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 there. 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.
His bedclothes were often damp with blood and pus, and he couldn’t understand why, because his wounds seemed to have scabbed over enough not to be bleeding. Eventually he was able to determine that the blood and pus were coming from his bedmate, who was now Stardust, and he didn’t know if it was because they were flogging Stardust too; he tried not to listen when they were flogging somebody and the poor devil was screaming his head off. Stardust was not one to talk, anyway. But then Stardust began noticeably to take leave of his senses, as if he had not already left them long a
go: he could be observed standing beside the bunk, moving his hands in the air as if building imaginary trees, root to bough, twig to trunk. That’s all he did, when he was not crooning. He would stand for hours making trees until Fat Gabe would come and cut him down and dump him in beside Nail, where he would bleed and ooze. Finally Stardust and his few belongings were gathered up and taken away to the state hospital for the insane…which, I have good reason to know, was not a better place.
As soon as Stardust’s spot was empty, they filled it with a new man, or a kid, rather, a boy maybe fifteen, sixteen at the most, whose hair reminded Nail of that woman’s, what was her nice lady name who came and what was it she pretty girl had hair that same reddish sort of, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, yes her name was Monday, that lady, this boy his hair is like hers, red, he could pass for her kid brother only she was too nice a lady to have a kid brother to get hisself in trouble and thrown in the pen. This boy had stolen a horse. Nail listened, which was all he did these days and nights, when he wasn’t running off to those sheep-cluttered hills in Stay More. The boy’s name was Ernest something, but they were calling him Timbo Red because he came from Timbo, Arkansas, up in the hills of Stone County. Timbo Red talked more or less the same way that folks up home talked. Most of these fellers in here sounded like east Arkansas or downstate somewheres or probably outlanders from some other state, but Timbo Red sounded nearly just like Nail’s kid brother Luther, and Nail took an interest in what he was doing and saying, and he took a special interest that first night when Thirteen tried to seduce the kid. Nail still couldn’t talk very strong, but he had enough strength to raise himself up and say to Timbo Red, “Boy, don’t ye let this here feller show ye his jemmison, or you’ll hate it.”
Thirteen turned on Nail. “My what?” he said.
“Keep yore pecker in yore pants, Thirteen,” Nail said.
“Shit, mine is better than yours,” Thirteen snarled. “You want to git him to yourself? I claimed him first. He’s good ripe cherry punk, and I got him, and I aint gon let no man mess with my bride.” He put his full palm over Nail’s face and pushed down hard and mashed Nail’s head down into the bunk. Then he resumed his seduction of Timbo Red, telling the kid that it wouldn’t hurt a bit, not anywhere like the way the kid would get hurt if he didn’t get his sweet ass out of those pants real damn fast.
Nail listened. He tried to tell if the kid was scared or eager or what. Some boys liked that kind of thing; there was a big old boy several bunks over who couldn’t seem to get enough of it and would drop his pants for any feller who asked, and sometimes even went around asking them. Nail listened and thought he could hear Timbo Red asking to be let alone. The way Nail’s mind ran away from him these days and wound up in that Stay More meadow faster than he could think, his mind was now beginning to believe that Timbo Red was Miss Friday or Miss Monday herself, asking old Thirteen to leave her be. Nail couldn’t just lie here and let that nice lady be took against her wishes, or even took with her wishes by somebody foul like Thirteen. Now she seemed to be squealing. It wasn’t a very happy sort of squeal. Nail’s fingers were absently fooling with the collar of his jacket, and then slipping inside the jacket and fooling with the string around his neck. And then his fingers touched that steel. It was still there; he had almost forgotten about it in the what? weeks or days or months or whatever time had passed since he had intended to use it. He still had to remember not to roll over onto his stomach at night, or, if he did, to do it carefully so the razor-sharp dagger didn’t cut his chest.
He took a deep breath and somehow got his legs up and under him so he could crouch and use what energy he had left to reach over and fall against Thirteen and pin him down and hold the dagger up to his eyes so he could get a good look at it, and then Nail said to him, “Thirteen, d’ye want to try out the edge of this and see how sharp it is? Or will you jist take my word for it?—it’ll leave a gash from one of your ears to th’other’un in jist one swipe.”
Thirteen scrambled away from the kid and away from Nail. “Where’d you git that shiv?” Thirteen asked.
“Been savin it fer ye,” Nail said. “And I’ll use it on ye if you touch her again.”
“‘Her’?” Thirteen said. “You want ‘her’ for yourself, huh?”
“Him,” Nail said, flustered. “He ast ye to leave him alone. I’m askin ye to leave him alone. Or die. You choose.”
“Them guards catch you with that pigsticker, they gon make you die,” Thirteen grumbled, but he didn’t bother the kid for the rest of that night, and maybe not for the next few nights either, Nail couldn’t tell how many nights went by, one after the other, without the kid being bothered.
