The Choiring Of The Trees (33 page)

The warden spoke to the prisoner. “Well, Chism, you’ve sure got twelve of ’em this time. Count ’em. They’re all big-time, big-city newspapermen. Look at ’em. You’re a celebrity, Chism!”

It was clear to Tom Fletcher that the warden was enjoying the scene and would probably milk it for all it was worth. The warden even faced the reporters and “presented” Chism to them, holding his hand out, palm up, beneath Chism’s waist and making a little bow toward the reporters, like a circus ringmaster presenting his star performer. Tom said he wouldn’t have been surprised if Chism had begun doing some tricks at that moment…but the trick came later.

The strange thing then, Tom said, was that the
Atlanta Constitution
’s man began clapping his hands. Tom knew him, and had tossed down a drink with him earlier that afternoon, but the man wasn’t intoxicated. Maybe his applause was prompted by the warden’s ridiculous bow. In any case, one by one the other reporters dropped their notebooks into their laps and began clapping too. Tom joined in, telling himself that he was clapping for probably the same reason the rest of them were: that they admired him as a man, knowing he was innocent and was coming to this end bravely, without fear or cowardice or hysterics. The warden seemed stunned at this continuing outburst of applause until finally he himself began clapping. So did one of the guards. The only people in the room who did not were the minister and the executioner, who looked embarrassed, as if they knew they ought to clap but didn’t know how.

Chism did not bow. Tom wouldn’t have been surprised if he had. Tom
was
surprised at what Chism did do: he spoke to them. “I thank ye,” he said. “I thank ye kindly. I hope you fellers will git a good story for yore papers. I hope—”

“Shut up, Chism,” Warden Burdell said. “You aint supposed to talk to them.”

“Let ’im talk!” yelled the man from the
Chronicle,
and the others said, “Yeah, Warden, let him talk.”

“Well, okay,” said Burdell. “He’s allowed some last words anyhow. Say your last words to them if you want, Chism.”

And Nail Chism continued. “I hope that while you’re here you’ll trouble yoreselves to find out a few things about a boy name of Ernest Bodenhammer, who’s not but sixteen years old and is downstairs waitin to die in that chair hisself. He’s just a ole Ozarks country boy, like me, but he’s got a talent I couldn’t never hope to have: he can draw like a angel, although there’s only one angel I ever saw do a drawing, and she aint here today, I’m glad to see.”

The warden spoke. “Well now, that’s enough now, Chism now.”

“Let him talk!” everybody else said, and the warden shrugged his shoulders and fished out his timepiece.

“The other convicts call him Timbo Red,” Nail Chism went on, “because we’ve all got nicknames, like it would be bad for a feller to go by his real name. I reckon we figger a man’s real name was what got him into trouble, and as long as he’s got a play-like name he can pretend he’s innocent. Now, you boys know that I don’t have to pretend I’m innocent. But it’s Timbo Red, or Ernest Bodenhammer, that I want to tell ye about, and I hope you’ll write up his story. He aint innocent of killing a guard, because he really did kill that guard, name of Fat Gabe McChristian, who murdered more men than that electric chair ever done.”

“Now that’s enough, Chism,” Warden Burdell insisted, and said to the witnesses, “I’m very sorry, gentlemen, but if you gave him a chance he’d talk to you from now until midnight.”

The
Commercial Appeal
’s man stood up from his chair and declared, “We’ve got until midnight, then. Let him talk.”

The warden held up his pocket watch and turned the face toward them. “He has to be executed at sundown, and it’s nearly time.”

The man from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
stood up and pretended to read from his notes: “‘Warden Harris Burdell refused a legitimate request from the press to allow the condemned man a minute to finish a thought-provoking statement.’”

“All right, dammit,” Burdell said. “But watch your tongue, Chism. Watch what you say and don’t go spreadin a pack of lies.”

“It aint no lie that Ernest Bodenhammer does not deserve to die for puttin an end to the life of that murderin son of a bitch Fat Gabe McChristian!” Nail said, with the only flare-up of emotion they were to witness. Then, more calmly, he resumed, “Now, maybe you fellers think that this don’t make no difference, but I just hope you can get a chance to see some of his pitchers that he drew, and then tell Miss Viridis Monday that I hope she will do what she can for him, and I shore appreciate what she done for me.”

