say this, but she tried: “Dorinda Whitter is not totally bad. She’s not very intelligent, and what little sense she has is corrupted by her greed and selfishness, but she is not hopelessly malignant.”

“Oh, so you talked to her too?”

“I talked to everyone, Nail.”

“Everyone? That’s an awful lot of people.”

Their allotted time was running out. She opened her purse and took out the bundle of pages and peeled off the top sheet. “Let me read the beginning,” she said, and read: “‘To His Excellency Governor George W. Hays. We, the undersigned, residents and voters of Newton County, Arkansas, do hereby solemnly petition Your Excellency to consider the sentence of death under which our friend, Nail Chism, has been placed, wrongly we feel. We each and severally believe him to be innocent of the crime of which he was charged, and we humbly entreat Your Excellency to wield your authority to pardon him, or at least to commute the sentence of death.’”

Viridis held up the many sheets so that Nail could see the signatures. “There are 2,806 names here, in all,” she said. “Of course, many of them are just X’s, but in each case where the person was unable to write his or her name, I have filled it in beside the X. See?” She held up page after page for his scrutiny.

Nail peered at the sheets as closely as the screen would allow. “I declare, you’ve got
everbody
on there!” he exclaimed. And she did, and she knew it: people from all over Newton County but particularly the Stay Morons: all the Ingledews, Duckworths, Plowrights, Swains, Coes, Chisms, Bullens, Bournes, Murrisons, Cluleys, Dinsmores, Kimbers…yes, even the Whitters. Of course all of the names were male; a voteless woman’s name carried no weight with the governor. But there was one female name, and Viridis held her forefinger on it and said, “Now, here’s an X, but beside it there’s an attempt to spell out the name. Can you make out the letters?”

Nail slowly read and spoke each letter. “D,” he said. “O, and R, and I, and N, and—” He stopped, he looked up at Viridis, and his eyes were questioning so that what he said next sounded almost like a question but was actually a statement, just whispered: “It’s
her.
”

Viridis nodded. “Now, listen, Nail. Our time is almost up. I’m going to go home and try to write you some of the things that I don’t have time to tell you, and I’ll get Farrell Cobb to bring you the letter within a week. There’s so
much
I have to tell you about my trip to Stay More. I have to tell you about Judge Jerram…”