The Choiring Of The Trees (37 page)

The same issue of the
Democrat
that had her
Bodenhammer story
had a front-page item under the headline
GOV. HAYS INCREASES DEATH CHAIR’S PRIVACY,
to the effect that the governor and his legal advisors were taking steps to reduce the number of witnesses required for an execution from twelve to six, and to limit strictly the attendance of newspapers. “An execution is not a circus,” the governor was quoted as saying. “An execution must not be a public spectacle. Capital punishment is a remnant of barbarity, but as long as we practice it we must insure that it be done mercifully and with dignity, and this requires that we make it as private as possible, as silent as possible, as inconspicuous as possible.”

When the
Gazette
also featured this story, Viridis asked Tom Fletcher, “What do you think he’s up to? You don’t suppose he’ll start having secret executions, do you?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Tom said. “That word ‘inconspicuous’ bothers me. The message to us is that we have to pool a man…” (he lifted his eyebrows) “…or a woman, and let that one reporter cover the scene for all newspapers and wire services. No more parties.” At her expression of dismay he pointed out, “That’s really not so different from what we had been doing, is it? Weren’t you the only reporter at the execution of that nigra, Skipper Thomas?” When she nodded, he assured her, “We’re supposed to receive notice of all intended executions so that we can arrange with the
Democrat
and the
AP
to pool a man. Or a woman. I’ll keep you posted.”

But Tom’s promise wasn’t enough to make her comfortable. She went to the state capitol and asked to see the governor. This time he did not make her wait all day, but didn’t she understand that, without an appointment, she couldn’t just barge in on him? He apologized for keeping her waiting and offered her coffee, which she declined.

“And how was your tryst with the moonshiner?” he asked.

“I don’t appreciate your failure to keep your part of the bargain,” she said.

“I saved your life probably,” the governor said, and then from the pile of papers atop his desk he lifted the issue of the
Democrat
that had her story. “And I see you didn’t keep your part of the bargain either.” He slammed the newspaper down on his desk. “That’s a dreadful story, Miss Monday! My telephone hasn’t stopped ringing! The telegrams are piling up! The letters are burying me!”

“Really?” she asked.

He laughed, then changed his tone from mock-indignant to coldly informative. “Do you want to know the sum total of public response to your story? Do you want to know how many people I’ve heard from as a result of that piece?” The governor made a show of propping his elbow on his desk top and then rounding his thumb and forefinger into a big 0. “Zero. None. Not a blessed soul.”

“So you’re going to go ahead and pull the switch on him Saturday night?”

“That was dramatic oratory on my part. I could never pull the switch on a man myself. Mr. Irvin Bobo is a licensed electrician. I am not.”

“But this Saturday night?” she said. “Three days from now?”

He did not respond. Instead he said, “I read your story. I was touched. I was impressed. The boy really is some sort of wizard with a pencil. Not that I know anything about art, but I recognize talent when I see it. I’ve never seen that chair myself, but he sure made it look petrifying, didn’t he? I don’t understand why nobody cares about him. Isn’t that a shame, Miss Monday, that nobody cares?” She glowered at him, not knowing just how sarcastic he was trying to be. “Except you, of course,” he amended. “
You
care an awful lot. In Ernest Bodenhammer you’ve found the perfect answer to the prayers of a lonely spinster. He’s much better for your purposes than the moonshining rapist. Bodenhammer never raped anybody, except probably his sister and his mother. He’s young and fairly innocent—all he did was kill a fat guard nobody liked anyway—and he’s savable and malleable. You can make him into anything you want him to be, and everybody will live happily ever after…except the wife and children of Gabriel McChristian, the man he murdered.”

She waited to see if the governor was going to say anything else. She told herself to try very hard to be polite, that the least show of anger would defeat her purpose. She took a calm, deep breath and said, as if it were the only thing she had left to say, “He’s only sixteen.”

“So? The state of Arkansas has executed murderers of fifteen and even fourteen. Once several years ago we hanged a thirteen-year-old nigra.” The governor began to wave his forefinger back and forth. “But if you’re asking me to show mercy for someone on account of youth, remember that Nail Chism’s victim was only thirteen.”

