The Choiring Of The Trees (34 page)

At the request of the
Post-Dispatch
she went upstairs to Dorinda, told her to put on her best dress, then led her downstairs and presented her to the newsmen. One of them offered Dorinda a glass of champagne, which the girl sampled but did not finish. Several of the reporters stimulated the girl into conversation, and before long Dorinda was talking and talking.

When the
Kansas City Star,
who also happened to be the newspaper’s art critic, asked to look at some of Viridis’ paintings, she took him upstairs to her studio for a while, and he was quite impressed, or pretended to be. He asked her for her opinion of Ernest Bodenhammer’s work, and she said that she was still looking forward to seeing the young man’s drawings. The
Star
suggested that they go together to the penitentiary the next day to interview young Bodenhammer and see his work.

The man from Associated Press wanted to talk with her about Governor Hays. Was it true, he asked, that the governor considered black people a primitive race of subhumans? Yes, she said. Was it also true that the governor’s primary objective in office was to build up a loyal political machine? Quite true, she said. Was Governor Hays using the prohibition issue as a football and playing quarterback simultaneously for both teams? She did not understand football, but yes, the governor had succeeded in making Arkansas almost totally dry while pretending to be sympathetic to the wets.

Her mother and her sister Cyrilla did not join the party, although both she and her father invited them to come downstairs. Cyrilla declined her sister’s invitation with “Tonight belongs to you,” and would not leave her room; later, however, Viridis looked in and saw the
Atlanta Constitution
sitting with her and offering her some champagne.

Only one of the reporters, the
Times-Picayune,
actually broached the possibility that Viridis’ great effort to save Nail Chism was motivated by anything other than her humanitarian zeal. “Honey, let me ask you a question,” he said to her in the kitchen while she was refilling the bowl of shelled nuts. “If they let Chism out of there tomorrow, would you run away with him?”

She paused, and gave a laugh to cover up the discomfort the question caused her. “It’s very unlikely they’ll let him out of there tomorrow,” she said.

“But if they did,” the
Times-Picayune
persisted.

“Oh, sure,” she said with irony. “I’ve always wanted to be a shepherdess.”

“No fooling?”

She looked him in the eye. “There are worse things to do with your life.”

Tom Fletcher was the last to leave. Each of the newsmen, before leaving, thanked her not just for the party but for having invited them to Little Rock. She thanked each of them for having demonstrated the power of the Fourth Estate not simply to report events but to exert an influence on them. Then she was left to deal with Tom. She had drunk too much champagne. And, clearly, so too had he. She was still miffed at him, his earlier abandonment of her project, his refusal to let her or any of the
Gazette’s
other reporters spend any more time on what he had called “a lost cause,” and now his Johnny-come-lately enthusiasm and interloping after she had gone to such great lengths to attract the out-of-state journalists to Little Rock. Some of his remarks this evening had clearly betrayed his envy of the larger newspapers represented here. And he had also said things to indicate he still considered Nail Chism an ignorant, grubby peasant. She had overheard him asking Dorinda, “But aren’t you glad it wasn’t
him?
” She had not heard Dorinda’s reply.

Now Tom, tipsy and hanging back until the others were gone and her family had gone to bed, began to hint that he’d like to stay the night. She was too tired and too intoxicated to care, really, and her room was private enough, with its own entrance (or, rather, exit), for Tom to escape in the morning without anyone else in the house knowing about it. But she couldn’t let him. She was still sufficiently sober to be faithful, with the same faithfulness that had saved a man from death tonight. She turned Tom away.

“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” he said peevishly but unbelievingly, as he retreated.

She stared at him. She knew he would think less of her if she confessed, but perhaps it was time he began to think less of her. She confessed, “Maybe I am.”

She was still nursing a hangover the next afternoon when the
Kansas City Star
arrived in a taxicab to take her out to the penitentiary, where he intended to demand an interview with Ernest Bodenhammer. She was all excited, riding out there; maybe she’d get to see Nail too. Maybe Burdell would be so intimidated and submissive as a result of last night’s incident that he would permit her to visit Nail without the intervening screen of the visitors’ room.

