The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

As for character witnesses, any man, woman or child in Stay More who ever knew me or just saw me out yonder in the pasture with my sheep will likely tell you whatever you need to know. But you should be sure and talk to the fellows that sit on Ingledew’s store porch, except this time of year they won’t be out there on the porch, they’ll be inside sitting around his potbelly stove. And Willis Ingledew himself can tell you I was there on that porch that time they said she claimed it was done to her. I’m sorry to have to say, though, that there isn’t one of those folks who could let me call them best friend.

  I’m not too sure just what that is, tell you the honest truth. My brothers are both real good friends but they’re brothers so maybe that don’t count.

  Right now I feel like you are my best friend.

  On the back side of this sheet I’ve drawed a sort of map that ought to help you get from Jasper to Stay More (that is the way it is always spelled, not Staymore all one word the way you did it). All the roads thereabouts are hell on autos. But I have to tell you, Viridis Monday, I can’t imagine a lady riding a horse into Stay More. Nobody there has ever heard tell of a cowgirl and their tongues are sure to wag out of their faces.

  But come to think on it, let them wag. This time of year they don’t have nothing to talk about anyhow. Just give each and ever one of those Stay More folks that smile of yours, which is I swear the nicest smile I ever saw on any creature except one of my late lamented sheep. Tell everbody I said hello, and give them all my love.

  And to you, good lady, there are no words, except:

  Your friend,

  Nail

  P.S. I really can’t use anything myself I don’t already have, but if you’d like to bring something the next time you come or send Mr. Cobb with it, there is a boy here who is a friend of mine and very good at drawing like you and even has hair like yours but he has nothing to draw with excepting a piece of chalk. If you could smuggle one of those drawing pencils like you use and that type of pad. We would appreciate it.

  Then he just had to wait for a chance to get the letter out to her via Farrell Cobb. He did not have an envelope, but he kept the pages folded three times and pressed inside his copy of Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Advisor, where he could get the letter out and slip it to Cobb the next time he showed up.

  January came, a new year, 1915, without any observance or notice. The few men who had old calendars ripped them up, and the fewer men who had new calendars brought them out and began to mark off the days. The flyspeck room always had a waiting list of patients suffering frostbite from being sent off to work at the lumber yard or the brickyard or on the Rock Island railroad. Nail was able to walk around pretty well, although he’d lost forty pounds and wouldn’t have known himself if he’d had a mirror to meet himself in, which he didn’t, but he was not able to be sent out to work, even if it was permitted, which it wasn’t. Convicts under sentence of death, according to law, could not be made to work, or even volunteer to work, and he was still under sentence of death although he wore stripes like the other men (condemned men, by the same law, could not be made to wear stripes since it was assumed they would never escape). He could tell by feel that his hair was growing back in; it was just as well he couldn’t see that it was coming back in irregular patches of white and his usual old brownish blond.

  He didn’t have a calendar, but he was well enough and sane enough to keep count of the days, and to know that two weeks of January went by before he ever got a chance to “mail” his letter in care of his lawyer. Those two weeks were restless ones. The other men weren’t speaking to him. If his harmonica at Christmas had temporarily thawed the chill of their hatred for a child-molester, it was just as temporary as the thaw in Fat Gabe’s cold blood. Nobody spoke to Nail except Timbo Red.

  The boy sensed that Nail was a fellow mountaineer, even without recognizing it in his voice. One morning while marking up the floor with his chalk as Nail watched him, Timbo Red looked up and said, “Do you ’member what a bar looks lak?”

  “Why, shore,” Nail said, a bit surprised that someone had spoken to him.

  “Could ye draw one fer me?”

  Nail laughed. He could see a bear as plain as if one were sitting on the edge of the bunk, but he couldn’t draw a bear, or anything else. “Son, I can just barely draw my name,” he said. “But why don’t ye give it a try, and I’ll tell ye what’s right and what aint.”

