The Choiring Of The Trees (45 page)

Nail protested. “I aint fixin no electrical equipment with these here cuffs on me.”

“Warden’s orders,” Fat Gill announced. “He says if you can’t fix whatever’s wrong with the cuffs on, we’ll just have to forget it.”

“Well, shit, let’s go,” Nail grumbled, and let Fat Gill lead him upstairs into the engine room. Nail had to get Fat Gill to do things for him because his hands were cuffed. “Reach up there and open the lid on that box…Now jiggle that little knob there and let’s see what happens. Nope. Must be the other box.” Purposely he led Fat Gill on a false trail of increasing difficulty until he was in a position to suggest, “If you’d jist take these cuffs off of me, we could git finished a lot faster.”

“Sorry,” Fat Gill said. “I’m just doin what the warden told me.”

“Well, give that there knob—no, the next one—give it a sort of one-quarter turn anticlockwise.” Fat Gill did as he was instructed and loosened the fuse to the projector’s circuit, and of course nothing happened, not then. “I reckon we’d better go look at the projector,” Nail suggested, and Fat Gill escorted him out of the powerhouse and up into the barracks, where the men were fidgeting until the show resumed. Warden Yeager himself was there, with Short Leg and some of his best black trusties surrounding his seat.

“What’s the problem, Chism?” Warden Yeager demanded. “What’s takin so long?”

“He put these here cuffs on me,” Nail protested. “How the hell can I fix anything when I have to explain to somebody else what to do?”

“Take ’em off,” the warden told Fat Gill. “He aint gonna try nothin with all of us around.”

Fat Gill removed the handcuffs, and Nail went to work on the old Edison, opening it and fanning away the remaining fumes of the scorched short. Sure enough, it had shorted exactly in the spot where he had twisted that wire before, and the wire’s end had dissolved. He turned to the warden and guards. “Any of you fellers got a pocketknife I could borrow for jist a secont?”

The guards looked uncertainly at the warden, and Yeager said to them, “Well if y’all have one hee hee then
give
it to him hee hee.” Short Leg produced a pocketknife. “Just take it easy with that thing hee hee,” the warden said to Nail.

Nail scraped the ends of the wire and twisted it tight and firm around its contact. He stepped back dramatically as if expecting something to happen, but nothing did. He jiggled the projector’s switch. He pulled out the plug, turned it around, reinserted it. Nothing happened. “Must be still a fuse or something down in the engine room,” he declared.

By now the prisoners were whistling, clapping, and shouting, “Put a nickel in it!” and “Crank it up!” and “Turn on the steam!” and “Spit on it!” and they were stomping their feet and jumping up and down.

“Well, go fix the fuse hee hee,” the warden said, and Fat Gill escorted Nail back downstairs.

Back in the engine room, Fat Gill wanted to put the cuffs on him again, but Nail protested, “The warden didn’t tell you to.”

“Aint takin no chances,” Fat Gill said, and was holding the manacles open with one hand while he summoned with the other. “Come on, hold out your hands.”

“Well, shit,
here,
” Nail said, and brought his wrists together and thrust his hands right at Fat Gill, then suddenly raised them under his chin, snapping the guard’s head back and stunning him long enough to throw a punch that caught him on the side of the head and slammed him against the wall. Nail didn’t want to get into a boxing match. Before Fat Gill could recover from the blow, Nail picked up a length of lead conduit and brought it down on the guard’s head, knocking him out. Then Nail took away his key-ring and opened the door leading down into the death hole. There were so many keys on the ring, and he didn’t know which one would fit.

He turned out the lights in the death hole, groped his way down the stairs, and counted past the cells of Dewein and Strong and his own empty cell to Ernest’s. He found the keyhole with his fingers and began inserting one key after another. A long moment passed, and Ernest knew he was there, and he knew Ernest was there, and apparently the other men in the death hole began to guess that something was happening.

“Nails?” said Sam Bell. “Is that you, Nails? What’s up?”

It seemed it was the very last key on the ring that finally opened the bars of Ernest’s cell. He felt Ernest’s arm and gave it a tug. Only after he passed his own empty cell did he remember he’d intended to pick up the copy of Fletcher’s poems, but he did not turn back for it.

