“Well, not exactly,” Cobb said.
“What do you mean, Mister Cobb?” Fat Gabe demanded. “Is this yours or his?”
“It isn’t mine, I assure you,” Cobb said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“Get the fuck out of here, Cobb,” Fat Gabe said. Cobb hastily departed, and Fat Gabe said to Short Leg, “Get the boss.”
Warden Burdell was summoned, and came, and Fat Gabe handed him the letter. The warden took out his spectacles and put them on. He unfolded the sheets, giving Nail a glance to indicate he recognized the writing-paper as the same he had given Nail to write his mother at Christmastime. He read the letter, grinning. Nail stood helpless, the sole of his shoe pressing down on the wad of Viridis’ letter. Would he ever get a chance to read it? Finally the warden looked up and said to Nail, “So this was intended for Miss Monday of the Gazette, huh? As I suspected, she’s sweet on you. Right?” Nail did not answer. The warden flapped the letter. “You say here that you’d like to kill the governor. Is that true?” Nail would not answer. “Answer me, or do you need Gabe to give you some persuasion?” Nail gave a semblance of a nod. “And it says here you’re planning to kill a few of us before we electrocute you. You want to tell me how you’re planning to do that?” Nail could not answer. The warden removed his spectacles and looked at Fat Gabe and Short Leg and said to them, “Maybe he thinks he can do it with his bare hands!” and both of the sergeant-guards laughed. “If you’re so impatient to give it a try, Chism, your date with Old Sparky is right around the corner. I think we’d better put you back in the death hole to wait for it. But first…” (the warden inclined his head in the direction of Fat Gabe) “…first I believe my assistant here, ole Gabe, would like to inflict an appropriate punishment for your stupid attempt to smuggle this letter out of here. Is that right, Gabe?”
“Just let me get my hide,” Fat Gabe said. “We’ll do it right here in the mess hall.”
“Very good. Everybody can watch,” the warden said. “Except me. I wouldn’t have much fun watching you get strapped, Chism. But I expect I’ll have some pleasure watching you fry. Unless you find some mustard oil.” Before walking away, the warden shook his head and said again, “Mustard oil!” and snorted a laugh.
Inmates hate to have to watch a flogging right after supper; several of them are sure to puke. The wheelbarrow was not brought in as a rack for Nail’s body; he was just spread out right there face down on the dining table, with three trusties holding his arms and legs, while Doc Gode got ready to take his pulse.
There were three things Nail saw, in succession, before the blows started: first, the wad of Viridis’ letter, still there on the floor, nobody noticing it or thinking anything of it, or at least not bending down to pick it up and find out what it was; second, the face of Timbo Red, who was looking at him with mingled terror and fierce indignation, whose sixteen-year-old eyes were already beginning to acquire some of the keen look of having seen too much of this world and having tried without success to make sense of it; and third, as Nail shut his eyes, that face with its caressing green eyes and frame of fire-red hair, that face he would always see whenever he shut his eyes until the very last time he shut them. He tried to fix that face in the darkness as the brass-studded lash opened up the skin of his ass. And when they sponged salt water into the wounds, he did not scream. He bit his tongue and gritted his teeth and hoped that maybe he would faint before the pain got too bad. The only sound he could hear at first, other than the loud slapping of the leather against his skin, was the heavy breathing of Fat Gabe exerting himself as he had never done before, almost as if he’d found a woman who was his match in bed and needed every bit of breath and thrust he could give her. And then Nail heard a man retching and heaving up his supper. And then another. Nail’s own double-supper had risen in his craw and was threatening to choke him. Better to drown in his own vomit than be beaten to death. But he held it down, as he held back his screams that were begging him to let them beg.
He was not counting the blows. It was somewhere past thirty, but he wasn’t counting. He was thinking how sad it was that Viridis would never see that last letter he wrote to her. No chance the warden would let her have it.
Fat Gabe seemed to be getting a bit frustrated. “Goddamn you, Chism, if you die, it’s gonna be me who does it, not Ole Sparky.” Nail made no response. There was a longer interval before the next blow, and when it fell Nail knew why: Fat Gabe must have hauled off and reared back as far as he could with that strap before giving it all he had. And all he had was not enough to bring a scream out of Nail, only a groan. And Fat Gabe cursed the trusty: “Nigger, goddamn you, squeeze some of that salt in there!”
