The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  He heard a voice say, “Turn him around,” and the two blacks who were keeping him from reaching his dagger and murdering Fat Gabe turned him toward his assailant, who was wearing a look as if he were not tired but enjoying himself, and who swung back the strap aiming to lash Nail on his genitals.

  He begged for the first time in his life. “No!”

  But Fat Gabe hit him there, and it was much worse than being hit on his buttocks. Even the torturer seemed to retain a shred of fellow-feeling to realize how hideous the scourging must have felt, and he was not putting the full force of his swing into the blows but checking them so that they slapped against Nail’s genitals without cutting, only stinging and bruising. Nail lost consciousness.

  How much later he came to he couldn’t tell, except that it was dark and there was a face close to his own, speaking to him. The voice was Toy’s, and Toy had very bad teeth, which gave his breath a rancid stench, especially so close: they were lying side by side in the lower bunk. “They done that to me last week,” said Toy. “It helps if you kind of draw your knees up towards your chest. Here, you can have my space to draw up your knees. Like that. It keeps your balls from killing you. Don’t it? Do you feel some better that way?”

  “Hush,” Nail said. “Let me sleep. Thanks.”

  “You know what they strapped me for?” Toy went on. “At dinner once Stardust wouldn’t eat his bread, sometimes he don’t eat at all, and once when he left his bread like that I was real hungry so I took it and ate it. You know we aint supposed to touch nobody else’s food ’ceptin our own?”

  “Yeah, that’s the rule,” Nail said. “Let’s be quiet now and go to sleep.”

  “One of them nigger waiters saw me grab it, and he reported me, and I got twenty lashes behind and ten in front.” Toy sighed, and his sigh carried a full blast of fetor.

  “Fat Gabe is the meanest feller on this earth,” Nail remarked. “Now hush. Shh. Let me sleep.”

  “It wasn’t Fat Gabe that put the strap to me. It was the warden,” Toy said. “Mr. Burdell.” And Toy went on talking. He seemed on the verge of telling Nail his whole life’s story, and Nail began to crave some ventilation. Toy was born in Lonoke, Arkansas, and had been all the way to Memphis, a big town. He once went to a whorehouse in Memphis. He’d saved up his money from picking strawberries and wanted to find out what having two women simultaneously would be like. He picked out a light-haired one and a dark-haired one. Nail told himself that Toy must have had better teeth in those days, or no woman would have come near him. Toy began to tell what each of the women had done to him, or let him do to them.

  “’scuse me,” Nail interrupted suddenly. “I need to go out real bad.” He climbed out of the bunk and painfully stood up, clutching his groin. He was not going out, of course, but he needed to find the pot, not just to get away from Toy; he was suddenly very sick in his bowels. If he didn’t get to the pot soon, he’d mess his pants. The barracks had a couple of those enameled tin slop buckets: a white enamel one for white men, a black enamel one for black men. In the dark it was hard to tell them apart, but Nail didn’t care. At least he had the decency to use the pot; most of the men thought that using the slop buckets was dandified, pretentious, effeminate: they preferred using the floor, and you had to be careful where you walked, especially if you were barefoot, as many of them were who couldn’t afford shoes. Nail never took off his brogans, but still he could feel an occasional squish beneath his feet as he stumbled through the rows of bunks, feeling his way with his hands, and touching an arm or a foot here and there, and unwittingly waking a man or two, who cursed. He reached one of the pots, black or white, just in the nick of time. The pot smelled far worse than Toy’s breath, and Nail poured into it a searing torrent of distress from his guts. He continued to squat there until long after the stabs and quakes had stopped tearing within him. He hoped that if he waited long enough, Toy would be asleep when he returned to the bunk.

  But Toy suffered from insomnia and welcomed him back and resumed his long story of the Memphis brothel. Then he thought of an even better story: the time he found that nymphomaniac in the strawberry patch. He had to interrupt this story twice to allow Nail to stumble off into the darkness to the commode. Toy was still breathing his vile story when Nail managed at last to doze off.

