The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  “Well, Chism, you son of a bitch, what do you have to say?” the warden demanded.

  “I,” said Nail. It was all he could get out for a moment, as if he had said “aye.” And at last he said the rest of it: “I’m right glad of that.”

  “You better be ‘right glad,’ you bastard,” the warden commented. “Gabe, put the cuffs back on him. Take his stuff out of that death cell and throw him in with the others in the stockade. Let me know how he likes that.”

  The two guards took his arms once again and started to lead him out of Old Sparky’s room. Fat Gabe was fit to be tied, he was so disappointed that Nail hadn’t got it. Nail was going to be in real trouble with Fat Gabe.

  “Wait, Mr. Burdell,” said the lady from the newspaper, the one called Miss Monday. “Would it be possible for me to interview the prisoner before you return him to his cell?”

  “Interview him?” said the warden. “What for?”

  “Well,” she said, “I’d just like to write up how it feels to escape death.”

  The warden snorted. “You jist heard him say he’s ‘right glad,’ didn’t you? What else could any man say?”

  “Could I just ask him a few questions?” she requested.

  The warden looked back and forth between the lady and Nail. “Okay,” the warden said. “Here he is. Ask him.”

  “Do you mind?” she said. “He’s not going to feel free to talk with everyone standing around like this.”

  “Well, I aint gon let y’all use the visit room,” Burdell told her. “We don’t let condemned men use the visit room.”

  “He isn’t condemned anymore, is he?”

  “He aint been pardoned, Miss Monday. He’s only been reprieved.”

  The lady gestured at the witnesses’ chairs, two rows of wooden folding chairs at one side of Old Sparky’s room. “Couldn’t we just sit here a few minutes?” she asked.

  Again the warden needed time to make up his mind. His brains is real slow, Nail reflected. “Well, okay, I guess,” he said finally. “I’ll have to leave Gabe here with y’all, and let me remind you, ma’am, this person is a convicted rapist and is dangerous. I ought to hang around too, but, hell, I’m late for my supper already.”

  “Mr. McChristian can handle it,” the lady said, calling Fat Gabe by his proper name.

  “Mister McChristian, huh?” the warden said, as if he’d never heard nobody call ole Gabe that before. “Well, Mister McChristian, you watch ’im, and if he tries any funny stuff you beat the everlastin sh—horse hockey out of him.”

  The warden and the others left the room. Nail sat down in the same chair he’d sat in to watch Skip get electrocuted, and Miss Monday sat in the same chair where she’d been sitting. Fat Gabe watched them as if they were getting ready to pull something funny. A sudden inspiration occurred to Nail: he could reach inside his jacket, take his blade, kill Fat Gabe with it, then take the woman hostage and break out of here. He would have to handle it carefully: right now Fat Gabe was far enough away to pull his gun beforehand. Nail would have to get him closer. But with these handcuffs back on his wrists, he wasn’t sure that he could handle it, even if he got Fat Gabe close enough and moved fast enough. He hadn’t even had a chance when he’d tried to reach his blade as Fat Gabe and Short Leg were putting him into the chair. They hadn’t even given him enough time to—

  “Hello.”

  The lady had spoken to him. He realized he wasn’t paying her much attention. He looked at her. She had her notepad out, and a broken piece of charcoal pencil, which was all she had to write with, the same pencil she’d made that mark on his hand with before, the same pencil she’d used to draw that portrait of him that made him look so awful, the pencil now broken. “Howdy,” he said.

  “How does it feel?” she asked. “Or is that a stupid question? Were you all prepared to die?”

  “No, ma’am,” he answered her. “I’ll never be prepared to die, until I’m real old and there aint nothin to live for no more.”

  She wrote this down, or tried to, the dull charcoal pencil making big clumsy letters, with few to a sheet before she had to turn the page over. Then she asked, “Did you really think it was going to happen? The execution, I mean. Did you still hope you might get a reprieve at the last minute?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he admitted.

  “Could you tell me what was going through your mind during those last minutes?” she asked, and added, “If it’s not too hard.”

  “Well,” he said. He thought. Both of them were looking not at each other but at Old Sparky sitting there forlorn and cheated but vengeful. He did not know quite how to say it, or even whether to try to tell her. Would she think he was nuts? Or just misunderstand? “I wasn’t really thinkin,” he said. “I was just listenin to the trees singin.”

  Her mouth fell open. She thinks I’m crazy, he said to himself, and cursed himself for having tried to tell her. She asked, very quietly, almost whispering, “What did you say?”

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “No, tell me. Did you say—?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was sayin.”