There was a silence then. The reporters waited for him to continue, but he did not. Warden Burdell asked him, “Was them your last words, Chism?”

“No,” he said. “It’s these:
tell her that I and the trees will love her forevermore.
”

“Okay, boys, strap him in,” Warden Burdell said to the two guards, and they took him to the electric chair and made him sit down, and the guard named Gorham unlocked his handcuffs while the guard named Fancher secured one of his arms with an old black strap of leather that seemed to have been cut from mule harness. Chism made a brief move as if to struggle, but the warden himself nervously helped them hold him until the strapping of his arms, and then his legs, was completed. The warden whispered to the condemned man something that the reporters could not hear. Then he looked at the executioner and asked, “Ready, Bobo?”

Mr. Irvin Bobo, despite his intoxication, was lucid enough to point out something to the warden: “You aint put the cap on him yet, boss.”

“Oh,” said Burdell. “Right.” He motioned to the guard with the short leg to set the metal cap atop the head of the condemned man and strap it in place beneath his chin. “There, now.” Tom Fletcher experienced a sympathetic shiver as the steel cap touched the man’s shaved head. The warden and the guards stepped away from the chair. Mr. Bobo raised a hand to hold the switch-handle.

The man from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
stood up again and began to read: “‘The State of Arkansas last night put to death in its electric chair an innocent man, Nail Chism, twenty-seven. He had been tried and convicted of assaulting a young white woman who later confessed that he was wrongly convicted on her testimony. Appeals to Governor George W. Hays failed to gain a pardon or even to stay the execution. Last-minute appeals were made by a delegation of newspapermen directly to the warden of the state penitentiary, Harris Burdell, but Mr. Burdell remained unconvinced that the unfavorable publicity resulting would probably cost him his job…’”

“Awright, goddammit!” Burdell yelled, and grew very red in the face and stood in front of the press gallery with his hands on his hips and said, “You guys are makin it very difficult for me to exercise my sworn duties! Time and time again I’ve told you that I don’t have any power whatsoever to stop this execution, and I’m not goin to stop it!” He turned and gestured. “Bobo, put your hand back on that switch!” The warden pointed his trembling finger at the condemned man. “Y’all keep talkin about him bein so innocent! Let me just show you gentlemen how innocent he is! That business he kept yappin about, about his punk pal Timbo Red Bodenhammer killin one of my men, was on account of a letter he tried to smuggle out of my prison, tryin to get it out to that same sweetheart of his he keeps talkin about, Miss Viridis Monday, in which he told her, and I quote!” The warden fished into each of his coat pockets before he found the letter he was looking for, then began to read from it, first fumbling with his spectacles to get them into place. “‘I reckon you know that if they try to electercute’—that’s
sic,
gentlemen,
sic
—‘electercute me I aim to kill as many as I can beforehand and I reckon you also know how I aim to do it.’ Now, gentlemen, we managed to intercept this threatening letter, at the sacrifice of the life of my best guard, and I have been careful to keep a close watch on this man Chism and attempt to determine just how he intended to kill as many of us as he could. That means you too, gentlemen. He intended to kill as many of you as he could. And how did he intend to do it?”

The warden let his rhetorical question hang in the air defiantly for a long moment. Several of the reporters were attempting to write down the warden’s words as fast as he spoke, and he was speaking very fast: “I’ll tell you how! We discovered that the past several days he has been sharpenin a piece of metal in his cell, a plate of steel, this long, taken out of a mouth organ, a big harmonica. His young punk Timbo Red killed my good man McChristian with a previous dagger that Chism had been wearin on a string around his neck for quite some time, probably since the last time we tried to electrocute him. So we suspected that Chism might try to make himself another dagger. Unbeknownst to him, and to his punk pal Bodenhammer, we’ve been spyin on ’em this past week. Nail Chism went and sharpened a piece of metal into a dagger, which he then tied to a string around his neck, intending at the last moment to get that dagger out and kill me and
you
and as many of us as he could! Now, is that man
innocent
?”