Calmly Viridis protested, “She recanted. She’s willing to testify that she lied.”

The governor picked up his telephone. “Martha, bring me that folder on Dorinda Whitter.” Hanging up, he said, “Double perjury doesn’t equal truth. Which is a fancy way of saying two wrongs never make a right.” The governor’s secretary brought to him a file, which he ostentatiously opened and displayed. “As I told you, I like to do a good bit of investigating of my own, in the interests of justice. I’ve attempted to find out all that I can learn about the victim, her background, her family, et cetera.” The governor held up a small item. “I’ve even got her current report card at Fort Steele Elementary. Not doing so well, is she? Lies a lot to her teachers, doesn’t she? And do you yourself have any suspicion that she may have struck the match that burned the school on April 5
^th
? We know it was arson. But what concerns me more is her riffraff family. The girl’s older brother, one Ike Whitter, was a murderer and ruffian who was executed by lynching, a manifestation of that community spirit and mob violence I keep trying to tell you about, Miss Monday, that has to accept capital punishment as a harsh but civilized answer to problems of justice. But the lynching of Ike Whitter isn’t our topic. Our topic is that this girl, victim though she was, and an especially pitiful victim in view of the perverse, grotesque nature of the sexual crimes against her, is yet a girl of very low intelligence, with backward and inbred lines in a pedigree of coarse animals that even nigras would not consider of the human race. The girl has no sense of truth. She may or may not have lied when she told what Nail Chism did to her, but she is lying her head off when she tries to take it back!”

Viridis wanted to tell the governor of her trip to Stay More, she wanted to describe her meetings with Simon and Precilla Whitter, Dorinda’s parents, whose poverty was the result not of inbreeding or lack of intelligence but of a series of misfortunes that had plagued Simon Whitter from his birth. But the governor did not have time to listen to her. She was not even here to rehash the “Chism case,” as such. She knew there was nothing else that could be said to George W. Hays to alter his opinion of Nail Chism as a “moonshining rapist.” She asked, “Would you consider postponing Ernest Bodenhammer’s execution for a week or ten days?”

“Why?”

“I’d like to get an expert from a New York art museum to testify that Ernest’s drawings are the work of a creative genius whose life must be spared.”

“Testify to whom? To the state Supreme Court? They have already considered and rejected the automatic appeal that all capital cases must have. Testify to me? I’ve already told you, I consider Bodenhammer a creative genius. Testify to the people of Arkansas? Your New York expert would have to do more than testify. And you don’t believe he could turn the people of Arkansas into connoisseurs of art in a week or ten days, do you?”

She clutched at a straw: “Governor, if you consider him a genius yourself, why couldn’t you commute his sentence to life imprisonment so that he could go on making his drawings, even in prison? That would surely be preferable to breaking his pencil forever.”

The governor shook his head. “If I did that, we would never again be able to hire a prison guard. This state must have a hidebound law that the killing of a law enforcement officer is automatically punishable by death. Otherwise, we wouldn’t even be able to keep the policemen we’ve got.”

Viridis felt her eyes beginning to get wet. While she could still see clearly through them, she looked at the paintings hanging on the walls of the governor’s office, portraits of his predecessors, some of the state’s more enlightened governors, such as Donaghey and Robinson and even the demagogue Jeff Davis. Her glance fell upon one portrait she recognized because of the clear family resemblance: Jacob Ingledew of Stay More. None of the portraits was a skillful painting. Each of them, by a different artist, was sloppy in brushstroke, muddy in color, unperceptive in interpretation of character. Her hand idly swept them. “Just to think,” she said, “someday Ernest Bodenhammer might have been the very artist to do
your
portrait to hang on that wall, and he would have made you look much better than all of them.”

His eyes, following her hand, gazed upon the clumsy likenesses of his precursors and seemed to reflect a mingling of veneration for their subjects’ high position in history and a distaste for their second-rate execution by the semiskilled portraitists. He studied the portraits for a while, even swiveling his chair around so he could contemplate them. Was he trying to imagine his own image up there someday? At length he swiveled his chair back to face her, leaned across his desk with his arms upon it, and said to her, “You really love Ernest Bodenhammer, don’t you?”