Suddenly Nail felt someone tearing at his chest. He opened his eyes to see Timbo Red, who said, “Let me have that knife!” and grabbed the string inside Nail’s shirt and pulled it out, and tore the knife off it, tearing off too the gent’s tree charm, which flew out and landed on the floor not far from the wad of Viridis’ letter.
“No!” Nail hollered at Timbo Red, but before anyone could lay a hand on the kid he had stuck the knife into Fat Gabe’s belly and pulled upward with all his might, tearing right up through the middle of his guts. Fat Gabe screamed and dropped the strap and clutched himself in the middle, and Timbo Red slashed the knife across Fat Gabe’s throat, from ear to ear. Short Leg had his gun out, but before he could fire it, Timbo Red had plunged the knife into Fat Gabe’s chest.
The trusties holding Nail had let go of him, and he too was up and watching as Short Leg, instead of shooting Timbo Red, decided to cock him over the head with the butt of his gun, and knocked the boy unconscious to the floor, right beside the wad and the tree charm. Nail sprang down beside him, and, while making sure the boy was okay, or at least pretending to care for him, he palmed the wad and the tree charm. A moment later, while everyone was watching Fat Gabe roll and toss and buck, Nail concealed his treasures by thrusting his hand down into his pants and tucking the wad up under the space behind his testicles and then hiding the tree charm in his anus.
In the confusion that followed, nobody paid much attention to Nail for several minutes. All of the trusties were there, including the armed ones. All of the half-trusties, or do-pops, came running, and everybody crowded into a circle about Fat Gabe, who was flopping and coughing up blood, his guts spilled onto the floor. Short Leg was waving his pistol as if somebody else might try to do something, and Timbo Red lay sprawled on his back, his eyes closed but almost a trace of a smile on his mouth. Fat Gabe, with his last bit of strength, pulled the knife blade out of his breast and held it as if to plunge it into Timbo Red. At that instant Warden Burdell came running in and yelled, “Christ, Gabe, what in hell is a-gorn on here?”
Fat Gabe’s eyes clouded over, and he echoed one of the words as if he were already on his way there: “Hell.” Then he collapsed and was dead.
Down in the death hole later that night, Nail lay on his side in the old, familiar, mouldy cot that had been his bed so many months in the autumn. It was almost good to be back. He was careful how he lay, because of the wounds in his buttocks, which still bled. It was absolutely dark, and he would have to wait until morning before attempting to read Viridis’ letter, which was still in a wad tucked snugly into his groin behind his testicles. For now, he was watching again and again that scene in the mess hall, particularly those precious seconds when he had failed to prevent Timbo Red from taking his knife and killing Fat Gabe with it. If only he had acted quicker. The boy should have known that Fat Gabe wasn’t killing Nail, that Nail would survive it, that it wasn’t worth risking his own life to kill Fat Gabe. The boy had practically committed suicide. There was no way now they would ever let him go. If they didn’t electrocute him, they’d keep him in The Walls for the rest of his life or, worse, send him off to Tucker Farm, where the hardcases would rape him to death. Nail was tremendously moved and beholden that Timbo Red would have done something like that for him, would have liked him so much that he would act
impulsively to protect or save him, but he was sorrowful beyond all imagining that it had actually happened, and there was no taking it back. The sheriff of Pulaski County had come out to The Walls to arrest Timbo Red and take him off to the county jail, because that’s the way the law worked, and the sheriff and some other men had taken Nail into Warden Burdell’s office and questioned him for an hour, trying to find out if Timbo Red was Nail’s “punk” and if the boy might have done it because he was in love with Nail. Finally Nail had lost his temper and demanded to know why that sheriff had never come out and arrested Fat Gabe for all the murders he’d committed on the inmates. That question had shut up the whole room for a long moment, and then Short Leg had taken Nail down here to his old home in the death hole. Before the heavy iron door clanged shut on him, Short Leg had remarked, “I’m just afraid that whoever the boss gets to replace ole Fat Gabe is going to be a meaner feller than he ever was.” Nail had thought about that for a while, trying to determine if it meant that Short Leg had approved or disapproved of Fat Gabe’s ways.
