December 22, 1914
Dear Mr. Chism,
They haven’t let you see any of my previous letters, have they? I asked your attorney, Mr. T. Farrell Cobb, if it might be that the “authorities” are not allowing you to receive your mail. He said that it is a common practice for the warden and his assistants to open and read letters to check for contraband, inflammatory statements, scurrility, or information damaging to the morals and well-being of inmates. None of my previous letters to you contained any of these things.
Shortly after I last saw you, I attempted to visit you at the penitentiary, but I was told that you are permitted to have only one visit per month, and that you had already had your December visit, so I will have to wait until January. I went straight home (I live here in Little Rock) and wrote to you.
Have you, I asked myself, chosen not to reply to my letters? That is possible, and you certainly have no obligation to respond. I did not ask you anything that required an answer, with the exception of my request for the whereabouts of your hometown, Staymore. I have, without any vanity, reread the first drafts of my letters to you several times, in order to discover what they might have contained that could have accounted for your silence. I have not been able to determine anything possibly untoward or disagreeable in them. Thus, I like to think, and I do not like to think: they wouldn’t let you have my letters.
So I am resorting to this expedient of asking Mr. Cobb to “smuggle” this letter to you. He said that he would. He seems a kind and well-meaning person, and I say this not to flatter him in case he is reading it too (Mr. Cobb, if you are reading it, please honor our agreement and deliver it as promised) but because there are so few decent, humane, compassionate men in this world. You are one yourself, Nail Chism, and you are rare, and that is the reason I have chosen to burden you with my attentions and devotion. If I have little else in the way of qualifications for existence, I have the ability—some would call it talent—to draw and paint the human likeness, and in the process to “read” the…whatever you wish to call it: soul, psyche, spirit, essence, of the subject, sitter, victim, poser, person. I am not bragging, and I do not boast that the finished work of art conveys this inner character of the person (or even that it is a “work of art,” whatever that is), but I am sure of my knack for seeing it, and when I saw your spirit in those terrible moments that were presumed to be your last, there in that awful room with that hideous chair, I knew you, and I understood you, and I intuited you, and I appreciated you in a way that I have not been allowed to feel toward another human being.
Yes, I know you may be telling yourself: here is one more of those many lonely ladies who like to cultivate convicts, and who visit or correspond with prisoners, especially those condemned to die, and play upon the men’s desperate need for sympathy in order to gratify their own wish for an imaginative relationship safe from entanglement, safe from physical contact, and above all safe from permanence. Some of these women see themselves as substitute mothers or nurses or sisters, and they think they are purely altruistic and they glory in their charity, while other women—widows, spinsters, the jilted and the frustrated—who have had unpleasant experiences with men who were free to touch them and free to hurt them, are craving a liaison which now permits them to have the upper hand, to be free to say no, free to manage and schedule every aspect of the association, and free to quit at any moment.
Please believe that I have never before written to a prisoner…or, for that matter, written a letter as long as this one to anybody. And please believe that my only interest in you is a deep certainty of your innocence, and a consuming desire to prove it.
When I first knew you, I was disposed to hate you. Do you remember our first meeting? We were both members of the “audience” at an execution. Before I was permitted to enter that room, I was lectured by Mr. Harris Burdell, the warden, who only with great reluctance had acceded to the request of my employer, Mr. Thomas Fletcher, managing editor of the Arkansas Gazette, that I be allowed to make a drawing of the condemned man, a young Negro. Mr. Burdell warned me that I would be sitting next to you, and he told me the crimes of which you had been accused and convicted and for which you had been sentenced to die. I suppose that Mr. Burdell was simply trying to frighten me, having failed to dissuade me from experiencing the horrors of the execution itself. But I was not afraid of you, because I despised you so intensely. The Gazette had carried a story of your original trial, and although the details had struck me as a ludicrous miscarriage of rustic backwoods justice, there was no mistaking the nature of the offense itself: a girl of only thirteen brutally abused and raped. Mr. Burdell personally checked my hair to make sure that I was not wearing a long hatpin with which I might stab your heart or put out your eyes. But I had not even seen you! When you were led into the room and given your seat beside me, I steeled myself to behold in your eyes the corruption and savagery which would have permitted you to commit such an abomination, and thus I was greatly surprised to detect such gentleness, such goodness, and such compassion as would preclude your hurting anyone, let alone a thirteen-year-old girl.
And you remember, I’m sure, how you inveighed against that butcher of an executioner, Mr. Irvin Bobo, when the first charge of electricity failed to remove the poor Negro from this world. You called upon God to damn Mr. Bobo, and although I had the feeling that you were spontaneously invoking God without any real belief in Him, you conveyed exactly the words that I would have spoken myself if I had not temporarily closed myself off from all feeling.
Often at night when I am trying to fall asleep I hear your voice shouting those words. And when you yourself sat down in the chair and the warden lifted his hand and Mr. Bobo placed his hand upon the switch, I said aloud, “Goddamn you, Bobo, turn up the juice and leave it on!”