One night Timbo Red just tapped Nail on the shoulder and said, “I thank ye, mister.”
Timbo Red did not lose his virginity before Christmas, but he got the dose of the strap that Fat Gabe measured out to let anybody new know who was boss. Nail, listening, was not able to determine that it had been provoked. Probably not. Timbo Red seemed to be trying his best to get along with people; his lockstep was always right in line, and he tried to be well behaved and inconspicuous. Somewhere he had found a piece of white chalk, the same kind you write on blackboards with, and he would sit on the concrete floor drawing pictures on it. He could draw pretty fair. More than pretty fair, really. He could make an eagle that looked like an eagle and a black walnut tree that looked like a black walnut. The way he would sit and draw also reminded Nail of Miss Monday. Timbo Red’s drawings got walked on, but he didn’t care, and somebody always pissed on the drawings during the night and erased them that way, but Timbo Red would just start a fresh one the next morning. If Timbo Red ever did anything that might have provoked Fat Gabe, it must have had something to do with the way he was arting up the floor.
But more than likely, Fat Gabe just felt it was time to let the kid know what the strap felt like. Coming from a dirt farm in Stone County, Timbo Red probably knew the feel of harness leather on his hide the same way that Nail did, and he took the first ten lashes without even flinching. Fat Gabe was halfway through the second ten, and panting like a horse, before Timbo Red gave any sign that he even noticed what was happening to his behind. But along about the fourteenth lick the boy started to weaken. He whimpered. At the nineteenth lick he was broken and sobbing. Fat Gabe didn’t stop at twenty. Usually, twenty swings of the strap was all that Fat Gabe could manage at one time, but he was mad because the boy had tried to hold out on him like that, and he kept going. The boy kept sobbing like a child.
Nail didn’t bring out his dagger, although he was tempted. Instead, he brought out his harmonica. He had never played it before where anybody could hear him. He had played it all the time when he was alone in the death hole, but not once since then, and he missed it. Now he wasn’t even sure he could get the tune right, but from the first note he blew into it, he knew he could do a fair job. He played “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” He played it loud, he played it lively, he played if with his tongue and lungs and heart. He played it loud enough to drown out Timbo Red’s crying. He played it louder than the crack of Fat Gabe’s strap.
Everyone listened. A few men tried to hum in tune. From several bunks away a good tenor voice picked up at: “…above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by…”
“Pack it up, Chism!” Fat Gabe hollered, and he stopped beating Timbo Red and started swinging at Nail, who scooted over to the far side of the bunk so Fat Gabe couldn’t reach him without going around. Nail finished the carol and started playing “Deck the Halls.”
One by one or in groups of several, the men of the hall joined in singing the words, and the blacks joined the chorus with: “Deck de haws wif baws ob holly!” One man at the end of the barracks climbed to an upper bunk and stood up and began to conduct the choir, waving his arms as if he’d once been a high-school band director. Everyone was singing.
Fat Gabe stopped beating on Timbo Red and shyly tried to sing, “Fa la la? La la? La la LAH LAH!”
Nail Chism played “Good King Wenceslaus.” He played “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” The three hundred voices singing, or trying to, drifted beyond the wall and reached the warden’s house, the big two-story Victorian on the downslope to the highway. When the warden arrived at the barracks, Nail was playing “Silent Night,” which was the last one that he knew. Mr. Burdell arrived in time to contribute “Sleep in heavenly peace,” twice.
Then he smiled. No one had seen Mr. Burdell smile before. He said, “Well, gentlemen, it looks like you’re already in the spirit of the season.” He took from his pocket a letter, which he unfolded. “This year Governor Hays has seen fit to grant Christmas pardons to a total of thirty men. As follows.” One by one the warden read the names, pausing after each to allow time for the men to whoop and holler and slap backs and carry on. Of course the two hundred and seventy men who were not pardoned were feeling low, and this included Nail, although he hadn’t expected to hear his name on the list.
But his Christmas did not go unnoticed. Farrell Cobb came to visit, and stood beside Nail’s bunk for a while, and gave him a present. “The missus fixed it,” Cobb explained. “Hope you like fruitcake, although it’s such a tiny one.” Nail sampled a few bites, his first ever. Before the lawyer left, saying he hoped to bring good news from the state Supreme Court when he came again in January, he elaborately looked all around them to see if anybody was watching. Nobody was. Nobody cared what Cobb was doing there, or who he was speaking to. The nearest black trusties were shooting dice against the wall. “You can read, can’t you?” Cobb asked, and when Nail nodded, the lawyer reached inside his coat and brought out an envelope and handed it to him. The lawyer put his finger to his lips and said “Shhh,” and then he winked and departed.
Nail tried to sit up in his bunk to open the envelope. It contained several sheets of paper and something very small wrapped in tissue. Nail read the signature first and, thrilled, backed up and read each word with deliberate slowness.
The Choiring Of The Trees Page 13