She would not deny it. “I really love Ernest Bodenhammer.”

“And you really love Nail Chism, don’t you?”

As if intoning a litany, she said, “I really love Nail Chism.”

The governor stood up. Respectfully or politely she stood too, wondering if he was not going to say anything further. But he did: “Miss Monday, I’d like for you to put yourself in my place. No, I’m going to do it for you: I’m going to put you in my place. As of this moment, I hereby authorize you, by executive order, to determine which one of the two men shall live, Nail Chism or Ernest Bodenhammer.
Decide.
”

It was almost as if he had struck her, and it took her a moment to recover from the blow. Her first reaction was to say, “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, but I
am.
I am dead serious. Aren’t you already beginning to feel the awesome responsibility that bears down on me? I am shifting that burden to you.
You
make that choice. The State decrees that both of them must die. There is no way on this earth that you, or I, or anybody, can save
both
of them. The State—call it public opinion if you will—would not allow it. But you may save
one
of them; just decide which one.”

“You are simply trying to make a point,” she declared. “You wouldn’t let me do that, any more than you would let me enter Nail’s cell and stay with him.”

“I give you my solemn word of honor, Miss Monday. The choice is yours.”

“It isn’t fair!” she cried out.

“No, it certainly isn’t!” he cried back at her. “But people ask me to make that kind of decision every day of my life! It’s grossly unfair!”

For a moment she did understand, and she did feel some sympathy for the governor. It was a terrifying dilemma. But now, if he was playing a game with her to prove his point, could she meet the challenge? She thought of Solomon sitting in judgment on the two prostitutes arguing over a baby, and Solomon’s determining the true mother by proposing to slice the baby in two. Could she find a Solomonic solution to this problem?

“Well?” the governor said at length, after waiting for her response. “Give me your decision, and I’ll have Martha come in here and draw up the executive order commuting the death sentence to life imprisonment for the man of your choice.”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t do it. Not right now. I would have to think about it.”

“They don’t give
me
time to think,” the governor protested. “Oftentimes I have to make a judgment right on the spot.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t you realize I would have to live with the decision all the rest of my life?”

“And don’t you, my dear, realize that
all
of my many decisions will haunt me the rest of mine?”

She turned as if to flee. She turned back. She turned again. “Could I have a couple of days? The execution is Saturday night?”

He nodded, to both questions. His last words to her were: “Unless you decide,
both
executions are Saturday night. We’ll have a doubleheader.”

His allusion to a sporting event did not escape her. There actually was a doubleheader baseball game on the afternoon of Saturday, May 1
^st
, between the Little Rock Travelers and the Memphis Chicks, and that is where she found Mr. Irvin Bobo. The landlady of the rooming house where Bobo lived, on Asher Avenue within walking distance of the Arkansas State Penitentiary, told her that she would find him at the ballgame. And that was where he was.

Saturday morning, May 1
^st
, she got up before five, when the first light of dawn came into her room. She had slept no better than the previous three nights and felt weary to the bone. She drank a pot of coffee and went outside and soaked her face in the morning dew, then went for a long walk up Arch Street past the Mt. Holly Cemetery, all the way to the beginning of Arch Street Pike, a road that ran to Malvern, her grandparents’ home, forty miles away. If she had had Rosabone beneath her, she would have fled into the countryside and never come back. But she was on foot and had to make a very simple decision governing her simple walk: she could have turned west on to the Hot Springs road that led to the penitentiary, but she turned east and walked seven or eight blocks to Cumberland Street, then turned back north, toward town. Throughout her hike many dogs barked at her. A milkman stopped his wagon alongside her and asked if she was all right. The sun was well up in the sky when her feet began to fail her, and she stopped at a small café on Third and Cumberland that had just opened for the day. She ordered breakfast and read the
Gazette:
there was a page 3 item,
LITTLE HOPE FOR TWO MEN FACING SUNDOWN DEATH,
and a subhead,
EXECUTIVE SAYS HE WILL NOT INTERVENE WITHOUT ‘DIVINE INTERCESSION.’
Viridis asked herself, Am I “little hope,” or am I “divine intercession”? but the answer remained stubbornly absent.