But you were spared! Although you weren’t pardoned or your sentence commuted, you were not murdered. I have learned as much as I can about the reprieve: I’ve talked to Mr. Cobb (hello again, Farrell!), I’ve talked to Judge J.V. Bourland and Judge Jesse Hart; I’ve even had a short audience with His Excellency George W. Hays Himself (although the governor, I regret to say, doesn’t even seem to know who you are), and I know that you are still very much in peril of having another date set for the electrocution. I intend to do whatever I can to prevent this.
I have received permission from my employer, Thomas Fletcher (who is another of the rare breed of gentle and kind men), to investigate the case completely. As I told you, I’m not one of the Gazette’s regular reporters, only a member of the layout and design department, where I am usually found trying to enliven the margins of inner pages with my little sketches. But I have written for the Gazette in the past—the longest thing I ever wrote, before this letter, was an article, “An Arkansawyer in Calcutta,” a place where I saw some of this world’s most unkind and uncompassionate men. Mr. Fletcher has promised to free me from my usual duties long enough to permit me to finish my investigation.
Only these severe winter storms we’ve been having have prevented me from attempting to find and to visit Staymore. But when we get a thaw in January, I’m going to locate it…even if I can only reach it on horseback! (I should have said I have two talents: the other one is that I am a “cowgirl.”)
I have three requests, if you will be so kind:
1. Where is Staymore? I have a map showing Newton County but cannot locate your town. Is it north of Jasper? What kind of roads lead to it?
2. What people should I talk to? Can you give me the names of any witnesses who can account for your whereabouts at the time of the crime? Also, any character witnesses. Who was your best friend?
3. Before I go, is there anything I can do for you? Is there anything you need? Will they allow me to send you a basket of fruit and some cookies? May I smuggle you a book or two? Do you enjoy reading? Any favorite authors? Are you well clothed? Do you need any personal articles? Please do not hesitate to respond to these requests, and do not think of the expense. Meanwhile please
accept the enclosed trifle as a token, a talisman, a keepsake, a substitute for a real Yuletide. Merry Christmas, and many more.
Sincerely,
Viridis Monday
Nail Chism read this a second time before he opened his present. In due course he would come to know it by heart. He would unfold it and read it when no one else was looking (and no one else ever was), again and again, until its creases broke and it began to turn dirty and frayed. But for now he read it only twice, and then he picked open the tiny wad of tissue paper.
Inside was a gent’s charm, the kind of chain ornament you hook on one end of your watch chain, if you have a watch, but Nail didn’t. It was made of gold and must have cost her several dollars. But she must have had it special-made by some jeweler, because it didn’t look like a store-boughten gent’s charm. It was in the shape of a tree. Not a Christmas pine or a cedar, nor a hardwood you’d be able to recognize, but just a tree tree, no mistake. Nail turned it over. She’d had the trunk on the backside of the tree engraved in tiny letters: To N.C. from V.M. XMAS 14.
Even if he’d had a watch, and a watchpocket to put it in, he wouldn’t have worn this on a chain for all the world to see. Instead, he attached it to the string around his neck that held his dagger, and wore them both hidden inside his shirt and jacket. It was the nicest Christmas present he’d ever gotten. He could hear that little tree singing to him.
And on Christmas afternoon the Salvation Army was permitted to come into the building and serve a soup that actually had some chicken in it, and with real biscuit besides. The men were required to sit through a long sermon before they were allowed to drink the soup, which was cold by then, but Nail was able to make it to the mess hall on his own legs, for the first time in weeks, and to drink his soup.
Afterward, as the men were waiting to leave the mess hall, required to keep lockstepping in place until the line could move again, Nail discovered that he was lifting and setting his feet right beside the standing figure of Mr. Harris Burdell, who was observing the Christmas festivities.
“Warden Burdell, sir,” Nail managed to say, although his words were nearly drowned by the men tramping the floor with their feet. “I sure do ’preciate you lettin us men have a good Christmas dinner like this. I know I don’t deserve it, and I know I don’t deserve nothin on account of my misbehavior. But I jist want to thank you, sir. It is real good of you. And Merry Christmas to you, Mr. Burdell.”
“Same to you, Chism,” Burdell said, without smiling but without any rancor or malice in his voice.
“Sir, my brother told me that our ole mother is a-dyin, and he ast me could I jist send her a few last words. Sir, would there be any way I could git me some writin-paper and a pencil? Sir, I’d do jist anything if I could have me somethin to write a letter to my dyin mother.”
The line was beginning to move. Nail looked pleadingly over his shoulder at Mr. Burdell, who did not seem to have heard him. But a few days later one of the blacks who waited on the table at dinner wordlessly placed beside Nail’s plate a lead pencil and a penny tablet of lined paper, which, Nail counted, contained twenty sheets. He used a sheet dutifully to write a letter for Mr. Burdell to see, censor, and mail:
Dear Momma,
Waymon told me about you. I hope you are better. You know we are going to meet again in Heaven, where they are saving a special place for you. I’m sorry you did not get to see me again. Waymon said you were not able to come with him to Little Rock, and I understand. You must try to take care of your self better. I wish there was something I could say to make you feel better but all I can say is I love you and do not worry about me. What happens to me is in the hands of some one far better than me. And I aim to see you, all bye and bye, and you can count on it. Please be happy.