But Burdell wasn’t there. His office was occupied by the new sergeant, a mere guard, Gillespie Gorham, who impressed Viridis as more repulsive than the guard he had replaced. No, he wasn’t taking Burdell’s office permanently, he was just holding down the fort until the new warden came up from Tucker. Yes, Burdell had been fired. No, the governor couldn’t fire him, but the prison board could, and the governor had appointed the prison board. Until the new warden, Superintendent T.D. Yeager of Tucker Farm, arrived to take over, probably by the end of this week, Sergeant Gorham was not going to let nobody do nothing. So for them to even ask to see Ernest Bodenhammer or his “scribbles” was out of the question. The
Kansas City Star
had to catch a train for home, and said he hoped Viridis would let him arrange a show of her work in a good K.C. gallery.

The
Arkansas Democrat,
an evening paper, scooped the
Gazette
with the front-page story under the headline
GOVERNOR ‘FURIOUS’ AT PRESS OVER CHISM INCIDENT; FIRES WARDEN
and the subhead
CALLS OUTSIDE JOURNALISTS ‘MEDDLERS’; THREATENS TO ‘THROW THE SWITCH MYSELF
.’ The
Democrat
gave a full report of the scene at the aborted execution, including the condemned man’s moving appeal, not for himself but for his fellow convict, “less than of age” Ernest Bodenhammer, and his accusation that Bodenhammer’s victim, the guard McChristian, had murdered numerous inmates. The reporter, to Viridis’ embarrassment, quoted the condemned man’s intended-to-be-last words, “Tell her that I and the trees will love her forevermore,” and identified “her” as “Little Rock reporter-illustrator Viridis Monday, 26, daughter of banker Cyril J. Monday,” but was not able to identify the reference to trees.

Tom Fletcher invited her to the
Gazette
to watch what was coming in on the wires. Associated Press did not use those quotations or identifications but carried an abbreviated narrative of the drama in the death room, which, to Viridis’ delight, was running nationwide, including the huge newspapers on both coasts. And the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
proud that one of its own reporters had been instrumental in stopping the execution, gave an entire page of detailed coverage, in addition to an editorial commending Viridis for her “dedication and bravery in the face of a politician’s cronyism and malevolence.”

Tom Fletcher shook his head and said, “Don’t be surprised if you hear from the governor.” So she was not surprised when she did, except by her treatment: she was not called to the capitol to wait for hours in His Excellency’s marble-walled, marble-floored, marble-ceilinged anteroom and then to stand on the carpet in front of his huge desk and listen to his rantings. No, he invited her to dinner at the governor’s mansion, which, although the governor belittled it as “just an old-fashioned big old pile of dark-red bricks,” was one of the city’s finer homes. The governor himself met her at the door and shook her hand with both of his, and introduced her to his wife Ida and his sons Grady and Bill, eighteen and ten years respectively. The five of them sat down evenly spaced around a dining-table that could seat thirty, lit by candles, and attended by eight black waiters. Later Viridis could not even remember what the food had been; it had not been outstanding, nor had the wine, a sweet red that would have been all right with the dessert. The governor and his family ate very rapidly, scarcely pausing between bites to make conversation about insignificant things: as near as she could recall, they had talked about the latest improved passenger cars on railroads and the opening of the new movie theater at Eighth and Main, the Crystal, where they were showing a gripping oriental mystery story,
Bombay Buddha;
everyone had seen it except poor Billy, whose mother wouldn’t let him. They argued about whether or not the movie was dangerous for a ten-year-old boy. When they finally asked Viridis her opinion, she replied that she couldn’t say, since she hadn’t seen it herself.

Trying to be nice, she noted that young Grady was not much older than Ernest Bodenhammer and would perhaps be interested in meeting the boy and seeing his artwork. “Artwork?” Grady asked, with a belligerent frown, and then: “Who’s Ernest Bodenhammer?”

“A convict,” the governor told his son. “Miss Monday, you see, makes a hobby of convicts.”

“Oh,” said Grady. “Why does he do
artwork
?”

“A hobby,” Viridis said.

As soon as the dinner was finished, the governor dismissed his family and moved from his chair at the head of the table to sit next to Viridis at the side. “Now,” he said, when they were alone, and only one waiter remained, to bring them some peach brandy. “Now, I want us to be friends. I have been thinking a lot about the last time we got together, and I think I owe you more than just an apology for my rudeness. I want you to understand that I was preoccupied with the Hot Springs business. Have you been keeping up with this matter of legalized gambling?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been preoccupied myself.”

The governor laughed. “You certainly have! Trying to save that moonshiner must have been a full-time occupation for you! But anyway, some of my best friends want to legalize pari-mutuel betting at the racetrack over at Hot Springs. Would
you
want me to let them do a thing like that?”