  “You said,” she said, “didn’t you? that you were listening to the trees singing? Did you say that?”

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “I been feelin awful, tell you the truth, I don’t know what I was sayin.”

  She laid a hand on his arm. “That’s strange, because—”

  “Don’t touch the prisoner!” Fat Gabe hollered. “No con-tack allowed!”

  She removed her hand and continued her sentence: “Because I was hearing the same thing. Trees. I heard trees singing. I swear.” She laughed, and observed, “I didn’t even know trees can sing.”

  A strange lady. He smiled at her and waited for her to ask something else.

  “Can they?” she asked.

  “Can who what?” he said.

  “Trees. Sing.”

  “These were.”

  “What kind of song?”

  “Want me to play it for ye on my harmonica?”

  “Yes! Would you?”

  “Fat Gabe, would you fetch my harmonica?” he asked, grinning so Fat Gabe would know he was just funning.

  Fat Gabe snarled, “I’d like to shove that mouth organ up your—Listen, Chism, why don’t y’all jist shut up this love song and git your goddamn talkin finished?”

  “Do you really have a harmonica?” the lady asked Nail.

  “Yes’m, I do,” he said.

  “I hope—” she said. “I hope sometime I can have a chance to hear you play it.” Then she held out her hand. “My name is Viridis Monday.” He did not take her hand, and then she must have remembered that Fat Gabe had forbidden their touching, for she withdrew her hand.

  “I reckon you know my name,” he said. “Pleased to meet ye. And you know, don’t ye? that I wouldn’t be alive right this minute if you hadn’t drew that pitcher.”

  She smiled. She had such a nice, pretty, clean smile, teeth real good and straight and white. She didn’t use a whole lot of lip-rouge either, the way most women did these days. She said, “Mr. Chism, I’d like to help you. I’d like to do some investigating. I’m not really a reporter, I suppose you know. I’m just an illustrator. But I know how to do what reporters do, such as checking into facts. There’s one fact I’d like to determine: whether or not you…you actually did what they said you did, to that thirteen-year-old girl.”

  Nobody had made any reference to Rindy in a long time, and at the mention of her Nail clenched his jaw, narrowed his eyes, and took an involuntary deep breath. “Lady,” he said, “there’s only three people on this earth who honestly and truly believe that I’m innocent. One of ’em is me, of course. The other’n is my mother. And the third one—” he paused, and gritted his teeth to pronounce her name: “is Miss Dorinda Whitter, the so-called victim.”

  “I would like,” Miss Monday announced, “to talk to all three of you. Right now I’m talking to you. Why do you think the girl would
have falsely accused you?”

  “Now, that’s a real long story,” he said. “Fat Gabe aint et his supper either, and he aint gonna want to hang around and let me tell it to you. Right, Fat Gabe?”

  “Boy,” Fat Gabe snarled, “I’ve tole you before: you don’t never ask me no questions. I do the askin, you hear me?”

  “Yes, boss,” Nail said, knowing that Fat Gabe was going to get real mean with him as soon as this lady left. Again he flirted with the notion of killing Fat Gabe now and taking this lady hostage, but this lady, he decided, was too nice to have to be subjected to something like that.

  “The first thing I’m going to do,” Miss Monday declared, “is find out the status of your reprieve. If Governor Hays did it himself, on his own, it’s probably got some political motive and is very temporary. If the Supreme Court made him do it, it might be permanent.” She stood up and stuck her notepad into the pocket of her coat, then pulled the coat tighter around herself. The sun had gone down; the room was very cold now. But Nail, despite the thinness of his cotton jacket, did not suffer the cold. The kindness of this lady warmed him.

  He stood up too. “Lady—” he began, but decided that wasn’t polite enough. “Miss Monday, why are you doing this for me?”

  Again that pretty smile. “I don’t know what song the trees sang,” she said. “But somehow it told me that the trees would be very sad if you were killed for something you didn’t do.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I thank you kindly.” And he reached out his handcuffs and shook hands with her.

  “I said no con-tack, dammit!” Fat Gabe hollered, and moved closer.

  They separated their hands. “I’d like to meet the trees,” she said, with one last of those smiles.

  “This time of year,” he observed, “they’re as bare as bare can be.”

  Off

  Fat Gabe and Short Leg beat him up. He shouldn’t have talked back to them. They took him from the death room downstairs to his cell, that dark, dank, cold, tomb-like little space that had been his home for months, since the day in August they’d brought him to The Walls. The cell was in a sort of basement of the electric light and power building that held not just Old Sparky’s room but the transformers and dynamos and generators and the rest of that stuff that charged up Old Sparky and all the lights in The Walls and even some of the freeworld neighborhood out beyond in southwest Little Rock, along the Hot Springs highway. Fat Gabe and Short Leg took him back down to that hole, and Fat Gabe said, “Get your stuff.”