Your son with love for ever,
Nail
His mother might puzzle just a little over that—if she got it—but he knew that Waymon would help her understand any of it that she couldn’t, and he would explain the rest of it to her when he saw her, not in Heaven, which was a strange land to him, but in Stay More, one of these days.
Then he used several sheets of the penny tablet to write the following, which he did not give to Mr. Burdell to see, censor, and keep from mailing.
December 29–31, 1914
Dear Miss Monday,
How can I hope to answer? You write like the morning breeze soughing through the cedars, like a hive full of honey, like sun climb on the ridge, you write easy as breathing, like an angel’s sigh, and I am dumb.
How can I hope to thank you? You give me more than a gift, far more than this tiny tree trophy I’m wearing now next to my lungs, far more than any fruit basket or book you want to bring me, even far more than the many hours you’ve done already spent talking to folks on my behalf. You give me hope, real hope, but that is not the greatest gift. You give me your “attentions and devotion,” although you call them a burden and they aren’t, but they are not the greatest gift either. You give me words nice as music singing where my merit hides, but they are not the gift which gladdens me greatestly.
The gift which greatestly humbles me beyond any speaking of thanks is that this world don’t have very many women in it who are able to like themself enough so that they have so much left over they can give some to a man, and you are one of those, you give me some of that self-respect or self-liking that you have left over after you get done helping yourself to it.
I would beg you please don’t misunderstand if I did not think you know what I mean without any insult or accusing you of pride or airs or vanity, which I don’t mean at all. You are not just a uncommon kind woman, Viridis Monday, but a woman more uncommon than that: a smart kind woman. Not a woman who is kind because she is too dumb to know any better and goes around trusting everbody and being sweet and stupid and benevolent because there’s not a thought in her head to keep her from thinking she ought to trust and be sweet. No, you have thought it all over. You have even thought about how much of that trust and sweetness you ought to spend on yourself before you go throwing it around to others less deserving.
And then you discovered you had enough to spare and you shared it with me. I can accept it from you with gladness and gratefulness because I know you can afford to spend it, which maybe you can’t afford to do on a basket of fruit or a book, not to mention this solid gold gent’s charm you gave me. You won’t misunderstand this either: that I sure do appreciate the gent’s charm, and I do know exactly why it’s a tree, and why you asked them to make it like that, and I will still be wearing it to my grave or old age, whichever comes first, but it bothers me some that it cost you money that maybe you couldn’t afford, the way you can afford to let me have some of that leftover self-respect.
You do not know me. I believe that you are blessed with some kind of ability to look a person in the eye before doing their picture and tell whether that person is good, bad, or not worth shooting. You make better pictures than I ever even drempt was possible to draw. I don’t know you either but I know that you must have seen all kinds of eyes. Clear, squinty, keen, beady, bright, dim, smiling, pink, crossed, hawk, walled, dull, catty, goggled, popped, bug, glared, blinked, squinched, cataracted. Enough of all kinds to be able to look in their eye and tell what demons are afollowing them or what angels are aleading them.
But you don’t know me or any of my life except what they said I done to that girl, which you know I didn’t do. You don’t even know how the way that I was raised and what I come to want to do with my life was such that I couldn’t never even have thought about doing it to her. You don’t know the hills of Stay More, and you don’t know the Ingledews, Duckworths, Bournes, Whitters, Plowrights, Coes, Bullens, Murrisons, Dinsmores, Kimbers, and Swains, and only one Chism, me, and not much of me. Even if you did know ever last one of them, you’d just have the makings of a start on knowing somebody like Sull Jerram, who is waiting at the end of your investigation like a toad sitting on a rock all day long waiting for a butterfly to get within
shot of his tongue.
But Sull Jerram is not real Stay More folks, though he was born there. The closest Judge Jerram ever come to being Stay More folks was somehow persuading my nice but not very bright sister Irene into marrying him. She’s my half sister, actually. But I am not even going to start in trying to tell you about all these people. If you want to begin from scratch and try to get to know Stay More, in the dead of winter, or at any time, you would probably enjoy it, even if you never found a shred of proof that I didn’t rape Dorinda Whitter.
She’s not the one you should start with. She’s the so-called victim, and many a time I have told myself that she couldn’t be just playing off that way, that somebody actually must have done it to her. And I think maybe whoever done it to her done it just so the law would believe her when she got up and said what he told her to say.
There is another girl you ought to talk to first, if you are really of a mind to visit Stay More. Her name is Latha Bourne, and she is about the same age as Dorinda, and I reckon you could say they was best friends at one time, maybe still. But she is another one of them females who like yourself is able to be honest enough with herself to have some left over to be honest and kind and smart with other people. If you want to look into a pair of eyes, start with hers.
The Choiring Of The Trees Page 14