  The five o’clock gong woke him. Toy was still talking but had rolled onto his back and was telling his story to the ceiling, a tale of some De Valls Bluff girls who gang-raped a twelve-year-old Lonoke boy, not Toy but his cousin Virgil. At the fifth clang of the gong a guard yelled, “Rise and shine ’em, squad up and jump.” When Nail tried to get out of bed, he knew he was not going to be able to rise or to shine, to squad up or even to eat, let alone to jump. He was sicker than a dog, and it wasn’t any food he’d eaten that had done it either.

  As Toy, Stardust, and Thirteen lined up and prepared to get into lock-step, Nail said to them, “Tell ’em I need a doctor.”

  Much later in the morning two Negro trusties, not the same two who had held him when Fat Gabe laid the strap on him, came and got him and dragged him upstairs to the attic. It wasn’t a bare attic but had been fixed up into a kind of room. It had two windows, both of them rendered almost opaque by flyspecks. There were dirt-dobber nests on the rafters. The black men put him on one of the two cots and left him there. He was too sick to get up and reconnoiter the surroundings, but from where he lay he could see the blurred shapes of black bars through each flyspeck-frosted windowpane. The whole room smelled foul in a new kind of foulness that was almost a relief from the smell of Toy’s breath and the slop bucket because it was different: a smell of sickness and decay and, yes, something that Nail realized he’d never smelled before: death. The cot that Nail lay on had gray sheets that were ripped and stained but appeared to have been washed recently, while the other cot had sheets and blankets that were thick with dried blood and other discharges. The room was terribly cold yet not absolutely frigid; Nail realized that because it was in the building’s attic it received some warmth rising up from the barracks below, what little body heat the three hundred men had generated. The extreme cold of the room would not ordinarily have bothered him, but now in this sickness he was weak and began to shiver uncontrollably. Nail had enough strength to reach the other cot and remove its bloody blanket and wrap himself in it.

  Eventually a man came in, accompanied by two more of the black trusties. He was dressed like them, dressed like Nail, in clothing printed with wide gray stripes. He wore thick spectacles and did not look like a criminal. He stared down at Nail not with curiosity or kindness but with a kind of boredom, and he asked, “What do you need?”

  “I need a doctor, I reckon,” Nail said.

  “You won’t get one,” the man said. “I used to be one. I’m the closest to one you’ll find. Gode’s my name. Now what do you need?”

  “Something for my stomach,” Nail said. “Or my bowels. Or both.”

  “Gaumed up or trots?”

  “Trots.”

  “Wee-wawed any?”

  “Wee-wawed?”

  Doc Gode did a pantomime of vomiting. “Puked.”

  Nail shook his head and pointed at his mouth. “Not at this end.”

  The man was staring at the top of his shaved head. “You been in the death hole? Your head’s peeled.”

  Nail nodded. “I cheated the old hot squat,” he said, and smiled.

  Doc Gode didn’t smile back. He reached inside his pocket and took out a key. On the wall of the flyspeck room was a wooden cabinet, its two doors latched and padlocked. The man unlocked and opened the cabinet. The two shelves inside contained a blue bottle, a brown bottle, and two bottles in shades of green, as well as a roll of gauze and a few other items. From where he lay Nail could only read the label on the brown bottle: CARBOLIC ACID. The ex-doctor took down one of the green bottles, uncorked it, and handed it to Nail. “Take just two swallows of this,” he commanded.

  The label read: PAREGORIC. The name sounded sinister
. “What does it do?” Nail asked.

  “It will ease your guts,” the man said. “Come on. Take two swigs and hand it back.”

  The stuff didn’t taste too bad. After a second swallow Nail handed the green bottle back, and Doc Gode returned it to the cabinet. Before he could close the cabinet, Nail requested, “Could you take a look at my behind? I reckon I may need a bandage back there.”

  The man motioned for him to turn over, then pulled down the back of his pants, took a look, and said to the black trusties, “Hold ’im, boys.” The two Negroes grabbed Nail’s arms and gripped tightly, and soon Nail felt a burning on his butt worse than the licking he’d received, and he screamed.

  When he got his voice back and could see through the tears in his eyes, he saw Doc Gode holding the unstoppered brown bottle, CARBOLIC ACID, and he said, “Ye gods! What was that for?”