  He didn’t have much to get: his change of underwear, his comb (he wouldn’t need it) and toothbrush, his harmonica, his 1914 calendar nearly all marked up, just twenty-nine days unmarked left to go, the Bible that Jimmie Mac had lent him and which he read for entertainment: the action stories of those old Israelites fighting the Moabites and Midianites and Ammonites and Philistines, and Old King Solomon’s song, which didn’t have much excitement in it but was real pretty, what the king said to that lady; that, and his copy of Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Advisor, which somebody had left behind in the death cell, eight hundred and ninety-seven pages he’d already read three times, no stories but interesting topics like “Sexual Isolation,” “Prostitution,” “Prevention of Conception,” “Diseases of Women,” and “Unhappy Marriages,” and hundreds of pictures he knew by heart now: vital organs, anatomy of men and women, diseases of the ear, eye, and throat. He thought of leaving it, but you never could tell when he might want to use the pages for the makes of a cigarette, not that he had any tobacco left, but you never could tell.

  “I like it here,” Nail observed. “Why’ve I gotta move to the stockade?”

  Fat Gabe hit him with the back of his hand swung hard across his face. “That’s twice this evenin you’ve ast me a question, Chism.”

  Short Leg, who wasn’t as bad as Fat Gabe, had the kindness to explain: “You aint condemned anymore, at least not for right now. You caint stay in the death hole till you get another date set up with Old Sparky.”

  Nail wiped the blood from his mouth and turned to call goodbye and good luck to Ramsey, the quiet murderer who’d been moved into Skip’s cell when Skip was killed. Ramsey did not answer. Then the two guards marched Nail up out of the electric light and power building, across the yard, and into the main building, to the stockade, which was just one huge room, a barracks with few windows covered with wire mesh as well as thick bars, in which three hundred men were crowded together. The beds were double-tiered, and, as Nail discovered, four men slept together in each bed. He had slept in the same bed with his brothers Waymon and Luther; he knew how to sleep with other men, but those had been his own kinfolks, not strangers. The blacks and the whites were separated: the three men he would have to sleep with were all, more or less, the same color as he. Those three were sitting on the edge of their double-bunk or standing around it, waiting to see who the new man would be, and they sized him up; he was taller than any of them.

  “Don’t I get any supper before bedtime?” Nail asked his guards before they abandoned him there.

  Fat Gabe stood on tiptoe to hit him again, in the face, then slugged him in the stomach to bend him down to his own level, and backhanded him once more across the face, to knock him down. “That’s three questions you’ve ast me, Chism. When will you know better?”

  Short Leg removed his handcuffs. Nail wanted to take out his dagger and slash up both of them, especially Fat Gabe, but it wasn’t the right moment yet. He had suffered worse beatings than this. He remained sitting on the floor, holding his arms around his knees.

  “New boy, what’s your name?” asked one of the three men at his double-bunk. He was a young man nearly as corpulent as Fat Gabe but not as muscular. Nail Chism told them his name. He learned theirs, or, rather, their nicknames, for each man in the prison was known only by his nickname, and his sentence, or “time.” The fat one was called Toy, doing two years for stealing a bicycle. There was a thin one called Stardust, who did not look at Nail when he was introduced, who did not look at anything, who seemed to be staring at something impossibly far away. He had written bad checks and was doing three. The third one, doing five for safecracking, was a glowering, ugly, scarfaced man not as tall as Nail but more powerfully built, called, for a reason Nail never learned, Thirteen.

  Nail’s bunkmates understood his name to be Nails, and thence-forward everyone called him that; it stood him in good stead, because it suggested being tough as nails, mean as nails, hungry enough to eat nails. He got a chance to earn his nickname that first night: Thirteen tried to persuade Nail to let him put his penis in Nail’s mouth; Nail declined rudely, and later, when they’d gone to bed and Thirteen was sleeping behind Nail, Thirteen tried to force himself into Nail’s anus; Nail whipped around and hit him, and Thirteen fought back viciously. The two men slugged and whomped and whacked each other all over the barracks before the night guards came in with wooden clubs and knocked them both senseless.