Before bringing him down to the death hole, Short Leg had let him pick up his stuff: his two books, the Bible and Dr. Hood, and his harmonica, which he hadn’t played since that one time around Christmas. Now he raised it to his mouth, cupped his hands around it, and let his breath escape slowly onto the holes and reeds, and then he made one hand tremble to shiver the sound. The hand trembled pretty well all by itself without his willing it. He was still shook up. He drew in his breath slowly, changing the notes of the sound, making them more mournful, and he discovered he was playing a very slow and elegiac version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Mine. Eyes. Have. Seen. The. Glory. Of. The. Coming. Of. The. Lord! The confines of the dank cell gave a special resonance to the haunting voice of the Hohner, so that the hymn was not one of praise but of loneliness, sadness, yearning. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored! The measured cadence of the poignant notes was molded by his hands, his lungs, and his lips into an expression of nostalgia and regret. He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword! Nail made love to the instrument the way he’d sometimes had fancies of kissing Viridis. His! Truth! Is! Marching! ON! He stopped and took his lips away from the harmonica and said aloud to himself, “On?” and then he asked also, “Truth?” and he just lay there in dazed thought for a long time before he could again raise the instrument to his mouth. Then he played a few old ballads. He played a couple of his favorite love songs, “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Down in the Valley,” the latter filled with the sound of the wind blowing through the valley, the loneliness of jail, the hope of knowing and seeing love. And then, to test the harmonica’s range of perky and jolly tunes, he played “The Old Chisholm Trail.” That was about an old cattle-driving road running from Kansas to South Texas, which, his daddy had told him, had been named for a kinsman, Jesse Chisholm, who didn’t know how to spell his last name. It runs on through twenty-three verses, with the chorus of Come-a-ti-yi-yippy after each one, but twenty repetitions was all he could tolerate before he grew very sleepy and quit.
“Dat sho am sweet,” a voice said, and Nail realized that the other death cell was occupied. They introduced themselves. His companion was Percy James, called Fleas, or Fleece, Nail would never be sure which. Fleas had carved up his wife with a razor while drunk at Christmas, believing she had been unfaithful to him. He was scheduled to sit on Old Sparky in just a few more days, he wasn’t sure whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday. He wasn’t too scared; an uncle of his had also had an appointment with Old Sparky, and, oddly enough, for the same offense. Nail and Fleas got acquainted until both of them grew sleepy.
Before falling asleep, Nail focused his mind away from the gashes on his buttocks to a spot nearer the front, that fleshy little mound where the skin of his scrotum joined his crotch, wherein the paper wad was nestled, which, both then and moments later in sleep, he imagined was the gentle thumb of Viridis.
The only light the death cells ever got was a wedge of early-morning sun that hit a small basement window and bathed the interior of the cells for an hour or so in a glow that in autumn and winter had seemed cold and menacing but now, in spring, was warm and promising, and lit the floor as well as the wall. Nail sat in that light and ate all of the hunk of rock-hard cornbread they gave him for breakfast. And drank his tin cup of water. He remembered his neighbor and called out, “Good mornin to ye, Mr. James.” There came in reply a chuckle, followed by: “Moanin to you, Nails. Aint no wat man eber call me mistah befo.”
Then Nail reached down to where the thumb still touched, and took out and gently unfolded the wad. He unfolded it once, twice, thrice, a dozen times: it was a sheet of ordinary white writing-paper, now turned grayish by the tiny pencil markings written in a fine hand with a fine point all over it, on both sides. He had to hold the paper very close to tell one line from another, and he had to squint to tell one word from another and he had to reread to tell one letter from another. There were no margins. To save space, she had omitted the date and the greeting and the closing and their names, but these were not necessary.