  “A little disinfectant,” Doc Gode said. “It’ll keep the germs out. But I can’t waste any wrappings on that. Just don’t sit on it for a week.”

  There was a commotion on the stairs, the door flew open with a crash, and two more of the black trusties came into the room, carrying the limp form of a middle-aged white convict, naked, his entire body flayed: flaps of his flesh were dangling loose, two-inch strips of skin hung from wounds that looked as if they had been scorched with a hot iron, and he was covered with blood.

  The blacks dumped the body onto the other cot. One of them said, “Marse Gabe done really laid it on ’im.” There was almost admiration in his voice, as well as awe. “Ole Marse Gabe done whupped de daylights out ob dis po buckra.”

  Doc Gode lifted the man’s dangling arms and folded them over his chest. He opened one of the man’s eyelids and looked closely at the unseeing eye. He felt the man’s pulse. He turned his head and looked at Nail and asked disdainfully, “Now you see why I couldn’t waste any bandages on you?” Doc Gode took down the roll of gauze from the cabinet and the bottle of carbolic acid. He gave Nail one more look. “You don’t want to watch this.”

  Nail turned his head away. He listened but heard no sounds coming from the victim, and a good while later, when he stole a glance in that direction, he saw that the victim’s worse wounds had been wrapped and taped, but many areas of his body were still raw and bloody.

  Mr. Burdell came into the room. “What’s goin on up here?” he demanded. “Y’all havin a party?” He saw Nail and said, “What’re you doin here, Chism? Playin off?”

  “Doc Gode’s been treatin me for what ails me,” Nail said.

  The warden looked at the ex-doctor. “What’s wrong with Chism?”

  “Dysentery,” said Doc Gode.

  “No shit?” the warden said.

  “Too much shit,” Doc Gode said.

  Nail couldn’t help laughing, even though it was a serious matter if Doc Gode was truthful: Nail recalled reading about it in Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Advisor. But Doc Gode too was chuckling a bit, and maybe he wasn’t serious.

  “What’s so funny?” the warden demanded, but then he seemed to become smart enough to catch the joke, and he smirked and said, “Well, if you got any shit left in you, Chism, we will beat it out.” The warden lost interest in Nail and began studying the other patient. “He don’t look too good, does he?” Burdell said.

  “Very weak pulse,” Doc Gode said.

  The other fellow looked done for, Nail observed. He couldn’t recall ever having seen the man before; he was just one more convict among the hundreds; but Nail suddenly found himself inventing the man’s life: he had a wife somewhere out in the country and a whole bunch of children; he had a mother still living, and some sisters and brothers; he had worked hard all of his life, toiling in the sun, until the day he got in trouble and was sent to the pen. Probably he was hoping he could get a Christmas pardon and be home with his family.

  “Mr. Burdell, sir, could I say somethin?” Nail discovered himself requesting before he could have the sense to stop himself. The warden turned away from the dying man and looked at Nail. Burdell didn’t say, Yes, go ahead, but he didn’t say, No, keep your trap shut, so Nail went ahead and said what he had to say: “Sir, I know that Fat—I know that Mr. Gabriel McChristian is jist doin his job, and I know it aint a easy job either. But I jist wonder sometimes if you know, sir, how evil he is. Evil. This world is full of cussed wickedness and cruelty, but when a feller gits a crazy pleasure out of causin awful pain to another human bein, he aint jist wicked or cruel, he’s evil, he’s criminal, he’s sick in the head. Don’t that bother ye none, sir?”