  When Nail regained consciousness in the short hours of the morning, he found he was on the cement floor between bunks. The floor smelled of piss, tobacco spit, and shit, and it was harder than nails, but at least he had it to himself. He rolled over and cradled his head on his arm and settled himself for sleep, but he became aware of the sounds: a general steady, grinding hum of many noses snoring in unison and counterpoint, punctuated by voices mumbling in nightmares or severe dreams; occasional grunts, snorts, creaking of bedframes; and, reminding him of bullfrogs croaking on the creek-bank, a chorus of farts. He listened to this mixture of sounds for a long time until it became almost monotonous, no longer novel and interesting. He rolled over to cradle his head on the other arm. He found himself thinking, for a while, of Miss Monday. What had she said her first name was? Something he’d never heard before. Maris or Berdice or Vernice. She was a real looker, good for the eyes, classy and sniptious, spiffy and neat. In fact she was the spiffiest creature ever he’d seen. She was friendly too. And nice! Why, there’d be
en few women he’d ever known, his sister Irene for one, who were as nice. Had Berdice Monday really meant that about the trees? Or had she just been saying that to humor him? What call did she have to make him feel good? Anyway, he did feel real good, thinking of her, and it helped him fall asleep at last.

  Hers was the first face he saw in deep sleep, that lovely smile, only this time it wasn’t smiling but looking sad because he was sitting in Old Sparky waiting for Bobo to pull the switch. Only it wasn’t really him, it couldn’t be him, because there he sat beside Vernice Monday, that was sure enough him. Then who was this him sitting here in this electric chair? He looked at his strapped arms and saw they were black. He realized that this evening wasn’t the evening of the day before, December 2nd, his day, but the evening of October 31st, time had gone all the way back to Halloween, more than a month before, and he was a black boy named Skipper Thomas, who had been accused of killing his white lady that he worked for, although nobody’d ever seen him do it or had any evidence whatever and he’d worked for her long enough to know that it was her own nephew who’d done it so he’d get the money she left, but it was too late now, there was Mr. Burdell the warden with his hand in the air, and now he drops his hand, and I feels it! I feels the current coming up my legs and down from my head and meeting in my innards and there’s Mr. Bobo with his dull dumb blank look like he’s just absentmindedly broken off a limb from a bush, only it’s not a limb it’s the switch-handle, the switch-handle is down, the current is surging, my body is rumbling like a freight train, my head is shaking awful, I am biting my tongue nearly in two and trying to say to the trees, Save me, trees! Oh trees, save me! I’m not ready to die-ie-ie-ie! and I am trying hard to keep my heart still beating, my heart is pounding to keep from ever stopping, my heart will go on and on, although my head begins to hurt like no headache I’ve ever known, my legs are shot through with the pain of a thousand needles, my skin is all on fire, my stomach is boiling and about to come up through my gullet and into my mouth, I am in awful pain! and Mr. Bobo unbreaks the broken twig, he raises the switch-handle back up to where it was, and I know that I have lived! The current has not killed me, my heart beats strong, I am still alive, but the pain! The good God never intended for any of His mortal creatures to feel a pain as terrible as this, to burn like this. I look at Miss Maris Monday and her face is all stricken in what she knows must be my pain, and I look at Mr. Nail Chism sitting there beside her and he too has clenched his jaw and his eyes are stricken not because he knows this is what he too is going to have to endure come December but because he knows that no human being not even a worthless black nigger like me who shouldn’t have been born in the first place ought to bear such hideous agony as this death that burns and tears and strips all of my flesh and soul except my heart which still beats strong and wants to live! and Mr. Nail Chism’s eyes get wet and he yells, “Goddamn you, Bobo, turn up the juice and leave it on!” and sweet-faced lady Miss Berdis Monday puts her hand on his arm to calm him down. Mr. Bobo looks at Mr. Burdell the warden and Mr. Burdell nods his head once and Mr. Bobo pushes the switch-handle back down and once more I feels it! Once more I feels the divine almighty current charge like a thousand horses running through my veins and the violent fire burns away my pain for one long forever although my teeth are one by one jarred loose in my mouth and my eyeballs get rolled back inside my head so that I am blind and can no longer see the sweet but stunned face of Miss Vernice Monday and the sympathetic scowl of Mr. Nail Chism and I can’t see nothing only the raging of the horses that trample upon my heart but still can’t make it stop. The horses give up. The current stops. My eyes are blind, my nose is stopped by the stink of my burning skin, only my ears can hear the voice, it’s no angel coming for to carry me home but that warden Mr. Burdell: “Is he dead?” No, I am not dead, but I have now abandoned God before He ever had a chance to abandon me: I have done went and quit Him for eternity because no God however powerful or wrathful could create the kind of pain that wracks me now: this kind of pain could only be the work of Satan; only the Devil Himself could be evil enough to create such unspeakable torture and punishment as this burning pain.