“Nails!” hollered Sam Bell. “Is this a bust? Are you coppin a lam? What’s goin on? Take us too! Dewey! You still there? Joe? Timbo Red? Who’s bustin out? Who’s stayin?” Dewey’s and Joe’s voices joined in and followed them all the way up the stairs. Nail shut the door on them.

Ernest looked at Fat Gill lying on the floor. “You kill him?” he asked Nail.

“Naw, I jist give ’im a knot on his head.”

“We got a secont?” Ernest requested. “I want to say good-bye to Old Sparky.”

“That door.” Nail pointed, and Ernest went through it. Nail followed and turned on the one green-shaded overhead light that illuminated the death chamber. The familiar stage seemed strange, empty of all its actors…and its actress. The chair needed dusting. Ernest stood and stared down at it. Old Sparky looked far less menacing than Ernest had depicted it—as harmless, in fact, as some derelict piece of obsolete machinery. Ernest gave its leg a little kick with his shoe and said, “Mr. Spark, I hope you don’t never git another customer. You won’t git me.”

“Come on,” Nail urged, leading him out. “Let’s git that ladder.” Nail reached up into the top shelf of the broom closet and found the key Viridis had smuggled in to him, and the whiskey pint bottle filled with mustard oil. He gave the bottle to Ernest and said, “Carry this. Don’t lose it.”

“Can I have a drink of it first?” Ernest asked.

“It aint to drink,” Nail said. “It’s mustard oil.”

“What’s it for?”

Nail didn’t want to take the time to explain. “Now look, Ernest,” he said, more severely than he intended, “you let me do the talkin on this little trip. You jist do what I tell you and keep your mouth shut.”

Nail unlocked the padlocks holding the ladder to the wall. He decided to return Fat Gill’s key-ring to his belt. Then he tightened the fuse that ran to the circuit of the projector. They could hear the men in the barracks cheering as the motion picture resumed. It would be a few minutes before the warden or anybody else would begin to wonder why Fat Gill had not returned. And maybe a lot longer, if the movie was really interesting.

“Let’s go,” he said. The last thing he did before leaving the powerhouse was to open all of the circuits except the one to the main building, running the projector. The big lights in the guard towers went out. The guards up there would sound an alarm, but now the circuit powering the alarm was open too. By the time the guards could get down from the towers and into the barracks to notify the warden that the searchlights were dead, the searchlights would no longer be needed.

As Nail carried his end of the ladder through his tomato patch, he realized he and Ernest were trampling the young plants, but that couldn’t be helped. He didn’t mind that he would not be here for the harvest in July and August. When he had planted the tomatoes, he hadn’t expected to share in the harvest himself.

The sun was down, but the sky still held some of its light. Nail could hear the guards up in the towers hollering at one another: “What happened to the lights?” and “You got a lantern?” and “Not me. You got one?” Slowly he raised the ladder against the high brick wall. As he had suspected, it did not reach all the way up. That was why he had attached a rope about eight feet long to the top rung: they would have to stand on that rung and reach up and pull themselves up onto the top of the wall and then pull the ladder up after them.

Which they did. Nail went up first and balanced himself carefully on the wall, discovering it wasn’t as broad and thick at the top as he had expected. He straddled it and reached down as Ernest handed up to him the end of the rope.

Then came the really tricky part, as they say. Ernest and Nail had to move apart, straddling the wall, so that there would be enough space between them to pull up the ladder and turn it and lower it to the outside of the wall. Without exchanging a word, they gingerly performed this maneuver, Ernest lifting the bottom of the ladder over his head and pointing it toward the outside, while Nail held the top rung and the rope.

In his months of thinking about the escape, Nail had often wondered if the ground outside the wall, on the east side, would be lower than inside. He had no way of knowing. It stood to reason that the levels would be the same, that the wall stood on firm, flat ground. But from his one trip with Dempsey to the warden’s house, Nail had observed how sharply the land on that side, the north side, sloped downward away from the wall, and he was prepared to find that the slope was similar on the east side. But in this darkness they could not see the ground down there beyond the wall.

With Ernest steadying the ladder and letting go of it rung by rung, Nail lowered it until he was holding the end of the rope. The ladder still twisted and swayed. Nail’s forehead broke out in sweat. “Goddamn,” he said, just loud enough for Ernest to hear him. “I caint touch ground. The ladder won’t reach.”