  The warden just stared at him. Then the warden and Doc Gode exchanged looks. The black trusties exchanged looks, and one of them rolled his eyes up into his head. Finally the warden prefaced whatever response he was going to make by saying severely, “Chism—” but then he seemed to change his mind and adopt a milder tone, although it was a strain on him. “Nail, I know we aint perfect, none of us,” he said. “And ole Gabe is prob’ly the least perfect amongst us, shall we say? But evil? Evil, did you say?” The warden abandoned the effort to be polite. “Who the fuck are you to tell me about evil? You raped a kid, Chism. You grabbed a little girl and knocked her down and rammed your hot cock into her tiny little cunt! You tell me about evil! She begged you for mercy, and did you have any? Don’t you talk to me about evil, you miserable son of a bitch! I’ll show you what evil really is before you git your ass fried!” The warden whipped around and yelled at the trusties, “Git this bastard out to the yard!” As the trusties dragged Nail off his cot and toward the door, Burdell spoke up close to his face, shaking a long, trembling finger at the man dying on the other cot. “You know why he got beat? Huh? Because he was tryin to escape! I swear, Chism, when we git through with you, you’re gonna try real hard to escape.”

  They took Nail out of the flyspeck room, out of the building, into the yard. It was a big yard, acres of empty ground between the building and the wall. They stood Nail up and told him to walk. But he couldn’t walk. They picked him up again and kicked him and hit on him and told him to walk. He walked a bit. It began to snow. At first just feathers but then heavy flurries. His bare head and his shoulders became covered with flakes. And his back, when he fell. The rest of the day they kept picking him up and making him walk. The blacks complained to one another of the futility of it, the dumbness of it, the monotony of it, but they kept on with their job.

  The man in the flyspeck room died. Before they hauled him off for burial, they placed his body on the floor at one end of the barracks. Warden Burdell made a short speech warning against attempted escape, and Fat Gabe and Short Leg moved among the men, clubbing one who protested that the dead man had never tried to escape. When Burdell’s speech was finished, all three hundred of the men were lined up in slow lockstep, and each man, black and white, was required to bend down and shake hands with the corpse and say good-bye. Each man except Nail, who couldn’t lift his head from his bunk.

  Fat Gabe came to his bunk. “Can’t move a finger, hey?” Fat Gabe asked, but Nail couldn’t even talk. Fat Gabe moved his face close so that his words spattered Nail with flecks of spittle: “I got a mind to move a few fingers for you, boy. But not tonight. I’m gonna save you. I’m gonna save you till you’re strong enough to ’preciate what I’m gonna do to you. You got to be able to move to ’preciate what I’m gonna do. Gonna let you know what evil is. Gonna make you learn what sick in the head is. Gonna do crimes on you that spell out what criminal is.” Fat Gabe cleared his throat twice, hawked, and spat at Nail a faceful of phlegm.

  Nail lost track of time. He couldn’t remember having had anything to eat, he couldn’t recall ever being able to get up and go with the others to the mess hall, but he didn’t have any memory of anybody bringing him anything to eat. Probably he didn’t eat at all, for a week or so. But he didn’t have any memory of having to get up and go to the slop bucket either. Or use the floor. Strange, he didn’t know thirst even. His bunkmates began to try their best to pretend he wasn’t the
re. Toy said to him once, wonderingly, “Did you really truly rape a little girl?” All that Nail could manage was to mumble, “She wasn’t little.” And when it occurred to him to add, “And I didn’t rape her neither,” Toy had disappeared, and never spoke to him again after that. Another time, in the night, someone—he figured it was Thirteen—tried to insert a penis into his mouth. Nail had just enough strength to raise a hand to stop the action. The owner of the penis said, and it sounded like Thirteen, “You did it to that little girl, didn’t you?”

  Nail discovered that if he tried hard enough he could shut out entirely the Arkansas State Penitentiary in bitter December and make it into a hillside of Stay More in the middle of June with his sheep all around him. He could do anything he wanted to, with those sheep. They would gambol into square dances when he played the right tunes on his mouth organ. The fescue was cropped a bronze-green by their grazing, but the orchard grass was still like emerald, and behind the green meadow rose the turquoise mountain, and beyond it the blue-green hills, and beyond those the light smoky blue of faraway Reynolds Mountain. When the sheep finished their dancing, they would crawl up leaf-dappled under the green shade of the big oaks at the edge of the meadow, and there they would kneel and nap, and Nail would nap with them, long in the summer afternoon, listening to the clear spring gurgle down the talus. When they woke up from their nap, they were whole and sound and sane and ready to play some more, and Nail would play his harmonica for them and feel almost well.