  So Timbo Red commenced attempting to draw a bear from memory or imagination, and Nail would point out that the ears were a little off, or the nose was too flat, and the eyes looked a little more gentle than that, et cetera. Soon, between Nail’s talking and Timbo’s drawing, they had themselves a pretty fair bear.

  Nail wanted to tell Timbo Red about Miss Monday. He wanted to tell the boy that he hoped to get him one of those drawing-sticks made of charcoal that real artists use, and something to draw on more permanent than a pissed-on floor. But he didn’t want to count his chickens before they hatched, and he hadn’t even been able to send the request off to the lady.

  Nail and Timbo Red talked about other things. They talked about hunting and fishing, and which was the best gun for a squirrel and the best bait for a bass. Timbo Red had never seen a panther up close, and Nail described one and their habits and how to shoot one if you had to.

  Sometimes, when they weren’t talking about wildlife, Nail would tell the boy some of the old tall tales that he’d heard from the oldtimers: tales of kings and princesses and monsters, tales of trickery and daring and brave escape. Nail had never before been a storyteller, just a listener, and he was a little surprised to discover he had a talent for it. The boy made a rapt audience, especially for the stories about brave escape, and that helped.

  Out of the blue one evening Timbo Red asked him, “Was the gal ye took willin, or didje really have to force her?”

  Nail stared at the boy, not understanding the question for a long moment. Then he simply said, “There wasn’t no gal.”

  Timbo Red, for one, believed him. He got Nail to tell him the history, to tell him about Dorinda Whitter and Judge Sull Jerram and the county sheriff and the moonshine business and all that. When Nail had finished the long story, Timbo Red declared, “I knew a gal lak thet wunst.” Timbo Red talked about this old Stone County gal who was cut from the same bolt of gingham that Rindy was, and who got an innocent man in bad trouble, although he left the country before they could send him to the chair. “What’s thet cheer like?” Timbo Red inquired, and wanted Nail to give him a complete description of Old Sparky. On the floor Timbo Red drew a chalk picture of Old Sparky that was amazing, considering he had never actually seen the chair himself. For some reason that drawing was allowed to remain for several days before it got pissed away.

  One day Nail was telling Timbo Red the story of the king and his daughter Rhonda, who was beheaded by her father because she wouldn’t let him seduce her. The climax of this awful tale was interrupted by the appearance of Farrell Cobb. Nail just looked up from watching the reactions of his listener to his tale and there was the lawyer standing there, unsmiling. Farrell Cobb himself looked like someone who’d just been required to behead his own daughter. He looked like a preacher at a funeral. Nail’s heart took a jump and got caught in his throat.

  “Bad news, huh?” Nail said.

  Cobb nodded. “I regret to say,” he obviously regretted to say, “that the state Supreme Court doesn’t want to hear your appeal.”

  “What do you mean?” Nail asked. “Did they shut the door on ye?”

  “Figuratively, yes. Literally, I was allowed to present my request to be heard. They gave me all of an hour. Most of them listened. Judge Bourland spoke to them also, on your behalf. Judge Hart asked some intelligent questions and seemed genuinely interested in our case, but the others…” Farrell Cobb raised his hands as if trying to lift an impossible weight off his shoulders. “I’m sorry. The general feeling seems to be that unless Circuit Judge Villines recommends commutation of his
original sentence, that sentence must be carried out.”

  “But Villines is in cahoots with those fellers who did it!” Nail protested.

  “Did what?” Cobb asked.

  “Raped the girl and tried to pin it on me!”

  “Why would Judge Villines want to do that?”

  “That’s a long story, and I’m surprised at ye that you haven’t heard it.”

  But, as always, Farrell Cobb was not disposed to hang around for chitchat or complicated stories. He drew a piece of paper out of his pocket and said, “Sign this, please. It’s a shot in the dark, a hundred-to-one chance, but it’s all we can do. Do you understand what a habeas corpus is?” When Nail shook his head, the lawyer explained, “The writ might get you out of here and into a courtroom for a hearing. But as I say, probably not. And if not, your execution has been reset for April 20th.”