It was so quiet in the room that you could hear the electric dynamo hum. At least, Tom Fletcher thought it was the dynamo, but he wasn’t so sure.

Nobody answered the warden, who looked defiantly around him as if expecting an answer. “We all knew what was coming next,” Tom said. Warden Burdell moved toward Chism, saying, “Fortunately, we got him strapped into the chair before he could get his knife out and use it on us. But let’s have a look at it and see how lethal it is!”

With a flourish the warden reached out and grabbed Nail Chism by the collar of his shirt and literally ripped the shirt completely away, exposing Nail Chism’s bare chest and the string around his neck. But there was no dagger on the string—just some kind of small medallion, or ornament, which looked like a watch fob in the form of a…perhaps of a tree.

And what he had thought was the hum of the dynamo, Tom Fletcher decided, wonderingly, was some peculiar kind of remote, faraway singing, as if a choir were down the hill outside The Walls, or, no, not down the hill but somewhere up in the trees.

The gentleman from the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch
stood up for a third time and finished reading his story: “‘A display of last-minute theatrics by the overwrought warden failed to convince the members of the press that the innocent man was in fact a desperate cutthroat. The warden seemed completely dumbfounded when the dagger he intended to reveal failed to materialize. He looked unbelievingly at Nail Chism’s bare chest, then even looked behind Mr. Chism, as if the missing dagger might be hanging down his back. Then the warden looked at the reporters in consternation. Most of those present were laughing at him. Apparently, laughter would militate against any order for the execution to be carried out, and it was not. The flustered warden fled from the room, declaring, as his last words, that he wanted to talk to the governor.’”

Off

O
ff they trooped to the Monday house on Arch Street and had a party. She had planned it well in advance—planned it twice, in two different ways: If the execution took place, they would bring the body here, and she would wash it and dress it in a suit of her father’s clothes and prepare it for burial in a plot she’d bought in Mt. Holly Cemetery, just a few blocks down the street. If the execution did not take place, and it did not, the men responsible for preventing it would come here to this house to celebrate, to see the suit of her father’s clothes draped over the sofa and hear her explanation of it, and to put that into their stories if they wished. Wasn’t that the sort of “local color” they sought?

She had even ordered the champagne, and had a case of it on ice in the kitchen. Call her overconfident. Or at least say that she was so very hopeful and faithful that she had not even paused to consider how to dispose of the champagne if it were not usable. Give it away? Pour it down the sink? Probably after the funeral she would have consumed several bottles of it quickly all by herself, hoping it would kill her, but it is important, gentlemen, to put into your stories that she had not even given a thought to what she would do with the champagne. As it turned out, very happily, she gave it to you, all you could drink.

And they drank past midnight. Only one of them, the
Globe-Democrat,
was a teetotaler and did not come to the party until it was almost over, when he arrived to report that he had kept watch at the penitentiary until all the lights were out, the warden returned from an unsuccessful attempt to see the governor, and James Fancher informed him, the reporter, for a five-dollar consideration, that the condemned man was safely back in his cell, where he and the young man in the adjoining cell held their own celebration until Mr. Fancher made them shut up.

Cyril Monday, her father, was both proud and uncomfortable to have so many journalists in his parlor and his kitchen and, the night being fair, out on his front porch, where, journalists being what they are, they smoked cigars and swilled champagne and kept the neighbors awake. Her father’s occupation had required him to deal with many kinds of men, but he had little experience with journalists, certainly not a dozen of them at once. They were polite and respectful to him. One of them, the
Commercial Appeal,
interviewed him at length over a bottle of the Mumm’s, asking him such questions as: What did you notice in the childhood of your daughter that would have turned her into a crusader and heroine?

Some of these men, after several glasses of champagne, became excessively gallant and even romantic toward her, and before the evening was over she would receive, and decline, a proposal of marriage from the
Houston Chronicle.
Flattery flowed like the champagne. Tom Fletcher told her he’d never seen her more “radiant,” and he called her “ebullient” and told her she was “tingling.” No one had ever used those adjectives on her before.