The Choiring Of The Trees (36 page)

So Viridis got to see Nail. Indeed, as the warden had said, it was an awful place. Couldn’t they at least keep it reasonably clean? Did there have to be earth clinging to the walls? Weren’t there any windows or holes that could be opened for a little ventilation? The oppressive darkness and dankness and cramping were accentuated by the feeble glow from the one smoking kerosene lantern that Fancher carried, holding it down at his side, not raising it, so that the light came up from below and gave Nail’s face a ghostly and sinister cast. Guards Fancher and Gorham flanked her closely, standing a little behind her as if they were holding her back, and they would not go away.

“Strike me blind,” Nail said softly. “Don’t this beat all? How did ye do it?”

“I’ve got a
little
influence with the governor.”

“You sure must. You must almost have as much influence with him as you had with all them newspaper fellers. It was you, wasn’t it, who got them to come to my fryin party?”

“I suggested it,” she said. “And it worked. It saved you, for the time being, but I’m afraid I don’t have a
lot
of influence with our governor.” She told him of her invitation to the governor’s mansion the night before, what they had talked about, and the governor’s “calling her bluff” by pretending to arrange for her to be locked in with Nail.

Nail was speechless. “Gosh” was all he could finally say.

“But they’ll only let me see you for a little while.”

“Fifteen minutes,” said Gillespie Gorham. “Nope. There’s only about ten minutes left.”

“That was a mean thing for them to do, to rue back on ye like that,” Nail said severely. “Did you really want to come and stay with me?”

“Of course! I was dying to!”

“Gosh,” he said again. He reflected, “I would’ve sure enjoyed that. Yes, that would’ve been the best time of my life. But it’s terrible messy and stinky down here. No place you could even sit down without ruinin your dress.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “If I could just
be
with you…”

Nail slammed himself on the brow. “I aint introduced ye to my pal.” He pointed at the wall. “Timbo Red…Ernest Bodenhammer is right in there.” He called out, “Ernest! Here is Viridis!”

“Howdy, ma’am,” said a voice from the darkness.

Viridis turned and tried to move toward the adjoining cell, but Gillespie Gorham blocked her way. “You’re just supposed to visit Chism. The other one aint none of your business.”

“Couldn’t I say hello?” she asked.

“Say hello,” Gillespie Gorham told her, but would not move to let her nearer the boy’s cell.

She called out, “I’m pleased to meet you, Ernest. Nail has told me so much about you.”

The young man called back, in a voice so much like those she had heard in Newton County, “He’s shore told me a lot about you too.”

“I want to see your drawings,” she said.

“Aw, they aint much,” Ernest protested.

Nail said, “Ernest, give her your drawings.” And to her: “I reckon you couldn’t see ’em too good in the dark, though. He’s done filled up that pad you gave him, front and back every page. It’s time he got him another pad, if you could manage it.”

“Certainly, I’ll get him one,” Viridis said.

“Heck,” Ernest said, “I’m due to sit on Ole Sparky myself in just a few more days. I wouldn’t have time to use up a whole new pad.”

“Could I borrow the one you’ve finished?” she asked him. “To look at in good light?” She wished she could see at least the outline of his form in the dark, but she saw nothing of him.

His voice said, “Wal, yeah, I reckon, but they shore aint nothin to brag about.”

At the edge of the sphere of feeble light from the lantern she saw the sudden protrusion of a square thickness that she recognized as the corner of the drawing pad being offered to her. She reached for it, but Sergeant Gorham stayed her hand. “You aint supposed to touch nothing,” he told her.

“It’s only a sketchbook, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Search it if you want. There aren’t any secret messages in it.”

“Jim, hold up that light,” Sergeant Gorham said, and he took the sketch-book, flipped through it, gave it a shake, and then presented it to her. “Looks harmless,” he said.

“Thank you, Ernest,” she said. “I’ll get it back to you, along with a new-pad. Do you need some more pencils? Erasers?”

“I thank ye kindly, ma’am,” Ernest said.

Another square intruded into the lantern’s light, and Nail said, “Mr. Gorham, sir, I’d like her to have this too. It’s just as harmless as that drawing-pad.”