  Before Cobb could leave, Nail remembered Dr. Hood and got the book from under the bunk and took out the letter for Miss Monday. He looked around. Nobody was watching or paying any attention except Timbo Red, and he was a friend. “Mr. Cobb, could you deliver this for me?” Nail asked his lawyer. “Or someway get it to her? It’s my answer to what she wrote.”

  Cobb grinned, winked conspiratorially, took the letter, and put it inside his coat. “I feel like Cupid,” he remarked.

  “Look,” Nail said, “if they’re gonna go ahead and electercute me in April, I don’t guess there’s anything she could do to stop them. So tell her that, would ye?”

  “She already knows,” Cobb said. “But I think she’s still determined to save you. How, I don’t know.”

  When Cobb had left, Timbo Red said to Nail, “Now I reckon I know why you carry that blade around yore neck. You aim to use it if they try to kill ye. Just hurtin ye aint enough, but if they try to kill ye, you’ll take a few to Hell with ye.”

  For the rest of January, Nail waited to see if Cobb would come again with more news or another letter from Viridis Monday. He did not. Just as Viridis Monday had reread her earlier letters to Nail to determine why he hadn’t answered them (when in fact he hadn’t received them), Nail began to call up the words he had written to her and wonder if he had said anything that might have offended her or put her off. All he could find in his memory of his letter was that business about his sheep having a better smile than hers. Maybe that insulted her. But maybe she was planning to come see him instead of write to him again. Nail was owed a fifteen-minute trip to the visit room this month, and he kept hoping that Short Leg would come and take him there, but Short Leg did not.

  Most of the men who were not taken out each day to work were transferred to the new prison farm at Tucker downstate, where conditions were supposed to be even worse than here, and there were afternoons when Nail had the barracks practically all to himself, because even Timbo Red was out somewhere working. The only ones besides Nail who didn’t get sent out to work were those too sick or too frostbitten or too injured from floggings to be able to move. Nail wasn’t sick anymore, but they wouldn’t send him out, because of the law.

  He never left the building until, late in the afternoon on January 30th, Short Leg came and got him. Nail’s low spirits soared up, and he walked so briskly that Short Leg had to grab him at one point when he was heading toward the visit room and say, “Not that way, Chism. This way,” and then led him into the power and light building where Old Sparky was. For one terrible moment Nail thought perhaps he’d misunderstood the lawyer and that Farrell Cobb hadn’t said April 20th but January 30th, or maybe it was already April 20th and Nail hadn’t been paying good attention.

  But it was just that he was required to witness again. It was time for Ramsey. Nail was the first witness to sit, and before the others came he had to sit a long time, expecting and hoping that any minute the door would open and in would walk Miss Monday to do her drawing of Ramsey. Nail looked at the window and calculated that sundown was maybe still half an hour off, and maybe Viridis Monday could come and sit beside him and they could talk for a while, and if no one was looking he’d even sneak her a peek at his tree-shaped gent’s charm. He’d thank her again in a way he couldn’t do in writing because he couldn’t express himself that way. He’d thank her most for wanting to go to Stay More and meet folks and try to find someone who could help get him commuted. He’d tell her what had been on his mind these past few days: that when April 20th came around, he’d appreciate it if she would stay at home. He didn’t want her coming to his execution, not even to yell at Bobo.

  He didn’t have to yell at Bobo this time. The other witnesses came, but Viridis Monday wasn’t one of them. Burdell came. Fat Gabe came, bringing Ramsey, who was twisting and screaming at the top of his lungs and begging Jesus to save him. For a minute there Nail couldn’t believe it was Ramsey, who had been so silent and withdrawn. But it was him, changed into a wild lunatic. At one point he broke loose from Fat Gabe and fell down at Mr. Burdell’s feet and wrapped his arms around the warden’s legs and begged and pled and said everything he could think of that might move him, but Mr. Burdell just motioned for Fat Gabe and Short Leg to get him back up and into the chair, and they did. Jimmie Mac tried to say the final prayer, but his words were drowned out by Ramsey trying to get people to believe that if he had just one more chance he’d be the best man the world ever knew since Jesus Himself.