“They’ve been doing that at Longchamp for centuries,” she said.

“Where is Lone John?”

“
Longchamp,
” she pronounced it more carefully. “In Paris. A racetrack in the Bois de Boulogne.”

“You’ve been to Paris?”

“I lived there for four years.”

“My, my,” the governor said. “Well now, I’ll be.” He didn’t say what he would be. “And your father gave you his blessing?”

“He didn’t stop me.”

“Well, that’s amazing. But you know, I’m all in favor of taking the reins and bridle off of womenfolk and letting them run free. During my administration the lot of the fair sex has improved one hundred percent. I’ve reduced the women’s working hours to a nine-hour maximum for a maximum of six days of week; that’s only fifty-four hours a week. And my legislature has given you the right to enter into contracts and to own property in your own names.”

“We’re grateful, I’m sure.”

“And one of these days soon we’re going to submit to the voters a women’s-suffrage amendment and see if we can’t get you ladies a bigger voice, at least in the local polls.”

“The fair sex will be your slaves.”

“I’m only acting on my sense of what I think the people want. I very strongly believe, Miss Monday, that the State is the sum total of the will of the people. And now, that is why I must give my full support to capital punishment, however barbarous it may seem. Personally, I do not condone capital punishment. No, I do not. At best, it is a relic of mankind’s slow, painful rise out of the Dark Ages. But if the State did not take upon itself the awesome responsibility for executing murderers and rapists, the people themselves would resort to mob violence and lynching.”

“Did you know, Governor, that Arkansas is one of the very few states that still punish rape with the death penalty?”

“Of course I know it! You mean, still punishes
white
men with death. Every state still executes nigras for rape. Young lady, don’t try to tell
me
about Arkansas in relation to the other states. That’s the main reason I wanted to see you. This past week the state of Arkansas has become the butt of national derision and even contempt because of this Chism business. Just at a time in our history when we’re making some progress toward correcting the country’s notion that Arkansas is nothing but a barnyard full of rustic buffoons, along comes this moonshining rapist out of the Ozarks and sets us all back into ridicule!”

“Pardon me, sir, but I don’t believe it’s Nail Chism they’re ridiculing. They have focused their scorn on a chief executive who refuses to listen to overwhelming evidence that Nail Chism is innocent.”

The governor slammed his palm down on the table so forcefully that both their glasses of brandy toppled over. A black waiter hastened to handle the problem, which the governor ignored. “WHAT EVIDENCE?” he thundered, “The babble of the victim? The poor, frightened, illiterate backwoods child, driven out of her senses by a vicious assault and the most despicable rape and sexual perversion I’ve ever heard about in my long legal career, trying pathetically to undo this hideous act simply by recanting her testimony?
Please,
Miss Monday! It’s perfectly obvious that that pathetic waif you went to such pains to recruit to your cause is not of sound mind and not capable of testifying for or against
anybody.
”

“Governor, if you would let her talk to you for five minutes, you wouldn’t say that.”

The governor softened his voice. “Let me tell you a little story, Miss Monday. Not so very long ago my wife Ida and I received here at our house late one afternoon a Mrs. Ramsey, who had her little boy with her. It was not long until sundown, when the woman’s husband was scheduled to die in the electric chair at the state penitentiary. The woman wanted me to listen to her little boy, and wanted my wife to listen too. The boy gave the most touching speech about how he loved his daddy and what a good man his daddy was. Ida, who gave him a piece of bread and butter and a glass of milk, had tears running down her face, and she looked at me with such reproach as I had never seen from her before, and she asked, ‘George, doesn’t this little boy move you at all?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Ida, but his father moves me much more, because the man committed such a cold-blooded, brutal murder, with no extenuating circumstances whatsoever, that I still seethe to think of it.’ And at sundown they electrocuted Ramsey, the first white man I have refused to save from the electric chair. Nail Chism is the second. Let me finish. You think that I am deaf to the entreaties of good people, as my wife thought I was deaf to the little boy. But I tell you what I told her: that it devolves upon me as governor to investigate meticulously every last one of these crimes. I do not take death lightly. I will not allow a citizen of the state of Arkansas to die for
any
reason, unless and until I have satisfied myself that that man—and notice, dear girl, that I say ‘man,’ because I have never allowed the fair sex to be executed, and I will never permit it as long as I live—that that man is guilty beyond any shadow of doubt!”