It was a book. A thick, heavy book. Sergeant Gorham took it and submitted it to the same treatment he’d given the sketchbook. Nothing fell out. It contained no letters or words other than the printed words. The guard gave it to her. He asked Nail, “What’s it for?”

“It’s just a ole book I’d like her to have. I won’t be needin it no more.”

“
Nail,
” she said intently. “I’m going to save you. Ernest too.”

“Well,” he said, “there’s just a part of that book I thought you might find interestin.”

“Time’s up, now,” Gorham said, and put his hand on her shoulder. She shivered at the man’s touch.

“Did you get my letter?” she asked Nail.

“Yeah, I sure did, and it was wonderful. I reckon you didn’t get mine, but it wasn’t much compared with yours.”

“You know what I tried hardest to say in that letter?”

“It’s hard to say,” he acknowledged.

“I mean it,” she said. “I can’t say it again right here and now, but I mean it. Three words.”

“Three words,” he returned.

They took her back upstairs, and she picked up her purse at the warden’s office. She gave T.D. Yeager the sack of cookies and said, “Share these with your wife.”

“I don’t have a wife, ma’am hee hee, but say, thanks a lot.”

“I’ll be seeing you again,” she said, and offered him her hand. “And possibly again. Thank you for your kindness.”

She went home and closed herself in her studio with Ernest’s sketchbook and the book Nail had given her. It had a funny title,
Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Advisor.
The book was grimy and smelled mouldy, reminding her of the smells of the death hole, which she would like to forget. It was well worn, as if Nail had read it again and again. Why he wanted her to have this book she wasn’t sure, but she understood one thing: it was probably the only reading matter he’d had, and his giving it to her was as if he were saying he had nothing more to give. She was touched. She flipped idly through it, and did to it what Sergeant Gorham had done: held it with the spine up and the pages flopping down, and flipped it and shook it to see if anything might fall out; nothing did. She leafed slowly through it, looking for a penciled message; there was none. The chapters covered such things as “Sexual Isolation” and “Prevention of Conception” and other matters dealing with love and marriage and childbirth and parenthood. Was he perhaps trying to tell her that this book dealt with a kind of life they could never have together? The pages were dirty and smudged; one even seemed to have a smear of blood on it, beside a definition of “Oil of Mustard,” the significance of which she could not determine. She closed the book, a bit disappointed apart from being moved by his gesture of giving her his last possession.

Then she held Ernest’s sketchbook beneath the studio’s north light. The afternoon still had an hour to go before the light faded. The first drawing took her breath away. It was a landscape. Surely, it had been drawn from memory, in the poor light and confinement of a prison, but it had the authority and detail of a sketch rendered on the spot, the spot being the middle of a rushing mountain stream, looking upstream toward a tranquil pool overhung with great summer trees, themselves overhung by the crags of bluffs and the ridge of a mountain over which dramatic clouds gathered themselves. His clouds, particularly, were beyond her achievement. Her admiration for the draughtsman’s skill was almost overwhelmed by her envy of it. All in black and white, the drawing yet evoked distinct colors, shade upon shade of green. There were effects here that she simply could not duplicate, try as she might. A native genius she did not possess. She was good, certainly she had skill and long practice, but she did not have…what was it?…she recalled Nail’s words as quoted in the newspapers: “He’s got a talent I could never hope to have: he can draw like an angel, although there’s only one angel I ever saw do a drawing, and she’s not here today, I’m glad to see.”

As Viridis looked at Ernest’s drawings, she suddenly understood how an angel would draw. But she was not one herself.

There was one drawing that she did not immediately recognize. After all the landscapes, the interior came as a different place, a confusing scene.

It took her a moment to shift focus from the outdoors to a room. A room containing a monster. But the monster, she recognized after deliberation, was the machine that was called—what had Ernest called it?—Old Sparky, the electric chair, but not the electric chair as she remembered it. Had Ernest Bodenhammer drawn the picture from memory? Or had he actually seen the chair? No, it seemed to be drawn from imagination, not just the imagination of a highly creative and fertile artist but that of a person inspired by the foreknowledge of his murderous sacrifice to that monster. The chair had a distinct personality, a menace and a malevolence that exceeded the sum of its various straps, panels, wires, and braces. It seemed to be alive and waiting. It carried a threat not just for the artist but for all humanity.