  Bobo seemed to be relieved to shut out that noise; he seemed to be pushing down a lever that would turn off all that screaming and pleading, and he left that lever down. He left it down too long, and the room filled up with the choking fumes of blackened flesh. One of the witnesses fainted and knocked over another one while he was falling. Another witness vomited all over himself and one of the others.

  It was just as well Miss Monday hadn’t been there.

  February came. He imagined the buds were a-swelling. The trees were not going to sing for another month or more, but the buds swole up as if the trees were humming in practice and tune-up. The grimy windows of the barracks seemed to be admitting more sunlight. Timbo Red took to drawing daffodils on the floor, not just stick figures with ball flowers stuck on them but real convincing daffodils that you could almost touch, that looked as if they were bright-yellow although they were black-and-white, that smelled like daffodils although they really smelled like piss.

  The men who had “sweethearts” among the other men, the punks and queers, had a Valentine’s party and exchanged modest gifts or sentiments. A lucky few men got to go to the visit room to see their real female sweethearts.

  The powers of observation of men in prison take one of two directions: either they become oblivious to all but the most glaring sights around them, or they develop an ability to notice the most insignificant and inconspicuous little details. Nail one day noticed that Fat Gabe’s belt had small notches cut along the upper edge, and he counted them, eighteen, and one day after another one of the beaten prisoners had passed away Nail counted again and there were nineteen notches.

  One night in bed Timbo Red whispered into Nail’s ear, “Sometimes I git so pruney and itchy I got a mind to go ahead and let Thirteen have me. Unless you want me. I druther it was you.” Nail could not answer that, or respond, but later in the night, when it was clear the boy was not going to be able to sleep, Nail used his hand to get the boy over the mountain.

  Often Nail asked himself why it was that he hadn’t been returned to the death hole. If another date had been set for his delayed execution, April 20th, and he was once more condemned, then why wasn’t he back in his old cell in the basement of the power and light? He preferred it there. It was dark and solitary and even scary, but he didn’t have to put up with anybody except whoever was in the other cell, like Ramsey or Skip, who had been all right, for a couple of murderers. Sometimes he was tempted to request that Mr. Burdell return him to the death hole. Only two things kept him from it: one was he was genuinely fond of Timbo Red and wanted to keep an eye out for the boy and help him in whatever way he could, even if it meant what he
had done that one night, which wasn’t a queer thing to do but just handy and charitable; and the other reason was that in the death hole he’d never get to go to the visit room.

  Not that he ever got summoned to the visit room. As February drew to its foreshortened close, he consciously prevented thoughts of the visit room from ever again torturing him. Some men in prison are capable of such self-control of their minds; they are able to put themselves to sleep at night or to resume sleep after springing awake in the middle of a nightmare by preventing their minds from thinking too much, or thinking about the wrong things. The visit room was a wrong thought, and Nail succeeded at last in abolishing it entirely from his consciousness.

  Thus he was totally surprised one morning in late February when Short Leg came to his bunk, kicked his foot to draw his attention, and held out the handcuffs. “Visit room, Chism. There’s a lady waiting to see you.”

  On

  He looked terrible. His hair was growing back in uneven patches, which were white as well as blond, reminding her of dustings of snow on the Stay More hillsides beneath the dark branches of trees. But his head was still splendid compared with his body, which looked starved and emaciated. He was smiling at her as if he’d never been happier in his life, but his body looked as if it had already died. She held out her hands to the screen that separated them, a screen so fine that she could not even get her fingertips through it to touch him. He put his hands up to hers, and although their hands did not touch, it was almost as if they were in contact. The guard motioned with the end of his shotgun barrel for them to remove their hands from the screen. Dropping her hands, she found her voice: “Hello, Nail.” It did not cause her any discomfort to address him familiarly; she felt she knew him very well; indeed, she now knew many things about him that he probably did not know himself.