“Must be a
long
way down there,” Ernest said in awe.

Could there be, Nail wondered, some kind of dry moat running around that end of the wall? The eight-foot rope was attached to a ladder of about thirty feet. So was it over forty feet down to the ground? He kicked out behind him with his legs until he lay on his stomach flat across the ridge of the wall. “Hold me down,” he told Ernest, and he leaned and stretched as far down the outside of the wall as he could, with the rope in his fist…until finally it seemed he could feel, through the rope, that the shoes of the ladder had touched ground. He tugged the rope end against the wall, but the contact he’d made with the shoes seemed to vanish. He could only hope the shoes would hit ground and the side rails would lean the right way against the wall when he let go of the rope. He let go and waited.

Then, after a time, they heard the ladder crash to the ground.

“YOU HEAR THAT?!?” a voice in the tower called, and another voice answered, “THERE’S SOMEBODY OUT THERE!” and from a third tower another voice tried to substitute for the dead alarm bell by yelling at top volume, “JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK!” The lights in the barracks, on the same circuit as the projector, came on, and Nail knew the movie was aborted.

“Lord God!” said Ernest. “What do we do now?”

“We shore caint jump fer it!” Nail said. “We’d break our fool necks.”

“We gonna jist sit here till they come and git us down?”

Nail pointed. “See that?” Down toward one of the guard towers, about five feet out from the wall, there was the silhouette of a smooth cypress pole of the electrical system, carrying power to and from the engine room. It occurred to Nail that this pole, intended to help bring in the current that would have extinguished his life and Ernest’s, now offered the only hope of saving them. “Jist watch me,” Nail told Ernest, “and see if you caint do what I do.” Nail raised himself and stood up on the wall, balancing carefully, trying to feel the slightest warning in the delicate balance mechanisms within his ears as he placed one foot in front of the other until he was as close to the power pole as he could reach; he bent at his knees as if about to squat, then sprang up and out toward the cypress pole, slamming his body against it painfully but throwing his arms around it, and then his legs. Slowly he slid down the pole until his feet touched ground.

He wanted to kneel and kiss the ground, the free earth of the outside world, but he stood and watched Ernest teetering along the top of the wall toward the same leaping-spot. Ernest swayed and nearly toppled but caught himself, fighting the air with his arms for balance. “Come on,” Nail called. “You can do it, son.” Ernest reached the spot of springing but hesitated, as if trying to measure the distance, to determine consciously what had been instinctive for Nail moments before: the exact amount of effort necessary to reach the power pole without slamming into it and knocking yourself out.

Still unsteady, Ernest hesitated as he stared at the power pole and then pantomimed the first tentative flexing of his knees in order to leap. Nail realized that it might have been like this if he had gone first to the chair: watching Nail get electrocuted might have made it all that much harder for Ernest. Here Nail only wanted to show him how it was done. But was he leading the boy to attempt an act beyond his strength and ability?

Nail wanted to pray. But he did not. He heard the trees praying for him. Out there, beyond The Walls, they were all over: real trees, saplings and old ones, hickories, oaks, scrub pine and white pine, blackjack, all kinds of trees crooning to Ernest the song to get him out to that pole and down to the ground.

The singing stopped. Light shone on Ernest. The tower guards had obtained lanterns. “THERE HE IS!” a guard yelled, and another guard yelled, “HOLD THAT LIGHT STEADY AND LET ME GIT A SHOT AT HIM!”

“Jump!” Nail yelled up at the boy. “For godsakes, jump and grab the pole!”

Ernest flexed his knees once again and sprang out for all he was worth.

For
more
than he was worth: he jumped much too hard and almost caused the pole to bend with the force of his body slamming into it, stunning himself so brutally that he could only make the most clumsy grabs at the pole with his hands before he fell the forty feet to the ground, flat out.

Nail knelt quickly beside him. Ernest moaned. He was alive and conscious. Nail smelled something and realized it was the mustard oil: Ernest’s fall had broken the bottle. “Can you move?” Nail asked, and tried to get him to sit up or roll over.

Ernest shook his head and groaned weakly, “I reckon I’ve done busted ever bone in my body.” Nail tugged at his arm. “Ouch! Naw, I caint move. I’ve had it, Nail. You git on. Git on out of here.”