This must be a poor substitute for at least fifty pages I have written you since my last letter. Nice Mr. Cobb says that he will try to get this to you if I am able to abbreviate it to only one page, and I must ask myself which of those thousands of words that I wrote at more leisure I need most to say here. I feel like writing in quick, three-word sentences: “All is well. Please be happy. You will live. Don’t give up. Gardez la foi. We shall prevail. Truth will out. Justice will triumph. I love you.” There, but don’t you see how I can’t say that in only three words? Yet I can’t say it in one page either. Please believe I tried several times to visit you, but each time I was told that you were being punished for stealing food and were not allowed to have visitors. The last time I made an attempt, the guard, Gabriel McChristian, said he would let me see you if I would “step out” with him, which, I gathered, meant meeting him somewhere outside The Walls for some illicit purpose. I considered exposing his despicable bribe to the authorities, but these days I have very little faith in any authorities, as you can imagine, after my experience with the governor, which, I am the first to admit, I bungled by stupidly permitting myself to become irritated and indignant with “His Excellency.” But he is such a mean-spirited, small-minded little politician, probably the worst governor that Arkansas has ever had. Your dear friend and mine, young Latha Bourne, went to great trouble to collect the signatures of nearly 2,000 Newton County women to add to my petition of registered voting males, with a wonderful letter (she sent me a copy) in which she beseeched His Excellency for clemency and reminded him, “None of us females can vote, Governor, but we can sure influence the men who do.” As far as I know, Gov. Hays didn’t read her letter or give her petition any more of his precious attention than he gave mine. But if he and the people of Arkansas are blind and deaf to the hideous injustice of your wrongful conviction and punishment, perhaps Americans in general will not be. I am trying very hard to find a publisher for one or more of several articles I’ve written about the case. So far, I’ve placed one in the Houston Chronicle and one in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which isn’t much of an accomplishment, but at least it means that there are some editors who are interested in you, which is more than can be said, unfortunately, for the editors of Little Rock, including my former boss, Mr. Thomas Fletcher, to whom, I’m both sorry and happy to say, I’ve submitted my resignation. I am very hopeful that Associated Press, a national news service, will accept the best of my articles so that it will appear all over the country. Now, if you are interested in Dorinda, the pitiful origin of this whole mess, she is reasonably happy living here at my father’s house and attempting to attend Fort Steele Elementary School, where, I am told, she is having problems with reading and comprehension as well as “ability to get along with others,” but is making progress. She sends you her best wishes, her continuing (that is, lifelong) regrets, and her “bedtime p
rayers.” Sometimes I feel inclined to prayer myself. You are right, I don’t know you and I never asked you where you stand in regard to a Supreme Being, but I learned enough about you on my trip to Stay More to have the impression that you are not exactly a praying man yourself. If there is a God, He (or She) would at least have allowed Governor Hays to listen to Dorinda’s story, but he (and He) would not. I don’t believe in Governor Hays, either. I believe in you, Nail. I believe that men as good and as brave and as strong and as passionate as yourself are the highest manifestation of life on this earth…next to, of course, trees. If we were trees, if we were all rooted, and still, and swaying gently in the spring breeze, would we be happy? Perhaps, but we could still be cut down. Nobody is going to cut you down, my dearest. Not as long as I am still standing.
“Nails, mah fren, does I heah yo weepin? Do de sadnesses got you too? It aint no hep to cry. We got to be brabe, man. We got to face de music. You dry yo eyes now, heah me?”
Nail was not aware that he had made a sound, but he saw that a drop of water had fallen on Viridis’ letter, and it wasn’t sweat. He was almost glad that the letter he’d written for Cobb to smuggle out to her, that was probably right now on the warden’s desk, would never reach her, because it was such paltry, numb, ignorant nonsense compared with her letter. The only thing he’d said that came anywhere near equaling the beauty of her letter was when he almost came as close as she had to coming right out and saying “I love you.” How had he put it, or sneaked around not coming right out and putting it? Yes: he had written, “And I and the trees will love you for it for ever more,” which wasn’t the same as saying “I love you” or even saying “Me and the trees too love you” but just saying “We will” as if it hadn’t happened already but was likely to happen if we just all got a chance to last forevermore. Thinking of trees, he remembered the tree charm and remembered where he had hidden it, and he fished it out and cleaned it off and hid it inside Dr. Hood. To take advantage of the morning light, he read for a while in Dr. Hood, which was written as if a real medical doctor were having a series of informal but educational chats with one of his patients. Nail received advice on what to do while his wife was delivering the baby. He happened to read, “In the event of prolonged labor, the ingestion of a small quantity of mustard oil will increase peristaltic movements of the stomach and possibly advance the contractions of the womb.” Nail wondered who was supposed to drink the mustard oil, himself or his wife? Probably her. He flipped over to the section on Pharmacopoeia and read: “Oil of mustard—an ester of isothio-cyanic acid useful as a rubefacient, counterirritant, emetic, and to disguise one’s scent from bloodhounds while escaping from the penitentiary.” Nail gave his head a brisk shake and reread the definition and found the last part of it missing on the second reading, and told himself that he was beginning to go stir crazy…if he had not already been for quite some time now. It scarcely mattered that Viridis would never read his request for mustard oil; he couldn’t use it now if he had a gallon of it. He would stay in this hole until…but, goddammit, it did matter that she would never read his request not to attend his execution. Somehow he had to get word to her that he did not want her to do that.
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