Almost with relief she turned the page. But the drawing she saw next stunned her. The sketchbook fell from her lap and lay shut on the floor for a long moment before she picked it up and forced herself to open it again. Viridis felt her face growing very hot, and she felt embarrassment as if she were a voyeur standing right beside the bed where the naked couple clenched in a tangle of arms, legs, elbows, knees, at the center of which their genitals seemed to be trying to devour each other. The man was Nail. There was no mistake, although his face was in profile. Nail, with a full head of handsome blond hair disheveled and matted by the sweat from his exertions. The woman…she certainly wasn’t Dorinda Whitter, or anyone else Viridis could recognize, just a typical country girl, an earth goddess, very pretty and very shapely and very passionate. Had Ernest simply “borrowed” Nail for an imagined scene? Or had he re-created an actual event that Nail had described and narrated to him? Viridis was surprised at how grudging she felt; she turned three shades of green, jealous of whoever the lucky girl had been. And this answered, perhaps, her longstanding question, which she had vaguely worded to Nail’s mother: “Did Nail ever have a girlfriend?” But as she stared in awe at Ernest’s drawing, trying to forget the subject long enough to fully appreciate the draughtsmanship, she realized that it had the unexpected power to arouse her sexually. She was burning.

Not the
Arkansas Gazette
but its rival, the
Arkansas Democrat,
on pages 8 and 9 of the issue of Monday, April 26, 1915, carried Viridis’ story about Ernest Bodenhammer, with two illustrations: a fuzzy photograph of the boy taken about two years before, and a fair reproduction of his masterpiece, “Old Sparky.” This was the first picture of the electric chair that had ever appeared in the pages of the
Democrat,
whose readership has always been more plebeian and democratic than that of the
Gazette.
A younger newspaper with an inferiority complex (it was founded at the time of the Mexican War in 1846, whereas the
Gazette
has been “the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi” since 1819), the
Democrat
has occasionally resorted to sensationalism, if not outright yellow journalism, in its circulation rivalry, and Tom Fletcher himself suggested that Viridis try the piece on the
Democrat,
because he and his paper felt that the “Chism case” had already been given maximum exposure and readers were not interested in yet another story of “wrongful electrocution.” In Europe, Germany was making war on Holland and invading Baltic Russia and preparing its submarines to torpedo the
Lusitania
(the ship Viridis had taken abroad), and the
Gazette
’s readers were beginning to turn their attention away from small local events to the international crisis and the growing issue of America’s nonintervention, which most
Gazette
readers supported. Letters to the editor were preponderantly concerned with the war in Europe, and a total of only three letters had been received about the Chism case, two of them demanding to know why the governor didn’t go ahead and pull the switch himself, “like he said he would.”

Tom Fletcher said to her, “Very, this Bodenhammer piece is a serious mistake. It will only divert the public’s attention from the Chism case.”

Viridis’ story in the
Democrat,
which an editor titled
GIFTED YOUNG ARTIST MUST GO TO MEET HIS NIGHTMARE
, was the only publicity that Ernest Bodenhammer ever received. She was disappointed that the
Democrat
showed only one of Ernest’s drawings, but, as an editor candidly admitted to her, the typical
Democrat
reader “didn’t know Rembrandt from Rumpelstiltskin.” Viridis paid to have matted and framed behind glass a dozen of Ernest’s best drawings (omitting of course
that
one), and tried to find a good place to show them concurrently with the appearance of her
Democrat
article, but the only place she could hang them was the Little Rock Public Library. She had photoengravings printed of those twelve drawings and mailed them out to her friends at Associated Press, as well as to the men who had come to Nail’s thwarted execution and her party. She sent a special note along with the mailing to the
Houston Chronicle
man who had proposed to her. But if his newspaper, or any other newspaper in America, used her Bodenhammer story, she never received clippings or heard about it.

Art, she told herself, is dispensable.